Finishing move

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Finishing moves in video games often involve the violent and gory death of the enemy it is performed upon. The most (in)famous examples of these types of finishing moves are the "Fatalities" of the Mortal Kombat franchise, which involve attacks ranging from decapitation of a defeated opponent to even eating them whole and spitting out the bones.

Other games featuring finishing moves include Samurai Shodown, Mace: The Dark Age, Killer Instinct, God of War, BloodRayne, Eternal Champions, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War, Kasumi Ninja, BloodStorm, Ultra Vortek, Time Killers, Way Of The Warrior, Unreal Championship 2. Primal Rage, Weaponlord and Gears of War.

Finishing moves or the equivalent thereof also frequently appear in Console RPGs as well. Examples include "Limit Breaks" in Final Fantasy VII, "Purify Weird Soul" in Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth, or "Deathblows" in Xenogears.

[edit] Uses and Iterations

• Fatality - Term most popularly coined by its appearance in the Mortal Kombat franchise, and is pretty self explanatory. Defeated players are killed in numerous bloody, often overly elaborate ways, ranging from having their hearts ripped out to being torn apart limb from limb, or even being eaten by a giant dragon.
• Overkill - Another term for a finishing move involving the winning character slaying the other, it's been used as the defining term for finishing moves in such games as Killer Instinct and is the name of the background fatalities from the Eternal Champions series. Also, Halo 2 featured overkill as an achievement for getting 25 kills in a row without dying. In programming terms for the DOOM source code, the resulting death and animation from a rocket blast or BFG splash damage is called an Overkill defined by damage received going over the set amount of hit points of the character. Gibbing or fragging are more popular terms used by players.
• Death Move - a generic finishing move term used in Kasumi Ninja and certain other MK clones.
• Sunder - a special finishing move featured in the arcade fighting game BloodStorm, it involved cutting the opponent in half but not killing them right away, it is different then most finishers because it isn't an instant kill and the torso is still controllable.
• Vendetta - Finishing moves unique to each character in Eternal Champions for the Sega CD
• Poopality - A parody finishing move featured in Ultra Vortek for the Atari Jaguar, it literally had your opponent turn into a pile of feces and featured fart noises for a few minutes.
• Scrap/Destruction - A set of finishing moves from One Must Fall 2097. The player must first perform the Scrap move which will damage the opponent's machine, then follow with the Destruction move which will kill it.
• Babality - A finishing move from the Mortal Kombat series that turned the defeated opponent into a baby, one of several finishing moves featured in Mortal Kombat that didn't end in death.
• Friendship - A finishing move introduced in Mortal Kombat II in response to the criticism over the game's violence. Performing a friendship has the winning character show a sign of good will towards the defeated character, such as signing them an autograph.
• Humiliation - A finishing move featured in Killer Instinct that did not kill the opponent, but resulted in the defeated player's character dancing.
• Mercy - A finishing move in Mortal Kombat 3. Rather than killing the opponent, it gave them a very slight increase to their health bar after defeat, allowing the round to continue. Players were required to perform a Mercy and then defeat their opponent again in order to perform an Animality.
• No Mercy - The term used for finishing moves in the arcade game Killer Instinct.
• Animality - Finishing move in Mortal Kombat that had the winning character turn into an animal to finish off the defeated opponent.
• Brutality - A finishing move featured in some ports of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, Mortal Kombat Trilogy, and Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks. The winner performs a large combo on the defeated player, causing them to burst into an explosion of blood and bones, generally more than actually found in a human body (including several ribcages and skulls).
• Crazy Death Blow - a finisher featured in the World Heroes series for the Neo Geo, it was a desperation move that could only be pulled off when the players life bar was critical. Does not result in death of the opponent.
• Desperation Move - A generic term for a move much like the Crazy Death Blow.
• Hara Kiri - A non-traditional finishing move featured in Mortal Kombat: Deception where the defeated opponent could kill themselves instead of allow being killed or being hit by the winning player.
• Nudality - Featured in the arcade game Tattoo Assassins. The opponent's clothes disappear, showing him or her nude, though the hands cover the genitals.
• Destroy - An instant-defeat move from the Guilty Gear series. After entering a special mode, which forbids the use of tension-based techniques, the player is capable of execiting a special, often slow or easy-to-avoid move, which, if connects, will reduce the enemy's lifebar to zero, making a flashy "DESTROYED" emblem appear. If the move misses, the player's tension bar is lost.
• Hyper Combo - A powerful signature attack made use of in the Marvel Vs. series, that consisted of either an attack that consisted of a multiple-hit move or an energy-based attack(or in some cases, both)that could be used when the player's super meter was full. Other attacks, such as the Shun Goku Satsu required 3 levels of super meter power to be used.
• Cinekill - Unique finishing move from Eternal Champions for the Sega CD. It showed an FMV movie of the defeated opponent being finished off by the Eternal Champion. These were the most difficult moves to pull off in the game.

[edit] Trivia

• The fighting game called Weaponlord for the SNES and Genesis featured a unique combo based finishing move system. It required the player to string together normal combos with finisher combos which included: decapitation, debraining, disembowling, skin head and many many other bloody moves. The possibilities were nearly endless for any skilled player to pull off but the skill level needed also kept the moves difficult for beginners to pull off. This kind of system was later adapted for Mortal Kombat Armegeddon's Kreate-a-Fatlity system that some players felt was lacking and lazy on Midway's part.
• Primal Rage stirred up the campaigns to ban video game violence when a mother saw her son perform Chaos' Yellow Shower finishing move. Ironically, since this move features the performer urinating on his defeated opponent, the offensive nature of it has little to do with violence itself.
• This rating scale replaced the earlier Sega-exclusive VRC rating scale.