YMMV / Mortal Kombat II

• Catharsis Factor: What makes Shao Khan’s death sequence in this game particularly satisfying is his Villainous Breakdown when he realizes he’s lost just before he turns to stone and explodes.
• Cheese Strategy:
  • Shao Kahn, being a massively unfair SNK Boss, has a number of cheese strats dedicated to defeating him. Of note, spamming fast or low projectiles from Liu Kang and Reptile can allow either of those characters to simply wear Shao Kahn down in a battle of attrition rather than outplay him.
  • A lesser-known cheese strategy is the Raiden Teleport > Roundhouse Kick loop. After being knocked down once, Raiden can Teleport behind a CPU enemy and then deliver a Roundhouse Kick that knocks them down again, then loop the strategy ad infinitum. The computer AI has a hard time countering the strategy as the teleport usually forces it to stay in one spot until the animation finishes, and there only a few select options (besides blocking) that can stop Raiden from knocking it down with another Roundhouse Kick and repeating the process.
  • An easy way to cheese Kintaro in the SNES version is to jump into range to make him go for an attack, immediately jump back out and then immediately jump back in with a jump-kick. He'll either still be reeling from trying to go for an attack during your first jump-in and take the kick to the face or he'll be forced to block the hit and take chip damage. Rinse and repeat until he keels over. The same technique does work to a certain extent in the Arcade version too but if you're not careful he'll get fed up with the cheese and chaingrab you to death.
• Complete Monster: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Shao Kahn is this for a lot of fans due to his Evil Is Cool tendencies.
• Even Better Sequel: While the first game being inspired by Karate Champ but Bloodier and Gorier and had selectable fighters that makes the first game so original, this sequel takes the first game's violence and brutality up to eleven and introduces many fan favorite characters as well as the Outworld setting that would follow the series from here on out. The game also ran on more powerful hardware than the original, being a quantum leap forward in visuals, animation and audio from the first game, improved several gameplay issues of the first game, and was jam-packed with secrets galore, from the new stage fatalities to the three secret opponents.
• Franchise Original Sin:
  • As the first Mortal Kombat sequel, it was the first to remove characters for little reason, in its case Sonya and Kano being captured by Shao Kahn to establish his badass cred. It was forgiven for this game because, at the time, they were by far the least popular characters, so their removal was seen as an acceptable tradeoff in return for keeping the real fan-favorites (Liu Kang, Scorpion, Sub-Zero, etc.) and adding new characters who would themselves become favorites (Jax, Kitana and Mileena). It only became a problem when Mortal Kombat 3 started to remove characters for less in-universe reasons, in its case because the actors portraying them, Dan Pesina and Katalin Zamiar, left after the second game's development - Johnny Cage was unceremoniously killed off within the game's backstory, Raiden was unable to help out due to his status as a god, both Kitana and Mileena are not present despite how much sense it would make, and most infamously, Scorpion, the most popular character in the series, was left out for no explained reason. All of these would be rectified with Ultimate, but for the more casual fans it was too little, too late. It wouldn't be long after this that the series gained its infamy for arbitrarily dropping and re-adding characters for little rhyme or reason - sometimes suddenly killing them (Liu Kang in the opening to Deadly Alliance), sometimes replacing them with a Suspiciously Similar Substitute (Kano sitting out again for 4/Gold in favor of his new underling Jarek) - to the point that whenever a new game is announced, one of the first and most common questions asked about it is "will [insert character] be in it?"
  • Related in a sort of chicken-or-the-egg case is the later games' bloated roster. MKII could again be considered the start of this, which added Reptile, the first game's secret boss, and other characters with some connection to existing ones, like Kung Lao or Jax who were respectively partners to Liu Kang and Sonya. The difference is that the series was still small back then, so new characters were a welcome sight and felt like genuine expansions to the lore. Not long after that, however, the games started adding more and more characters, including bland and forgettable ones with even more vague and sometimes forced connections to existing ones (perhaps most infamously Mavado and Hsu Hao from Deadly Alliance, members of a never-before-mentioned "Red Dragon" crime syndicate that are rivals to the existing Black Dragon and ended up doing nothing of interest) and even ones that have only been vaguely hinted at, even just in a meme. This continued up to the point where the developers, as part of a deliberate attempt to kill the series and restart it with a "new generation" cast, included every single character from the previous games in Armageddon - even superfluous jokes like Meat or ones they'd gone on-record as disliking like the aforementioned Hsu Hao.
  • Despite being darker in tone than the first game in most regards, it also marked the move towards being Denser and Wackier at the same time - Friendships and Babalities were added, Dan Forden popping up to shout "Toasty!" started here, and even some the fatalities were much more outlandish and cartoony, such as Johnny Cage punching three heads off of the opponent (which was an Ascended Glitch from the first game) and Kitana kissing someone and causing them to explode into a pile of bones. It was fairly restrained in this game, mostly serving as fun Easter Eggs and a way to give the game some levity. However Mortal Kombat 3 took it too such a degree that most of the fatalities just looked cheesy and ridiculous (Liu Kang dropping a Mortal Kombat '92 arcade cabinet on top of the opponent or Jax inexplicably growing 50 feet tall just to name a few) and it became impossible to take the game seriously despite the plot's high stakes.
• Fridge Brilliance: When Noob Saibot wins a match, the announcement is "Feel the POWER of Toasty!". This could be considered a hint towards the fact that he's the original Sub-Zero since Bi-Han was killed by Scorpion, who tends to be most-associated with the phrase "Toasty" due to him being able to burn people down to a charred skeleton.
• Game-Breaker: Kitana's fan lift/pummeling combo was a nigh-indefensible move so widely abused that it was nerfed by a software update that made it difficult to corner an opponent. Some players found a workaround anyway.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • In the Super Nintendo version, using Johnny Cage's Shadow Ball twice in rapid succession, so that a second one comes out while the first is still active, will cause all projectile physics to break, making them stay in place once thrown and causing graphical glitches for other SFX. While this has very little utility during a fight outside of some wacky combos using the now-stationary hitboxes, it can create hilarious graphical glitches and especially broken fatalities.
  • Ed Boon considered some of the overpowered Kitana combos to be these; despite breaking any semblance of balance with the game, he expressed that he was genuinely impressed how players could come up with creatively timed juggle combos for her that no one on the team would even think of (and could nerf before release as a result).
  • In various ports of the game, positioning yourself just in front of Kintaro and throwing rapid mixed high and low punches will cause Kintaro to stop in his tracks and eventually break his AI, causing him to do things he's not supposed to do like jumping around when he's only supposed to be airborne when stomping or throwing moves that he technically doesn't have. Him doing so corrupts the graphics, making the whole experience even worse.
  • In various revisions of the Arcade version, performing a fatality on The Armory battlefield randomly causes the floor to begin scrolling as if the characters were walking around.
  • On the Dead Pool battlezone if a losing player goes into "Finish Him/Her" phase from a knockdown, with a fast enough input, they can sometimes get their fighter to sneak in one last uppercut before the winning fighter can react and send them into the acid instead.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The special intro in the Super Nintendo port, which features Shao Kahn and Kintaro beating up the Acclaim logo, is this due to the later bankruptcy of Acclaim, the company that distributed the first two games for said console.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• Memetic Mutation: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The sound heard whenever Raiden teleports, regenerates after being knocked down, or performs his winpose.
• Nausea Fuel: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• Paranoia Fuel: There's an eerie and unsettling tone to the game through the glut of cryptic messages, secret characters lurking in the shadows, and audio Easter eggs.
• Polished Port:
  • The SNES port is quite beloved, with the visuals and sound being quite close to the arcade version and the gameplay being translated perfectly. And it's fully uncensored.
  • Unbelievably, the Game Boy version turned out really well. Yes, the character roster had to be cut down due to hardware limitations, but the graphics and music are very good, the controls are perfect, and the gameplay is actually faster than the other versions.
  • The Sega 32X port vastly improves the maligned Sega Genesis version. All of the narration samples from the arcade are present (character names, round cues, etc.), as well as the game's type-font and UI matching the arcade version. The game also restores colors, background elements, the attract mode, full-screen character photos for the endings, sound and voice effects, and frames of animation missing in the base Genesis game. The music was left unaltered, however, though considering it wasn't bad in the first place, this isn't exactly a bad thing.
• Porting Disaster:
  • The Midway Arcade Treasures 2 version has the start button exclusively function as the pause button. This makes unlocking Smoke impossible.
  • The Sega Genesis version has the gameplay mostly intact, especially with a six-button controller, but the visuals are really bad, with missing frames in a lot of animations (Baraka and Johnny Cage's victory animations stand out; neither of which are the complete animation from the arcade); the sound, on the other hand, is almost completely absent outside of background music, with only a handful of the arcade's character sounds in combat, and as with the first game, the only voiceover narration is "Fight" and "Finish Him/Her". The port its sequel would get, from a different developer and being quite faithful to the source, is a very clear example that Mortal Kombat II could have had a much, much better Sega Genesis port. At least the music sounds awesome, being composed by Matt Furniss.
  • The PlayStation port, released only in Japan, is riddled with constant disc access issues, requiring the game to go into brief load times, especially during fatalities. Get used to seeing the MKII loading logo in the corner of the screen often.
• The Scrappy: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• Self-Fanservice: Mileena is the character subjected to this the most, likely because of the whole "smoking hot body, hideous face" dichotomy she presents. Fan Art tends to either outright give her Cute Little Fangs or somehow display/downplay her teeth in a way that doesn't detract from her beauty.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: A major issue with the game is its cheating AI, causing the game to become absurdly hard. It's difficult to enjoy a game when you get thrown almost every five seconds while your attacks are almost always blocked.
• The Woobie: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.

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