Mortal Kombat 3/YMMV

• 8.8: Trilogy had its rating cut in half, from 62% to 31%, by the UK-based N64 Magazine, for having characters and features cut compared to the PlayStation and Saturn versions. The magazine had a policy of penalising any game that didn't look and play sufficiently better than games on the two rival systems, even though the Nintendo 64's design quirks and lack of CD storage meant that, if anything, ports of games from the other two platforms more often came out looking worse rather than better (though to be fair, this probably wasn't obvious at the time, as Trilogy came out relatively early in the system's lifecycle).
• Awesome Music: The whole soundtrack. Even if some of the game's faults undercut its tone (see Franchise Original Sin below), the music is damn atmospheric for a fighting game.
  • The Bank.
  • Subway Stage.
  • The Bridge.
• Base-Breaking Character: Motaro. He is liked by some for his brutal nature and for bringing even more diversity of beings into the Mortal Kombat universe, others feel that the idea of a centaur is too goofy even for Mortal Kombat standards. The difficulty taken to beat him is at least one thing everyone can agree on.
• Creator's Pet: The designers anticipated that Stryker would become one of the most popular characters in the series. When this didn't happen (quite the reverse, actually, thanks to his design clashing with the rest of the series) they responded by increasing his power until he was a Game Breaker, which just made people hate him more. Some players, however, like the contrast, and the irony in how he's a darkhorse for being the most normal character in the game. It helps that his grenades are great against jumpers.
• Ensemble Darkhorse:
  • Kabal and Ermac started out as mild Base Breakers due to their initial overpoweredness, but when toned-down for their return in Deception, the two cemented themselves as this. Ermac even gets to play cleanup for the heroes!
  • Khameleon, introduced in the N64 port of Trilogy. Fans were not pleased that she wasn't included in Armageddon, to the point that she was added to the Wii release of the game.
  • Khameleon's inclusion in Armageddon is a possible case of Fridge Brilliance, as it mirrors how the different ports of Trilogy included these silver, translucent ninjas. The Sony Playstation and Sega Saturn versions had the male ninja Chameleon, who cycled through the male ninja's moves. The Nintendo 64 port featured the female Khameleon, who cycled through the female ninja's moves. Fast forward to Armageddon, and Nintendo's port still has the female and male while the Sony and Microsoft (taking place of Sega) versions have only the male.
• Epileptic Trees: Sheeva's connection to Goro. Speculation goes anywhere from his sister/a relative of his (a la Kintaro) to his wife.
• Even Better Sequel: Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 is considered (by some, hence why this trope is YMMV) to be the best game not just in the Mortal Kombat 3 series of games, but the entire series as a whole until Mortal Kombat 9.
• Fetish Retardant: Mileena.
• Franchise Original Sin: The series' sense of cool started to dissipate with Mortal Kombat 3. Shockingly enough, many fans still love it. If anything, everything stated below is possible Narm Charm:
  • All the colorful ninjas pouring off an assembly line, riding Scorpion and Sub-Zero's popularity.
  • Stryker, forcing us to admit a lot of the series' designs were actually kind of dorky and the games ran on cheapness. Even Ed Boon admitted as much in the DVD extras for Armageddon, although he found it amusing that players initially stayed away from him because of the lame design, even though, as people would discover, he had some of the most overpowered moves in the game.
  • The fatalities becoming extremely stupid and lazily done, with things like static dismemberment (imagine cutting up a photograph with scissors and you'll get the idea of how this looked) and exploding bodies raining down dozens of limbs, skulls and ribcages--all from a single victim. Compare the decapitations in Mortal Kombat 3/Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 (where the head simply falls off the body straight to the ground, the body —a still frame from the "dizzy" animation, by the way— standing completely upright) to the ones in Mortal Kombat 2 (the head tumbles in the air as it's lopped off and rolls a couple of times on the ground while the body drops to its knees and then flops onto the floor). Amusingly, one of Ermac's Fatalities in Trilogy combines both: he uppercuts his opponent with such force that his head, torso, upper legs and lower legs separate on the way up and reassemble upside-down, with the end result looking like just the aforementioned still frame flipped 180 degrees.
  • It was the moment when the cast gained familiar, western tropes. Until then even the American characters were still supernatural martial artists in exercise clothes. Now you had the magical Indian, the Supercop, the deformed guy with a respirator helmet, and a whole mess of cyborgs. Ignoring how the first three just happened to be incredibly broken, all their concepts were things we'd grown up seeing done better. Some of us paused for a second and wondered, "Is this how the rest of the game looks to Asians?"
  • Bears repeating: ROBOT NINJAS.
• Game Breaker:
  • Kurtis Stryker went from out of place in Mortal Kombat 3 to out of place and freaking annoying to fight in Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 when Midway gave him a gun for one of his special moves. This blew him to full-on Creator's Pet-dom and cemented his being Put on a Bus until Armageddon.
  • Nightwolf had this early on in the original Mortal Kombat 3's life cycle. In early arcade versions, he could run faster than he could throw. This let him pull off combos which were both impossible to avoid and not actually supposed to be possible in the first place. Thankfully, later revisions slowed down Nightwolf's running speed and kept him from Stryker's fate.
  • Both Rain and Noob Saibot have unlimited combos in Trilogy, the former using his screen-wrapping roundhouse over and over, and latter using his Teleport Slam.
  • In an example that ended up defining him instead of making him an annoyance, Kabal was the fastest character in the game. Add in the Run button, and you've got some really quick beatdowns.
  • Kabal and Ermac in their respective debuts (vanilla Mortal Kombat 3 and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3) at least approached this status, so the dev team was savvy enough to tone them down a bit in the Updated Rereleases.
  • Sheeva's Teleport Stomp move in Mortal Kombat 3 made her one. It was easy to pull off and quite damaging. With enough patience and skill, even Motaro can be swiftly taken down with it.
  • And there is Motaro himself. You really no longer have to bother with such futile things as skill or strategy once you unlock him.
  • Shang Tsung can temporarily morph into any other playable character, complete with their moves, combos, and fatalities. It can be a lot to juggle, but learn the ropes and there's literally no reason to pick anyone else.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Stryker executing a brutality to opponents can be this, as he is technically commiting police brutality, which could bother some, with unlawful force done by police officers frequently appearing in the news nowadays. Making matters worse, he is blatantly using such in Mortal Kombat 9.
• Most Annoying Sound: Shao Kahn's announcer voice in Mortal Kombat 3.
• Narm:
  • The Animalities aside from Liu Kang's. The ones from vanilla Mortal Kombat 3 are stupidly large and have few colors, the added ones from Ultimate are incredibly small by comparison, and all of them are total nonsense.
    • The most triumphant example may be Scorpion's Animality. He turns into a penguin that lays an exploding egg to defeat his opponent. Maybe because Sheeva already took his namesake Animality...
    • Just as ridiculous is Reptile, who turns into a chimp (seriously, with his name and abilities, you'd expect him to turn into one of his scaly brethren) and simply... startles the opponent into getting chased offscreen. That's it. No blood, not even an offscreen beatdown, nada.
    • Kitana's "killer rabbit" Animality might be an example of Narm Charm. Apparently, the game developers are Monty Python fans...
  • Sonya's Friendship in the vanilla edition of the game, where she swings her arms around like a freaking idiot. Ultimate changed it to her growing a field of flowers.
• Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: Mileena, again.
• Polished Port: The DS version Ultimate Mortal Kombat is a virtually arcade-perfect conversion of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, something that hasn't been seen on a console, let alone a handheld platform. It also includes the "Puzzle Kombat" minigame from Deception for good measure.
• Porting Disaster: Trilogy. You're pretty well boned no matter what version you opt to get.
  • The Playstation/Saturn version contains every available character (a few with multiple iterations), but being on a disc, there's Loads and Loads of Loading involved, and the game is prone to locking up. While the music is arcade-quality Red Book audio, all of the stage themes lack proper transitions and endings due to the limitations of the audio format. Additionally, all Mortal Kombat 3 songs were sampled incorrectly, so they are all slower and lower in pitch.
  • The N64 version, by contrast, has a much smaller character roster, is missing frames of animation, suffers from tinny sound, and has the problem with the N64's controller design, but is arguably more stable and contains a few additional features. The music is synthesized directly from hardware and only contains Mortal Kombat 3 tracks.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Stryker in Mortal Kombat 9. Inverted with Sindel in the same game.
  • The concept itself was rescued by the Ultimate update, and, at least until Mortal Kombat 9, considered that to be the peak of the franchise. This is lampshaded by the character roster of Mortal Kombat 9, which only features characters from the first 3 games (save for Quan Chi and Kenshi).
• The Scrappy: Stryker, before his Armageddon redesign.
• Scrappy Mechanic: If you watch a lot of the behind-the-scenes footage and interviews for Mortal Kombat 3, Ed Boon and John Tobias tout the combination lock system for multiplayer as something "revolutionary" and was the main focus in its advertising to arcade operators, listing that codes and symbols were going to be everywhere and that every Mortal Kombat player was going to be dying to seek out. In execution, it was a cheat system that not a lot of players used and Midway's NBA Jam series had been using this code system several years before Mortal Kombat 3 did.
  • Let's not forget the run button: it was a mechanic added to introduce combos into the game, specifically chain-styled, but when you used it, you either ran out before you could pull off anything useful, or your foe hit you, canceling your assault. It was better to call it a suicide button, because that's basically what you get when you press it.
• "Seinfeld" Is Unfunny: A game mechanic example: nowadays, it's taken as a given that a fighting game will have at least one unlockable fighter, so it's easy to forget that the arcade version of Mortal Kombat 3 was the first fighter to have a character be unlocked permanently with Smoke. Prior to this, hidden fighters were either single use tricks or would vanish after the machine was powered down. The idea that a hidden fighter would become a permanent fixture after unlocking, and on an arcade machine at that, had game magazines' jaws dropping at the time of release.
• That One Boss: Motaro, a centaur, who can teleport behind you and chain attacks with no end. Not to mention his immunity to projectiles. And then there's the uber-fast Shao Kahn...
  • Weaksauce Weakness: Jump kicks seem to baffle Motaro...
• Tier-Induced Scrappy:
  • In this era, Nightwolf ran faster than he threw people. Thankfully, Deception's lack of a Run button prevented a redux of this.
  • Stryker was unpopular in Mortal Kombat 3, so the developers tried to compensate for this by ramping up his threat level in Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Thing is, he wasn't unpopular because he wasn't powerful enough...
• Vindicated by History: Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 gets a lot more tournament play nowadays (and was one of the first online-enabled XBOX Live Arcade games), and a lot of the characters that were hated back in the nineties are now returning fan favorites in Mortal Kombat 9. Inverted with Sindel after a particularly infamous scene late in the story mode of Mortal Kombat 9.