Image: @Daniell3C4st
A new book celebrating the art of the Mortal Kombat series has come under fire for allegedly using AI upscaling to “improve” visuals from earlier entries in the franchise.
The officially licensed Mortal Kombat: Flawless Victory, written by Ian Flynn, launched recently to decent reviews, but a few people on social media have pointed out that some of the art doesn’t look quite right.
It seems that AI upscaling has been deployed in order to “enhance” the look of the original character portraits from the first two games in the series, which used digitised images.
The use of AI upscaling is disastrous in this book. It’s reminiscent of those nightmarish early AI models. This needs to be addressed or the fans should massively request for a refund… ♻️ https://t.co/hGE3qqeiCZ— Matias (@matiascel) October 23, 2025
Wow, this is pretty damn bad. I was going to order this one, but it seems filled with bad AI upscales. I think they could have just interpolated a nearest neighbor upscale of the original pixel art and it would have been good. https://t.co/06ojeXI8CW— Pramod Somashekar (@pr4m0d) October 23, 2025
The end result, as you can clearly see, has produced some rather odd effects, such as masks blending into faces and eyeballs seemingly melting.
Mortal Kombat: Flawless Victory’s publisher, Insight Editions, hasn’t commented directly on the issue, but it can only be a matter of time – the images are circulating on social media as we speak, with a predictably negative reaction from fans.
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Damien has been writing professionally about tech and video games since 2007 and oversees all of Hookshot Media’s sites from an editorial perspective. He’s also the editor of Time Extension, the network’s newest site, which – paradoxically – is all about gaming’s past glories.