Mortal Kombat games have gone a long way from being okay fighters that made up for their shortcomings with huge amounts of brutality. The last few games in the series absolutely rock even from a serious competition standpoint, but I still love the series’ absolutely absurd displays of violence. Here are my favorite fatalities in Mortal Kombat history.
7. Smoke bomb
Though easily the least graphic one of the bunch, Smoke’s explosive fatality is the most deadly in MK history. Smoke doesn’t just smoke his opponent, he smokes himself and even the whole planet. Flawless plan and a flawless victory indeed.
The original hardware MK3 ran on just wasn’t powerful enough to make this fatality look as cool as it should have, so I love finally getting to witness it in the glory it deserves in Mortal Kombat 1.
6. Quan Chi’s Chiropractic adjustment
This fatality was just the goofiest crap when I first saw it in Mortal Kombat Deadly Alliance. Then it grew up on me as I grew older. Headaches, mysterious neck pains, and all those recommended YouTube videos of professionals with dubious credentials nearly ripping off the heads of their patients made this one go from hilarious to horrifying.
Not even its lack of blood and guts helps make it any less scary. It forces me to think about the possibility of surviving the ordeal and having to go places with my neck looking like that.
If you still don’t find this one of the best fatalities in the series, I just ask you to give it enough time.
5. Sindel’s Scream
One’d probably expect a scream-based fatality in this game to simply explode the head of the victim, but this one taught me not to underestimate the artistry of the people behind this series. The fatality animations in Mortal Kombat sometimes surprise us with their originality, and this is the best example of that.
Instead of going for something predictable, you see Sindel’s scream ripping off a character’s clothes, and then their skin. The only thing that’s left is a still-standing corpse that most anatomy teachers would pay millions for.
4. Johnny Cage’s triple decapitation uppercut
Mortal Kombat, despite all of its blood guts, and bones, has always been goofy as hell. Over half of all fatality animations show a character’s body exploding and leaving two skulls, six femurs, and around four torsos on the ground. I laugh every time I think about parents wondering if this was the game that would totally turn their kids into demons.
I love this secret fatality because it uses Johnny Cage, a Hollywood actor, to hammer in the inherent ridiculousness of fatalities. There should be way more secret fatalities like this one.
3. Giving birth to Noob Saibot
Noob Saibot would be one of the coolest characters in the series even if his fatalities didn’t own. But they do. Not bad for a character that came to life as a joke.
Noob Saibot’s second fatality in Mortal Kombat 11 is one of the most inventive and gruesomely detailed in the history of Mortal Kombat. There’s nothing funny or wacky about this one. The only thing you’ll find here is proof that the people of NetherRealm are master wizards of gore.
2. Sub-Zero spine rip
This is the quintessential Fatality. Sub-Zero’s spine rip is likely the one that sold most people on the series due to the incredibly high detail of violence it manages to show via such simple hardware. No one was ready for this one.
The people behind the game know that they immediately struck gold with this one considering how they never stopped remaking it.
1. Liu Kang’s Arcade Fatality
Did you know that originally, Liu Kang was as non-violent as possible? Weird design choice for a game you loved because you got to tear your opponent’s face off.
In the original MK, Liu Kang doesn’t have a fatality that’s, well, lethal. It was only to contend with the desire of fans to ramp up the violence that the developers gave Liu Kang fatalities. Still, they originally only gave him fatalities where he got to keep his hands clean. Did you ever notice that Kang never directly killed anyone in the original trilogy? It’s true.
Sure, you see him turning into a dragon and eating a person, but that’s not his character model, that’s just a dragon! The same goes with this one, where an arcade cabinet falls on top of your opponent and just crushes the poor fool. You never see Liu Kang dropping it. Hell, he’s not even in the picture when it happens!
The developers were facing a serious handicap when coming up with Fatalities for Liu Kang, and I believe they still knocked it out of the park.
You wouldn’t know just how scary the Arcade Drop fatality is until you yourself are playing in an arcade that looks just like the one you just saw crushing someone on screen.
Special mention: Kronika’s demise
This one doesn’t count as a fatality because it’s a cutscene, but fatalities kind of are cutscenes, right? Well, either way, I just have to put this one here.
One thing that has always bugged me about Mortal Kombat is that villains don’t tend to get a proper sendoff. Upon defeat, they usually just explode in a nonchalant manner and that’s it. Not with Kronika, though. The poor creature goes out in the most violent way imaginable. Don’t believe me? Well, then why is this the only video of an MK fatality that I can’t embed here?
Now this is how you end the game with a bang.
