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A whole slew of lists have been made about horrible video game endings, but most of those include games that aren't really worth playing to begin with. These are the worst endings to games that are 100% worth your time until the end. This proves, once again, that for most games, the developers probably think about the ending LAST.
Not every video game can replicate the hype that's been building all game. That's a bummer considering you've been working hard to accomplish a particular goal and you end up falling flat on your face. So what are the worst video game endings? These are the worst video game endings for great games. Let's face it: they stink.
In a climactic twist of Shyamalian lameness, it is revealed that the protagonist's buddies are no longer MIA, but alive and well and planning to shoot you and take your diamonds. Which matters little, since you'll be dying imminently of advanced-stage malaria. Only one way out of this mess: suicide. Yes, you kill yourself and the game ends. Don't question a game developer's artistic vision.
Fallout 3 was the open-world, choice-driven, post-apocalyptic RPG that fanboys had been craving for decades, bringing the classic Fallout series into the modern age of gaming. That is why it was so disappointing to reach the end of the game and suddenly lose all freedom of choice. The player is martyred for the good of the wasteland, and that's that. What's worse is that your game is now over, cutting off any remaining side quests you may have had without any warning. Bethesda caught so much hell from gamers over this that they wound up retconning the ending through DLC.
The final fight of the game, which you've been preparing for throughout, goes to the villain Lucian, who kills your dog and your family (if you have one). He then begins to absorb your power. There is nothing you can do about this. But don't worry, in one of the worst examples of deus ex machina in video game history, you wake up as a boy again with your sister, get your hands on your old music box, heal your defeated hero friends with it, and then proceed to kill Lucian with one hit. As a reward for defeating evil in the most contrived way imaginable, the Seeress let's you choose between resurrecting your dog and family, resurrecting all the townsfolk that died making the Spire (not important), or just receiving a butt-load of money. That's right, you can trade your narrative standards away for any of THESE fabulous prizes, right HERE on Fable II!
No, not the crazy animated version Dragon's Lair, that game that everybody loves to look at but secretly hates to play. This NES adaptation was a different really difficult adaptation of Dragon's Lair. The game in of itself was pretty simple, but how all the characters were incorporated was pretty damn great. Also, it really didn't look to bad for the time, which is why we think they should've made more cartoon games back in the old days. You go through quite a crapload of work to save the princess, as a hero does, and that's perfectly fine.
But how does it end? Our hero just walks off-screen and we're told that he saved Daphne. Could we have SEEN that? Even Mario at least got to approach the Princess on-screen! This is the video game equivalent of that ending to Unbreakable that nobody likes. Can you imagine if this was commonplace? What if at the end of The Silence of the Lambs, Clarice Starling shot Buffalo Bill and then some text popped up on the screen saying, "And then she graduated from the FBI academy." Credits. What did we do to deserve this?
The Mass Effect series got so much right and was so beloved by gamers throughout all three titles in the trilogy, that it felt to fans like a gut punch when the ending of the final game rolled around and it essentially ignored everything that made the series so dear. All of the carefully plotted moral decisions and personal touches that players executed to shape the story thus far were thrown out the window in favor of a bland three-pronged choice of destroying the bad guys, taking control of the bad guys, or integrating organic life forms in the universe with their synthetic counterparts. Aside from which team members survived thus far and your military strength, none of the careful character-building the player had done over hundreds of hours factored into how the game ended. Shepard's story ended with a whimper.
THERE WAS CAKE?! The whole time...THERE WAS F**KING CAKE?!
At the end of Portal, the facility blows up and you've escaped into a big, open world that may or may not be in the middle of an apocalypse (maybe). Oh, and maybe you're even dead. That's fine. It's enigmatic and in-keeping with the tone of the story.
But after all that, the machine lives and has cake? What the hell?!
Everyone has just played, thought and lived through one of the most brilliantly designed puzzle games of the last decade thinking there was no cake and that the whole time the cake was a lie and we were fighting for our survival (which we were)... but at the end, there was CAKE? Who f**king baked that s**t?! Wouldn't the ingredients have gone bad by now? Is it strawberry? Because if it's strawberry we don't even want a piece of that f**ker.
For a cerebral game like portal to have a completely lame-ass ending like this kind of annoyed the crap out of us. Sure, we get Still Alive, one of the funniest and catchiest songs in the history of gaming, but the conclusion to our story is kind of a slap in the face of the experience.
