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

[Overcast]

Best reaction to that I’ve seen.

7:40 for the specific end boss reaction.

It is so satisfying listening to these guys react to the absolute train wreck that is this game's endgame.

 

[Cobra_64]

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.

Hate to break it to you, but even if Dinosaur Planet was finished, General Scales wouldnt have been the final battle.
He would've been robbed of final villain status through another character who showed up pretty much out of nowhere like Andross did.

The intended final boss was reduced to a side-scroller boss in the final game

 

[Hummingbird]

Let's not forget this ending from Ghostbusters on the NES.

 

[KillThemCrackasBabies]

Medal of Honor 2010

Spoiler

You die. Your squad sits around your body bummed out about it. Linkin Park music inexplicably plays over the credits.

 

[Red Hood]

Medal of Honor 2010

Spoiler

You die. Your squad sits around your body bummed out about it. Linkin Park music inexplicably plays over the credits.

As opposed to the PS1 MOH where you blow up the Krauts' V2 launch facility and soaring Michael Giachhino score plays.

 

[Duncan Hills Coffee]

Max Payne 2's ending isn't the worst, at least not compared to the other shit here, but there are parts of it I really don't like.

Spoiler

Specifically that Vladimir Lem is the bad guy. It's such a dumb heel turn. It is sorta foreshadowed throughout the game, but frankly it makes Vlad's character as a whole make no sense, especially compared to when we saw him in the first game. In the first game, he had a sense of honor and was shown to get a kick out of being a gangster, especially since he got to quote movies. His motivation feels flimsy too; I'm not a fan of the whole Inner Circle plot in the first two games, but Vlad inexplicably being a member the whole time feels forced and kinda lazy.

 

[Antique Rice]

Have to vote for System Shock 2 as well.

Still, I did find the MC going “Nah” and then blowing SHODAN away hilarious for how out of left field it was.

Really the whole endgame of System Shock 2 was horrible. It feels like the point where the studio ran out of money and just finished what they had built up to Friday afternoon and called it good enough to ship. I'm pretty sure it's the one part where it's possible to just get stuck from not having the skills or resources needed to take out the boss.

 

[Zaryiu]

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.

The reward you get are the seeds that would germinate in the sequel and end up blowing in everyone face un Command. Oh heythere's another game with awful ending: the default ending is a return to the status quo you had at the beginning of the game except Fox isn't the asshole this time and every other ending ks straight out of shitty fanfics

 

[shartshooter]

Have to vote for System Shock 2 as well.

Still, I did find the MC going “Nah” and then blowing SHODAN away hilarious for how out of left field it was.

Ken Levine has talked about what went wrong.

“Due to miscommunications or differing ideas, a different cinematic video was created from the one that I originally scripted,” says Levine. “It had this elaborate sequence where Shodan would attempt to kill you in a double-cross, as this ‘cyber stinger’ that was in view provided tension of your impending doom.” Upon getting his hands on the video for the ending sequence, Levine didn’t see anything that he wrote in the script. “We didn’t have much to work with. It was like when you look in the cupboard and you’re trying to make soup, and you have a bag of salt and couple of pinto beans.” Working with fixed assets can be extremely challenging especially with limited time and resources as well as fighting the technology back then. Levine remembers, “We had to write to the assets we had at that point, and all we could do was edit it. We completely ran out of time and that cut scene wasn’t the right ending for the game.”

Wasn't unusal for games to have shitty endings back then though.

 

[Mammal Pod]

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor
You "fight" a "literally who", Talion gets upset that he was being used (no shit) and 3 fucking quick-time events later you beat Sauron and the game ends.
I was completely flabbergasted. Felt like I was playing Dying Light for a second.

 

[Kamov Ka-52]

Not sure if it's been mentioned, but the cliff-hanger sequel bait ending of Star Wars: Republic Commandos always grated on me.

 

[Zaryiu]

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor
You "fight" a "literally who", Talion gets upset that he was being used (no shit) and 3 fucking quick-time events later you beat Sauron and the game ends.
I was completely flabbergasted. Felt like I was playing Dying Light for a second.

I looked it up and every source i found say that's supposedly the same guy that's been the main antagonist in the game the Black Hand of Sauron who Talion has done everything in the game to get kill him for killing his wife and son.
I wonder what they decided to do with Shadow of War Ending


Never mind i got it wrong

 

[Nazi vegeta]

The game is not that good to begin with but, splatterhouse2010 ending with a cliffhanger just because the original did, kinda annoyed me.
The devs knew full well the game was never gonna get a sequel but they still went with it.

 

[AnimuGinger]

Every Crysis game. Ever.

 

[UnclePhil]

South Park: The Fractured But Whole.

You go through the main story having a bunch of silly fun shit thrown at you. You fight just about every character and reference from the last decade or so of the show. Then it slams on brakes with a completely lackluster final fight and an anticlimactic ending where it all just...stops.

It's one of those games where the destination is not nearly as good as the journey there.

 

[ducktales4gameboy]

South Park: The Fractured But Whole.

Spoiler: Stick of Truth spoiler regarding TFBH

The thing that got me is that Canada is visible on the map and blocked off the whole game by a normal 'this path is locked' icon. In the postgame the blockage is gone except the canadian border is just a gigantic wall with one canadian on top taunting you about all of the amazing JRPG adventures happening on the other side that you can't access, complete with muffled 8-bit combat sounds. It's funny but irritating because that was easily the funniest gag in TSOT given how simultaneously low and high effort it was and I was waiting for it to show up again through the whole campaign.

Hate to break it to you, but even if Dinosaur Planet was finished, General Scales wouldnt have been the final battle.
He would've been robbed of final villain status through another character who showed up pretty much out of nowhere like Andross did.

The intended final boss was reduced to a side-scroller boss in the final game
View attachment 595776 View attachment 595777

It's less that you don't fight scales and more the fact that it drops you into a fight and then ends it before anything happens. That guy out of nowhere looks like he would've at least been a fight using the normal combat mechanics.

 

[SteelPlatedHeart]

South Park: The Fractured But Whole.

You go through the main story having a bunch of silly fun shit thrown at you. You fight just about every character and reference from the last decade or so of the show. Then it slams on brakes with a completely lackluster final fight and an anticlimactic ending where it all just...stops.

It's one of those games where the destination is not nearly as good as the journey there.

Felt like how an episode of the show would end to me, so I didn’t mind it. I gotta remember to play those DLC packs though.

 

[UnclePhil]

Spoiler: Stick of Truth spoiler regarding TFBH

The thing that got me is that Canada is visible on the map and blocked off the whole game by a normal 'this path is locked' icon. In the postgame the blockage is gone except the canadian border is just a gigantic wall with one canadian on top taunting you about all of the amazing JRPG adventures happening on the other side that you can't access, complete with muffled 8-bit combat sounds. It's funny but irritating because that was easily the funniest gag in TSOT given how simultaneously low and high effort it was and I was waiting

Spoiler

I got the feeling Canada must have been cut content, and the cheapest way of writing out what they had planned was putting a wall in front of it.

 

[Lucky Wildcard]

Red Steel 2: After defeating the anti-climatic final boss, you kill him in a cutscene and then he just stands on a cliff as it goes to the credits. You never find out what happens to the other characters and it was overall disappointing.

 

[Looney Troons]

Any open-world game that allows you to continue playing after the credits roll, at least in my experience.

Spoiler: Notable and recent exception...

Red Dead Redemption 2’s epilogue was borderline tedious, but still managed to be fairly interesting. I figured they would’ve prepared DLC for the events that prelude the events of RDR, but then I realized that R* is going to drop all of their shekels into RDRO.