Mortal Kombat II - Japanese version for the SNES

One of Nintendo's biggest missteps was the exclusion of blood on the SNES version of Mortal Kombat. After all, the original Mortal Kombat was not really known for its gameplay. Yes, it had digitized actors for its character sprites, but so did Pit Fighter at the time. Mortal Kombat was really about one thing: gruesome violence. When you see Sub-Zero rip someone's head off, know why it became one of the biggest franchises in the fighting genre. That's why it was so critical to put all the violence back into the sequel, Mortal Kombat too. It went on, of course, to be a huge seller.

You'd think then, in Japan, they would leave the violence in their version of MKII for the SNES. After all, their games are usually censored by the time they came to the States. For example, in the game Final Fight, the character of Poison became a man in the American version because her costume was too revealing (there's also an issue of whether or not she's actually a transvestite, but that's for another time). So it really surprised me to see that Japan censored Mortal Kombat II for their audience:



It kind of reminds me of how they brought Kill Bill over to cable TV by using black and white during the sword fighting scene. And green blood? What the heck?