YMMV / Mortal Kombat: Deception

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Shujinko's status as an Unwitting Pawn makes it possible for him to be seen as The Woobie, with shades of an Iron Woobie. While easily manipulated, he was merely a guy who wanted to face Shang Tsung in Mortal Kombat, actually got the chance to join that world, never meant for any of this to happen, and works his butt off to rectify his mistake.
  • In regard to Hotaru: Is he primarily a genuinely well meaning Lawful Neutral Anti-Villain who allies with Onaga because he believes it will prevent harm to Seido? A Lawful Evil tyrannical oppressor who simply uses the Seidan Guard's principles as an excuse for his actions? Or a Lawful Stupid Principles Zealot who suffers from Black-and-White Insanity? Those who dislike him tend to take the latter two to Ron the Death Eater extremes.
  • Darrius is also subject to this as well. While we are told that Seido's laws are oppressive, and thus would make Darrius seem reasonable at first, but he also does plenty of reprehensible things, including the murder of Dairou's family and framing it on another person in order to get him to abandon the Seidan Guard. Exactly what Darrius has in mind for replacing Seido's current regime is never elaborated on either, thus questioning how genuine he is.
  • Also for that matter, the society of Seido as whole can be subject to a sort of Alternative Societal Interpretation if only because the makers decided to abandon making any reference to it due to its associated characters (Hotaru, Darrius, and Dairou) falling into disfavor with the fans. Is it an ideal society that has some strict but fair laws? Is it an oppressive tyranny that is hiding behind a deceptive façade? And also are those who are members of the Seidan Senate and other public officeholders have its citizens best interests even if they are making some morally gray choices to insure its protection or manipulative oligarchs who abuse that as an excuse to control people's lives for their own benefit.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Bo' Rai Cho. Either you like him for being a Fun Personified Cool Old Guy or hate him for taking his already established Toilet Humor from Deadly Alliance and turning it up to eleven.
  • Kira and Kobra also count. Kira is either a cool and Fanservicey Evil Redhead or a Replacement Scrappy with the moveset of both Kano and Sonya, and Kobra is either a subversion of the Shotoclone archetype or a blatant rip-off of Ken Masters and one of the worst characters of the franchise (along with Hsu Hao, Drahmin, Mokap, and Meat).
  • Hotaru is either liked for being a notable Love to Hate Foil to the ever-popular Havik with his own unique design or hated for either being a fascist or just having a boring design and personality.
  • Ashrah has some fans who believe she has some potential based on her character arc of seeking redemption and no longer wanting to be a demon, but is disliked by detractors who view her as a pale imitation, if not a poorly made ripoff, of Sareena.
  • While not nearly as hated as back in the day, Shujinko still has his fair share of detractors. At best, he's seen as a character with wasted potential, especially when he was hyped up by the creators as "the next generation Liu Kang." However, his status as being Vindicated by History has fans hoping for his return.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • Motaro appears out of the blue in a random Earthrealm village in the Konquest Mode to give you some koins, then vanishes. It's a rare occurrence and the player has to be quick to make it happen, so it's more of an Easter Egg.
  • Meat randomly appears with a British accent in the Netherrealm in the Konquest Mode to give you some koins, then disappears.
  • In the middle of Konquest Mode, Shujinko encounters a fighter called Monster who challenges him to a fight, claiming that he's the true champion of the Elder Gods. Who he is, where he came from, and why he believes this are all a mystery. His appearance is not foreshadowed, he appears nowhere else in the game (or the franchise),^note The character's design was originally meant to be used as an alternate costume for Scorpion before the creators realized that the look didn't really fit him and after he is defeated he is never seen or mentioned again.
• Camera Screw: The PSP port suffers from a vary annoying tic in Konquest Mode, where getting too close to any kind of map geometry causes the camera to lock onto it until you move far enough away or manually rotate the camera back onto Shujinko.
• Complete Monster: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• Crack Pairing: Fans seem to be fond of pairing up Ashrah and Raiden despite no tangible connections existing between the two aside of being members of the Forces of Light. As noted on the Characters page, this is rooted in how similar the two appear to each other, with many mistaking originally Ashrah not only as Raiden's Distaff Counterpart, but his wife.
• Crazy Is Cool: Havik is probably one of the craziest fighters in the series and has the moves to prove it, from breaking his own knees to deliver a low projectile attack to sliding through the floor like a penguin to straight-up breaking his own neck just to regain a bit of health. Havik is one of the most fondly remembered fighters in this game, even making new appearances in later titles in the 2011 reboot, the Mortal Kombat X comic book, and Mortal Kombat 11. He returns in playable form for Mortal Kombat 1 to the surprise and delight of many.
• Designated Hero: Shujinko, mostly because he can't see through Onaga being a bigger dick, but you're still encouraged to rob everyone blind for the hell of it if you want to unlock everything, and a lot of problems are "solved" by just sucker-punching random people.
• Fan Nickname: Thanks to the new armor Sub-Zero picked up in this game (behold!◊), a sizable amount of fans began calling him "The Shredder."
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Say what you want about them, but Kira and Kobra do have their supporters, with shippers as part of those ranks. This actually is even given a degree of canonical support in Armageddon, wherein both characters' endings show them expressing affection towards the other in some manner... only to end up being backstabbed for their troubles.
• Foe Yay Shipping: The intense, reciprocally personal rivalry between Jade and Tanya took off starting here and continued into the next game, where they single out the other to square off during the Battle of Armageddon. Jade, who was established in the DA-D-A trilogy to be deeply patriotic, does have a justifiable reason for hating Tanya (who betrayed their homeland for a second time in Deception), but the fervently negative emotion from both sides still comes on a bit too strong for some.
• Game-Breaker:
  • A ton. The majority can be corralled under two things: moves that lead to unduckable throws, and moves that can be repeated ad-nauseam until the timer runs out. It's the core reason why this game was frowned upon by the professional fighting game community.
  • Dairou's Tombstone Drop is this. It's an unblockable ground pound that falls extremely fast and has a very quick recovery time, and the only way to avoid it is to anticipate it coming and jump. Unfortunately, given this game's mechanics, that's a lot easier said than done.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • Perform a Fatality and a Hara-Kiri at the same time to get these.
  • Possibly this or Game-Breaker, but for some odd reason, Liu Kang's bicycle kick ignores Onaga's defensive stat and takes off his health like you shattered one of the ring's Kamidogu. It's easy to defeat Onaga that way... provided that you never get sick of watching Liu Kang's ending.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Despite being dead and a ghost, Liu Kang wants to save Raiden before he grows too dangerous, as his ending provides. After the reset, Raiden becomes a Broken Pedestal to him after trying to change the past one-time too many.
  • In what could also be considered Heartwarming in Hindsight, Mortal Kombat 11's Story Mode has something similar to both cases. Liu Kang tries to warn Raiden about him being corrupted by Shinnok's amulet to almost no avail, until Raiden realizes from their confrontation that it and the events above were actually part of Kronika's machinations to keep him and Liu Kang into conflict throughout multiple timelines.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• It Was His Sled: Noob Saibot is the original Sub-Zero.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Hotaru, in addition to the other criticisms of him noted above, is regarded as the least effective in regard to playstyle based on the limited usefulness of his attacks, most notably his Lava Burst attack which can be easily nullified by the opponent being too far or too close. Thankfully, he received some well-needed adjustments in Armageddon, but even then he is roughly mid-tier at best.
• Magnificent Bastard: Onaga, the Dragon King, was the Emperor of Outworld before he was overthrown by Shao Kahn. In Konquest mode, over a process of decades, Onaga manipulates the protagonist Shujinko, from the time the latter is a young man, playing on Shujinko's desire for adventure and giving him the ability to copy the fighting style of any kombatant he meets. Using an avatar he calls "Damashi" — based on the Japanese word for "deceive" — Onaga pretends to be an emissary of the Elder Gods, and claims they need Shujinko to retrieve six items called Kamidogu. In truth, Onaga wants the items for himself, and once Shujinko has retrieved all six, Onaga is finally able to regain corporeal form. Revealing his deception, he takes the Kamidogu, overpowers Raiden, Shang Tsung, and Quan Chi to retrieve the latter's amulet, and sets about conquering the realms. Even though he is eventually defeated by Shujinko, Onaga survives, and is willing to work with Shang Tsung, Quan Chi, Shinnok, and even Shao Kahn, but is secretly planning to betray them and gain ultimate power.
• Memetic Mutation: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The fanfare that plays in the Krypt when you purchase a non-artwork item.
• Narm Charm: Ermac yelling "YES!" after his Telekinetic Slams Fatality seems so out of place and unfitting for his character, but he sounds so proud and hyped for himself that it's adorable. The throaty, echo-y effect in his voice helps, too.
• Nausea Fuel: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• Polished Port: Mortal Kombat: Unchained, is a near perfect PlayStation Portable port of Deception which additionally includes not only Shao Kahn and Goro from the Gamecube version of the game, but also Jax, Kitana, Blaze and Frost from Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance. The entire roster and all stages are unlocked from the start, plus an Endurance mode is also included.
• Replacement Scrappy:
  • Shujinko was the target of a lot of hate for replacing Liu Kang. He's terminally naive and stole the special moves and even appearances of the other characters during Konquest Mode. It doesn't help that Boon hamfisted him down the fandom's throat by labeling him "the next generation Liu Kang" in an interview, or that his name literally means "protagonist."
  • Kira, who can basically be described as Kano and Sonya's lovechild.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Nightwolf. Prior to Deception, he had just as much of a Hatedom as Stryker did when he was introduced.
• Ron the Death Eater: Hotaru is frequently demonized to a degree greater than the way he is presented in canon with some detractors going to the extreme of claiming he is A Nazi by Any Other Name. While it is true that he is a Legalist and possibly can also be interpreted as an Authoritarianist (though one with Utilitarian motivations), but there is no concrete evidence that he holds views that resemble those of fascism (unless one is going by the looser definition of the term). Even if Hotaru holds such a philosophy, to claim that the makers of Mortal Kombat are condoning this detestable ideology is as absurd as claiming that Marvel Comics condones the likes of the Red Skull by his mere existence in their fictional universe.
• The Scrappy: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Progressing through Konquest Mode forces you to complete many, many Forced Tutorials where you assume different characters and learn their moves — something you can do on your own at any time in Training Mode. While it's more substantial and interesting than Deadly Alliance's version (which was nothing but tutorials), the Konquest Mode here isn't exactly optional; it's your only means of unlocking a lot of the valuable extra content like new characters, costumes and whatnot, since they require keys exclusively found in Konquest Mode instead of regular Koins.
  • Combo breakers, which critics derided as a band-aid over some of the imbalance in the gameplay, considering they're both limited (three to a match) and easy to pull off, leaving some to feel like they were simply "outs" rather than actually balancing the game. Breakers would be much more well-received in 9 onwards as part of a traditional meter-gamble mechanic.
  • The tri-colored lights under each player's health bar, with each color attempting to signal a status to the player (red means attacking, blue means locked out while being combo'd, and yellow means being near a stage fatality). In execution, the speed of the fights and signals made it pretty much impossible to read the signals in real-time for a player (especially since they would have to focus their attention off the fighting itself), and the system would not return.
• Take That, Scrappy!: Mokap can be found twice in Konquest Mode. One time in Chaosrealm for a side mission and another time walking around in a flamboyant manner in Seido where he can't be interacted in any way aside from punching him out to unlock a fighting style video.
• That One Boss: Several candidates in Konquest, especially the fights with different stipulations depending on the A.I. difficulty and the opponent;
  • The fight against Tanya in Edenia, the first of the final two Kombat missions in the game. It doesn't sound bad on principle, except the game locks you into using Shujinko himself, a character with no special moves and lengthy combos that are hard to memorize and perform in the heat of the moment, as well as having a moveset you only used once at the very start and never again, meaning you'll be doing constant visits to the move list just to make sure you have something to use. Not only that, Tanya will be playing aggressive and will certainly be using all of her moves against you. Fortunately, she's still more manageable than the battle after hers. Speaking of...
  • The final battle against Scorpion is truly something grueling. Just like with Tanya, you're locked into using default Shujinko, and Scorpion will be at his most aggressive yet, even more than Tanya before him. Furthermore, this is right after another moveset tutorial with Sindel, which only acts as a complete swerve since it logically indicates you'd have to use Sindel for any upcoming fights... but you only have one Kombat mission left in the main story and you don't use her powers in any way, shape or form. Worse still, you have to beat Scorpion in THREE ROUNDS OUT OF FIVE.
    • Tying back to the matches with special stipulations, one such fight is, again, with Scorpion, a bonus mission that technically must be done in the post-game to unlock his Spear move for Shujinko. Sure, you only need to beat him in one round this time, but that's only the bare minimum of the compensation for the match stipulations: he deals 300% of his natural damage and his health will automatically heal throughout the fight. Couple that with an extremely aggressive A.I. that seems to bypass most of your blocks and read what combos you're trying to use, as well as a fighter that has Hellfire as a special (ie one of the few special moves in the game that cannot be blocked AT ALL), and you have a battle where you'll lose in about three to five hits without any damage counted on his end due to the fast healing. Sure, it's doable, but you're guaranteed to be hearing "SCORPION WINS! FLAWLESS VICTORY!" a LOT before you finally get the win.
• Vindicated by History:
  • Time seems to have been kind to Shujinko, or else a generation of MK fans who grew up with the PS2-era games turned out more fond of him than the old guard were; either way, when Cassie Cage's Arcade Tower ending depicted her unknowingly murdering Shujinko after mistaking him for Shang Tsung, many mourned his ignoble fate.
  • The new timeline's conclusion made people look back to this game with more fondness, since it provided endings where certain characters that were treated ignobly faring much better originally. Highlights include Ermac who ended up being nothing but a glorified Jobber with legion-like personality in the new timeline, but in here pulling an actual Heel–Face Turn after meeting Kenshi and rescuing many revenants from Onaga's enslavement (though with a help of a zombified Liu Kang, but Ermac did a lot of heavy-lifting), and especially Sindel, who received a severe Adaptational Villainy into an Evil All Along bitch in the new timeline, while in here, she was a bonafide good mother and queen who would go on a rampage to save her brainwashed daughter.
  • The GameCube release of the game was mostly dismissed compared to the other two main versions as it lacked an online mode. Now, with the online servers shut down, the GameCube version has been viewed as one of the better versions due to it including two exclusive fan favorite characters.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: Some of Seido's actions (particularly its suppression of people's freedoms ("freedom leads to anarchy, anarchy leads to Chaos, Chaos leads to suffering") and its wars against Chaosrealm and Outworld) seem like a derisive reference to the United States' national security policies under the then-current Bush Administration and American involvement in the then-ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of the larger War on Terrorism. This game also came out in 2004 (when a presidential election occurred) and Chicago (where the Mortal Kombat games were made at the time) is a notoriously liberal city in a deep blue state. Make of those last two what you will.
• The Woobie: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• WTH, Costuming Department?:
  • Some fans have this opinion in regard to Sub-Zero's "Shredder" outfit that he had in this game as being unfitting for him. Though on the other hand, some fans would consider this Narm Charm in that Kuai Liang is the type of person who is cool enough to make what would otherwise be ridiculous look stylishly awesome. Adding onto that, the costume is actually considered by quite a bit of fans as probably one of his best ones. To the point that there was quite a bit of rejoicing when it became a DLC skin for Sub Zero in MK11.
  • Special mention has to go to Sub-Zero's other costume, however, as it's not a look that even he can pull off. In a nutshell, he looks like a bald night elf with loose-fitting PJs.

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