Secret characters in fighting games were all the rage in the '90s and 2000s. Secret characters are those the player couldn’t pick at the start of the game and had to fulfill certain requirements to get them. There have been many such unlockable characters, but some are really difficult to obtain.

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Nowadays, the concept of secret characters has been done away with and has made way for more DLC characters. This might be due to the time-consuming nature of unlocking characters and the fact that people just do not have that time anymore. This list will look back over the years to find the hardest secret characters to unlock in the fighting game genre.

6 Mokap

Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance

Mokap…Mokap is a character from the 11th game in the Mortal Kombat franchise, Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance. The game — which is one of the darker ones in the franchise’s history — started with killing off the game’s main protagonist, Liu Kang. It released in MK’s 3D era and featured unlockable characters like Mokap and Blaze.

To unlock Mokap, the player had to complete Konquest Mode with all the characters. This is no mean feat, as each character’s missions start easy but increase in difficulty with each mission. Once done, the player is congratulated and can unlock both Mokap and Blaze. The player will have to highlight Cyrax on the character select screen and then press ‘down’ and ‘X’ simultaneously to access Mokap.

5 Devil Kazuya

Tekken 2

Devil Kazuya is an alter ego of one of Tekken’s main villains, Kazuya Mishima. In Tekken 1, he won the King of Iron Fist tournament and repaid his father, Heihachi’s, treatment of him at the beginning of the game by throwing him off a cliff.

In Tekken 2, the player cannot pick Kazuya but must first beat the game with every character, which unlocks those characters’ rivals. Then, the player must beat the game again with every single rival before having access to Kazuya. To go a step further and obtain Devil Kazuya, the player will then need to defeat the game with Kazuya to get Devil Kazuya. Considering how difficult the AI for the first two Tekken games was (especially for the arcade modes), doing all that to unlock one character was a big ask.

4 Morrigan & Nakoruru

Capcom VS SNK: Millennium Fight 2000 Pro

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The game included characters from both Capcom’s Street Fighter and Darkstalkers series and SNK’s Art of Fighting, Fatal Fury, and King of Fighters series. Two of the unlockable characters were Morrigan from Darkstalkers and Nakoruru from Samurai Shodown. To unlock them, players had to defeat the game with all the Capcom characters to unlock their EX versions and then defeat Morrigan to get her. The same was necessary for Nakoruru, as players had to beat the game with every SNK character and purchase their EX versions from the secret store.

3 Mewtwo

Super Smash Bros. Melee

Mewtwo is a character from the world of Pokémon who was added to Super Smash Bros. Melee back in 2001. The character was to appear on the Nintendo 64’s version of the game, but that never happened, and Mewtwo was instead introduced in the Gamecube version of Smash Melee.

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Unlocking Mewtwo isn’t hard in the traditional sense of the word, but it is quite a grind. A player would have to put 20+ hours into the game before Mewtwo became available. There is another way to do this, but it is just as time-consuming, as the player will need to have registered 700+ versus games. That’s a lot, and for a character that wasn’t particularly overpowered or anything, it would take a dedicated Mewtwo lover to go through with unlocking the character.

2 Akuma

Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo

The 1994 Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo was an update for Super Street Fighter, which had already added a couple of new characters. In this game, players got their first glimpse of Akuma who is one of the best villains of the franchise and a shoto character like Ken and Ryu.

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The game allowed players to face Akuma, but not before jumping through quite a number of hoops. The player would need to beat all the characters leading to M. Bison without using a continue and within a short period — 25 minutes. This is very hard to do, but its fitting, considering Akuma would only take on the strongest fighters… no matter what universe they are in. To select him in versus mode, one would first have to highlight Ryu for three seconds, then do the same for T. Hawk, Guile, and Cammy, before going back to Ryu, where they’d have to wait a further three seconds before hitting the Start Button and all three Punch buttons at once.

1 Retile

Mortal Kombat

Reptile is a character from the Mortal Kombat franchise that first appeared as a secret unlockable boss in the first game. He was notoriously difficult to unlock, even though he was a palette swap with the other ninja characters in the game (Sub-Zero and Scorpion).

To unlock Reptile, one would have to be playing the single-player mode against the CPU and must be on ‘The Pit’ stage, one of the most iconic Mortal Kombat stages. The player would have to win the fight with a double Flawless Victory (taking no damage), all without blocking, and the fight must end with the character’s fatality. Furthermore, it'd only be valid if a silhouette is flying past the moon on the stage at some point during the fight. On the bright side, if defeated, the player would get 10,000,000 points for their trouble.

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