The 50 Worst Video Game Endings

Final Level: Kiln of the First Flame
Why It Sucked: Not that it matters, because we adore every other facet of this game more than we can describe with words (even though that's sort of our job), but both endings are basically just filler that you have to go through before you can start your next new game plus.
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, sadly, neither does.

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 bitch slapped the first Kane and Lynch straight to the bargain bin. If you actually make it to the end of this train wreck (which is made easier by its roughly 5 hour length), the ending, unsurprisingly, feels as rushed and awful as the rest of the game.
How We Would End It: By throwing it in the garbage.

Final Level: The Ultimate Power
Why It Sucked: So Nick gains the ultimate power, immediately loses it, regains his memories, and what looks like it's shaping up to be an awesome fight versus several attack choppers instead fades to a dreaded "TO BE CONTINUED" screen. There's no resolution here at all, and the fates of all characters involved are left up in the air.
How We Would End It: We would have loved an escape mission where you had to bring down all those helicopters.

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—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 missable events doesn't help.
How We Would End It: Getting any ending besides the best one causes you to miss out on a ton of content, which is a bizarre choice, to say the least.

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 the Geek Squad down there.
How We Would End It: Even though you rescue Kate, you're both still on the run. This victory like there was still plenty left to do, with little accomplished. Not an ideal resolution.

Final Level: The Moon
Why It Sucked: This sucker—by which we mean great game—had a decent resolution—by which we mean shit was properly wrapped up—until the final cutscene. They just couldn't resist setting up the sequel, could they? When has anyone ever not bought a sequel to a good game because it wasn't properly teased? It's nonsense, and we're sick of it, and we were sick of it in 2003.
How We Would End It: Someone somewhere had damn well better still be working on that sequel.

Final Level: Apollo Sanctum
Why It Sucked: "The End...?" It's definitely an issue when the developers don't even know if there'll be a sequel, but they leave it on a cliffhanger anyway.
How We Would End It: We would have wrapped this shit up now. It's been how many years since their last cliffhangers? Douches.

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 whole thing, which is a bit of a cliche. But then it turns out he's actually not dreaming it. Then Polka kills herself, which is great, but she gets to come back to life because she's in love, which is great for her, but not for the narrative.
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. Spoilers!

Final Level: Orphan's Cradle
Why It Sucked: What a mess. FF XIII was such a slog that we didn't give one hoot about the ending by the time we finally got there. 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: We don't really feel the need to come up with this part, since Square Enix already did. They named it Final Fantasy XIII-2, and it's got some pretty convenient time travel loopholes.

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: Well, if they did it for the lulz, we can't fault them.

Final Level: La Vita Nuova
Why It Sucked: Dante gives away his awesome sword, Yamato, Nero and Kyrie don't even get to kiss, and the whole thing ends with a line so cheesy it's not even awesome: "Come on, babes! Let's rock!" We don't really mind that the Devil May Cry plot has become almost as complicated as a Metal Gear Solid game, but this one fell pretty flat.
How We Would End It: We wouldn't have played a Disturbed song at the end. Or at all, for that matter.

Final Level: Reckoning
Why It Sucked: Crysis's ending is so clearly unfinished it actually hurts. Anyone who didn't watch that final cutscene and assume that there was at least one more mission must have read the strategy guide beforehand. It didn't help that the sequel had jack shit to do with this plot.
How We Would End It: Don't end on a cliffhanger if you're not going to follow through—the resolution could have easily stood without our heroes heading right back into the fray, and thus leaving us hanging.

Final Level: Chronoplast
Why It Sucked: The worst kind of cop-out is when the ending leads straight into the beginning of the next game, with zero resolution and satisfaction. That's exactly what happens in Soul Reaver: Kain. The final boss, even says, "This is not where or how it ends."
How We Would End It: Obviously, we would have liked to see more of a resolution and less of a "See you in the sequel!" mentality.

Final Level: Killing the Disease
Why It Sucked: First you have to kill all your friends, who try to steal your diamonds so they can escape. The diamonds, by the way, that you were going to use to bribe the border guards so that everyone could escape. Then you're presented with a choice of either killing yourself now, or killing yourself later. And you never do find out what happened to The Jackal.
How We Would End It: They really wanted the protagonist to die! Because there's totally no cure for malaria, right? We would have arranged the ending a little differently, so that maybe you could actually escape.

Final Level: The Thief
Why It Sucked: Moral choices in games can definitely be hit or miss, and the choice at the end of Fable 2 has miss written all over it. You're supposed to choose between a bunch of money, resurrecting your family and beloved dog, or resurrecting the other, like, millions of people who've been killed along the way.
How We Would End It: This choice is completely ridiculous. Why the hell would one option resurrect everyone except your loved ones? Cosmic trolling?

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 this series, practically nothing happens inthe 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. So it's bad. But it had good intentions. But it should be destroyed anyway.
How We Would End It: Is that Jeff Goldblum? Nope, just Gollum. Maybe it would have been better with Jeff Goldblum.

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: That final scene was heavy, but it really got to us—it was good. Then Stahl escapes? Really? It's not like there's going to be a Killzone 4. Oh, please say there won't be 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 anticlimactic for them as it is for us—which is to say it's so bad, they decide to build boats and cross the ocean so they can find their real destinies.
How We Would End It: Blatantly setting yourselves up for a sequel is one thing, but it sucks when it comes at the expense of an actual resolution. This made it feel like the entire game was relatively pointless. Good thing we loved Patapon 2 and 3 so much.

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 "we could have wrapped this up, but no one buys shit unless it's a trilogy so we might as well add a pointless plot twist to pad out the next game" 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 then leaving on a cliffhanger (albeit, a pretty good one). Actually, 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: Corona Mountain
Why It Sucked: Sunshine tried harder than any other Mario game (besides Legend of the Seven Stars) to have a story, and that was its first mistake. For the second, well, all you have to do is hear Bowser and his little brat Bowser Jr. open their maws one time, and you'll understand why Zelda games still don't have voice acting.
How We Would End It: We would have never shoehorned a dumb story into a Mario game to begin with.

Final Level: Mission 6
Why It Sucked: So 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, why would we suddenly decide that the hostile planet E.D.N. III "welcomes you like the warm bed of a lover"?
How We Would End It: Imagine if Mario had walked up to Bowser at the end of Super Mario 64 and slapped a GPS tracker on him so someone else could blow him up later. Than Wario shows up in a jet and they fly away into the sunset. Now pick anything else and it's a better ending.

Final Level: Outer Haven Missile Hangar
Why It Sucked: We don't mind a complex story, but MGS 4 is honestly ridiculous. It feels like Kojima just wanted to play a joke on everyone who loved Metal Gear Solid 3. And 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, didn't it?
How We Would End It: We'd be hard-pressed to even explain what was going on during this train wreck, much less figure out how to fix it.

Final Level: Stage 7
Why It Sucked: Ghosts 'N Goblins was a notoriously difficult sidescroller 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 fucking mean.

Final Level: The Dark Isle
Why It Sucked: So you've finally solved the final puzzles and defeated Gar-Hob, the evil painter and dark lord or something. Your reward? Cut to the future, when mankind has finally touched down on Jupiter's moon, Europa—and Dave Chappelle is president. Seriously, if you're going to make the president black, at least do what even The Fifth Element 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: Crackdown wasn't the most story-heavy game, to be fair, 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 here and kill these things, then kill that person over there. 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 ass. Grand Theft Auto's 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: So 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. Too many games on this list suffer simply from being rushed to market before they were completed.

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 shit-covered cherry on top of the shit 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 jump the Batshark. 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: If we wanted to listen to a Japanese chick read a poem, we would have gone to a Yoko Ono concert. Talk about anti-climactic. If the story goes on, then fucking continue the story!
How We Would End It: The entire last disc of the game is just walking around looking at your feet. We would have ended it at the third disc.

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, I 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: SAVE THE BUNNIES!

Final Level: Countdown
Why It Sucked: Are you getting the sense yet that we don't appreciate cliffhangers? "We've got to see this through, this ain't over by a long shot" is not an ending.
How We Would End It: It literally says "to be continued"! It needed at least one more mission to "nail Gabriel's backer."

Final Level: The Vault
Why It Sucked: Basically, Spencer lost his real arm, and bionic arms are awesome, so he needed one of those. But in order for the bionic crap to meld with his body, it had to have some connection with him. So the sinister-for-no-reason Joe puts Spencer's wife into it. Then Spencer spends an entire game trying to find her. "I'M AT UR SIDE LULZ." Spencer headbutts through some glass and falls into a hole, and that's it.
How We Would End It: There are no words for how bad this is. To improve it, we'd probably throw in a couple jokes about how he really could've been with Emily all along. Get it? Masturbation.

Final Level: Federal Hall
Why It Sucked: The ending of every Metal Gear Solid game is pretty 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 and he has tentacles and someone wants to blow something up.
How We Would End It: Hideo Kojima is not a genius. He needs someone to keep his insane bullshit in check, and nowhere is this more apparent than in MGS 2. That said, we have no idea how to fix this train wreck.

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. Practically nothing is resolved, and Kreia (who for some unknown reason is apparently omniscient) attempts to wrap up every loose end from this 30+ 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: "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.

Final Level: Departure
Why It Sucked: Once you've defeated the tornado of darkness (we can't believe nobody made a "WE'RE NOT IN KANSAS ANYMORE!" joke), a diving suit from Bioshock shows up to tell you that you have to stay in this cabin while your evil doppelganger fucks up your life in the real world. Even Stephen King could have written a more logical resolution than that.
How We Would End It: How about explaining why there's an Alan Wake lookalike named Mr. Scratch running around? Or letting us actually rescue Wake's poor wife? Or telling us why any of this is even happening? No resolution, no thank you.

Final Level: Assault on Capital Prime
Why It Sucked: You've managed to do what no one else could—infiltrated Capital Prime, harnessed the Authority satellite and reactivated the Arks, ensuring you'll have allies in your burgeoning rebellion. Yet Rage's final mission is linear, cramped and repetitive, and 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 fuck-all left to do, so it doesn't matter at all which you choose. Besides, why would your sister even tell you about the option where you kill her and become evil? 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 replayable, 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: So let me get this straight: we just spent dozens of hours shooting and looting across Pandora in search of the legendary Vault, said to contain unimaginable treasures, and when we get there, a giant fucking monster pops out? And then we kill it, and that's it? There's no treasure, no reward, and no resolution. What did we expect when the planet was called "Pandora"? Shut up, that's what.
How We Would End It: Well, there could have been some awesome weapons behind the 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 to be more than it is: the same shooter we've been playing for a decade, now with annual releases. So 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: Talk about a botched reveal. 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! Come back for the sequel!
How We Would End It: At least if you're going to leave us on a cliffhanger, explain what the shit is 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 an extra three hours of falling action, followed by an uncharacteristically comic-booky 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 and the great reveal that Atlas was actually Fontaine all along, and you were just a slave, ignorantly doing his bidding. Blow players' minds, wrap it up, you're done. That's an 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? No? Well screw you too, Valve.

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 fucking years.