Tier (Mortal Kombat)

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This is a general overview of tier-lists in the Mortal Kombat fighting games. A tier list rates characters in terms of effectiveness at high-level play. It should not be confused with a character's overall popularity. Among expert players, opinions may vary on optimal strategies with characters, but in the Mortal Kombat community, there seems to be a broad understanding about the strengths and weaknesses of most characters among the high-level players.

Mortal Kombat

In the original 1992 Mortal Kombat game, Sonya Blade is widely considered to be the best character, if the two non-playable boss characters (Goro and Shang Tsung) are excluded. This is mainly because Sonya can endlessly sweep characters such as Raiden in many versions of the game. However, differences between characters in this game are minimal because each of them share the same basic moveset.

Mortal Kombat II

Expert players cite Mileena and Kitana as the best characters of the 1993 sequel to Mortal Kombat, mostly because of their air superiority. Again, differences are not all that great because this game kept the same basic movesets for each character.

Mortal Kombat 3 (and its follow-ups)

As happens with most fighting games, the most dominant character in Mortal Kombat 3, which came out in 1995, was the result of ineffective playtesting rather than intention. Sub-Zero had gained the notorious ice clone move, which made it possible for him to freeze opponents while they were blocking and quickly dominate the match. This error was fixed in Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, along with Kabal's very powerful juggles. To date, UMK3 is cited by experts as the most balanced Mortal Kombat game. Mortal Kombat Trilogy had a large number of imbalanced characters due to the bosses who were made playable and a myriad of glitches. In MK Trilogy, Noob Saibot is the most dominant character, due to having a special move that disables enemies from doing any damage for a large period of time, and having combos which are very easy to perform.

Mortal Kombat 4/Mortal Kombat Gold

Though Mortal Kombat 4 was initially heralded for its "back to basics"-style, it proved to be as imbalanced as its predecessors, with a clear domination of Jarek and Tanya. Both gained their status through superior speed and very effective special moves. When Mortal Kombat 4 was released, in 1997, most other well-known fighting games had already evolved to being more strategic and balanced fighters, which is one of the reasons both the fourth installment and its follow-up, Mortal Kombat Gold, were seen as relatively disappointing. Mortal Kombat Gold added Baraka and Sektor to the top-tiers of the game.

Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance

The fifth true Mortal Kombat title, 2002's boasted a totally revamped fighting engine. Some old-school fans saw this as a step in the wrong direction, while for others these measures were not radical enough to keep up with other fighting games which saw serious tournament competition. Deadly Alliance suffered from at least two characters with infinite combos, Bo' Rai Cho and Frost. Other dominant characters in this game were Scorpion, Sonya Blade, Mavado, Hsu Hao and Shang Tsung. The difference in effectiveness between the top characters and the bottom tier characters was so great, that this game was thought of by many high-level players as a failure.

Mortal Kombat: Deception

, which came out in 2004, attempted to fix some of its predecessor's shortcomings by adding counter hits and a system of combo breakers, but was quickly derided for its lack of wake-up games, frame data and lagging online play. Nearly all of the game's characters possessed infinite combos, and characters such as Noob-Smoke, Dairou and especially Bo' Rai Cho emerged as being notoriously overpowered.

See also

• List of Mortal Kombat characters
• Mortal Kombat
• Tier

 

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