YMMV / Mortal Kombat 3

• Base-Breaking Character: Motaro is an odd case. He was a cool design by fighting game standards, an interesting sub-boss indeed. But he was cheap and broken as a character, and some felt that the idea of a centaur was too goofy even by MK standards. Can't blame the MK team not wanting to revisit him, as adapting a four-legged monster like him into the 3D era would be a difficult task (in fact, this is the entire reason why he was made bipedal in Armageddon).
• Character Perception Evolution:
  • Sindel was never particularly popular (though her Mama Bear portrayal in Deception was generally well-liked). When she appeared in 9 and initiated a brutal Curb-Stomp Battle against the heroes while under Shao Kahn's control, fans derided her as a dull plot device Invincible Villain. After 11 Retconned her as a power-hungry Gold Digger whose original tragic story had been a lie to hide that she was Evil All Along, fans regarded this continuity's version of Sindel far more fondly for her Dark Is Not Evil qualities and fairly complex story for a game that otherwise ran rather light on character lore, which plays a factor of how Sindel in Mortal Kombat 1 is rerailed back to this original version with some extra depths.
  • This also happened with Rain. Many found annoyance with his status as an initially unplayable joke character and decried the origin of his name (A reference to the song Purple Rain by Prince) as a lame pun, to the extent the character appeared on more than a few worst character lists for the series. But after being Rescued from the Scrappy Heap in later games, many fans began to look back on the character more fondly, to the extent fans were angered he appeared as an unplayable character in Mortal Kombat X and rejoiced at his return in Mortal Kombat 11 as one of the final DLC characters. It also helps that after the death of Prince and the Posthumous Popularity Potential he received, many take less issue with the origin of his name and regard it as a neat bit of trivia.
  • Stryker was a character that was near-universally considered the lamest kombatant yet at time of release, with his whole gimmick as "normal cop" being considered tremendously bland and out-of-place among the classic "Supernatural Martial Arts tournament" aesthetic built from the first two games, and a point where the creativity behind the series' ever-expanding rosters started going downhill. It took until Mortal Kombat 9 for him to finally see an uptick in popularity, where he received a surprisingly engaging dedicated chapter that emphasized him as an everyman-type badass who can put up a good fight against the Outside-Context Problem that is the rest of the series, making his out-of-place-ness a strength rather than a flaw. Along with many other boundary-pushing characters in 3 being accepted as fan-favorites (such as the cyborg ninjas and Kabal), Stryker is now remembered with fondness as having earned his place in the franchise, with his interpretation in 3 often being seen as an endearing kind of "lame". An additional factor tying into his character perception is the increasingly visible and controversial profile of Police Brutality in real life since the 90's, which has in many ways elevated the concept of Stryker — a normal cop that participates in the ultraviolent spectacle that is imperative to the series' identity — to being an unintentionally amusing window to a more innocent time.
• Complete Monster: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• 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 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. It remains the only one of the pre-9 era to still have a visible tournament presence at events with retro selections.
  • As UMK3 added and improved on the original version of MK3, the vanilla version no longer tends to get ported in compilations or re-releases, with the last port being 2005's Midway's Arcade Treasures: Extended Play collection for the PSP.
• Franchise Original Sin: Though Mortal Kombat 4 is often seen as the beginning of the series' downward slope, many of the weaknesses of later installments were already visible with MK3, such as the over-reliance on cheap combos that require simply pressing one button over and over with no stick movement (derisively referred to as "dial-a-kombo") and bosses getting much cheaper. Shockingly enough, many fans still love it, since it was still a natural conclusion to the story so far, with the same stakes and tone as in previous games. If anything, everything stated below is possible Narm Charm:
  • All the colorful ninjas pouring off an assembly line, who were able to ride off of Scorpion and Sub-Zero's popularity, perhaps to compensate for the lack of any pallet swap ninjas in the vanilla version. Between every version since arcade Ultimate, there was Scorpion, Sub-Zero, Reptile, Smoke, Noob Saibot, Rain, Ermac, and Chameleon for the male ninja sprites alone.
  • Stryker was where the cheap but charming costumes of the first two games started to lose their appeal. 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 silly 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; thankfully, the iOS version of Ultimate being 3D-rendered amended this problem) and exploding bodies raining down dozens of limbs, skulls and ribcages—all from a single victim. Compare the decapitations in MK3/UMK3 (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 MK2 (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 Rain'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. Meanwhile, Sub-Zero's iconic "spine rip" fatality is reduced to a simple cut to black and some sound effects, because they never bothered to do any sprite work for a convincing decapitation.
  • 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 Super Cop, the deformed guy with a respirator helmet, and a whole mess of cyborgs.
  • Since the game takes place on Earthrealm, about half of the stages lack the interesting Asian-influenced mythological feel of the first two games and are rather mundane, such as "The Bridge", "The Waterfront" and the ever-exciting "Bank". The shattering of that theme also played in with the above, since with no overarching theme to the locations, it resulted in players realizing how ridiculous the characters looked - it's a little hard to take things seriously when you've got a brightly-colored cyborg ninja and a muscular woman with four arms in a very low-cut singlet beating each other up in a bog-standard subway station.
• Game-Breaker: Noob Saibot was is considered so incredibly high-tier and busted in Trilogy that he's outright banned in many competitive MK3 scenes. His basic strings are very strong and fast, and his special moves are incredibly devastating on their own, becoming a total nightmare when paired together, including a projectile that prevents the enemy from blocking, shadow clone projectiles that are too big for many to quickly jump over, and a teleporting grab-slam that can be easily locked into infinite combos. No other characters have any real counters to such a loaded arsenal, meaning that just a single hit from the guy can turn into a full-on death sentence as you'd get combo'd, denied the ability to get blocked into another combo, repeat until you lose.
• High-Tier Scrappy:
  • Kabal is the fastest character in the game, bar none, even without the run button. With his high rushdown, zoning potential from his projectiles, incredibly unforgiving hitboxes, he is a complete speed demon that can allow for frighteningly effective combos, and is almost unanimously considered one of the strongest characters in the game (aside from Noob Saibot, who is so broken that competitive scenes ban him).
  • Kintaro returns in Trilogy and is Promoted to Playable, and he is just as broken you would expect after facing him in II. If he connects with a fireball or his basic punch it leaves his opponent open for his Teleport Stomp, which shaves off massive chunk of health. Or the player using him can simply rely on his throw as the recovery time for it is shorter then time it takes for the opponent to get back up, allowing them using the attack over and over while the opponent has no chance to hit them back.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Sheeva is often considered one of the worst — if not the worst — kombatants in the game among the competitive scene, as despite having some cool features like her unblockable Teleport Stomp, she has several crippling weaknesses: not only are her moves are quite telegraphed and easy to react to, her height makes her incredibly easy to be hit by zoning projectiles, locked into combos, and even trapped in the corner (due to some hitbox wonk, she has the same hitbox when standing and crouching, meaning that she can be trapped in the corner just by normal jabs and whittled down even when blocking).
• Memetic Mutation: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• Narm Charm: While nobody's going to debate that Brutalities aren't the single cheesiest thing in a game already loaded to the gills with narm, a lot of people still find them to be satisfying and cool for the sheer spectacle of them.
• Nausea Fuel: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• Older Than They Think: This game was the first to feature Raiden sacrificing his godhood to fight as a mortal alongside Earthrealm's heroes. This plot point featured a short while later in Mortal Kombat: Annihilation and many years later in Mortal Kombat Legends: Battle of the Realms. Hilariously, Ed Boon himself fell into this trope during development of the latter, claiming "mortal Raiden" was something they'd never done before.
• Once Original, Now Common: 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 MK3 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.
• 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 (especially when you consider how Mortal Kombat Advance turned out). It also includes the "Puzzle Kombat" minigame from Deception for good measure.
• Porting Disaster: Trilogy. You're pretty well boned if you opt to get any version other than the relatively obscure PC version.
  • The PlayStation / Sega Saturn version contains every available character (a few with multiple iterations), but being on a disc, there's Loads and Loads of Loading involved (including an 8-second mid-match load for a Shang Tsung morph, bad enough that there's a toggle to disable his morphing), 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 MK3 songs were sampled incorrectly, so they are all slower and lower in pitch. The eccentricities of the disc wound up making it one of the few PS1 discs incompatible with the PS3.
  • The N64 version, by contrast, has a much smaller character roster (and Sub-Zero was consolidated with his masked version, with the masked version gaining the Ice Shower special move as a result), 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 (like Khameleon). The music is synthesized directly from hardware and only contains MK3 tracks.
  • Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 for the 16-bit consoles are considered to be one of the glitchiest games ever released for the consoles, as the game not only jampacked a lot of content, but extra exclusives to boot such as Rain and Noob Saibot. While the games are responsive, speedy, and faithful, one wrong move in terms of an awkward character collision or input can crash your game, or render the current match totally unplayable. Ironically, a lot of players actually have fun triggering these glitches, if only to see how many interesting ones they can find. Sheeva was also Dummied Out of this version but you can fight a super-glitchy version of her by entering a code.
  • Mortal Kombat Advance, a port of UMK3 for the Game Boy Advance. It was farmed out to another studio, Virtucraft, to make a quick buck on the MK name with two months development, and it shows. It has the dubious honor of receiving Electronic Gaming Monthly's first ever rating of a 0.
  • The iOS version handed by Electronic Arts of all people tries to fit everything the arcade version had onto a handy phone or tablet for Kombat on the go. One problem: unresponsive touchscreen controls. While the game does try to rectify this with an optional simplified 5-button layout (merging both Punch and Kick buttons into one button each, keeping Block and Run while merging the character's specials down to one directional-dependent button), it still doesn't remove the fact that Mortal Kombat, at its core, needs Some Dexterity Required, which is hard to do when the buttons and your fingers takes up a huge chunk of screen real estate. And that's not getting into how this version lacks the proper sound cues from every other version (sans Trilogy), the computer being braindead than they should, and the jarring switch to 3D graphics, making the already cheap presentation of the original look even more fake than before.
• Replacement Scrappy: The removal of fan-favorite characters Scorpion and Reptile in lieu of new characters who failed to measure up to the second game's memorable newcomers; without fail, Stryker and Nightwolf top the lists of least-popular 2D-era characters. Tellingly, Ultimate's roster expansion includes six returning faces, nearly equal to the amount of original characters the vanilla release had.
• The Scrappy: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • If you watch a lot of the behind-the-scenes footage and interviews for MK3, 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 MK player was going to be dying to seek them 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 MK3 did.
  • 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 got when you pressed it.
  • While stage transitions were a neat idea visually, one annoying bug related to it could lock a player out of most of the stages. In the Soul Chamber stage, if a player is uppercut into the Balcony stage, it will lock a player into a stage cycle of only Soul Chamber-The Balcony-The Street-Soul Chamber until an entire match in the Soul Chamber is completed without a stage transition, which breaks the loop. Since uppercuts are a significant offensive move for both human players and AI alike, this loop for a mechanic that does not affect actual gameplay can be very annoying.
  • Brutalities had an interesting idea of killing an opponent via No-Holds-Barred Beatdown, but not only did they require a very precise button input to do the job, but the overall result simply had the opponent exploding in a shower of chunks which wasn't enough of payoff to most players. As result, brutalities were absent from almost every other mainline game (not counting the Shaolin Monks spin-off) until Mortal Kombat X brought them back with complete mechanic overhaul.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • It is really hard to take the more explosive Fatalities seriously when your opponent explodes into more legs, arms, ribcages and ''heads'' than a body is actually supposed to have. Fortunately, the SNES and Genesis versions of the game seems to get this right, (if only because of the systems' limitations), but the worst offender seems to be any version of Mortal Kombat Trilogy.
  • The cutting fatalities don't fare any better. If a character gets cut in half at the waist, their arms remain suspended in mid-air. If a character with long hair gets decapitated, the hair that goes below their neck is still on their body.
• That One Attack: Motaro's teleport. It has no start up or cooldown allowing him to pull it anytime he wants, especially right after hitting you meaning he can hit you across the stage, then teleport behind you and hit you again before you can even react, and follow up by using his teleport again.
• That One Boss: Motaro, a centaur who takes the place of Goro and Kintaro as The Dragon before you can face Shao Kahn as the Final Boss. His projectiles are hard to avoid due to being launched from atop his head in a downward arc ^note they will fly over the player's head if they stand close enough to him but that puts them in range of a Tail Slap that is impossible to dodge if they are within range of it, he can teleport behind you (and the screen doesn't scroll fast enough to keep up, so you're liable to not even see what he's doing next until he's already doing it), he can jump toward you to quickly close distance, he's immune to projectiles (depending on which projectile, it'll either go right through him or even be reflected back at you), all of his attacks deal a lot of damage, and to top it all off, he can chain his attacks together, letting him bombard you with projectile fire or fire one to stun you, then teleport behind you and hit you again without any chance to defend. This makes for a Lightning Bruiser boss who deals heavy damage, is very mobile, and is invulnerable to a lot of ranged attacks. Most players consider him worse than Shao Kahn and resort to cheesing him by spamming jump kicks, which are relatively safe but still not a sure thing. The Ultimate edition nerfed him a bit by making him vulnerable to projectiles at close-range, as well as Scorpion's Spear and Sun-Zero's freeze.
• That One Level: Endurance Rounds turn into this in Mortal Kombat Trilogy. Nobody would ever call them easy, but in Trilogy any opponent can appear in an Endurance Match besides Shao Kahn. This means the player can find themselves fighting a boss in addition to a normal character, including the above mentioned Motaro, or worse, both opponents the player faces may be bosses.
• 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.
  • Downplayed for the Nintendo 64 version of Trilogy, but in any setting where Trilogy is played competitively it's become the standard for offering a unique experience with a different metagame, as well as the popularity of 3v3 mode. The lack of the PlayStation's Loads and Loads of Loading doesn't hurt.
• The Woobie: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.

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