When Endings Go Bad

[leady129]

You want a bad ending, turn to blizzard. Practically of of their expansion packs end with the bad guys winning. Brood war and Frozen Throne in particular. Diablo 2 was unique in that the bad ending was part of the original and in the expansion you're given a chance to rectify this.

 

[DJ OMiY]

Any PS2 Fatal Frame ending in the whole freaking series minus the extra ending in Fatal Frame 3. Lets take a quick run-through:

FATAL FRAME 1:

Spoiler

Ending 1 - Defeat Kirie and your brother (who you spent this whole game trying to save) decides to stay with the main ghost, and is soon crushed to death.
Ending 2 - Defeat Kirie and your brother actually goes with you, but now the main ghost must live in eternal suffering without her lost lover.

FATAL FRAME 2:

Spoiler

Ending 1 - Leave Mayu behind. Wake up outside of All God's Village with Mayu stating she'll wait forever a la Sae (definitely a bad sign).
Ending 2 - You complete the ritual, killing the main character's twin sister, Mayu, in the process.
Ending 3 - You save Mayu, but the main character ends up blinded for life.

FATAL FRAME 3:

Spoiler

Ending 1 - The third playable character, Kei, ends up eternally trapped/dead.
Ending 2 - Kei lives, and all characters meet after the terror is over (THE ONLY TRULY HAPPY ENDING and only available via sidequest).

However, Xbox gamers got an extra ending in Fatal Frame 2 that is happy.

Spoiler

Everyone gets out unharmed and the village is free. Go figure that one.

 

[TheBarefootBandit]

When a game has a happy ending, it makes the player feel that their hard personal efforts were worth it.
It doesn't make sense to sink 50+ hours into a Final Fantasy game to have the villain kill the main characters and destroy the world at the very end.

DOCTOR MCNINJA!!!

 

[lumpenprole]

Doom?

 

[brettman170]

The Darkness was one of the saddest endings I can think of:

Spoiler

Having lost everything important to him, Jackie ties up a brief request for revenge before letting the Darkness have total control of his body as a vessel of destruction for whatever its own twisted purposes are...credits roll

Also, Killzone 2 had a surprisingly downer ending for an FPS war game.

Spoiler

In the end, your rage-fueled squadmate kills the dictator you were supposed to capture ALIVE to stop the Helghast war machine. He warns you that his death will only make the Helghast remember him as a martyr and fight even more fiercely to wipe out the Vectans, and once he dies the player sees a massive Helghast fleet obliterating the ISA forces, crushing any hope that the war might be over before it could start. With the overwhelming Helghast fleet looming over him, he sits down on the stairs of the capital and waits for the end while the ISA falls back and starts fighting a war they know they can't win.

 

[Mordwyl]

Either one of the original Lufia games come to mind for downer or at least bittersweet endings. I mean:

Spoiler

In the prequel, Selan dies before everyone else and Maxim follows soon after he alters the course of the falling Fortress of Doom from falling on Parcelyte. The sequel has you forcefully kill off Lufia whom is later found to have lost all her memories.

Blood Omen from the Legacy of Kain series had two endings, but BOTH were downers. How's that for suckage?

 

[SAMAS]

It seems to me that people don't make a lot of games with sad endings because they are, by definition, SAD ENDINGS. Developers aren't scared to make them so much as they simply don't want to.

Although personally, I think that anyone who asks for more sad endings in fiction hasn't had enough of them in life.

 

[RonHiler]

Really? Four pages of comments and not one person has even mentioned Saints Row? You people dissapoint me. I thought you were gamers.

 

[Wounded Melody]

Final Fantasy Adventure had a tear jerker ending.
I guess so do FFX if X-2 hadn't come along...the ending to FFX was actually well done if, again, there were no X-2

 

[Skratt]

If the ending fit the game, I say great. However, it would be nice if some games had endings at all. A downer ending to me is playing a great game for hours and at the very end having a few stills possibly a small bit of dialogue but generally just some text, and...roll credits. I mean an ending should tie up the game rather nice (even if there is a cliffhanger) and be a small reward of sorts, or at least a few minutes of video or something as a Thanks for Playing! - even in an FPS.

While not all games have crap endings, one that I am still bitter about is the original Unreal ending. I've never forgiven them for that POS ending - no dialoge, no story, just a rocket flying away, leaving my ass in the boss pit. Nice.

 

[Andy Chalk]

I'm gonna go get that book from the library now, thanks for ruining the ending, JERK!

Actually it's a movie. Sorry about the spoiler, I guess I just assumed that the statute of limitations on them was somewhere shy of 30 years. Still worth a watch, though, and believe me, I haven't actually spoiled much of anything.

I agree that it would be a blast to play, if it was handled properly - which is a mighty big "if." But would it have mass market appeal? And if not, then what are the odds of it being made by anyone with the resources to do it decently? Which isn't to say I'm a big fan of the massive development teams being deployed on triple-A games these days, but creating a quality, story-driven FPS is a demanding project no matter how you look at it.

It's the difference between the perception of futility - Diablo 2 establishes that you dropped the ball in the original game (which is bad) but gives you a chance to fix things up (which is good) - and real futility - your guys are dead, you're hauling ass from the Russians, your post-game life expectancy can probably be measured in days and even if you somehow manage to survive, your home will be a smouldering cinder the next time you see it. Dramatically powerful, absolutely, but will it sell to an audience that's here to win?

PS: Weird, I thought I put this up hours ago, but when I checked back it was still in my editor queue but not posted.

 

[Lord_Seth]

A downer ending, on the other hand...nothing good happens. Successes are incredibly short-lived, even if they don't lead to greater, permanent horror. The protagonist doesn't survive, and in fact no one does. The world is destroyed, the antagonist is successful beyond their wildest dreams...

In other words, absolutely nothing is accomplished. I have only one response to those sorts of endings.

"Thank you for wasting my fucking time. I could have spent those hours doing something productive with my life, like hugging cacti, but thanks to you, I just feel barely-restrained disappointment and anger. I hope you're fucking happy with yourself, and I wish you fun times until such time as the meteor hits your house to balance out the world's karma."

I'm going to slightly disagree with you. While I generally agree that such endings leave me wondering "So what was the whole point of that?" there are times when I think it was pulled off well. Case in point: 1984. There is nothing even remotely happy about that ending; the fact the main character is truly happy is one of the saddest parts of it. Yet it is (at least in my opinion) a very good book.

Though, of course, most examples of the true kind of downer ending you mentioned are pulled off badly and make me wonder what the whole point of spending the time reading/watching/playing the thing was. I'm just saying I think there are some exceptions.

 

[NeutralDrow]

A downer ending, on the other hand...nothing good happens. Successes are incredibly short-lived, even if they don't lead to greater, permanent horror. The protagonist doesn't survive, and in fact no one does. The world is destroyed, the antagonist is successful beyond their wildest dreams...

In other words, absolutely nothing is accomplished. I have only one response to those sorts of endings.

"Thank you for wasting my fucking time. I could have spent those hours doing something productive with my life, like hugging cacti, but thanks to you, I just feel barely-restrained disappointment and anger. I hope you're fucking happy with yourself, and I wish you fun times until such time as the meteor hits your house to balance out the world's karma."

I'm going to slightly disagree with you. While I generally agree that such endings leave me wondering "So what was the whole point of that?" there are times when I think it was pulled off well. Case in point: 1984. There is nothing even remotely happy about that ending; the fact the main character is truly happy is one of the saddest parts of it. Yet it is (at least in my opinion) a very good book.

Oh, I agree. It was a good book. It's also a book I hate with a passion, and to which I had exactly that reaction I laid out. Well...minus wishing a meteor would fall on George Orwell, which would have been pointless and disproportionate; I mean, Animal Farm was also depressing, but that was meant as an actual real life allegory (as opposed to an ideological allegory).

Though, of course, most examples of the true kind of downer ending you mentioned are pulled off badly and make me wonder what the whole point of spending the time reading/watching/playing the thing was. I'm just saying I think there are some exceptions.

The only way I can see an exception is if the story was really good in the interim...wait, no. Then the ending just feels like a knife stab instead of a crowbar to the nuts. Those type of things, I take up Lemony Snickett on his advice. "If you really want to think this story has a happy ending, stop reading right here and pretend it happened." There's a reason I have read A Series of Unfortunate Events past book 6. It just didn't feel worth continuing.

I think the only exception I can acknowledge might be Mizuki's Unhappy Ending in the visual novel A Drug That Makes You Dream. Kouhei is alive, but clearly worse off than he was in the beginning of the game (now, instead of a monotonous life, he has a monotonous life and incredible loss), and Mizuki is dead...but it's what she dies of that makes the ending incredibly tragic, the longer one thinks about it...

Then again, maybe I can only accept that ending because it's written very well, the preceding story was also really good, and most importantly, it doesn't have to end like that.

 

[Xerosch]

For the ultimate in bad endings though, my personal fave, I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream

Spoiler

Normal Ending: You die, get resurrected and made to do it all again.
Happy Ending: You die
Sad Ending: You get trapped in a form where you can't move, breathe or die.

Oh my God... what a horrible szenario! Not in a bad way, but the bad ending made me somehow panic inside.

And I'd like to add Metal Gear Solid 3 and a little bit of Vagrant Story and Shadow of the Colossus.

 

[Xerosch]

You want a bad ending, turn to blizzard. Practically of of their expansion packs end with the bad guys winning. Brood war and Frozen Throne in particular. Diablo 2 was unique in that the bad ending was part of the original and in the expansion you're given a chance to rectify this.

True, Blizzard has a gift of completely ruin the main character's lifes. I can understand why evil has to triumph in the end (setup for a sequel), but especially Arthas strikes me as one of the most tragic figures in gaming. Kerrigan's fucked up, too but Arthas loses more than his humanity.

 

[wilted_orchid]

I love both bad and happy endings, they just need to be done properly. Games where you get killed as an ending don't really do it for me. I mean, games like Silent Hill 2 did the endings well, if the ending is bad, I want to see the protaganist emotionally crushed and broken.

If it's happy, I want there to be a none-cheese happiness. Let me think...

Me no know...

KH's ending was a weird one, it made me cry, but not because I was sad or happy, I'm not sure what it was...oh man...

Spoiler: Here we go...

"Kairi! I'll come back for you...I promise!"
"I know you will!"

*Hands separate, cue ending music. Tears appear*

I know exactly what you mean! That ending had me reaching for the kleenex, too, although I was gone before that what with -

Spoiler: *sniffles*

Riku:"Take care of her."

 

[MasterOfHisOwnDomain]

I have no issues with bad endings, but they actually have to feel like a conclusion as justifiable as a happy ending; I want to see more bad endings, but not where the main character is killed because death is apparently poetic...

 

[WindKnight]

A good downer ending is something I enjoy, no matter the medium. Which is why the snes spin-off of a manga I loved annoyed me so much when they tacked on a happy ending to take away the sting of the manga's finale.

When it comes out of nowhere, or makes no sense, then it upsets and angers me.

Which is why I loathed the finale of fallout 3's main quest. It came out of nowhere, it was VERY POORLY WRITTEN and made no sense from a game mechanic standpoint. Plus the way the game makes you out to be stinking great jerk if you don't do 'the right thing'

Spoiler

paladin Lyons is a veteran soldier dedicated to protecting the populous... and yet she at no point volunteers to put her life on the line for a TEENAGER who's lost their father, been exiled from their home, and has been forced to adapt to life in the wastelands. She makes you feel like a jerk for asking her to do it, the game makes you feel like a jerk for doing it, and allies you have who are NOT HURT BY RADIATION won't go in there so no-one dies. This soldier who would quite happily have let a teenage civilian die in her place is the 'true hero' if you do prod her into doing her duty. And to make it worse... what kills you is the legacy your dad left you in his 'heroic sacrifice' your supposed to emulate. thanks dad. your final gift was so bloody thoughtful.

 

[irrelevantnugget]

I wouldn't say game devs are afraid of giving a story a bad ending, and there are loads of games who have a bad ending, or at the very least ambiguous...
Off the top of my head: Unreal, Shadow of the Colossus, Painkiller, the first two of the Pop Sands trilogy, Golden Sun (though it was a setup for the sequel/second part of the saga, but still), Silent Hill 2, and maybe the pinnacle of depressing endings would be Crisis Core.

If you played FFVII prior to Crisis Core, you'd know that Zack Fair dies. It's pretty much common knowledge. But right before the ending (between the final bossfight, and the ending cinematic), you are given control over Zack once more in normal combat gameplay, but with infinitely respawning enemies and artillery all over the battlefield. You can't do anything but die, but the game made you want to break the barriers and change his fate. It was so damn depressing to see him die after that, even after trying everything you could, thus making it so much more powerful.
Shadow of the Colossus did the same, but with letting go (and the entire game is built around this concept).

A bad ending doesn't ruin the story for me though: if it's done right, it's just so much better.

 

[DoctorObviously]

I would accept a sad ending if the developers would make it in such a way, that it is believable. Example: If MGS4 ended with Snake pulling the trigger, I would have accepted that. But, if you would defeat a last boss (that is, by shooting or kicking his health bar to zero) and, the boss wins in a cutscene, that would anger me.