Mortal Kombat 1 is less than a month shy of its one year anniversary now and though relatively intriguing DLC additions have kept things interesting, discussion of the game continues to be more negative than not.
Developers at NetherRealm Studios don’t seem to have quite found their groove when it comes to gameplay in MK1, and while the majority of that is likely thanks to the way the Kameo dynamic influences the fight, it’s also because of the presence of silly and unintended sequences like the one Evo 2024 champion SonicFox recently showcased on X.
It was back in Mortal Kombat 3 that Shang Tsung first garnered the ability to erupt fireballs from the ground to juggle his foes with, and it took almost no time at all for players to intuit that they spam this move for infinite juggles.
It was the mid 1990’s, though, so fighting games got a bit of a break as we were all learning what it exactly was we wanted when it came to the balance of cool moves and fair fights in our Mortal Kombat experience. As long as this kind of thing wasn’t possible in future updates, it was plenty forgivable.
Well, SonicFox posted a clip to X here some nearly 30 years later in August of 2024 as Mortal Kombat 1 Shang Tsung is still very much capable of keeping his foe in the air via volcanic eruption:
100 hit combo with Shang Tsung.
Im pretty sure I can get more too since I just built another bar before fatal blow lol pic.twitter.com/MAyLxFUyNi
— SonicFox (@SonicFox) August 6, 2024
Unlike in the days of UMK3, damage scaling makes it so that the amount of health being lopped off becomes almost negligible after too long, but the timer scam potential and general suspension of action are substantial enough to make this kind of sequence an unequivocal farce by 2024 fighting game standards.
Mortal Kombat 1 does have the combo breaker mechanic in which players can spend all three bars of their meter to escape, but that’s a hefty price and meter build scaling can mean the defender never actually gets to a full three bars.
It would be one thing if something like this emerged as an unforeseen consequence of a recent balance or mechanical tweak, but this same sequence was actually in the game back in September when the game launched.
Hopefully NRS will attend to this when they fix Cyrax’ silly unblockable set up that persists between rounds, but given that it’s been around for as long as it has, maybe not.