The Cheapest Mortal Kombat Characters Ever

"You only won because that character is cheap!" "So OP!" "Picking ______ is basically cheating!"

We've probably all heard — and, let's face it, used — these excuses before in the world of video gaming. No genre sees these claims quite as much as fighting games. Go look at tier lists for any popular franchise; you will always find players on complete opposite sides of the spectrum regarding which characters are the best and worst in their game of choice.

For a franchise that's run as long as Mortal Kombat, there are bound to be some cases where those claims of picking cheap characters are actually true. With early games, they often could not get the playtesting or skill level needed to get the balance just right. Last minute design changes could also disrupt the entire ecosystem of a fighting game. For fighting games in the era of esports and online patches, balance changes and a shifting metagame are part of the expected features.

Today, we're checking out some times those complaints of broken characters were actually legitimate. Get over here — we're taking a look at the cheapest characters in Mortal Kombat history.

Broken is not the right word for the god of thunder in his first outing. He was definitely beatable, especially for players who knew what they were doing.

If you were just a casual player, however, Raiden was damn near untouchable. He had an ability to control the space that not many other characters could. He had a fast projectile to keep players far away, a teleport to escape if he get stuck, and his "Superman" special move to keep opponents at bay and punish them when they got close. Essentially, he had a tool for every situation, and was incredibly frustrating to play against if you did not play the game enough to know the systems.

On top of that, Raiden had some of the best damage in the game, and a corner lockdown that was practically impossible to escape. Cheap is the perfect word for him. He could even abuse a bizarre glitch that gave him an infinite combo.

Mortal Kombat 9, which was technically just called Mortal Kombat, was released in 2011, and was essentially a reboot of the series. It was the first release in the series after Street Fighter 4, a game that is often credited with beginning a fighting game renaissance, and MK9 was the attempt to bring the Mortal Kombat series back to basics and make it a presence in the esports scene.

For the most part, it worked, but MK9 featured some growing pains; especially on its release, it featured a lot of broken characters. Shang Tsung had a few features that made him one of the cheapest characters in the game once the dust had settled.

He just had so many projectiles. He threw them straight at you. He threw them off the top of the screen. He pulled them through the floor to juggle you around. Just watch this. Gross.

The sorcerer is not unbeatable; there are plenty of ways to counter his strategy. But his projectile pressure and frame trap game made him an absolute nightmare to fight, and characters without mobility options may as well set their controller down when going against a strong Shang Tsung player.

Remember how Mortal Kombat 9 had several problem fighters? Few were as infuriating as "Day 1" Cyrax, who had all sorts of stupid setups and resets that made him practically impossible to fight against.

Part of the nature of the problems was that much of Mortal Kombat's competitive play was online, and his resets took advantage of the slight delay we saw in 2012 online play. His combos were incredibly damaging, and few characters were able to "reset" damage like MK9's Cyrax. Using nets and bombs to juggle an opponent, then letting them drop just long enough to restart the combo, a single hit from a strong Cyrax player could essentially spell game over.

Even worse was NetherRealm's difficulty in addressing it. Cyrax was nerfed in multiple patches in a row, but his bomb traps remained a problem for months after release. He was eventually balanced down a bit, but Cyrax was a character you were almost guaranteed to face off against every time you played online because of his cheesy style.

Sub-Zero is one of the most iconic fighters ever in the Mortal Kombat series, and his freezing special moves were a big reason why. Characters in the first game had some outrageous damage potential, and Sub-Zero's ability to freeze characters in midair could lead to some very quick matches.

If you understood the properties of Sub-Zero's normal moves, you could do massive (and oftentimes 100%) damage by launching your opponent, freezing them as they fell, and relaunching them while they sat there, helpless. Here's a good example of Sub-Zero doing just that. It takes some serious precision, but watch how easy it is to set up if you understand the frame data on Sub-Zero's different moves.

It didn't always take multiple freezes, either. Since damage output was so high and did not scale down in combos, you could also get situations like this. Corner pressure was a huge issue in the first Mortal Kombat, and few fighters could exploit it like Sub-Zero. He could use a few glitches in the game to utilize all manner of corner shenanigans.

Mileena had plenty of tactics and tricks in Mortal Kombat 2 to make her infuriating to fight against. Her special moves were incredibly fast: the projectile recovery on her sais beat almost every other character's projectile move, and she also had two different moves that sidestepped projectiles entirely (her drop kick and her roll), meaning she had excellent mobility and an option for nearly any scenario. Her roll move had an even more dastardly quality: it popped opponents up into the air.

Naturally, this can lead to all sorts of stupid combos, many of which involved trapping your opponent in the corner and rolling them to death. Like this.

Oh, she can also fire her projectiles in midair, giving her an even better toolkit. Matches with Mileena could be over before you even knew they had begun, and you may as well restart the match if she traps you in the corner.

Mortal Kombat: Deception is often forgotten, but this was another attempt to make the Mortal Kombat series a fully 3D fighter. It is probably best that way, as it also featured one of the most infuriating special moves in Mortal Kombat history: Dairou's Tombstone Drop. He fell down ... really hard? And it hurt the other player.

This move made Dairou so cheap because of canceling. In fighting games, canceling means ending the animation of one move early by inputting another move that overrides it. This is often used for complex combos, but it was much more sinister with the Tombstone Drop.

In the PlayStation 2 and Xbox versions of MKD, players could cancel a sidestep (remember, this was a fully 3D fighter) into the Tombstone Drop, allowing it to come out much more rapidly than normal. Abuse of this would lead to silly situations like this.

In later versions, like the GameCube MKD, this particular cancel was patched out. Wonder why?