The Worst Game Endings - Or How to Ruin Good Gameplay with Bad Writing (Spoilers, duh)

Almost every Ubisoft esque open world game that ends with unchanging status quo, so the ending is some emotional beat followed by "lol nothing you did actually improved the world, so do some sidequests and maybe we'll throw a foreshadowing for a sequel or second credits scene that is just as unimpressive ".
 
Almost every Ubisoft esque open world game that ends with unchanging status quo, so the ending is some emotional beat followed by "lol nothing you did actually improved the world, so do some sidequests and maybe we'll throw a foreshadowing for a sequel or second credits scene that is just as unimpressive ".
Speaking of Ubisoft open world games, I'll be fucked if I go look to see if anyone mentioned this, but Far Cry 5 has to have the biggest shit ending I can think of (outside of my aformentioned Danganronpa V3)

Not only does nothing you did actually matter, all of your friends die, and you get captured and tortured, because a random ass nuke goes off, somehow not hurting the main villain, totally unforshadowed, meaning this insane lunatic jibbering on like he was a prophet was actually *right*, and not only gets away with everything he did, but actively wins.

I don't mind villains winning in a narrative, what I fucking hate is villains winning 'anyways'.

He didn't earn it. He didn't outplay you, he didn't beat you, it just fucking happened. For no reason.
 
He didn't earn it. He didn't outplay you, he didn't beat you, it just fucking happened. For no reason.
I haven't seen it myself, but someone I know played FC6 and he claims that A - nuke was just one, B - Sneed bought it from Pagan Min, the antagonist of FC4. Why the fuck the rest of US ignored it and didn't come to the rescue? Because Ubisoft is retarded and should die.
 
I haven't seen it myself, but someone I know played FC6 and he claims that A - nuke was just one, B - Sneed bought it from Pagan Min, the antagonist of FC4. Why the fuck the rest of US ignored it and didn't come to the rescue? Because Ubisoft is retarded and should die.
They literally painted it as end of the world shit. Which is why New Dawn was offbrand Fallout.

What the fuck, Ubisoft?
 
Too many writers think happy endings are inherently a bad thing, and while unhappy endings aren't necessarily bad either, there's nothing wrong with ending on a brighter note.
There is if the brighter note is entirely contrived and makes no sense. Realistically everyone should lose in the Mass Effect games. The Reapers are shown to be overwhelmingly unstoppable and their cycle has been perfected over who knows how many millions or billions of years. A positive ending barely makes sense in the context of what we actually witness. Like the ending of The Thing where it is obvious that they have failed to destroy the alien and it will likely infect the entire world. Or Invasion of the Body Snatchers where the entire world is turned into pod people.

Imagine an ending of The Thing where the main characters kill the alien, blow up its ship, and disinfect every surface of alien material to save earth. That is the stupidity of the 'good' Mass Effect endings. I would rather have a bad ending that makes sense.
An ending's only as good as the writing behind it. If anything, happier game endings are superior in giving players a sense of agency and the rest of the story meaning.
That only makes sense right up until the ending. If you play a game for the first 99% thinking that you cannot lose you still have a sense of agency. You still think that you can win and are in control. You only find out that you can lose or already are hopelessly lost at the final 1% of the game. That might change your perception on subsequent playthroughs but not while you are on your first play. And some people will still play through a game again knowing that they lose in the end because the game is great.

Diablo I has that ending. You fight the entire time to kill Diablo. In the end you end up becoming him. By jamming his soulstone into your brain. In Diablo II you are literally traveling through the world killing the main characters from Diablo I on your way. In the original Fallout you save the entire Vault but are permanently exiled by the Overseer as he is terrified that you are a trained murderer or possibly infected from mutation. Those games and stories are classics. Dead Space 1 has a negative ending that is basically 'end of the world' level. And then Dead Space 3 confirms it.
If Gordon goes from kicking alien ass for four games straight then suddenly decides it was all hopeless and he might as well just kill himself, that's such a tonal and narrative shift that it not only makes no sense, but greatly belittles everything the previous games were about. I'd take a generic "happily ever after" ending over a pretentiously bleak one any day, especially if the grim tone comes out of nowhere and jars the whole story.
This is literally the plot of Alien, Aliens, and Alien 3. Ripley goes from running from aliens. To killing them. To being infected by them and having to kill herself. Then magically revived for one of the worst movies of all time in Alien 4 of course.

It was not really 'jarring' when Ripley killed herself in Alien 3 (spoiler alert). Because we knew she was not only infected. With a queen even. But that the Weyland-Yutani Corporation wanted her as a prisoner to help study the aliens and they wanted the queen inside of her. So she throws herself into the liquid metal.

Gordon saving the world is retcon in my opinion. It is heavily implied in the first Half Life that the G-Man aliens were working with Black Mesa for years and that the G-Man simply needed another trained scientist to do his dirty work. So he takes the most capable one who can also use the HEV suit which is Gordon. In Opposing Force and Blue Shift we see that the G-Man is even more powerful. But in HL2 and beyond Gordon and Alex are like Marvel Comics characters with their plot armor. Gordon is gunning down hundreds of enemies like you are playing Doom or Quake.
 
I mentioned this in the Bullshit thread, but Dying Light ends on a bitter but optimistic note - there's no cure, but the city hasn't been abandoned, the company behind the outbreak has been exposed, and the protagonist has developed from a mercenary to someone who is genuinely selfless.

It's expansion has you spread the infection to the rest of the world, or nuke the city and completely undo the events of the main game. Neither plot thread is touched on in the sequel, nor are the games tied together; in DL2 the infection has gone global Just Because.

I love the game, but this completely wrecked my desire to replay it. Yeah yeah, videogames are inherently pointless etc, but the stories in it amounting to nothing make the whole exercise fruitless.
 
I need to get over myself on this one - but I can't. It's been 20 years, and I am still not over it.

Star Ocean 3. Hands, fucking down killed the entire franchise.

I've never been so fucking hurt by the ending of a videogame.

Our heroes cross the threshold of humanity and discover... They're videogame characters. Their creators unleash DELETE_EVERYTHING.EXE and our heroes fight back and defeat it.

But from that point on, you're supposed to carry on playing the franchise like you never played part 3. That knowledge just eating at the back of your head. The main characters aren't important. Nothing you do is important. You're just a person playing person playing an MMORPG. Every prequel or sequel won't change the truth of the world. So, you sit through another Star Ocean game and wait for them to break the 4th wall again - - and they don't. Or they do, slightly, with characters like Welsh who only exist to remind you that the 4th wall was broken and that things will never be the same again, but they won't actually do anything with that power or knowledge.

But that's the thing. Other games have done the same exact thing but the difference? You knew from the start that it was a veil, that your character is just a character controlled by another character. Digimon World 3. Sword Art Online. Seventh Dragon, etc. Like.. How do you drop the hiroshima of plot twists and then act like all you did was spill a glass of milk?
I remember back before GameFAQS was a shell of its former self, and people unironically defended that shit (complete with Neo/Matrix references). Not that they matter, but Gabriel Celeste and Ethereal Queen being divine beings; nah, fake. The Nedians who once held the universe hostage with their power, and subsequently annihilated 99% of their planet, and what remains is more of an asteroid with a shield around most of it, so what's left can live there... just a storyline. Humanity almost nuking themselves to extinction, using the call of space to unify, and determine that uplifting primitive species is a bad thing... ... ... Nah man, Earth doesn't even really exist.

WHO THE FUCK THINKS THAT'S GOOD FUCKING WRITING?!
 
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The Sleeping Dogs ending feels weird somehow. Whenever I replay the final act of the game, I get the vibe that back when it was True Crime HK it had a branching story (or at least, multiple endings) like the other games did. My guess is it got cut when development moved over to UFG and they had to hack together all the pieces they had into a working game -- you may recall they descoped a lot of things, like the romance sideplots, for example, so I could buy it happening here also. Would explain the triad and cop points existing but only being used for upgrade trees, too.
 
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They literally painted it as end of the world shit. Which is why New Dawn was offbrand Fallout.

What the fuck, Ubisoft?
Ubisoft has never given much of a shit about Far Cry continuity.

The stuff explaining the nuke and everything was done in DLC for Far Cry 6 I'm pretty sure, which was basically just them jerking themselves off over their villains without giving a fuck about it making sense.

IIRC, someone from Ubisoft claimed that the "canon" endings are the "walk away" endings, and that the spinoffs and DLCs are just that and shouldn't be taken seriously.

So basically, they don't give a fuck and they don't want you to give a fuck cause it's just Far Cry.
 
MGSV: The biggest self suck fest of Kojima pretending to be smart by reusing the player's avatar (Raiden) as Venom, and then he punches a mirror and walks off into the fart gas.

Resident Evil 7: Fucking abysmal final boss and underwear model Chris Redfield shows up because you wouldn't recognize it as Resident Evil beyond that.

Resident Evil 3 remake: Dumb Dead Space boss fight with a shitty ending nuke scene that is nowhere near as good as the PS1 FMV.

Death Stranding: I cannot recall in detail why I hate it specifically since the fucking game was all over the place at the end and I only played it once. All I remember specifically is a Princess Peach line that made me wince in pain.

Mortal Kombat 11: Jax ends slavery. This is exactly what MK needed on top of smearing the guest character feces on everything, a fucking political message of BRAKK PEEPOO SUFFERED
 
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Any game where Bloober Team writes mental health problems.

The Medium You spend the game learning of this little girls abuse because she has an unkillable demon in her. You have the choice of killing her or yourself, since the invincible demon wants a stronger vessel. Even if you kill yourself (Which is done off screen to sequel bait), you are leaving a child (Who is your sister you've been told was dead the whole game, mind you) with all her mental problems and processed.

Blair Witch You are a war veteran who has severe PTSD from both being forced to kill a pregnant woman during a mission, which ends up getting your squad killed. You come home and are a cop that has an episode and kills an innocent kid. When he decides to help find a missing kid, his ex-wife shit talks him on the phone the entire game and the sheriff does the same behind his back, but is a two faced bastard when the MC talks to him. You end up getting the choice of killing the bad guy, which breaks your mind and you become him via witch time travel shenanigans, or kill yourself and break the time loop.

The Layer of Fear games which are just PT but built around obsession in one form or another.

And these are the fucks that are handling the Silent Hill 2 reboot/remake.

If you want a good game about mental health, play Omori. Yes it is a RPG maker game, but the creator uses a lot of hand drawn assets and handles how people handle guilt and death spectacularly. It's even on Gamepass right now, so it's worth the $1 trial to play it.
 
Mortal Kombat 11: Jax ends slavery. This is exactly what MK needed ontoP of smearing the guest character feces on everything, a fucking political message of BRAKK PEEPOO SUFFERED
Yeah, there's no topping this - they even used "woke" unironically.

Just truly embarrassing:

mortalkombatjax.PNG
 
Yeah, there's no topping this - they even used "woke" unironically.

Just truly embarrassing:

View attachment 3979119
The one redeeming thing about this is when you remember that the only way Jax could've ended slavery was to go on a massive nigger killing rampage, since the majority of black slavery (since we all know they're not talking about anyone else), was done by african warlords edit: At which point, it becomes unintentionally hilarious.
 
I may as well add Bayonetta 3. God where to begin? Jeanne getting one-shotted by a guy in a fucking pod who was obviously evil from the start, having to face the final boss so many times it becomes tiring, none of the other Bayos making a dent in him at all, Bayo and Luka being dragged to hell, and Viola inheriting the title of Bayonetta?? Fuck all that. The story itself is kind of a retconny mess overall, but the ending... Sheesh. Were it not for the implication that Bayo and Luka are actually alive in Inferno and will likely return in the next game, I'd be pissed.
 
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They literally painted it as end of the world shit. Which is why New Dawn was offbrand Fallout.

What the fuck, Ubisoft?
That's hilarious. Dont they imply sam fisher dies too?


Any game where Bloober Team writes mental health problems.

The Medium You spend the game learning of this little girls abuse because she has an unkillable demon in her. You have the choice of killing her or yourself, since the invincible demon wants a stronger vessel. Even if you kill yourself (Which is done off screen to sequel bait), you are leaving a child (Who is your sister you've been told was dead the whole game, mind you) with all her mental problems and processed.
I am endless annoyed when nobody tries to get an exorcist.
 
I always felt a little let down with either ending for the original Darksouls. Masterpiece of a game with a kind of meh ending.
 
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