#1099 Mortal Kombat Deception (PS2) Unplayable Characters (1/16): Shang Tsung playthrough.

A playthrough of the unplayable character Shang Tsung in the PS2 version of Midway’s/Netherrealm’s Mortal Kombat Deception. Yep, you read that total-number right. There are more unplayable characters in this game than there are unlockables. Think about that for a second. Now we finally reach the Unplayables. One of the most legendary (borderline infamous) things about Mortal Kombat Deception is the insane number of unplayable characters it has. All the following ones we’ll see are featured in the Konquest Mode of this game, and we’ll be seeing a ton of familiar faces as I cover the entire of this. Most notably, the majority of the unplayable characters in this game are actually taken from Mortal Kombat Deadly Alliance, which heavily implies that this game was simply built on top of its data, rather than made from scratch. Rather than go into paragraph-by-paragraph detail, I’ll just the noteworthy things about the Unplayables: • The announcer will never say their name. • They don’t have any victory animations. • They cannot input fatalities, nor do they actually have any • Some don’t have weapon fighting styles • They have no sounds for jumping down from a higher area, and never is there a sound effect for them when they’re killed by a death-trap. • None of the characters have move lists in the menu • They all have a generic throw (R1), which is very reminiscent of Ryu’s throw in Street Fighter II. • Most have no special moves, or their special moves cannot be accessed because the AI actually uses a special flag system to activate them. Something which was all too common in original MK trilogy. Old habits die hard, it seems. • They can pick up the stage-specific weapons with no problem. • Oddly enough, they can touch the Kamidogu in Onaga’s stage, making a playthrough with them perfectly viable. • With the exception of some choppy animation here and there, the Unplayables are surprisingly playable, and just stable in general. For one-off characters who were never meant to be used by players, they are incredibly stable (especially for an MK game), and never cause the game to crash despite being somewhat glitchy in places This NPC-programming is really very well-done, and will only continue to get better from here on out. Ah, sometimes time really does heal all wounds, although the MK series is possibly the only fighting game series to have been served better by each subsequent gaming generation. [continued in a pinned comment]