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

[vertexwindi]

Fez, goddamn Fez.

I've talked a bit before about how I hate Fez. The game has some interesting ideas but a butchered execution implemented by some egoistical cock who thinks he's hot shit for making a mediocre platformer/puzzle game. I like the backstory parts though, the lore, all those tidbits, they're tiny and non-intrusive and seem to be building up to some kind of reveal, or at least some kind of satisfying ending, but that never comes. After you initially break the artificial universe and manage to reboot it again and the game's over, the bad ending zooms into Gomez, his organs, his cells, the atoms, strings, etc. while the good ending goes the other way around zooming away from Gomez and the world he lives in into the universe and multiverse before turning into static and turning the game off.

These endings, while cool to look at, aren't satisfying in the slightest. They don't have anything to do with the game, the story or its themes. It just screams to me that Phil Tacofish wanted to have these endings so the game would look deeper. I mean, I get what these endings are trying to do, they make you feel both big and small respectively, so it's not like I don't get it and I hate it because it's 2deep4me or other dumb bullshit. It just screams "pretentious".

 

[Raging Capybara]

Fable II

If you wait, a NPC kills the final boss for you.

 

[NIGGO KILLA]

Drawn to life 2 for the Ds

Spoiler

IT WAS ALL JUST A DREAM

 

[Second Missing Primarch]

Glad to see there are other people who hated the end of KOTOR II. It was the first time I'd ever really felt disappointed by a game's ending. I still remember that feeling of "What, that's it?" as I watched the credits roll.

And yeah, I'll jump on the Mass Effect 3 bandwagon too. The thing that specifically pissed me off the most about that ending was that, depending on your choices, you could have already proven the Catalyst wrong about organic and synthetic life being unable to coexist, and you didn't get the chance to point that out. Like, motherfucker, I had a geth sniper helping me fuck Reaper shit up in the last game, I went and made peace between the quarians and the geth, and my pilot is dating a sentient AI. I've proved we can coexist.

Also, no one brought up Far Cry 4 yet, so I'll just come right out and say I didn't like that ending either. Kyrat is pretty much fucked no matter what you do, because it's either going to become a oppressive narco-state or a fascist theocracy, and Pagan Min can optionally get away with all the shit he's pulled if you choose to let him fly off into the sunset. Alternatively, if you went with the secret ending, Kyrat will continue to be a third-world shithole run by a complete sociopath, with another sociopath-in-training waiting to take over once Pagan dies or fucks off.

 

[Secret Asshole]

I hate when people bitch about ME3's ending.

They forget about how horrible the start (Reapers? Oh we found plans for a magic weapon against them in our backyard) and the middle (Kai Leng) was.

The problem is the Gary Stu of Kai Leng and the other Deus Ex Machina were completely overshadowed by the horror of the ending.

No. This is a common misconception that frequently gets brought up that I would like to clear once and for all. ME3's ending was absolutely fantastic and it brought me untold joy.

You see, you made the mistake of assuming that a company mostly known for wrpg-themed waifu simulators would actually fulfill their promises in regards to having a living universe. Every single piece of evidence pointed against this but people wanted to believe. Every concern about another pile of corporate sludge speculating on barely legal marketing practices were dismissed as "contrarianism" or, my personal favorite, "hiding an anti-LGBT agenda." The series trudged on, selling itself out every step of the way, but people cheered every decision their neon god had made. Pre-release of ME3 was like watching mass-hysteria combined with thousands of fever dreams posted across all over the internet. Even the websites dedicated to small web businesses and IT contractors that I visited for work had a ME3 thread. I rented the previous two but pre-ordered 3; I wanted to be there when the bubble burst.

And burst it fucking did. I slamma-damma ding donged my through on casual difficulty and watched true beauty unfold. The dev team did not even ATTEMPT anything good. Pure, unfiltered sewage danced across the screen, the climax to god knows how many hours on the previous titles on Insane difficulty. I found myself laughing unto near-asphyxiation, tears and snot running down my face, chest heaving feet stamping as I beat my chest as what was left of my reason was convinced that if I didn't keep beating my lungs I would choke and die. For I had been right, absolutely completely right. By the time of the "moon scene" I had recovered enough to have clear thoughts again. "Ah, so this is how it all ends. With some half-assed 'b-b-but the moon people knew of the PC's sacrifice!'" I don't recall, at that time I had already forgotten which colour machine I had picked. It was over, finally over, but the reaction of the faithful on the internet was still unpicked - and ripe for harvesting. I was glued to my seat, salivating, anticipating the joy ahead when "It" came. For ME3 hadn't ended, not yet. It was -

Spoiler

View attachment 595288

Breath sputtered out, leaving only grunts on my lips as every pore on my body opened up, heart rate racing as the most powerful ejaculation in my life ROCKED my body to its core. I had gone from nearly composed and flaccid to a catatonic state ruining my clothes in a heartbeat. With the last of my strength I wrenched myself up and ran towards the computer cackling like a madman - if there was anyone else present at the scene I would have been committed to a mental institution in a New York Minute - only to trip and fall on my still throbbing cock.

You say ME3 had a bad ending; it did not. The most physically pleasing event of my life may have just ended but the paroxysms of mental joy were just ahead - on social media and forums, numbers untold. I rate it higher than the 2016 election for pure schadenfreude.

tl;dr u r dum n ghey

I mean, if you didn't care much for Mass Effect and just wanted to laugh at a complete and utter clusterfuck, then yeah, it could be the best ending for you.

FarCry 5 was total, pointless dogshit and a criminal waste of talent by actor Greg Bryk. You can tell that all of Joseph Seed's dialogue were written separate from the actual story of the game. This is what happens when you have multiple shit writers start cramming their exceptional agenda into what is supposed to be a straight forward game.

By far, the stupidest and most ridiculous situation to me was that everything (EVERYTHING!) takes place in a valley where radio and broadcast comms are dead to the outside world. Seed already had the town blocked off in all directions. It would've made more sense to tell his followers that the outside world already fell and it's time to start breakdancing to Eden's Gate or whatever the fuck he was talking about.

My only regret is I can't strap this game to a Ubisoft employee so they know what it's like to be fitted with a bomb.

If you want a bleak ending, but not audience fucking ending, here it is: You find out the cult was telling the truth, but you get hints of it through the game. It wasn't a prophecy however. Joesph knew about the government infiltrating his cult and tortured the information out of a government agent. This was the point that he turned Doomsday and was retroactively correct. He never had any real insight, just a source he used to sway people. This is why people joined him, because he tortured the 'proof' out of this government agent. At the end of the game, you confront Joseph where he/she is shown concrete evidence of 'The Fall'. At this point, its still all prophecy, seemingly predicting things with supernatural accuracy. You then get a choice: Join the cult or resist. Join would be the 'bad' ending and you end up becoming one of his lieutenants and killing all your friends. After you do that, he reveals to you the truth, and it eventually drives you insane.

If you resist, you are surrounded by his cult and have to fight your way out of an impossible situation. Your friends die one by one as they sacrifice themselves for you. In fact, this could be a Mass Effect 2 situation with loyalty levels, where you can assign roles and depending on how you built them up, they either survive or don't. During the course of this intense fight/chase through his compound, you find the Government agent who tells you the truth. Joesph is a psychotic fraud. Just before you are overrun, you blast this out to the remaining cultists over the speakers, the ones not affected by Bliss because you disposed of the mind control in freeing the region earlier. The cultists then turn on Joseph, hoisting him up on a cross, leaving him to die.

The rest of the cult throws down their arms and surrenders to the deputy and the sheriff. You can't save the world. You can't ever go home again. But you saved this little part of the country. And that's all that matters.

And you don't posit that

Spoiler

infanticide, child murdering, human experimenting cannibals are correct. The ending makes you think that because they're correct, they're just. Nope. They all deserve to die, right or not. Just because you are correct doesn't make you just, which the writer of this ending thought and royally fucked up. People think that you are the 'villain' because the cult was right. This is simply not true.

This solves several plotholes as well: The Army can't come because they're way too busy dealing with shit and all communication to the outside is actually cut off, not by the cult, but by the collapse. Its always assumed to be Joseph until the end of the game.

 

[RJ MacReady]

Fable II

If you wait, a NPC kills the final boss for you.

Fable 3 was even worse. It not only failed to deliver on the potential of being the ruler of Albion (instead reducing it to black-and-white binary decisions as stupid as how to decorate the castle; NPCs barely even acknowledge that you're the king and you have no royal powers to play with) it wasn't even possible to get the best ending unless you farmed money (by purchasing every building to collect rent) to fund the entire country out of your own pocket.

Picking any "evil" choice to raise money locked you into being a tyrant, but none of it mattered anyway because you fend off the invasion no matter what and your choices only determine how many NPCs are left in the world (and how they react to you) in the post-game. Being evil is essentially the correct path because you effortlessly win the war and save nearly everyone in Albion at the cost of being hated (which again doesn't matter because NPCs barely react to you.)

 

[Exceptionally Exceptional]

Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy.
Nothing says Fuck You like a nice "To Be Continued" at the end of the game before the epic confrontation. And considering they never did release a sequel, that was salt in the fucking wound.

 

[The Last Stand]

GTA V. And the GTA franchise potentially.

 

[Guts Gets Some]

Assassin's Creed 3.

Not because of the actual story (even though it was underwhelming) but because as soon as this game in particular ended, suddenly I realized why I was having such a hard time following this franchise despite giving every previous game a full playthrough and wanting to love them:

The whole franchise is fucking schlock with no planning at all. And it's shat out yearly on top of that. Finally it all made sense.

My first mistake was not realizing literally anything that tries to use the 2012 doomsday plotline seriously should never be taken seriously.

GTA V. And the GTA franchise potentially.

Which ending did you get? I felt it was satisfying enough for a pretty overall great game. At the least the canon ending.

 

[PoisonedBun]

Drawn to life 2 for the Ds

Spoiler

IT WAS ALL JUST A DREAM

Drawn to Life 2's insane ending doesn't get nearly enough attention, because it's literally

Spoiler

coma theory, and also God is involved because every character is named after a figure from the Bible. None of the characters or universe actually exist, both in the second AND first game. Basically, you've been playing in the fantasy world of a child who fell into a COMA after a car crash that killed both his parents. The repos are just toys they won at a carnival. Crazy shit.

 

[Nobunaga]

Digital devil saga 2
How the fuck do you manage to mess up sutch a kino game as dds 1 and then fucking ignore 90% of the plot points or just say its solar data lmao
Im still fucking mad

 

[Zaryiu]

I bought it because the beginning of it was released as a free demo and I enjoyed it. It was David Cage's evil plan all along, and I fell for it hook, line and sinker. The clear and exponential progression of that game getting worse and worse over time as you play it feels almost like deliberate trolling.

What's scary is that's not his worst game

Teen Titans on PS1, what's the point of playing if

Spoiler: Seriously

the characters break the fourth wall and berate you for even turning the game on? That's not funny

 

[frozenrunner]

This won't be a popular opinion, but I thought the ending of Shadow of the Colossus (obviously a great game deserving of it's classic status) was seriously hurt by everything that happens after Mono wakes up. It's the sole black mark on what is otherwise a perfect game.

Spoiler: autistic rant

First of all, Argo's apparent death is reversed for no good narrative reason, robbing his "death" scene of the weight of his sacrifice. He fell hundreds of feet but apparently he just has a slight limp! Yeah, that's not a cop-out at all.

And Wander is turned into a fucking baby. All of the implied and demonstrated (through small details like animations) emotional yearning which the player knows Wander is feeling--his undying and very youthful love for Mono, the blasphemous desperation of his decision to take her to The Forbidden Lands, the foolishness and impotence of his courage in the face of a series of seemingly impossible battles, his growing suffering along the way that only increases with his victories, the loss of his only companion in a lonely, awful place, and so on--none of that matters in the end because he turns into a baby, and he had to turn into a baby so there could be a connection to ICO and a happy ending.

No, game, I want you to commit to tearing my heart out. Everything has been building up to a tragedy, so I want a goddamn tragedy. I want the last shot to be Mono waking up... alone in the Forbidden Lands as we realize Wander's plan worked, but it didn't matter because it utterly destroyed him.

And if they just had to connect the game to ICO, why couldn't they do it in a way that didn't weirdly nullify all the emotions that came before? How about Wander is not dead but broken and barely alive, hideously and pitifully disfigured (including horns as an eternal brand of shame on his bloodline) by the stain of his sins? Mono is horrified, both by the sight of him and the understanding of what he's done... but she does not reject him, and the audience understands they will live out their lives together there in exile and that their progeny will in some way lead to the protagonist of ICO. That's meaningful, and it connects to the emotions coursing throughout the rest of the story.

But no. Mono wakes up, Agro is alive only because she would be totally alone without him there, and then she finds a random baby (who she doesn't know is actually her boyfriend, I guess?) and decides to raise it... because I guess she assumes she's actually dead, and this magical garden is the afterlife, and that's what you do in the afterlife, you find random babies and you raise them as heretofore absent wildlife appears to graze around you like a fucking Disney movie.

I don't care about the details of the lore or whatever spergy explanation there is for what we got and why it was actually great and perfect. What we got wasn't dramatically effective.

 

[rexas texas_]

Borderlands 2 & Tales from the Borderlands

 

[NIGGO KILLA]

Drawn to Life 2's insane ending doesn't get nearly enough attention, because it's literally

Spoiler

coma theory, and also God is involved because every character is named after a figure from the Bible. None of the characters or universe actually exist, both in the second AND first game. Basically, you've been playing in the fantasy world of a child who fell into a COMA after a car crash that killed both his parents. The repos are just toys they won at a carnival. Crazy shit.

Spoiler: eeeeeeh

I played the final area well past midnight into the wee hours of the morning only to have the ending make it appear like Roposa world just turned to dust, that was a real slap in the face to me. the only reason why i didnt throw the cartridge into the trash was because it was at least implied Raposa world is still alive in mikes mind. Still, kinda of a let down

 

[Zaragoza]

Digital devil saga 2
How the fuck do you manage to mess up sutch a kino game as dds 1 and then fucking ignore 90% of the plot points or just say its solar data lmao
Im still fucking mad

Digital Devil Saga 1 had a great story. Digital Devil Saga 2 was an absolute mess, the actual reason why the story got worst in the second game was because Atlus hired a novelist and drafted most of what we saw of the first game, but halfway through development she suffered health issues and couldn't continue with the second game. Also, she made a deal with Atlus to keep her ideas so after she got better, she made a couple of novels inspired by Digital Devil Saga called Quantum Devil Saga so, really the real sequel is what you get in this book.

 

[No creativity]

Tales from the Borderlands

Cliffhanger aside the whole final episode felt rushed. It should have been split into two different episodes and they should have had the balls to kill off you-know-who depending on your earlier decisions, but I guess expecting choices to matter in a Telltale game is just wishful thinking.

 

[Kyria the Great]

Cliffhanger aside the whole final episode felt rushed. It should have been split into two different episodes and they should have had the balls to kill off you-know-who depending on your earlier decisions, but I guess expecting choices to matter in a Telltale game is just wishful thinking.

Telltale being brought up brings up my personal choice for this list Telltale's Game of Thrones. Oh shit is this one a mess. This is a game where you focus on a family that gets the shit whipped out of them with no real way to strike back and scheme because you have to keep the canon of the books and tv show, fun. The final chapter is a joke as all it is massive failure regardless of how many careful choices you make and then has the gall to end on a cliffhanger on the remaining family members as Telltale thought they were going to get a sequel, well 2 years and one bankruptcy later, that shit isn't going to happen and all we are left with is a sad, shit smear of a game.

 

[ducktales4gameboy]

Starfox Adventures still holds a special hated place in my heart a decade later for having the single worst final battle I’ve ever played.

Spoiler: since we have an active lp of it going on

The game’s big bad is this lizard nazi furry named general scales. He’s built up similarly to ganondorf over the course of the game and at the very end you’re thrown into an arena with him with dramatic music ready for a 1v1 melee.

.. but unfortunately the fight AI was literally never implemented because of how rushed the game was. The fight starts and you land a single hit on him and suddenly out of nowhere he gets vaporized. Fight over.

30 seconds later you’re crammed into Fox’s arwing and forced into a terrible Starfox fight vs Andross, who up until that point hadn’t been present in the game at all. You win and there’s no plot resolution, the only reward you get is not having to play the game anymore.

 

[SteelPlatedHeart]

Starfox Adventures still holds a special hated place in my heart a decade later for having the single worst final battle I’ve ever played.

Spoiler: since we have an active lp of it going on

The game’s big bad is this lizard nazi furry named general scales. He’s built up similarly to ganondorf over the course of the game and at the very end you’re thrown into an arena with him with dramatic music ready for a 1v1 melee.

.. but unfortunately the fight AI was literally never implemented because of how rushed the game was. The fight starts and you land a single hit on him and suddenly out of nowhere he gets vaporized. Fight over.

30 seconds later you’re crammed into Fox’s arwing and forced into a terrible Starfox fight vs Andross, who up until that point hadn’t been present in the game at all. You win and there’s no plot resolution, the only reward you get is not having to play the game anymore.

Best reaction to that I’ve seen.

7:40 for the specific end boss reaction.