Mortal Kombat is known for having really enjoyable gameplay, even if it doesn’t always have the most interestingly done characters. While there are some real classics on MK’s roster, there are also some characters, especially from more recent games that have almost absolutely flopped and not really even made a reasonable mark on fighting game history, let alone the history of gaming as a whole.
While characters like Liu Kang, Johnny Cage, Raiden, and Shao Kahn will forever live in the hearts of Mortal Kombat fans everywhere, those that are about to comprise this list won’t be so lucky. Let’s take a look at some of the most forgettable characters that have been added to the Mortal Kombat roster.
10 Meat
While some people might remember Meat, a character introduced in Mortal Kombat 4, it would be safe to say that most of the people reading this article probably don’t, other than maybe gamers who pride themselves on weird and wacky video game history.
Meat was originally just a skin that could be accessed in Mortal Kombat 4 until he started getting referenced as a real character by the game’s creators on their website while they were promoting the 3rd revision of the arcade game. After a while, Midway decided to make him an actual playable character, and he had appearances in both Mortal Kombat: Deception and Mortal Kombat: Armageddon.
9 Mokap
Oh, Mokap. If only you could stay lost, forever wandering the deepest depths of the annals of video game history. Unfortunately, we can’t allow for that to happen considering this list would be incomplete without him. He’s originally featured in Deadly Alliance as a joke character, and unfortunately for everyone, this really half-baked joke went entirely too far.
Mokap was conceived as an actual Hollywood motion-capture actor that was somehow transported to the world of Mortal Kombat by some unknown mechanism. Since he’s a motion-capture actor he isn’t completely useless, because he has a pretty decent command of varying styles of martial arts. The most unfortunate thing about that is though, that a really nice hook-kick isn’t going to do much against a god from another realm that has a hammer twice the size of Mokap’s body.
8 Jarek
Jarek, like the Goblin King from Labyrinth? No wait, that’s Jareth. Also, Jarek is not nearly as captivating as David Bowie was at anything he did.
Jarek was a character that first showed up in Mortal Kombat 4, but was chronologically first introduced into the series as a boss in the also completely forgotten Mortal Kombat: Special Forces, a pretty terrible game for the PS1 in which you play as Jax and only Jax. How entertaining that must have been. Aside from that nightmare, when you could actually use him as a playable character in MK4, he pretty much just had Kano’s moveset.
7 Reiko
Reiko looks like some horrible other-worldly mix of Shao Kahn and Chris O’Donnell’s Robin from Batman and Robin.
Not only does he look like some sort of reject from really early drafts of Mortal Kombat Vs. DC Universe, but the fact of the matter is that at the end of the day, Reiko just seems to be some weird rip-off of Shao Kahn confusingly done by Midway themselves. He’s way too similar to Shao Kahn to truly be his own character, even though at points in the series canon it seemed like he’d end up being the next big bad.
6 Tremor
Yet another one of the characters that didn’t quite undergo a solid metamorphosis after the admittedly terrible idea of making an entire 1/6th or so of your fighting game’s roster just palette-swapped sprites, is Tremor.
Tremor’s concept is simple enough, and really would have worked well as a pretty memorable MK character, or at least a character at least as memorable as Rain. That is, if he had been properly developed and not just kind of hastily come up with. He shows up as a downloadable character in MKX which really isn’t the best way to introduce a new character into your franchise. Aside from that, he showed up challenge mode of the Vita port that MK9 had.
5 Bo Rai Cho
A lot of people (and by a lot of people we mean probably most of the people who even know of Bo Rai Cho’s existence in the first place) aren’t really fans of the character. What’s not to love though?
Mortal Kombat as a franchise absolutely needs a character who’s main abilities are drunken style kung-fu and assault with various bodily functions. While it seems sophomoric and silly to think that Bo Rai Cho vomiting on an opponent is funny, that’s really the entire spirit of the Mortal Kombat world if we’re being honest with ourselves. Of course it’s not actually funny if you aren’t, like, 16 years old, but at the same time, imagine all of the joy people who were 16 at the time of the release of Deadly Alliance felt. Have a heart (no fatality pun intended).
4 Drahmin
Drahmin is a weird forgotten character because he was admittedly really really cool. Despite the fact that he was introduced at one of the low points in the Mortal Kombat franchise in a game that honestly a lot of the characters on this list came from, but he also had potential, not something a lot of really anyone else in this article had.
Drahmin was a pretty unique concept that legitimately felt at home nestled in the edgy, or if we may indulge ourselves here, wicked-sick roster of characters that Mortal Kombat is known for. The issue with Drahmin isn’t that a demon with a giant club isn’t the most awesome character for the series we can think of, it’s that he was a great concept with absolutely dismal execution.
3 Kira
While Kira has a legitimately really cool backstory, for one reason or another she never took off. What her backstory says about her is that she was originally an arms dealer in the mountains of Afghanistan who had to disguise herself as a man to make it in the business. She’s been compared to an evil version of Sonya, even though she fights with the same knives that Kano uses.
She was also recruited by Kabal to get the Black Dragons up and running again. If anything, the fact that she doesn’t really appear in more recent games probably has to do with her being a mash-up of other already-established characters.
2 Onaga
“O-who?” everyone but the 6 people reading this that actually played Mortal Kombat: Deception must be asking themselves… Well, to explain, Onaga is a giant dragon king that tries his best to usurp the throne from Shao Kahn, who had previously usurped the throne from him after being one of his most trusted advisors. Not convoluted enough for you yet? Just a sec.
And then, after all of that happened, he was commissioned by Quan Chi and Shinnok to help defeat Blaze, another character who should probably be on this list considering he’s a character who was adapted into an antagonist in the series after his only previous appearance was as a guy on fire presumably burning to death in a fight in the background taking place in one of pit fatality levels. No wonder no one remembers Onaga.
1 Hsu Hao
Hsu Hao is a character that even the game designers at Midway have said they regret making in interviews. Not only is he entirely forgettable, but when the people who made the character would rather forget about him too, the character really isn’t even worthy of being talked about.
He looks quite a bit like a laughably bad (and quite beefy if we do say so ourselves) rip-off of the main villain of the Street Fighter franchise M. Bison, and we here wouldn’t happen to be too surprised if he was originally conceived as some sort of weird parody that Ed and Tobias won’t admit to.
NEXT: 5 Fighting Mechanics That Changed The Genre (& 5 That Are Outdated)