Poll of the Day > What's the worst ending to a game you've seen (spoilers!)

(+) Yeah! (+)

mooreandrew58 posted...

My gripe with OoT is being sent back into the past shouldnt that mean ganondorf was technically never beaten? In child links timeline anyways.

But for me any ending that equates to it never actually happened. Like it was a dream. And if the theory that mgs2 was all virtual reality was confirmed it would ruin that for me.

He's able to stop him as a child from ever doing whatever he did. So, he kid of was. He just wasn't killed or sealed or whatever... From what I can remember...

And as a kid, he got the Ocarina or Time from Princess Zelda, and traveled far away so he couldn't use to to get to the sacred realm. Thus, preventing him from doing whatever he did before...
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DiScOrD tHe LuNaTiC posted...

I can't help but wonder how different the trilogy would have been if A, Karpyshyn hadn't left BioWare; and B, Walters hadn't decided to ignore most of what Karpyshyn had set up so he could come up with his own ideas (supposedly, in Karpyshyn's plot, the Reapers were going to be using dark energy somehow, which is hinted at in Tali's mission on Haestrom).

I don't know, but I feel certain it would have made a lot more sense. I mean, just so much doesn't connect because of the sudden change in tone including, well, why it's even CALLED Mass Effect. It makes sense in the original because the Mass Effect, the cornerstone of Galactic civilization, is also the thing that's slowly KILLING the galaxy. Now, however, it's just... kinda there.

I suspect that the player would have been put in a position to make a choice between either destroying/disabling the relays (letting the galaxy recover at the cost of rendering all travel down to a local at-best level), letting the Reapers continue on their purge (potentially saving future species at the cost of the current cycle), or keeping the relays active and destroying the Reapers (allowing the current cycle to continue but potentially dooming the galaxy to a slow and steady death). In a delicious twist this could have lead to a perfect set-up for ME:A since they'd want to colonize another galaxy because, hey, suns be blowing up here.

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I didn't hate it but the ending of Far Cry 5 was pretty lame. I did everything right and still lost.

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I may be alone here, but I was exceptionally disappointed in the ending to Panzer Dragoon Saga when I played through it for the first time. The game is so beautiful, engaging, and imaginative; you really feel the anguish and difficulty of certain choices Edge has to make throughout the journey. The ending felt confusing and anticlimactic to an extremely dissatisfying level. I wouldn't say it ruined the experience as a whole for me, but I was quite frustrated for a long time. It was years before I was able to play through it a second time, because I hated the ending so much.

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Kotor 2.. wtf was that

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Fable 2.

The final battle is literally pick A B or C for a good, average or bad ending. All.of the endings suck and there is no actual final battle.

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Xenosaga 2. The end boss wouldn't even fight me back, after it was hard AF to get to him!!

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Strata2win posted...

Kotor 2.. wtf was that

Oh I forgot about this lol

Back when releasing unfinished games was unusual

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Batman: Arkham Asylum: The Joker Takes The Form Of A Hulking Green Monster


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BUMPED2002 posted...

Batman: Arkham Asylum: The Joker Takes The Form Of A Hulking Green Monster

Like the whole story was building up to that? It's not even the weirdest thing Joker has done.

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Metal Gear Solid 5.

Because there wasn't an ending at all.
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thedicemaster posted...

Lord of the rings: the fellowship of the ring on the gameboy advance.

you go on an rpg-like quest to destroy the ring and defeat sauron.
just as your journey is really getting underway you climb a hill.
sauron sees you.
game over, you "win".

it's like playing a demo, you're not even halfway into the actual journey and you're presented with what's basically a "buy the game to continue playing" screen without having accomplished any real goal.

I mean... that's how "Fellowship" basically ends.

DiScOrD tHe LuNaTiC posted...

I can't help but wonder how different the trilogy would have been if A, Karpyshyn hadn't left BioWare; and B, Walters hadn't decided to ignore most of what Karpyshyn had set up so he could come up with his own ideas

That's the one thing I'm willing to cut them slack on - because Karpyshyn's idea was also kind of stupid.

The real problem is that, when they made the original Mass Effect, they didn't really have plans for a continuing franchise. They left the ending open-ended so they could continue it if they wanted, but they didn't necessarily bother to come up with overarching themes/plot to act as connective tissue, and thus didn't really have a storyline to pay off in the eventual finale. Drew tried to seed ideas into ME2 to set up that sort of pay-off (once they realized it was going to be an issue), but it mostly feels "too little, too late" (especially since it's really only hinted at in minor conversations you can completely miss, and didn't really tie into anything from the first game), so it still would have been an awkward fit if they'd based large chunks of ME3 on it.

And you'd still have the logic problem - "We're encouraging you to use a specific style of technology so we can better harvest you, but that style of tech is entirely built around the thing we don't want you doing in the first place, which is the entire motivation for literally everything we do". If the entire goal of the Reapers is to kill off everyone who uses dark energy and "prematurely ages" the universe, then why base the entirety of their own technology around Element Zero and dark energy?

The sad part is, the plot they eventually went with - the meme-worthy "We kill organics to prevent them from creating synthetics that will kill organics" - does actually kind of work. The real problem is that they present as being more or less correct, which just makes everyone involved look stupid. If they'd set up the plot in a way where you can easily contradict that logic, and point out the flaw inherent in it in-game, it would turn the entire Reaper plot into a terrible tragedy - thousands of civilizations, trillions of lives, all destroyed because of a mistake.

It's similar to some of the storylines Marvel did for the Sentinels in the X-Men - humans invented Sentinels to protect humans from mutants at all costs, but the pure logic machines with no mercy and pity deduce that the best way to protect humans is to kill all mutants and essentially enslave all humans. Conversely, when Sentinels are programmed to destroy all mutants, they conclude that all mutants ultimately come from humans, so if you wipe out all the humans, then you prevent new mutants from ever being born. It makes SENSE from their perspective, while still being horrifying and wrong. And the people who create these things usually have just long enough to be absolutely aghast at what they've unleashed right before they themselves get killed.

If Shepard (and others) could learn the Reapers' motivation in-game, and then point out how utterly stupid and wrong it is, and rebel against it, and basically just call the Catalyst a broken, defective AI who has been committing atrocity upon atrocity due to what is essentially a program error, a lot more people would probably have been okay with the ending as presented. What makes Vent Boy so damned annoying is that you can't ever really argue with it. You can't even point out that it's taking on the form most calculated to manipulate you, that the most basic assumptions of its logic are flawed, that it betrayed its own creators and perverted their original intent, etc. In a franchise which originally allowed you to literally talk one of the main end-bosses to death, you can't talk back to this thing at all. That's frustrating.

The closest you can come to that is presented in Leviathan, which is kind of shitty, feels like an afterthought, and was DLC released 5 months later. If they'd incorporated the backstory of Leviathan into the main game (but kept the original Leviathans long dead), then allowed Shepard to use that knowledge to argue with the Catalyst, it would be way more satisfying.

But it makes sense that the last 20 minutes is the part most people shit on hardest - most of ME3's plot was the result of a group of writers working together, and able to point out plot-holes and problems to each other in the brainstorming process, but the ending was the product of Hudson and Walters alone, kept a secret from all of the other writers, because they thought they were being super-clever and didn't want anyone interfering with their grand vision. If they'd been willing to allow criticism and other ideas to be suggested, things might have been handled better.

The other blatant problems with ME3 are admittedly harder to dismiss, though. Having the only way to overcome the Reapers being to build a giant deus ex machina gun when the developers explicitly claimed they wouldn't resort to deus ex machina to explain everything away is kind of BS. As is mostly reducing the final endings to "Do what Saren was brainwashed into doing/Do what the Illusive Man was brainwashed into wanting/Blow everything up like your surrogate dad wants", and then have minimalist ending scenes that blow up all the mass relays. Or having your cold, hard, badass Shepard suddenly become overcome with guilt just so they can have their Vent Boy interludes. Or stripping back dialogue options so they could save money on voice-acting. Or having Javik be a thing, then locking him away as on-disc day-one DLC.

Another thing that hurt the game was that it was taking longer to finish than originally expected, so instead of give it the time it needed, they cut content and rushed it out faster (because that worked so well for KotOR2). If it had had an extra year to bake and there was more cooperative discussion in the writers' room, a lot of the flaws could have been avoided (or at least mitigated).
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Drawn to life: the next chapter

I disagree with the Reaper's decision being a nonsense choice. After all, the only way to travel faster than light is to utilize the Mass Effect. So if they want to develop a cure for the Mass Effect they need to be able to travel around and whatnot and keep things under control. What doesn't make sense is the cycles. The Reapers had no reason to not become effectively draconian overlords keeping intergalactic travel tightly regulated to reduce impact and giving space-faring species the choice of submission or destruction. After all, why let these species rise to a level where they can challenge you in the first place?

But I think this just goes to prove a further point. That the plot for ME3 was screwed beyond repair and they basically made the worst decisions possible in regards to it resulting in a product that ruined ME1 and 2 with its terrible nature.

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Unbridled9 posted...

the only way to travel faster than light is to utilize the Mass Effect.

The only KNOWN way to do so is the mass effect. Since every civilization for the last billion years (in the Milky Way) has developed FTL technology based on Reaper tech/mass relays, any research into alternative methodology would be discouraged ("Why invent a better way when we already have a perfectly effective one?"). So if an alternative exists, we'd have no real way of knowing.

Andromeda shows us technology that evolved entirely outside of the Reaper model (as far as we know), but they don't really go into deep enough detail of the Jardaan/Remnant or Kett to really say for sure they're using the same methods for FTL transport, or if Eezo is as important to their tech as it is to Reaper-influenced tech.

Ultimately, if the Reapers wanted to discourage dark energy use, what they should have done is retain their own FTL methods but discourage any other culture from developing FTL. Devote most of their harvesting efforts to mining/recovering/removing Eezo instead of people and they can make it almost impossible for anyone TO develop mass effect technology (or biotics) - as the requirements for creation of Eezo are significantly rare, it wouldn't be overly difficult to keep the galaxy stripped of it after an initial harvesting. For more sophisticated methodology, disseminate data to any culture that manages to discover it that establishes the dangerous side-effects (or even implies some made up ones to make it even scarier), to discourage them from using it.

Encouraging everyone to DO the one thing you DON'T want them to do, and then wiping them out as soon as they start doing it, is quite possibly the worst possible solution to that particular problem.
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LinkPizza posted...

I think I saw AVGN play this...

.
I remember that playthrough

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In the old Infocom adventure game Infidel, you play a treasure hunter exploring a pyramid that you've discovered underground, and the ending has you find a great treasure and immediately get buried alive. Arguably that's what you deserve for trying to loot a new pyramid on your own, but it made me wonder why I'd bothered playing the game, and I hadn't even spent much time on it because I'd been mostly following the hints.

Is there something that's like a cousin to "bittersweet", where the ending is poopy and disappointing, but, like, it's a good kinda suck?

Like the ending to Inside___(spacesaving)__

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Lokarin posted...

Is there something that's like a cousin to "bittersweet", where the ending is poopy and disappointing, but, like, it's a good kinda suck?

Like the ending to Inside___(spacesaving)__

Super Mario bros 2? Whole game felt like a fever dream, and then..