12 Most Hated Fighting Game Characters

1. Shao Kahn - Mortal Kombat (2011)

With some of the examples on this list, you can kinda understand why they were so brutally cheap. Arcade fighters back in the day were supposed to rinse players of their hard-earned coins by stopping them just short of beating the game.

Mortal Kombat's Shao Kahn, though, has no such excuse for being the way he is. Outworld's big bad returned in 2011's reboot, and instead of being designed to encourage players to part with their coins, he seemingly existed to get players to part with their own sanity.

I haven't actually touched this fighter since it came out, and that's because the nightmares surrounding the final boss continue to haunt me. Sweaty visions of cowering in the corner while over-powered combos beat my fighter to a pulp. Promising starts ending up in my overconfidence being punished. Some rounds where I might as well have not touched the controller at all for all the good it did. It all keeps me up at night.

This isn't just my experience either, but the experience of pretty much every MK fan who slogged through this torturous final fight looking for some kind of closure that never came.