It's hard to find a fighting game as iconic as Mortal Kombat. Its blood, gore, and killer gameplay have carried it for over twenty-nine years as a franchise that still has more games to come.
With the newest Mortal Kombat movie recently released, many are looking back at the franchise's story and noticing just how over-the-top and wacky it is. Still, it's nothing compared to some of the games that tried to copy it back the game's heyday.
10 Dong Dong Never Die
It's possible we could spend an entire article trying to explain the fever dream that is Dong Dong Never Die so we won't even try to. The game features digitized versions of all of its characters just like the original Mortal Kombat but the characters in Dong Dong Never Die have such wild and wacky special attacks it's impossible to understand what's going on.
Plus, Mario makes a cameo in the game as a playable character bringing its antics to a whole new level.
9 Timeslaughter
Adding time travel to the story of a game is sure to make it better, right? Featuring what might be the ugliest pixel art ever used in a fighting game, Timeslaughter features a strange mishap with a time-traveling car (yes, it's a Back to the Future reference) that somehow ends with people from various eras throughout history violently fighting each other. It makes absolutely no sense and the gameplay is abysmal — no wonder its sequel was canceled.
8 The Black Heart
The Black Heart is a free-to-play game that is a hidden gem of the fighting game genre. The game features more over-the-top violence than Mortal Kombat while keeping things firmly planted in the horror genre. When the creator of the "other world" is murdered, an entity called Final emerges from the chaos that exists between two worlds.
Final apparently rips out the heart of the now-dead king of the other world and it is presumed that everyone is fighting to get their hands on the heart which offers incredible powers if it can be utilized correctly. We have to believe the game's mechanics were the focus when designing it, not the storyline.
7 Cardinal Syn
It's so hard to follow the plot of Cardinal Syn that it's best anyone doesn't even try. It involves warring clans, a Book of Knowledge, peace, a weird demon somehow turning those books into swords, and said demon declaring a tournament for people to win the swords despite already holding ultimate power in their hands. Oh, and that demon also cheated in the first tournament to win when they could have simply never hosted one at all.
6 Survival Arts
Survival Arts also tried to go the route of using digitized characters and ultra-violence like Mortal Kombnat but didn't manage to do so nearly as well. The story involves all of the fighters knowing a single part of the "Survival Arts" with everyone entering a tournament to obtain each part so they can be the ultimate martial arts master.
Considering the fact that the creator of the survival arts literally eats people to steal their powers, it might have been wiser for these human combatants to work together to defeat him instead.
5 Ultra Vortek
A tablet excavated from a South American dig site was so cursed it somehow resulted in the apocalypse taking place. The future, now looking like a lot like the Mad Max series, and a Guardian of the tablet calls for a "Time of Testing" where various groups of fighters will compete against him in violent combat. If no one can defeat the Guardian, the world will be destroyed.
Sounds confusing? Don't worry, game critics weren't big fans of the storyline either.
4 Thea Realm Fighters
Thea Realm Fighters (even the name is trying to rip off Neatherealm) is an unreleased game for the Atari Jaguar that was designed specifically to be Atari's answer to Mortal Kombat. The game was canceled due to the lack of success for the console, but not before it was almost entirely completed. Several ROMs of the game have been leaked online allowing fans to still experience the game.
Several martial artists that played Mortal Kombat characters were a part of the game's development including Ho-Sung Pak (Lui Kang), Phillip Ahn M.D. (Shang Tsung), Katalin Zamiar (Kitana, Mileena, and Jade), and Daniel Pesina (Johnny Cage).
3 War Gods
War Gods was also designed by Midway Games which might explain its over-the-top violence and wacky storyline. The games not only share a similar control scheme, but they both have the exact same fatality systems. However, people didn't seem to click with the story which involved an alien spaceship dropping life-giving fragments of rock all over Earth that resulted in people being transformed into supernatural fighters.
Seeing as how one of the characters is a blatant Terminator rip-off character, we don't suspect the rest of the story was all that well written.
2 Clayfighter
It's not hard to believe a game designed specifically to parody the fighting games like Mortal Kombat would have a goofy plot. The original Clayfighter game starts out with a massive meteor made of clay landing on a circus, somehow bringing new life to the various attractions there.
For some unexplained reason, they all end up fighting each other as well. Perhaps gaining sudden untold clay-based superpowers just brings out the primal rage in a person.
1 Bio F.R.E.A.K.S.
Not a lot of gamers were looking for a fighter involving Techno-Industrial Civil Wars and a new country formed by corporations called Neo-Amerika but Midway Games delivered it anyway. Players were supposed to use these Biological Flying Robotic Enhanced Armored Killing Synthoids (the Bio F.R.E.A.K.S.) to battle each other to maintain order somehow.
It made little sense to gaming fans back when it was originally going to be released either, resulting in the arcade version being canceled, but the console ports still being sent into the world for them to try regardless.