What video game(s) has the most disappointing ending that leaves you with a sour taste in your mouth?
Anticlimactic endings in video games
What video game(s) has the most disappointing ending that leaves you with a sour taste in your mouth?
Star Fox Adventures comes to mind right away.
when i watched the karate kid ending for the NES from AVGN i was like "what the hell?"
infact alot of the games he reviews has really stupid endings.
It doesn't leave a bad taste in my mouth, but the end of Final Zone is really anticlimactic. I love the game though, and the solemn music that plays at the end really makes it work.
Rygar: The Legendary Warrior (the original arcade version) has a pretty anticlimactic ending that should sour me, not it doesn't for some odd reason or another. I suppose it's just a part of the games charm.
Now, Sid Mead's Terraforming for the Turbo Grafx CD, there's a game with a terribly anticlimactic ending that leaves me sour.
007: Agent Under Fire had a pretty meh ending. I actually had no idea I had beaten it until I confirmed online that, yes, that was the end.
I imagine a lot of NES games have ultimately disappointing endings.
I'd imagine after making the game itself, they perhaps didn't have the memory left for a flashy ending.
Especially for the kind of ending you'd like after beating a "Nintendo-hard" game.
Battletoads in Battlemaniacs for the SNES. All that hard work, and you get a weak ending.
Any old-school Sonic game when you don't collect all the emeralds... screw you Robotnik and your stupid jewelry fetish, I beat the game, I don't care.
Star Tropics 2 i thought had a really good ending and that was a pretty lengthy game!Originally Posted by SparTonberry
Having been into the Donkey Kong Country games at the time, I distinctly remember being royally pissed at Donkey Kong Land's ending. It's essentially just "Congratulations."
I've seen plenty of that "Congratulations...game over" stuff before but usually you kind of expect certain games to have non-endings so it's not so disappointing. But Donkey Kong Land bothered me because of how it clashed with the rest of the game. Super Mario Land had a more fulfilling conclusion.
Final Fantasy X also had an anticlimactic end. Not the ending itself but the fact that the final showdown is between your party members and a tick that will kill itself if you cast the right spells. Final Fantasy VII featured a one on one duel between Cloud and Sephiroth. Even though you can't lose and it's just for show, it made a good show. But apparently for FFX a little bug that could easily pass for a normal random battle was sufficient.
Chrono Cross's ending also kinda pissed me off. I hate endings that are essentially "...and so everything that transpired essentially never happened and nobody remembers a thing." It pisses me off when TV cartoons and comic books do that shit as a way of returning to the status quo. So when your 40+ hour RPG gives me the same thing? I'm going to be pretty angry.
And, most recently, Mortal Kombat 9. Beating Shao Kahn didn't have the same oomph that his defeat in MKII did. None of the "No! No! No! No!!!!" I was hoping for more.
Last edited by TonyTheTiger; 09-15-2011 at 09:43 PM.
It doesn't get more anticlimactic than this:
Yeah. That's the ending of Karnov for the NES. The whole ending. To struggle through the game and get THAT as your reward was a slap in the face as far as I was concerned. But what really grinds my gears is that the Famicom version had not one, not two but three full endings: http://www.vgmuseum.com/end/nes/a/karj.htm
Actually, you know what endings pissed me off? Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and Vandal Hearts.
These are two of my favorite games on the PlayStation and yet for whatever reason Konami was going through this phase at the time where they thought it would be fun to end on the dumbest cliffhangers...just for the sake of ending on a cliffhanger. And to this day they were never resolved.
Vandal Hearts was especially bad because it leads you to believe that upgrading Ash to Vandalier rank would get you something special and the obvious assumption would be an extended or otherwise special ending. Nope. Just some bullshit splash screen telling you how awesome a player you are.
I think that bothers me more than games that simply have shitty endings. At least a game that ends with "Congratulations...game over" is up front about it. Games that supposedly have some bonus ending for accomplishing some special task but ultimately give you crap in return for the effort piss me off more.
Jak & Daxter did that with the precursor orbs. Yes, if you get them all you get an epilogue. But the epilogue is ridiculously short and tells you nothing. The only thing that exonerates it is that it's nicely resolved at the beginning of Jak II.
Last edited by TonyTheTiger; 09-15-2011 at 10:00 PM.
God of War III
First I was like, "uh.. ok. What now?"
Then I was like, "are we there yet?"
Then, "ok this is getting old, also SHUT UP!"
[Something actually happens..]
Finally, "wow, really?"
The Chrono Cross ending is a little deeper than just returning everything. Schala is still out there lost in time, and it implies that she's looking for Serge in our world.
Gundam Crossfire's Zeon campaign ends with a text epilogue about how you won the final battle, but soon after, the Federation captured you as a prisoner of war and Zeon falls.
Mega Man Zero seemed like it was going to end on a really interesting note with all the robots looking up at Zero in wonder, like he was some sort of tragic hero who would rise to lead them, but then he slashes them in half. I was really disappointed.
Ocarina of Time ends with a time paradox. If Gannondorf was defeated in the future, then he's still a threat in the present.
Phantasy Star Online just kind of ends. I know there's more in Episode II and stuff, but originally, Episode I doesn't really have much of an ending. Granted, the story is pretty slim to begin with, but it still felt lacking.
Dude, Data East would have to throw a parade in my honor after I beat it for me to attempt to play that game all the way through. The difficulty level is just way too hard for my tastes. I picked that bastard up at the local Flea Market a few months ago because I remember playing it a bit at the local Seven11 and with an old childhood neighbor on his NES. After 15 or so minutes, I recalled why I didn't have much memories of the game: we played the game, put the game down, and cautiously walked away. The game just does not offer near enough pleasure in exchange for all the pain it gives.
Actually, I might revisit the game again if I can find it on eBay for the Famicom.
Some of the weakest endings (based on the effort you need to put in to get them):
1) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1 on NES (only achievable for me thanks to save/load states): If I went through THAT MUCH EFFORT to actually beat the game without cheating, only to see that weak-ass 5-second ending, I would have thrown my controller into the TV and sworn of games for good. Thank you, NesterDC.
2) Battletoads: I actually *did* beat this game without cheating (single-player, Genesis version), and I never touched the game again after witnessing, again, a completely anticlimactic 5-second ending. Soured me on the entire franchise after that, actually.
and lastly, I need to mention Shenmue 2. Truth be told, I count the entire 4th disc [highlight for spoiler](your entire walk along the river/chat with Shenhua) [end spoiler] as a denoument/ending, but where the final scene leaves the story, and the fact we likely won't ever see any resolution, leaves it as one of the biggest **** teases in gaming history.
Yes, but it both goes nowhere (similar to the SOTN/Vandal Hearts thing) and is obfuscated by the ridiculous, near nonsensical scripting.
What it boils down to is that if I'm given an actual ending I expect it to actually do something. Ending on a cliffhanger isn't necessarily bad. Inception did it masterfully. But the way these games tend to do it is just annoying and random. There's no real need to close off Chrono Cross with live action footage of this girl wandering around what appears to be Tokyo and then expect me not to be mad.
Actually, the Mega Man X series bothered me a bit with the endings. The SNES games were fine because they weren't really doing anything beyond what the NES ones did. The PlayStation games, though, started throwing in all these plot points, particularly X5, about what apparently happened to Wily and all that. It kinda started in X2 but the PlayStation games dialed it up.
But the endings never really gave much beyond the standard Mega Man fare. So you had these X games feature cryptic references and dialogue apparently aiming at something but the endings (and subsequent games) completely ignored all of that even existed. It's really jarring when you go from cryptic in-game dialogue like "An old friend of yours built me this new body!" to an ending that's "Fight, Mega Man! For everlasting peace!"
I think this is appropriate:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coglCRr77aA
Last edited by TonyTheTiger; 09-16-2011 at 12:21 AM.
The Guardian Legend. It's up there in my top-25 favorite games of all time, and all that hard work I put into the game was ended in disappointment.
I actually agree with you and brings me back to Back to the Future 2. Why in the holy mother of fuck did they even bother going to the future to change Marty's kids when.. It's going to happen anyway? If you go BACK in time, that period of time's going to happen again.. You can't change the future and then go back to the present with the future turning out fine.. What. That makes absolutely no sense at all.
Last edited by aryoshi; 09-16-2011 at 05:26 AM.
"Nothing can beat the music of hundreds of voices screaming in unison!" ~ Kefka
Metroid Prime. I don't think I ever worked so hard to beat a game, and got basically "Congratulations" because I only had 78% scanned. It still ticks me off.
If you can't do it with 8 bits, you don't need to do it!
You took the words right out of my mouth. That was it?? Really? Whatever.
Also, Vegas Stakes for SNES. You actually win the game when you earn $10 million. They show a woman who asks you "What you are going to do now?" and you have to type in an answer. I typed in "Eat your pussy" for the hell of it. And she "replies", "I hope you get to eat your pussy."
Last edited by AceAerosmith; 09-16-2011 at 07:34 AM.
“The world has, forever and always, been brimming with shit-heads.” - Dana Gould
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