10 Video Game NPCs Who Could've Solved EVERYTHING (But Didn't)
7. Nightwolf - Mortal Kombat (2011)
If you play Mortal Kombat 9's arcade ladder with DLC character Freddy Krueger, it climaxes with him defeating Outworld leader Shao Kahn and receiving demonically enhanced bladed gloves for his efforts.
Even accepting that Freddy is a bad piece of work on his own sinister merits, that's pretty badass, right?
But comeuppance soon enough seems to come for him, as though Freddy technically saved Earthrealm from Shao Kahn's iron fist, the guy's still a dream-faring serial killer at the end of the day.
And so, the heroic Nightwolf decides to deal with Freddy by... enacting a shamanistic ritual which sends him back to the Dream Realm.
But as any horror fan worth their salt knows, the dream world is precisely where Freddy thrives, and so Nightwolf effectively just did him a favour, "banishing" him back to the realm where he's functionally immortal and can terrorise dreaming humans once again.
Even accepting that Freddy had absorbed some of Kahn's powers, dealing with him as a corporeal entity on Earth certainly beats sending him back to the place where he's most powerful and can torment victims from afar.
Sure, Nightwolf likely wasn't entirely aware of Freddy's nature, but all the same, he had a ripe opportunity here to deal with Freddy once and for all.