Mortal Kombat: Armageddon / YMMV

See also the franchise-wide pages for:

Accidental Innuendo: Konquest Mode involves collectible "Relics" for each character in the game. Moloch's is the ball and chain he carries around... but it's called "Moloch's Ball." Cue Heh Heh, You Said "X".
Base-Breaking Character: Jarek. He gained a few fans with his new moves, but still has his detractors who continue to see him as a Kano-Klone until this day. A small difference from his debut, where he was the Replacement Scrappy for Kano.
Contested Sequel: Though the game definitely has its share of fans, due to its dream match premise, the Motor Kombat mini-game and the Kreate-A-Fighter feature, its detractors will point out that the gameplay system used since Deadly Alliance had already aged by that point, as well as the fact that the characters don't have original Fatalities, the fighting styles being cut down from three per character to two per character and the lackluster storyline. As a result, it's possibly the most divisive game in the whole series.
Crazy Is Cool: Havik, continuing on from his Deception debut. (See here for more details.) This line from his doppelganger sells it:
Havik: "Looking for trouble, I hope?"
Fanfic Fuel: The Kreate-A-Fighter allows one to make any multitude of fighters such as some Fake Secret characters (e.g. Hornbuckle, Aqua, Nimbus Terrafaux, and Skarlet), canonical non-playable fighters (e.g. Tremor), and some who had not been conceived until later sequels (e.g. Skarlet introduced in MK9, as well as Kung Jin, Erron Black, Kotal Kahn, D'Vorah, Geras and Kronika) ^note along with making creative stories as to where they were in the original timeline.
Game-Breaker:
- Sareena is seen as a high-tier character for one reason and one reason alone: her knives. As Ed Boon best put it, they are among the fastest projectiles in the game. You can also juggle opponents with them, leading to a few combos rivaling Kitana's infamous fan lift setup in terms of litigiousness.
- The air combo system has a fatal flaw: If you drop the fourth hit in a combo after making your opponent spin in mid-air, you can leap right back up and do it again, resetting the combo and trapping them in an infinite loop unless they have a Combo Breaker.
Harsher in Hindsight: Shao Kahn's position in the poster featuring the cast of the game, showing him directly under Blaze, dead center in the top row. Now, consider who won the final battle.
Ho Yay: Humorously invoked in a concept art drawing for the Evil Tower stage in the Krypt featuring Scorpion and Sub-Zero holding hands as they try to avoid being sucked into a vortex. Not that this didn't stop some from taking the image at face value.
Magnificent Bastard: Onaga returns. See that page for details.
Memetic Loser: Li Mei gets this treatment for being the first explicit casualty in the Battle of Armageddon, being stabbed through by Hotaru's Naginata right as the Forces of Light and Forces of Darkness first clash. The Downer Beginning of MK9 establishes it wasn't just a non-canon scenario based on Rule of Cool and shock value either, as her still skewered body is explicitly shown among the various corpses scattered around the Pyramid of Argus, most of which belong to that game's playable cast.
Mis-blamed: Motaro losing his hind legs was decried by fans as the programmers being "lazy"; in reality, it was due to the fact that the physics engine for this game couldn't properly render a four-legged character and that he would be a hitbox nightmare in terms of getting the character to cooperate with the rest of the roster.
Narm:
- On top of every other issue associated with Kreate A Fatality, the fact that move strings like pulling out an opponent's heart or brain aren't considered fatal is rather silly (the final move has to be either a neck snap, a spine rip, a decaptiation/head crush or a bisection).
  - Furthermore, the aforementionned brain and heart ripping moves, along with tearing out things like thighs or ribcages, leaves no physical damage on the opponent, looks ludicrous.
  - Lastly, the fact that the remains are just fleshy remains with red blood even when performed on characters who shouldn't have that (like shokans and Cyber Lin Kuei).
- Similar to the above, Stage Fatalities leave bloody chunks of human remains even when performed on characters that lack such features.
Play the Game, Skip the Story: While the story has been criticized to oblivion, the gameplay, despite reusing the mechanics of Deadly Alliance and Deception with no significant improvements and suffering more unwelcomed changes (including the infamous Create-A-Fatalities mechanic), is viewed in a slightly better light due to Armageddon boasting the largest roster of any other Mortal Kombat game, featuring Kreate-A-Fighter and having Motor Kombat as an additional game mode.
Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
- Stryker's new design attempted this with a new look. It would not be until Mortal Kombat 9 that the team would successfully redeem him in the eyes of most fans.
- The developers themselves were disappointed with Shinnok in Mortal Kombat 4 and were satisfied with his moves from Armageddon.
- To a lesser extent, Jarek. Though more of a Base-Breaking Character than fully rescued, he was given new moves in order to move him away from the main criticism of the character being nothing more than a "Kano-Klone."
- Rain, who was despised by fans for being a Joke Character based on a joke that fell flat, became better received with the establishment of his personality and expanded backstory (as an illegitimate son of the Edenian protector god Argus) in this game. This would continue into 9, X, and 11; while X would further develop his character by putting him in a mutually treacherous alliance with Mileena, 9 and 11 would go a long way in making his gimmick legitimately dangerous and a sight to behold.
Scrappy Mechanic: Create-A-Fatalities, one of the most critically panned aspects of this game, since it blatantly took the place of the series' classic Fatality system and replaced it with generic cut-and-paste finishing moves that any character can do.
Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: Motor Kombat is so well done for a mini-game that you might end spending more time on it rather than on the main game.
Take That, Scrappy!:
- In contrast to all the other fighters that Shang Tsung had to struggle with to ascend to the top of the Pyramid of Argus (Shao Kahn, Zombie Liu Kang, and Mileena), all it took for him to deal with Shujinko was a single punch to the face to send him flying. Shang being the one to deliver this blow is a reference to many fans' complaints that Shujinko is "basically Shang Tsung with better hair."
  - Adding onto that, in Konquest Mode. Taven calls Shujinko a "foolish old man", which is a sentiment shared by quite a bit of fans.
- Hsu Hao also gets this twice in this game. In contrast to everyone else's ending in which they get to absorb Blaze's power upon his defeat, Hsu Hao gets killed in the explosion and turned into a mindless demon in the Netherrealm. A more subtle example is that his relic in that rather than being something that is iconic about the character (e.g. Scorpion's kunai and rope ("Spear") for Scorpion and Raiden's hat for Raiden), it's simply his watch.
  - Which is also a Stealth Pun: The development crew having you find his lost watch is trying to send you the message that the character it belonged to was a waste of time.
That One Boss: The Shao Kahn Colossus statue in Konquest Mode. He's completely invulnerable to your attacks, you can only cause damage to him by activating four orbs with your fire attack, and then lure the statue to the center of the room before hitting a switch with your Ground Stomp attack. Oh, and you can't avoid his attacks. No matter where you are in the room, you will always take damage.
They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Motaro being reduced to having two legs. Read Mis-blamed above for details.
Vanilla Protagonist: Daegon and Taven, the only true new original playable kombatants in this game, are also supposed to be the de facto main characters, with their plot being central to the fate of Armageddon, but it's widely agreed by Mortal Kombat fans that they're tremendously forgettable. Their designs are very generic, their gameplay has no notable flair to them, and their lore (two clashing brothers, one of whom is destined to stop Armageddon) is not only shallow and underutilized, but also pointless as both of them fail at their goals, with Shao Kahn winning and bringing upon the apocalypse. While Daegon was given a little more development in the Mortal Kombat X comics, NRS ultimately treated them as so inconsequential that they were treated to an anticlimactic fridging by Rain in Mortal Kombat 11, and not many fans are clamoring for their return. To add further insult, in a fan poll in 2013 that ranked their favorite characters in the series, Taven was ranked dead last.

YMMV / Mortal Kombat: Armageddon

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