The 10 Best End Of The World Scenarios In Games

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but 2012 is going to be one hell of a year. If popular culture is right, as it always is, we can expect the Mayan prediction that the world will end in 2012. That’s it, we’re done, good game, life as we know it will cease to exist in a short time.

It’s easy to get existentialist when your very being has been prophesied to end on December 21, 2012. Sure, last year the rapture was supposed to happen on May 21, 2011, and while that was proven to be false, who are we to deny the truths of our Mesoamerican forefathers. We’re gonna die, so we have two options: party like there is no tomorrow, or keep working your soul crushing job until that fateful day.

If the later sounds more appealing, you callow unbeliever, then help me celebrate the impending end of the world with the best apocalyptic events in gaming. Nothing is more depressing than playing a game for 20 hours only to have your heroes die, the world implode, and existence as we know it snuff out. In anticipation for this event, let’s pour one out for our dead gaming friends and check out the following SPOILER-ridden list.

Nintendo has taken a good long break with the Advance Wars franchise, which is a criminal shame. Developer Intelligent Systems seems like they are busy with the new Paper Mario and Fire Emblem games for the 3DS, so if we’re lucky they can get back to their strategic routes. Anyone who has played the spunky strategy game with candy-coated warmongering knows how much fun they can be.

That said, many remember the North American and European-only Advance Wars: Days of Ruin taking a decidedly macabre turn from the fun and light heartedness of the older games. Sure, the basic mechanics remained he same, but a story about warring nations struggling to survive after a meteor slaughters most of mankind is a pretty big thematic shift from all prior titles. God, no wonder they didn’t release this game in Japan. S**t got depressing.

People really seem to dig Namco Bandai’s more recent Tales of Vesperia, but there is actually a duo of titles that, in my opinion, blow that one out of the water: Tales of Symphonia and Tales of Phantasia.

Both of these titles take place in the same world, medieval places where technology and magic are defined by those in power. Breaking way from other Tales games, Symphonia takes place thousands of years before Phantasia. Main character Lloyd is tasked with uniting to codependent continents unaware of each other’s existence, with each continent’s societies living in alternating success or failure.

At any given time, the people of Sylvarant and Tethe'alla are living happily or in misery. Unfortunately, while Lloyd is successful in uniting the two worlds as one, he also creates mass conflict, which leads into the Wii-only sequel Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World. All of this actually sets up a massive war that weakens society even further. Thousands of years down the line after this war, a meteorite slams into the planet, killing most people. It is here that after a few generations, Tales of Phantasia starts.

That’s right, after all the time and energy spent in Symphonia, it turns out that game was nothing more than a prequel to an old SNES title that shows the characters in a worse state than before. Whoops!

Technically, if you really want to get down to it, Marvel vs Capcom 3 has the most depressing world ending event in this entire list, which not only sees the destruction of Earth absolutely, it sees the destruction of both the Marvel and the Capcom universes!

No Ryu, no X-Men, no Frank West or Phoenix Wright, no Spider-man! It would be a very depressing future for any nerd in general. Thankfully we’re all used to Mega Man’s exclusion from gaming at the moment, so I guess we’re halfway there to a dead Capcom.

Anyway, if you play through the arcade mode all the way to Galactus, and then lose, you’ll get a quick cinematic of Galactus crushing earth in his palms. Sucks to be us!

Indigo Prophecy (or Fahrenheit to our European friends) was an outstanding little adventure game from the mind of David Cage at Quantum Dream, during that period before Heavy Rain became the big name title it was (press X for “JASON!”) and before Telltale brought adventure games back from the dead.

That said, Indigo Prophecy brought some impressive gameplay and narrative elements to gaming. Considering what it meant for the genre, it’s an important title that many people look onto fondly for it’s intense and dark narrative from both a supposed murderer and the police trying to find him.

Unfortunately, the plot goes a little off the rails near the end, with weird physical manifestations of computer AI, cultish clans, frustrating quicktime events, and the two leads bumping uglies in the most awkward way possible (European version only, for no one’s loss). Thus, it’s not a perfect game, but it’s definitely worth checking out.

As far as the end of the world, it depends on one of the three endings. In one, lead hero Lucas gets his cop girlfriend pregnant, an evil web-base organization called The Purple Clan unleashes robots onto the planet while the Sun is wiped out and the temperatures drop, killing millions of people while the rest are slaughtered.

It’s a far jump from the first portion of the game, but considering David Cage made it, it could have gone much crazier.

Look, any discussion about Mother 3 is going to have to be prefaced with a disclosure that we don’t condone emulating games. That said, Nintendo has made no inclination that they will be bringing Mother 3 outside of Japan, and our friends at Earthbound fan site, Starman.net, have done an amazing job translating the game into English. So, you know, make your own peace with God, download the game, and get playing. We can wait.

Ok, so you’ve finished Mother 3, which easily goes down as one of the most depressing and heart wrenching games of all time. Dead moms and twin brothers, sociopathic children locked away for all eternity in a box, it’s all pretty horrific stuff painted up in a friendly 16-bit aesthetic.

The end of the world is pretty implicit as well, with Lucas pulling the final of the Seven Needles, summoning Dark Dragon, and ending the world. Now, before we get too negative here, in this epilogue players can walk around in the dark and talk with other characters, indicating they are alive somehow, but there is an ambiguous finality to the game. Pretty damn grownup considering it’s A) Nintendo and B) easily mistaken for a children’s game.

Many of the games on this list are about heroes trying to save the world from total destruction. Not so with Pandemic 2, an addictive, if visually bland, flash game.

Players are tasked with creating and evolving viruses, bacteria, or parasites to ultimately kill every last person on the planet. Sure, the game may not look like much, but it’s an inversion of the familiar stock trading/team management games, only this time you are hoping to kill everyone you love.

Check it out here, and a word of advice, pray to god you can start the game on Madagascar!

Who can honestly forget the “red-headed stepchild” of the Zelda franchise? Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask is a weird game, and oddly dark for Nintendo’s flagship franchise. Only Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, the odd sidescrolling RPG, takes the cake for pure head-tilting weirdness.

That said, Majora’s Mask is certainly weird, and probably one of the blackest Zelda games to date. Not only has the young Link been transported to Termina, where he is transformed into various species through horrific masks, he’s also tasked with saving the world on a very short deadline of three days. Sure, he can start over as much as he’d like, but a ticking clock is never fun to see.

Topping things off, if Link screws up and takes too long, the player is treated to a horrific vignette of the moon crashing into Termina, obliterating the planet and killing all, including the ten year-old boy hero. It’s an awful, but also totally awesome way to go.

So many of the Final Fantasy games deal with heroes heading off to save the world that it has become a tired trope weighing down the JRPG genre. That a cast of spiky haired heroes saves the world is in itself a pedantic plot device. Everyone has played a JRPG, and everyone has saved the day. It gets old after the first few times.

That’s why the ending of Final Fantasy VI is so thrilling. Set in an unnamed world with many memorable characters, Final Fantasy VI sets itself apart with multiple lead characters, fascinating antagonists, and a memorable plot

What really sets Final Fantasy VI apart is actually Kefka, the nihilistic clown set upon destroying the world. In one scene, he poisons the drinking water for a whole town, killing hundreds. Halfway through the game, he goes so far as to smite millions of people and successfully destroy the world.

For half the game you’re working to stop him because you failed the first time, and while Terra and her crew ultimately defeats him, the world left behind is radically different after Kefka’s rampage. I’d like to see Sephiroth do as much damage as Kefka.

Ok, so maybe Enslaved isn’t the darkest post-apocalyptic addition to this list, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an awesome game. Sure, this Western reimagining from Team Ninja isn’t really depressing, and it does end on a mostly positive note. That said, any opportunity to discuss Enslaved is a good one, so just roll with it.

Enslaved stars Monkey, a man with no past who is collared by the spunky Trip to guide her back to her father’s home. Unfortunately, robots from a distant war and a militaristic group stand in their way, complicating the plotline and ultimately ending in a dramatic robotic battle in a desert.

Characters come and go, slavery of the remaining humans becomes a serious issue, and all is not as it seems. If you haven’t played the game, it’s a strong recommendation.

The thing is, when you get to the very end, it turns out that all the supposed slaves the military has been collecting throughout the game are placed in a Matrix-like computer system, living out fantasies in the mind of an apparently evil man. What’s right and wrong rapidly becomes ambiguous, and the game turns thoughtful.

It’s actually pretty fantastic, as the game is in general. So yeah, it’s not really the end of the world, but the rebuilding of the world from a state of absolute decay.

Based upon Harlan Ellison’s short story of the same name, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is the most depressing example of dystopian future on this list. Seriously, imagine a future where a computer AI slaughters all of the human race, saving five last humans to torture for all eternity. If it sounds like Portal’s GLaDOS, it’s not, as IHNOAIMS’s AM supercomputer is a sociopathic beast of a machine, replaying the worst moments in his five test subject’s lives over and over forever.

It’s pretty awful, while there is a positive good ending in the game, there are three bad ones. The good one results in the shutting down of AM, while surviving humans awaken on the moon, but for the three bad ending, one of the characters is transformed into a blob creature incapable of doing anything, all while tormented forever alone, in pain, and isolated.