The 50 Worst Video Game Endings Ever

It was all a dream. Sorry, but the Princess is in another castle. To be continued.... There's nothing worse than having the sand-papered tongue of a sucky ending nuzzle your tender bits as the end credits start to roll.

But what's a rage-filled gamer to do when a hollow ending with no closure leaves them feeling like they've just been told that Santa Claus is just your step-dad Carl? Make a list of The 50 Worst Video Game Endings Ever and attempt to take back the hours of your life lost to massive disappointment, obviously. Let us know what you think of our round-up in the comments section below. Hopefully it's happy endings for all!

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Final Level: "Kiln Of The First Flame"

Why It Sucked: The ending's not really an ending. Not a 'to be continued' ending either. It's just the beginning of your next play-through of the entire game on a more difficult setting.

How We Would End It: If you think the ending of this game matters, you're missing the point. Our one wish is that the ending you chose somehow affected the next playthrough, which it, very sadly, doesn't.

Final Level: "One Way Ticket"

Why It Sucked: We're not sure why we were expecting better; maybe we just hoped they'd learned their lesson after reviewers back-handed the first Kane and Lynch right into the bargain bin. If you actually make it to the ending, unsurprisingly, it feels as rushed and awful as the rest of the game.

How We Would End It: By giving explicit instructions on how to throw it in the garbage. Sorry, but this was a terrible game that just also happens to have an awful ending. Not much the doctors can do for a patient this terminal. The developers attempt to use some Michael Bay esque explosions to gloss over a flacid conclusion.

Final Level: "The Ultimate Power"

Why It Sucked: Nick finally gains the ultimate power, he regains his memories, and gets into what is shaping up to be an awesome fight. Attack choppers hover everywhere, weapons at the ready. Amazing setup. Let's blow some sh!t up using our mind bullets! Instead the game fades to a dreaded "To be continued" screen. There's no resolution here at all, and the fates of all characters involved are left unresolved.

How We Would End It: Literally any other way than this. The whole thing could have been an extended commercial for Valtrex and we would have been happier than this. Seriously. If the Valtrex logo came up during the credits, that would have been more satisfying than "To be continued."

Final Level: "Light The Dragonfires"

Why It Sucked: It looks more like an old school Godzilla movie than the climax of an Elder Scrolls title. Plus it really became apparent here that your character wasn't the game's main character, which felt pretty jarring. We need to be the center of attention!

How We Would End It: We would have seriously rethought that final quest and put in an ending that ended with the player. Don't bench us in the final level. We've got all these swords. We're guessing it looked a lot more epic on paper.

Final Level: "Brock"

Why It Sucked: For the record, we think multiple endings should mostly just go away. There are exceptions, but Dead Rising isn't one of them. The fact that getting the "good ending" depends on a couple miss-able events doesn't help.

How We Would End It: Getting any ending besides the 'bes't one causes you to miss out on a ton of content. A bizarre choice, to say the least. Start with the best ending and then bring people back to keep exploring the game. Allow them the choice to find and play the other endings in a non-arbitrary way.

Final Level: "The Shard"

Why It Sucked: Everyone either dies or turns their coats, with only Faith and Kate left alive by the end. And for what? They don't even jam a wrench in Project Icarus. The only victory is Faith's destruction of the mayor's servers, which we're sure will be fixed as soon as they can get Best Buy's Geek Squad down there.

How We Would End It: Even though you rescue Kate, you're both still on the run. It would be a cool set up for a sequel, but a few missions with Faith and Kate making it out of the mess they caused would've been the move.

Final Level: "The Moon"

Why It Sucked: Beyond Good and Evil was a great game, had a decent resolution-by which we mean the story was properly wrapped up-until the final cutscene. No one has ever refused to buy a sequel to a good game because it wasn't properly teased but obviously the developers felt differently.

How We Would End It: Be a bit more risky and tease the sequel by giving us a tighter preview of what to expect in the next title. Kind of like on TV shows where they'd give you a "next on Beyond Good and Evil" type of tease.

Final Level: "Apollo Sanctum"

Why It Sucked: "The End...?" It's definitely an issue when the developers don't even know if there will be a sequel, but they leave it on a cliffhanger anyway.

How We Would End It: First we would have gotten rid of the implied rising intonation found in "The End?" Honestly, for brevity's sake we would have wrapped it up in the first release. It's been too long since the cliffhangers from the last titles. Gamers are accustomed to long waits between insatallments, but at least give us a concrete maybe.

Final Level: "Heaven's Mirror"

Why It Sucked: There were a lot of cool things about this game that went unrealized. For one thing, Frederic is supposed to be dreaming the ordeal. It's cliched but luckily it turns out he's actually not dreaming. Polka kills herself, but comes back to life because she's in love. Great for her, but not for the narrative as a whole.

How We Would End It: Polka should have stayed dead and the world should have ended when Chopin died, just like when Link wakes up the Wind Fish in Link's Awakening. Sorry for the spoiler. If there are no consequences, then what's the point?

Final Level: "Orphan's Cradle"

Why It Sucked: What a mess. FF XIII was such a bore that we we never got around to getting emotionally invested in any of the characters . By the time the conclusion rolled around, we didn't give one hoot about the ending. Fang and Vanille's self-sacrifice felt meaningless, and never before has an FF game been so blatantly set up for a sequel.

How We Would End It: Square Enix realized they had crapped the bed as soon as the game started pulling down reviews. Square Enix tried to back-peddle over some of the more massive plot holes by releasing a 'sequel'. They named it Final Fantasy XIII-2, and it's got a pretty convenient time travel/plot device thrown in to explain away some of the more glaring omissions in continuity.

Final Level: "Dinky Island"

Why It Sucked: The Monkey Island games never shied away from breaking the fourth wall, but it just got awful when the ending to the second game revealed that LeChuck and Guybrush were actually two kids playing a game at a carnival. It was so bad that they disregarded it for Monkey Island 3 and pretended it had never happened.

How We Would End It: Tie in all the game titles or at least tell completely different stories. A concise ending that loops a bow around the series would make the classic series damn near perfect.

Final Level: "Pale Horse"

Why It Sucked: For the amount of buildup in this game, we couldn't have been more disappointed by the ending. In the grand scheme of the series, practically nothing happens in the first Gears. it's not even until the very end of the final cutscene that they reveal there even is a Locust queen.

How We Would End It: Blowing up those tunnels felt hollow in the long run; this game should have ended with a much more meaningful victory. That's what happens when half the game is filler, though.

Final Level: "Pyramid"

Why It Sucked: It turns out the force you're trying to stop the entire game is actually capturing slaves so it can give them a better life. But that better life involves being plugged into the Matrix and ignoring the real world. it's bad, but had good intentions.

How We Would End It: Is that Jeff Goldblum? Nope, just Gollum. Maybe it would have been better with Jeff Goldblum. He shouldn't be too busy these days.

Final Level: "Fleet Battle"

Why It Sucked: We get that the Helghast are the bad guys, but genocide is pretty much never cool. And then to strongly imply that the target of said accidental genocide-the dude they were actually trying to kill-escapes? Double not cool.

How We Would End It: If Stahl is going to escape put in more about that so we'll anticipate a Killzone 4.

Final Level: "Servant of Darkness"

Why It Sucked: In Patapon, you play a deity in charge of banging your magic drums and guiding the little eyeball creatures in battle. Their quest is to reach the end of the world and gaze upon "IT," at which point their destinies will presumably be fulfilled and everyone will get cake. Only it's not, and the ending is as anti-climactic for them as it is for us-which is to say it's so bad, they decided to build boats and cross the ocean so they can find their real destinies.

How We Would End It: Focus more on resolving the story and less on setting players up for a sequel. That would've made Patapon 2 and 3 even better.

Final Level: "The Summit of Sacrifice"

Why It Sucked: Dude, you can't just kill Athena. We know you're mad, Kratos, but she's been helping you the whole time! You couldn't have killed some other, lesser gods, like Dionysus or Hermes (no, that happened in GoW 3). Chuck this one in the filler-to-make-a-trilogy pile.

How We Would End It: We would have ended this series on the second one, with Kratos actually killing Zeus instead of accidentally murdering Athena and leaving on a cliffhanger (albeit, a pretty good one). Scratch that, we would have ended it at the first game, which had a resolution that actually made sense.

Final Level: "Chicxulub Crater"

Why It Sucked: To be fair, this one is pretty divisive. Some will praise Resistance 2 for daring to kill off their main character two thirds of the way through the trilogy. We, on the other hand, were like "NAAAAAAAATE NOOOO!"

How We Would End It: There has to have been another way! Restrain him or something! He belongs in a museum, not dead on the floor!

Final Level: Mission 6

Why It Sucked: Building an appropriately epic final boss battle isn't easy, but there is no way this was the best they could come up with. And after spending an entire game killing everything that moves, we suddenly decide that the hostile planet E.D.N. III "welcomes you like the warm bed of a lover." Huh?

How We Would End It: We would've had Mario make a guest appearance and have Bowser slap a GPS tracker on him so someone else could blow him up later. Wario would then show up in a jet and they fly away into the sunset. In short, any thing else would've been better than what we got.

Final Level: "Outer Haven Missile Hangar"

Why It Sucked: We don't mind a complex story, but MGS 4 is truly ridiculous. It feels like Hideo Kojima just wanted to play a joke on everyone who loved Metal Gear Solid 3. The final series of cutscenes-which clock in at about an hour-are the punch line. The fist fight with Liquid was actually pretty tight, but it just had to end with a movie-length cinematic.

How We Would End It: We'd be hard-pressed to even explain what was going on during eyesore, much less figure out how to fix it.

Final Level: Stage 7

Why It Sucked: Ghosts 'N Goblins was a notoriously difficult side scroller back in the day, and it still defies our every effort to complete it. That's made even worse by the fact that when you finally do reach the end, it turns out Beelzebub was jerking our chain the whole time. Yup, if you want to see the real ending, you're going to have to play the entire game again-and it's harder.

How We Would End It: Well, we just wouldn't have done that. It's a joke too mean to play on anyone.

Final Level: "The Dark Isle"

Why It Sucked: You've finally solved the final puzzles and defeated Gar-Hob, the evil painter and dark lord or something like that. Cut to the future, when mankind has finally touched down on Jupiter's moon, Europa-and a president that looks straight out of Dave Chapelle's sketch is in charge. Seriously, if you're going to make the president black, at least do what even The Fifth Element movie had the decency to do: don't make him a stereotype.

How We Would End It: Other than that, this ending was actually kind of cool.

Final Level: "Shai-Gen Corporation"

Why It Sucked: To be fair, Crackdown wasn't the most story-heavy game, but we still expected more than a minute-long cut scene explaining that we were actually working for the bad guys all along. It's not surprising, though, given that every single mission followed the exact same structure: go to a destination and kill something or someone. The mechanics and city in Crackdown were great, but the plot and missions were garbage.

How We Would End It: Simple is not always better, and in this case it sucks. Grand Theft Auto has been out for years; is it really so hard to develop interesting and varied missions in an open-world environment? We love the sandbox elements, but we would have made this game a lot more story-driven.

Final Level: "Revelation"

Why It Sucked: It's a damn shame XIII's ending is so god awful, because this game actually had a half-decent story. It turns out the man you've been looking for all along-the head of the conspiracy, "Number 1" is actually Walter Sheridan. Yes, the brother of the recently assassinated president, and the man who's been helping you for half the game, is actually the one you've been seeking.

How We Would End It: It's not the most original twist, but it totally works. So why the hell would the game end there? It needed another level, or at least a boss fight.

Final Level: "The Last Straw"

Why It Sucked: How Dragon Age 2 could be so bad after the brilliance of Origins is just one of those things that blows our minds every time we think about it. Not that we should have expected any different, but its ending was the crap covered cherry on top of the dung cake the game had been all along. Like the rest of the story, it was random, ill-conceived and poorly presented.

How We Would End It: We would have explained the deal with that freaking Lyrium idol, for one thing. And why does Leliana show up at the end at all? We've been told it makes more sense if you purchased the Origins DLC "Awakenings," which makes it even worse. Does anyone really care what happens to the "Champion" at this point?

Final Level: "Last Laughs"

Why It Sucked: Arkham Asylum is one of the greatest licensed games ever made, but boy did its ending take a batarang to the neck. All of the Joker's subtle manipulations and machinations end with him injecting himself with crazy pills and challenging Batman to a duel. That's so out of character we think it must have been a joke that the writers forgot to write out before the game went into production.

How We Would End It: We didn't want the Joker's storyline to end with an actual joke-he would have gone out with a bang and maintained a shred of his peculiar brand of dignity in our version.

Final Level: "Stone Pit"

Why It Sucked: Who wants a poem as a video game ending? Talk about anti-climactic. If the story goes on, then continue the story!

How We Would End It: The entire last disc of the game would be just walking around looking at your feet and buying coffee from vending machines.

Final Level: "The Tower of Return"

Why It Sucked: Last minute deaths are almost as big a cop-out as cliffhangers. Dark Void may not go that far, but Will does have to leave Ava behind for some reason. It basically boils down to "you got stabbed, gotta go, peace."

How We Would End It: It's clear the developers had something better in mind, but ran out of time and/or money three quarters of the way through development. That said, if you can't end a game right, at least end it happy. In our version, he'd carry her through the portal and they'd have tons of babies.

Final Level: "Project Impurity"

Why It Sucked: For such an enormously ambitious experience to have no endgame play is totally unacceptable. You sacrifice yourself to save everyone, and that's it. The final cutscene's narration changes depending on your actions throughout the game, but all that is meaningless if there's no way to continue playing in a world that's been affected by your actions.

How We Would End It: Add some end-game content-the DLC expansions helped a lot, but they weren't exactly free. And this game needed another ending besides straight up martyrdom.

Final Level: "Dis"

Why It Sucked: "You've proven too tough for Hell to contain" is a great line, but why did it have to be bunnies? And are the bunnies the "hellspawn," or did some other "hellspawn" come through the door and start murdering bunnies?

How We Would End It: A mission to save the bunnies.

Final Level: "Countdown"

Why It Sucked: Are you getting the sense yet that we don't appreciate cliffhangers? The message, "We've got to see this through, this ain't over by a long shot" is not an ending. F our lives.

How We Would End It: It needed at least one more mission to "nail Gabriel's backer" and we would've been satisfied.

Final Level: "The Vault"

Why It Sucked: To make a long story short, Spencer lost his real arm, and since bionic arms are all the rave, he needed one. But in order for the high-end accessory to meld with his body, it had to have a personal connection connection to him. Thus, the sinister-for-no-reason villain Joe embeds Spencer's wife into it. Spencer spends the entire game trying to find her. Spencer headbutts through a glass obstacle and falls into a hole. The end.

How We Would End It: There are no words for how bad this is. To improve it, we'd probably throw in a couple of masturbation jokes about him cheating on his wife with his other hand.

Final Level: "Federal Hall"

Why It Sucked: The ending of every Metal Gear Solid game is terrible when you really think about it, but Sons of Liberty stands out to us as the most nonsensical of the bunch. It's something about the President being your dad, he has tentacles and someone wants to blow something up. It's a total acid trip of an ending.

How We Would End It: Hideo Kojima needs someone to keep his insane video game visions in check, and nowhere is this more apparent than in MGS 2. That said, we have no idea how to fix this train wreck other than a complete rewrite.

Final Level: "Malachor V"

Why It Sucked: For one thing, we never did get to meet Revan (the mysterious protagonist from the first KotOR), which would have been awesome if it happened. Nothing is resolved, and Kreia (who for some unknown reason is apparently omniscient) attempts to wrap up every loose end from this 30-plus hour game with a brief conversation.

How We Would End It: It's a well known fact that KotOR II was rushed out the gate, and Obsidian should have had at least another few months to wrap its enormous story up in a more satisfactory way. Too many of those loose ends-including the fates of most of the characters-are left dangling.

Final Level: "Sin"

Why It Sucked: Some may call FF X the last great Final Fantasy, and they certainly wouldn't be far off. Yet the ending left so much to be desired that X became the first Final Fantasy to ever get a direct sequel. It actually made us give a damn about the romance between Tidus and Yuna, and then Tidus just disappears at the end. Or does he!? Ugh.

How We Would End It: Ambiguity is one thing, but we'd have liked more of a resolution than Yuna being sad and Tidus swimming away somewhere. It just needed some fleshing out. It probably would have been more poignant if Yuna actually had died during the final summoning.

Final Level: Fighting Gozer

Why It Sucked: Right after beating Gozer you'd get the message, "CONGLATURATION ! ! ! YOU HAVE COMPLETED A GREAT GAME. AND PROOVED THE JUSTICE OF OUR CULTURE. NOW GO AND REST OUR HEROES !"

This one's just hilarious. Before "Engrish" became a cross-cultural phenomenon, it was simply what happened when game developers couldn't afford decent writers and translators. In 1984, it really didn't matter.

How We Would End It: Honestly, we wouldn't change this one even if we could. It ranks right up there with "All your base are belong to us" from Zero Wing.

Final Level: "Priority: Earth 10"

Why It Sucked: The BioWare team rick-rolled devoted fans of the series by creating the illusion of choice and consequence. Even the ending rendered player choice irrelevant and the promised multiple endings are all functionally the same. The result was a lynch mob-like uproar from fans, that forced BioWare to offer an alternate ending via DLC.

How We Would End It: Why not incorporate all of the emotional and philosophical weight that players have been navigating through during the first two titles? How about making the choices we make truly result in actual wildly different endings? Create a multi-faceted, non-linear ending that creates true closure.

Final Level: "Departure"

Why It Sucked: Once you've defeated the tornado of darkness, an old-time diving suit that looks like a Big Daddy from BioShock shows up to tell you that you have to stay in a cabin while your evil doppelganger screws up your life in the real world. Even Stephen King could have written a more logical resolution than that.

How We Would End It: We'd explain why there's an Alan Wake lookalike named Mr. Scratch running around and let players be able to actually rescue Wake's poor wife. The way the game is now, we don't know what's going on. There's no resolution, no "thank you," nothing. Just a kick in the pants for playing.

Final Level: "Assault On Capital Prime"

Why It Sucked: You've managed to do the impossible: Infiltrate Capital Prime, harness the Authority satellite, reactivate the Arks, and ensure the loyalty of the allies in your burgeoning rebellion. Yet Rage's final mission is linear, cramped and repetitive. The abrupt ending hints at awesome things before ensuring you'll be back for the sequel.

How We Would End It: Cut out all the pointless fetch quests in the middle of the game and add half their length's worth of decent missions onto the ending. Gathering up the other Ark survivors and launching a full-on assault on the Authority would have been satisfying as hell (but then what would the sequel be about?).

Final Level: "Try To Stop Jack Of Blades"

Why It Sucked: Moral choices in games need to have consequences to actually be meaningful. At the end of Fable, you can either kill your sister and become "powerful," or ditch an awesome sword and get to keep your sister around. But either way, the game is over, and there's nothing else left to do. And why would your sister even tell you about the option where you kill her and become evil? What an Idiot.

How We Would End It: By giving players something to do with that badass sword and all that "power" (which manifests itself in the form of a pointless mask, by the way). How about making the arena re-playable, with different challenges and enemies? What kind of game has an arena that you can only challenge once?

Final Level: "Destroy the Destroyer"

Why It Sucked: We just spent dozens of hours shooting and looting across the world of Pandora in search of the legendary Vault, which is said to contain unimaginable treasures, and when we get there all we get is a monster. After we kill it, that's it. There's no treasure or resolution. What did we expect when the planet was called "Pandora?" A big ol' shut up, that's what.

How We Would End It: There should have been a bunch of awesome weapons behind that giant monster.

Final Level: "Redemption"

Why It Sucked: Take two parts Fight Club, one part American tragedy, and what do you get? A contrived attempt for Call of Duty: Black Ops to be more than it is: the same shooter we've been playing for a decade, but with annual releases. Mason assassinated JFK and got brainwashed by everybody and has an imaginary friend. It's B-movie crap dressed up in a full-metal jacket.

How We Would End It: Apparently, we'd be better off just leaving this one alone, since Guinness World Record voters recently decided that it's the best video game ending in history. Please kill us now.

Final Level: "Memory 7"

Why It Sucked: After "Memory 7" wrapped up, we wandered around Desmond's sterile crib for 20 minutes before we realized there was writing on the walls. But what does it mean? It's not like you'll ever know, because guess what, the game's over! Now buy the sequel.

How We Would End It: If you're going to leave us with a cliffhanger, at least explain what's going on. Explain that the Animus is screwing with Desmond's perception of reality, or that the abilities of his ancestors are starting to bleed into his DNA. Then let us kick some modern-day Templar ass.

Final Level: "The Final Battle"

Why It Sucked: Instead of ending with the story's logical conclusion, players were subjected to what felt like an extra three hours of falling, followed by an uncharacteristically, comic book-like boss fight. It then concluded with two equally inane ending sequences, succinctly trivializing the entire experience-as if the whole thing was a simple question of either "good" or "bad." At least they were brief.

How We Would End It: Everyone knows that the game should have ended with the death of Andrew Ryan. The great reveal should've been that Atlas was actually Fontaine all along, and you were just a slave, ignorantly doing his bidding. The objective should've been to Blow players' minds, wrap it up, be done. Now that's a real ending.

Final Level: "Dark Energy"

Why It Sucked: As if Half-Life 2's original ending wasn't bad enough (the G-Man pulls the ultimate deus ex machina, and the game just fades to black), Episode 2 climaxed with one of the series' best characters getting killed-in a cutscene, no less. The rest of the remaining cast were left crying on the ground. Even discounting the fact that that was five fucking years ago, it's a shitty way to end the story.

How We Would End It: How about a boss fight? Another half-hour of gameplay so that players could at least avenge Dr. Vance and feel some measure of closure before putting their crowbars down for half a decade?

Final Level: "The Great Journey"

Why It Sucked: Bungie's first mistake was forcing fans to play half the game as The Arbiter, an alien, enemy soldier who would have been nothing but target practice for the Master Chief in the first Halo. To top it off, the Chief's storyline ends on a cliffhanger at the end of the second-to-last level, and the finale is an Arbiter level. Seriously?

How We Would End It: With an extra mission after "The Great Journey" that resolved the Chief's arc instead of leaving him (and fans) hanging for three years.