Welcome to Part 2 of this very special series that we just started. Can you give it 100%? This time, the game in question is “Mortal Kombat 11,” and this one is incredibly fun but extremely grindy in areas and requires some serious skill for a couple of achievements. Can you 100% “MK11” realistically, though? Yes! Even if you are not into fighting games, this one can be done, but your time to completion will increase exponentially. On the other hand, for someone who is well-versed in fighting games and plays “Mortal Kombat” or any other fighting game for that matter, this should be a cakewalk for you guys. Time consumption will still be a factor, especially if you try to do everything legally. I’ll state this right at the beginning: I have not 100% completed this game myself and am sitting at 97%, and I think this is where I’ll be, unfortunately. There are two achievements I need. One requires a skill that I don’t have, the other requires me to find a very specific online match which I can’t do despite trying for days on end. Enough about my sob story here; let’s jump in and see what it’ll take to be 100% “Mortal Kombat 11”.
The Game
The first “Mortal Kombat” game came out all the way back in 1992 from the mind of the now legendary Ed Boon and was the center of attention for a series of controversies. It was the first fighting game of the time that featured very graphic content like ripping out spines, beheadings, and more in the form of fatalities, a series staple now, and a ton of blood and gore in general. The stuff on display here looks like a joke if you look at it today and compare it with modern games, but back in the day? Oh boy, did it cause the entire gaming industry a lot of trouble! Violence in video games was the talk of the town, and “Mortal Kombat” quickly became their poster child. Did it stop the developers and shut the series down? Nope! They kept releasing more games featuring even more graphic content, which may seem unnecessary and attention-seeking, but it’s not. It’s satisfying and separates the series from others while sending a strong message that this isn’t the children’s playground but the adult’s table. Another thing that separated “MK” from other games of its genre was its charming and charismatic characters and its reliance on story and lore, which is very good!
In 2010, Ed Boon started his new studio called Netherrealm Studios under Warner Bros., and they released “Mortal Kombat 9” in 2011, which was really good. A few years later, in 2015, they released “Mortal Kombat X,” which was even better, and finally, in 2019, we got “Mortal Kombat 11,” which I’d consider their magnum opus. The game boasts an incredible story campaign, tons of replayability with its towers, competitive online play, and some of the most brutal and gory fatalities and brutalities the series has ever seen. This game is straight-up gorgeous and unsettling at times because of its gore and how real it looks, and it casually and confidently shows us what makes “Mortal Kombat” a great series, perhaps the best fighting game series there is. Let’s take a look at the achievements now, shall we?
The Easy/ Story Achievements
The game comes packed with 58 achievements for you to unlock/ trophies to earn, and unfortunately, there isn’t a lot that’ll fall under the easy banner. It’s not all doom and gloom here as there are a handful of achievements you’ll unlock here, like the one you’ll get for completing the story 50% and the other for fully completing the story. Then you can also add the “Hit the Dojo” achievement here for completing all basic tutorials, alongside “Blood in the Water” for spilling over 10,000 pints of blood. You can also add the “Deadly Encounter” achievement here for performing 15 different fatalities, which means performing the endings or final moves using 15 different characters, as each character has one fatality unlocked by default. “Klassic” for completing a tower once, and finally, “Thank You For Being A Fan” for watching the credits of the game. All of this can be done in 7–10 hours, roughly.
Unfortunately, these seven achievements/trophies are all that you can call easy. However, that doesn’t mean the rest is hard! The game features a ton of achievements that are easy but grindy, then a bunch that you’ll unlock while playing online, a few for doing easy miscellaneous things, and finally, a handful that is hard. Let’s look at those now!
The Miscellaneous Achievements
Okay, before I start this, I originally wanted to put all of the Krypt-related achievements into the grinding section, but some of them are so basic that there isn’t a need to do so. Basically, The Krypt is a place that you run around in the third-person and explore. The place is full of chests that you can unlock by spending currencies that you earn by playing the game. These chests randomly reward you with cosmetics and more fatalities, brutalities, concept art, costumes, and other stuff. With the explanation out of the way, let’s take a gander at some of the achievements related to The Krypt, among other general miscellaneous achievements.
While running around The Krypt, you can earn the “Already Enough” achievement by hitting the gong, which will be pretty much in front of you. Next up, you can also earn the “My Magic Shoes” achievement for running 5 miles in The Krypt and “Get Over Here” for spearing 50 hanging bodies. There will be 4-5 in random places each time, so get them, then feel free to reload The Krypt. Finally, “Gimme Dat Money” for spending 50,000 coins at the Naknadan shrine, which sounds like a lot but isn’t. These have been the miscellaneous achievements related to The Krypt; there are more here, but they’ll be under the grindy section.
There are three more miscellaneous achievements that you can get in standard matches for doing random things. “Oh My Days” asks you to duck a hundred times during a match, and “Disco’s Not Dead,” asks you to flip your stance 50 times during a match. Finally, we have “Total Disrespect,” which asks you to defeat someone as Bug-Vorah while playing as D’Vorah, which means you’ll have to pick a certain loadout and lose the round on purpose, so a flying bug creature comes out of D’Vorah’s corpse and use it to kill your enemy. If any of these sound complicated, then fret not because they can be done while playing against the AI on very easy difficulty, or if you want it even easier, plug in a second controller and leave it idle to do your thing. These seven achievements can be unlocked in 2-3 hours tops, most of which will be spent running around The Krypt and finding and spearing bodies.
Online Achievements
Anyone who is an achievement hunter or trophy collector will happily tell you about their hatred for online achievements. These suck, and while I agree they are “achievements” that require skill, an in-game alternative would be a better way to implement them, but hey! The devs never listen, so we have to earn them regardless of bad servers, inability to find matches, or getting matched with opponents that are leagues above our skill level somehow, despite the games heavily advertising SBMM(skill-based matchmaking). The good news is that none of the online achievements for “MK11” are brutally difficult. They are just time-consuming, and the servers for this game are unruly, to say the least.
The easiest stuff here will be “My AI Can Do It” and “Puppet Master,” which are for playing 10 and 25 AI simulations, respectively. Here, you’ll select a team of three AI-controlled characters and let them fight a team of three AI-controlled characters controlled by another player. You don’t have to win these, and you can fast-forward matches to get past them quickly. Next, you have an achievement called “Teamwork,” which wants you to play a cooperative match with two other players. The opponent you’ll be facing here will have a massive health pool, and the three of you will have to work together to defeat him or her. For the achievement, you don’t have to win the match, just see it to the end, and this is one of the two achievements I mentioned I don’t have because the game won’t give me two players simultaneously!
For “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” boot up King of the Hill and reward 100 respect points. You can only give a maximum of 10 points per match, and you don’t have to participate in any. Just sit back, relax, and watch two players fight each other, then give them 10 points at the end of each match for ten matches, and you’ll have this one in the bag. The “Not Dead Yet” achievement asks you to show mercy to your opponent ten times, which means instead of performing a fatality at the end, you spare them and give them a fighting chance. This can be boosted with a friend or done using a second controller to make your life easier. The last online achievement here is not difficult but time-consuming. “Kompetitor” wants you to play 50 casual online matches. Play them, not win them. These sum up the online achievements, see? Nothing too crazy. I can’t put a time on these due to internet connectivity and matchmaking times differing because of them, but I’d say you should be done with them in under 10 hours.
The Hard/ Grindy Achievements
The final stage. Many grindy and a few hard achievements that will definitely test your patience and take most of your time, unless you are a fighting game fanatic, then you’ll enjoy them. The structure here will be a bit off as they are somewhat connected with each other as you’ll be doing towers to earn money to spend at The Krypt to get cosmetics and fatalities, which you’ll perform in the towers, so bear with me.
First, the Krypt, with “Grave Robber” for opening 200 chests and “Skull Kabob” for impaling a head at the shrine. Two hundred chests aren’t a lot, as The Krypt literally has thousands of chests that you’ll be opening anyways to unlock fatalities (more on that later) and consumables. The grind here is to earn money to open chests, so you’ll be lopping between the towers and The Krypt a lot. Impaling a head, on the other hand, is a completely different story, as in order to get the head, you’ll have to perform a fatality on that specific character 25 times. Good luck. Once you impale their head, your reward will be a costume alongside a few other cosmetics and a new victory pose for the character, which brings us to our next achievement. You’ll unlock “Victorious” for equipping a victory pose on five different characters, which means you’ll have to gather four more heads of different characters by performing 25 fatalities on them each. That means this achievement will require you to perform 125 fatalities on five different characters, as that’s the only way to get victory poses. GOOD LUCK. There is RNG stuff in The Krypt, as well as if this weren’t enough. You’ll have to get lucky and find and equip five different character intros to unlock “Have We Met?” and find 24 fatalities (the second one) for the 24 characters in the base game. Doing this will let you unlock 24 achievements for performing both fatalities on each and every character. The fatalities themselves are cool and worth getting, but you can’t put a finger on how long it’ll take you to get them. Use those unlocked fatalities to get “MURDER!” for performing 30 different fatalities.
Now that you are done with The Krypt, you may be wondering if the worst is behind you. To an extent, yes, it is, but the absurdity doesn’t stop just yet. “Brutal End” and “Psychopath” will be next on your list for performing 25 and 100 brutalities, respectively. You can perform simple and easy brutality by uppercutting your opponent when they have roughly 10% health left. This’ll knock their head clean off their body, so set the matches to one round, plug in a second control and get to work. Then you can go for “I Want It All,” which is for completing a tower at novice level or above difficulty with ten different characters. On the other hand, “More Power” and “Konsumed” are for using 50 and 100 konsumables, respectively, in the towers that you will be using because the last two achievements of this batch are a nightmare, not in terms of difficulty but in terms of time investment. “Tower Champion” and “Master of Time” can be unlocked by beating 125 and 250 towers, respectively, and why this is necessary is beyond me. Once again, I wish you good luck. There is a cheat here where you start a match on the Endless Tower and leave it immediately, which counts as one tower completed, but even that method isn’t super fast, plus you’ll have to do a lot of towers anyways to earn money so as to spend it in The Krypt. The grind here is laborious, to put it mildly, and you’ll easily be spending 30+ hours getting all of this over.
There are two achievements standing between you and your 100%, and one of them ain’t that bad, but the other is incredibly challenging and brutal in its difficulty. Will you believe me if I tell you that the most difficult achievement in “Mortal Kombat 11” is to beat its tutorial? That is true, and that is the case, as the achievement for beating all the advanced tutorials titled “Ready To Kompete” is pretty much a cakewalk, but what comes next is my personal hell and the second achievement I don’t have in this game. “No Bad Match Ups” simply ask you to complete all strategy tutorials. A simple request on the surface, but this is anything but that! They start off easy enough but slowly get difficult, and some of them have crazy timing that you’ll have to pull off to get through. Towards the end, you’ll have a tutorial here that’ll give you control of Raiden and ask you to pull off a crazy combo with incredibly tight timing and precision. Do that, and there’s no other achievement in this game that’ll stand in your way. A fighting game veteran reading this may be laughing at me and calling me a noob, but I ain’t ashamed to admit it was hard for me, and I was forced to give up on it, and I know roughly 20 other people who feel the same. This section is the longest stretch of the game and will take you anywhere between 20 and 40 hours to get through, if not more.
Final Thoughts
I am not much of a fighting game person, but I love “Mortal Kombat,” and “Mortal Kombat 11” is brilliant. Some of the achievements here really made me feel like banging my head into a wall, but believe it or not, this is one of the easiest “MK” games to get 100%. I know I gave up at 97% myself, but if you are interested in knowing, my recommendation here will be to go for 100% if you plan to play this game for fighting game fans or otherwise. It’s a lot of work, true, but it’ll be a proud and shiny addition to your profile. Below you’ll find my completion rating. The score below is not for the game but for its completion and is a mixture of difficulty, skill, and time consumption.
6/10
60-100 hours.
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