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

[Fuckyoudad]

I haven't seen Kane and Lynch 2 mentioned. Not a good game, but the end is so abrupt and out of place that it makes you wonder if you skipped the ending scene or if the game glitched.

Spoiler: Kane and Lynch 2s ending

You are running through an air port. Security sets some dogs after you. You board a plane and the credits roll. No boss fight, no fanfare, nothing.

[/SPOILER]

Spoilers ahead:

A much maligned game that I actually appreciate including that ending. Because it's a giant fuck you to the player.. it's kinda like Spec Ops The Line minus the moralizing tone of "so you wanted to play a cool military shooter huh? lol we'll show you dudebro!". Dog Days does it without ever bringing it up. There's nothing slick about what you're doing in that world. You're a middle aged bald loser in a country you have no business being in, getting the woman you supposedly care about murdered and left naked in a public toilet. The pixelation suggests they defecated (or worse) on her too.

And your answer to this (after being sliced up and running around the streets of Shanghai wet and naked) is to go on a rampage and shoot everybody in sight innocent or otherwise for 5 hours. It even accommodates you with terrible guns that can barely hit a thing the entire time to hammer home how unlike Max Payne etc you are. I can see why people hate it obviously.. people rarely want shooters to behave this way. But the tone of it all is ( far as I can imagine) about as close as game has come to sticking you in the head of a psychopath. The ending feels like that. "Well you got what you came for.. bye now."

 

[UncleTusky]

I never liked the bait-and switch Final Fantasy III and IV pulled:

Spoiler

III: Part of why I dislike the ending is the gameplay and not just the story: The final dungeon is really two back-to-back dungeons, sadistically hard, and does not let you go back or save once you enter the 2nd one. It's hard to get invested in the story when you're going to end up either grinding like no tomorrow or restarting the dungeons so often.

Then there's the story itself: Xande, the main villain up to that point, wants to cover the world in darkness because he was "blessed" with mortality and does not want to die. Then after you beat him, the game goes "lol jk" and reveals he was controlled by Cloud of Darkness, who wants to destroy everything because reasons.

IV: You finally confront Golbez in the Giant of Babel..... only to learn that he was brainwashed and under the control of the real villain, Zemus, the entire time, and he is actually Cecil's brother. "Cecil and Golbez are brothers" is a really cool plot twist but "Golbez was brainwashed the whole time" is not, especially when the game puts so little effort into explaining who Zemus is or where he came from that the whole last act feels like they phoned it in. It reminds me of how they swap out Vaas at the 3/4ths mark in FC3.

 

[MysticMisty]

IV: You finally confront Golbez in the Giant of Babel..... only to learn that he was brainwashed and under the control of the real villain, Zemus, the entire time, and he is actually Cecil's brother. "Cecil and Golbez are brothers" is a really cool plot twist but "Golbez was brainwashed the whole time" is not, especially when the game puts so little effort into explaining who Zemus is or where he came from that the whole last act feels like they phoned it in. It reminds me of how they swap out Vaas at the 3/4ths mark in FC3.

I've read that Square had this massive story planned out for IV but due to memory limitations (since this was in the very beginning of the SNES' life) most of it got cut out. So everything that's in the game was what they decided was required to keep the plot moving at the expense of all the backstory that never got used.

 

[Kamen Rider Black RX]

I was really, really disappointed with the final chapter of Fire Emblem Echoes. It was a very bad final chapter that brought every little complaint and irritation I had about the game come to the forefront. But after playing the first half of Fire Emblem Fates Conquest, Echoes is looking better. While Echoes felt like a half-assed updated version, it at least feels a lot more concentrated.

 

[Kaiser Wilhelm's Ghost]

Secret of The Stars on the SNES, by and far the worst RPG that was ever produced on the system.
The story was dull, the game was weak, and the climatic ending was essentially you and your crew killing the big bad, then getting beamed up into a mothership as it turned out your father had been an alien that had sent you back in time from the future to this distant world because of reasons, and you having proven your worth and revived a village of functional retards basically opted to return to this village because they are your friends.

 

[GentlemanFaggot]

Kotor 2 is worth a mention since the game was released before they managed to actually make an ending. You just suddenly arrive at the climax and then the credits roll and you're like wtf. There is no ending because they evidently didn't have enough time to put it in so the game just sort of stops.

That was such a cock-punch, because I was p.damn invested in it, more than KOTOR1, when it came out.

Modders restored the cut content (Almost all of which was already fully voice-acted), including the actual ending, at least.

 

[Ruin]

NES games that just have a splash screen saying "lol you win gratz" are cheating.

 

[Hideous K]

the ending of the world of light from super smash bros. ultimate

I guess sakurai creamed himself when he saw end of evangelion

 

[Zaryiu]

the ending of the world of light from super smash bros. ultimate

I guess sakurai creamed himself when he saw end of evangelion

I just watched all the cutscenes and it's obvious Smash Bros success was always because of other people and not Sakurai in anyway (seriously the fuck did I just watch? Sakurai fanfic that has almost nothing to do with Smash Bros?) It's time Smash Bros was taken from Sakurai if that's how much of a hack he is and fuck his dicksuckers and dickriders

 

[Muncie Anderson]

I do remember one of the early NES baseball games (forget the exact title) that had the Little League "mercy rule" programmed in it, which meant that if the computer scored ten runs in one inning, you would be taken to a "Game Called" screen after you finally got the third out. What's worse, even if the computer player batted first and got ten runs, the game would still be cancelled without letting you go up to bat and attempt any sort of comeback against the ten run deficit.

You know, it's better to just stop the player from embarrassing themselves instead of letting them go up to bat and have their first three batters struck out on nine straight pitches or something.

 

[Miller]

I've played AssCreed Origins, I enjoyed the new gameplay mecanics, the bosses and the supernatural suff but the writing was so bad (the [current year] protagonist is a Mary Sue who loves science so much that she built her own Animus machine and it's the bestest ever) and I hated the ending.

Spoiler

Bayek becomes a beta. His wife - the strong female assassin - created the creed, left him and went back to Rome to kill Ceasar.

Spoilers ahead:
A much maligned game that I actually appreciate including that ending. Because it's a giant fuck you to the player.. it's kinda like Spec Ops The Line minus the moralizing tone of "so you wanted to play a cool military shooter huh? lol we'll show you dudebro!". Dog Days does it without ever bringing it up. There's nothing slick about what you're doing in that world. You're a middle aged bald loser in a country you have no business being in, getting the woman you supposedly care about murdered and left naked in a public toilet. The pixelation suggests they defecated (or worse) on her too.
...

I kind of liked K&L 2, I wish IO Interactive would make another game. It's an interesting descent into the minds and the lives of two unlikable characters who can't stop getting into shitty situations. It's like an old 80s movie.

 

[Belmont]

The bulk of the extra Endings in Chrono Trigger are just weak. Chrono Trigger is a great game, don't get me wrong..but only one ending matters. To compound this, the real ending of the game goes on to mess with Chrono Cross's whole plot and it's multible stupid ending that aren't the real end.

 

[MadDamon]

Solid snake didn't have gay sex with Otacon at the end of MGS4.
I'm very disappointed to say the least.

 

[Belmont]

They were Gay Dads together..the sex was implied.

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

Final Fantasy Tactics. I'm fighting some weird succession war, then suddenly demons and aliens and shit?

Some of that could be my fault for scrolling through the poorly translated text so fast... but I doubt it.

 

[Billy_Sama]

Final Fantasy Tactics. I'm fighting some weird succession war, then suddenly demons and aliens and shit?

Some of that could be my fault for scrolling through the poorly translated text so fast... but I doubt it.

Better story than FFTA2.

 

[BeSafe]

Turning Point: Fall of Liberty. When you finally get to the German Atomic bomb to stop it, you press the button and it goes staight to Credits! I don't know if that happened to anyone else or if I skipped the scene by accident, but I was so overly mad I wasted time playing such a bad game and that happening I never wanted to play again.

 

[Judge Dredd]

Turning Point: Fall of Liberty. When you finally get to the German Atomic bomb to stop it, you press the button and it goes staight to Credits! I don't know if that happened to anyone else or if I skipped the scene by accident, but I was so overly mad I wasted time playing such a bad game and that happening I never wanted to play again.

I haven't played that one, but iirc it was a budget game by the same guys that made Legendary: The Box. I think it was meant to be the first of a series but they never made a sequel. It's been years though, and I'm too lazy to look it up.

I looked up the ending though, and apparently there was an ending. You missed an animation of him sitting down.

 

[BeSafe]

I haven't played that one, but iirc it was a budget game by the same guys that made Legendary: The Box. I think it was meant to be the first of a series but they never made a sequel. It's been years though, and I'm too lazy to look it up.

I looked up the ending though, and apparently there was an ending. You missed an animation of him sitting down.

Doesn't look like I missed much of an ending. Kinda more disappointed after seeing that.

 

[Tanti-Fanti]

Danganronpa 3's ending was a weird mix of brilliance and disappointment.

Spoiler

So each game has an end twist that reveals everything about why and how the characters are in this death game.

DRV3's ending goes way too fucking far even for DR standards. The characters are pretty weak to me with very few exceptions, the ones they have prominently shown are super annoying (fuck Kaito) and the main character being another wannabe Makoto in favor of an actual character (Kaede) was annoying as shit.

In the end, it turns out the death game is actually the 53rd game and people willingly involved themselves in this from the real world to do this because the game is supposed to be a satire on crazy anime fans who want more DR. The game shouts "Real-fiction" like a reality TV show, but it fails, because the build up is awful. Instead of being subtle with the premise, the writer just hammed it up way too much. There's barely any hints leading to this twist either because everything is muddled with the truth v lie themes of the game, so info isn't as reliable as before.

You can tell like the writer just hated their own weeb audience that they cater to, to begin with. Which I don't blame them, obviously(weeb cans be annoying af), but these are the same people you kind of cater to, why choose now to alienate them now? I know DR has always had some shit with the fandom, but they're the same people who kept you alive for so long. The least you can do is be grateful.

I commend them for wanting to end the series the DR way, but they went too far here for me personally.