Worst Video Game Endings Ever

After spending an insulting amount of hours inching towards a resolution for Aiden Pearce's story of revenge on the people who killed his niece, you'd think the payoff would be colossal. The implosion of Chicago? The downfall of the city's entire government? After all, the conspiratorial twist the game keeps hinting at seems humongous.

Turns out it was all red herrings and bad writing. You take out the game's main villain by hacking his pacemaker and then staring at him through a window—yeah, it's as stupid as it sounds. You then go after an entirely different group of bad guys. You get rid of the first one in an uneventful lighthouse showdown, and the next inside a garage at the story's epilogue. It's literally yawn-inducing. And the whole time you're slogging through this drab finale—not to mention sitting through all of the game's credits—you're constantly reminded that none of it even matters, because Pearce doesn't see an inch of character development throughout the entire dozen-plus hour journey.

Imagine you're watching Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back. But instead of getting the full movie, you're only allowed to view the film up until the end of the battle of Hoth, also known as the end of act one. Well, that's what you get with Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. The final showdown is essentially the end of the first act's narrative, leaving the door wide open for the real conflict to begin. Unfortunately, that's also where Square Enix turns off the valve and rolls the credits. In that sense, it's one of video gaming's worst endings–because it isn't one. Mankind Divided has no resolution, only a heavy-handed cliffhanger designed to force players to buy the next installment if they want closure with the narrative. If you didn't know better, you might see it as an attempt to artificially manufacture a trilogy.

Coincidentally, for a series all about conspiracy theories, it seems there's actually a plausible one regarding the aforementioned hypothesis: Square Enix did cut the game in half, creating a deliberately broken narrative. If this rumor is true, the game's story would've been twice as long and had a real ending; fittingly, Square Enix's greedy decision to try to double-dip ended up costing them, as few bought Mankind Divided due to its mixed reception (a major point of contention being its unfinished narrative) which led to the indefinite pause of the would-be finale's development.

Life Is Strange has one of the most egregiously bad endings in gaming history—in fact, there's two of them. No matter which one you pick, you lose.

None of the decisions you make actually matter at the end of this Square Enix title. At most, you'll get to make one pivotal decision towards the game's climax and that's it. Life Is Strange gives you two options: save your best friend in exchange for the life of an entire town with thousands of people, or save the town and retroactively negate literally every event of the game leading up to that point. Basically, it boils down to "do you want to actually have an impact on the narrative and screw over a bunch of people for an awful hipster girl, or do you want to do the right and smart thing in exchange for feeling like you didn't even matter to the story?" It's an ugly setup, and one we have to believe the writers chose to go with out of convenience. A real, meaningful ending would've required a level of effort we can only assume they just didn't have at that point.

This game is a colossal pain when it comes to 100-percenting its content. You've got to find every single secret stage exit and hidden path in the hub worlds, complete every single level, find and collect each level's three big star coins, and then triumph over that godforsaken bonus world. You'd imagine Nintendo has a pretty big bonus in store for those willing to slog through this game's nightmarish completist's challenge.

Turns out, there's nothing. No true ending to the game, no cute bonus cutscene, no secret ability or special power-up you get after all that toiling; there's just a "thanks for playing" message that leaves you feeling like a complete idiot for having spent all that time working toward a meaningless goal.

Middle-Earth: Shadow of War completely goofed up its ending, and not because it was bad — far from it. The ending itself was great; the issue was that it was locked behind a penultimate fake-out "ending" and tons of hours of grinding.

The first ending, achieved by naturally progressing through the game's story, featured a disappointing quick-time-event-loaded showdown with Sauron. Had that been the game's true finale, this would be an even more egregious entry on the list. However, the fact that the game's true, better ending was locked off behind hours of busywork makes matters almost as bad. Just like you'd been doing all game, you had to conquer endless generic fortresses and claim dominion over the orcs of Mordor, only this time, there was no plot to spice things up. It was just constant grinding until you finally had enough war assets to unlock the final cutscene.

It's a neat Easter egg cutscene that really subverts the average video game narrative (spoiler: it's a sad ending), but that alone doesn't warrant sacrificing so much of one's time to unlock it when it can just as easily be viewed on YouTube. Plus, it's not even like Shadow of War's grindy finale incentivized the game's microtransactions — it literally existed just so that every player would have to sink a lot of time into the game, to the point where playing became a chore.

While this isn't an ending so awful that it retroactively ruins the game, it definitely feels like the sort of thing Rocksteady came up with as a result of having ran out of better ideas. "Let's turn the Joker into a giant, steroid-infused jock monster" was, and still is, not a good twist to throw at Batman fans.

The character of the Joker is all about mind games and using trickery to put heroes in unwinnable situations. However, Joker's endgame move in Arkham Asylum was to transform himself into the one thing Batman is guaranteed to beat: a big, dumb goon. It makes no sense, considering Joker had all the advantages: he had Commissioner Gordon as a hostage, a successful plan to steal the entirety of Gotham's media coverage for himself, control over the Arkham Asylum itself, you name it — yet he threw away all of that victory ammo in favor of 'roiding up and losing to Batman in an old-fashioned punch out. That doesn't seem like something the greatest, smartest villain in Batman's rogues' gallery would do, wouldn't you agree? While Arkham City redeemed Joker, Asylum really dropped the ball with its big finale.

Darksiders 2's ending is a bit of a bummer for a couple of reasons: firstly, it just happens. There's no real buildup or natural evolution to the plot that screams "final scenario approaching." The Crowfather just tells you it's time to fight Absolom, and you go and beat the snot out of him. Then a cutscene rolls, and BAM: the adventure's over. This wouldn't be so much of an issue if it weren't for the fact that the boss fight itself is a joke and the cutscene that plays after isn't much better.

While the fight is interesting from a gameplay perspective, it's far too easy for a final boss — he goes down with less resistance than some of the basic mini-boss enemies from earlier in the game, which saps the feeling of accomplishment from beating him. After this, Death sacrifices himself to restore humanity and undo his brother War's crime. But then, right after, it's revealed that War already freed himself from prison and summoned the other horsemen to his aid, which instantly returns Death to life (ironic, we know).

Basically, the ending reduced the whole game to being a fun filler journey in Vigil Games' theoretical quadrilogy. That would've been fine, honestly, if not for THQ dying and taking Vigil down with them — though we are finally getting a Darksiders 3, so maybe real resolution is still on the way.

In a game where the villains make genocidal remarks and threaten to send Sonic home in a body bag, the ending is a brief two-minute cutscene that sees the hero literally pressing a button and making everyone happy again. Seriously.

It's like the ending of a bad Saturday morning cartoon, and undermines a narrative stuffed with interesting twists and shocks. You beat the final boss and then a cutscene takes over, wherein Sonic immediately sees the magic button sitting right out in the open, the one that'll make everyone happy again by restoring color and vibrancy to the world. Then Tails swoops in, says some stuff about the power of friendship, and bam! Everything is fixed. There was no meaning to the story, no payoff to be found. And it's all because of that awful, overly short, childish, and underwhelming ending.

This ending reeks of being the byproduct of a game that was rushed to release. Everything about it is sloppy and unfinished: the finale's cutscenes are lazily animated and overly brief (some scenes even have errors, such as this one where Shadow and Rouge smile as the sun itself is about to burn them to death), the "climactic" levels feel like they belong in the middle of the game due to their easiness, and the story's resolution wraps up in such a way that you can tell the writers either didn't care or didn't have the time to. 

There were two major questions lingering over the plot, up until the finale: how will Sonic and Co. stop Infinite and Eggman, and how will Classic Sonic get home. Neither question receives a real answer. The two villains simply disappear after you beat them in some quick fights, leaving the audience with no clue if they're dead, bruised and beaten, or if they somehow escaped. Then, Classic Sonic simply fades back into his own timeline, something which is never explained beyond "the plot requires him to go home." Neither of these beats make a lick of sense, and when coupled with the underwhelming execution of the cutscenes and zero-stakes nature of the gameplay, Sonic Forces' shoddy ending acts as proof that we were not recipients of the epic game we were promised.

Far Cry 5 has three endings, two of which are pretty lame and a third that only takes 10 minutes to unlock. This means you either slog through a dozen-plus hours of gameplay to reach a pair of unsatisfying conclusions or wrap your AAA gaming experience inside the time it takes to go to the bathroom.

The two endings that come at the end of the full game both consist of you, the player, losing. In the "good" ending where you take down the bad guy, he actually ends up being right about the impending apocalypse and ultimately takes you down.

In the "bad" ending, you realize you can't beat the bad guy on his home turf, so you and your compatriots voluntarily leave town ... only for a last-second "Thriller" twist where it's revealed you've been infected with the bad guy's hypnotic voodoo magic.

In the short ending, you also voluntarily leave ... but, unlike in the long version, you don't end up infected. So, basically, we're left to assume that your character leaves town and calls in the military or some other more qualified organization to take down the game's domestic terrorist antagonist. It's easily the best ending, as well as the most logical. This explains why it comes so soon, but still, it kind of sours the rest of Far Cry 5, knowing that by actually playing the game you're actively working towards a worse outcome.

It's a rare day when a game comes along that feels like it's missing multiple endings. Such is the case with Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite, a game that should have dozens of conclusions — but, in actuality, only has one.

Honestly, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that a sequel with a downgraded roster and minimal single-player and multiplayer content would also see fit to cut out any story from its arcade mode. Still, that narrative content is a staple of arcade modes in fighting games.

While Capcom's defense for this absence of content would likely be, "We do have a regular story mode in MvC:I! It has a [massive cliffhanger] ending!", that's a shallow argument no matter how you angle it. Not only is the ending of the main story mode a sequel-baiting fake-out (since a sequel isn't going to happen), but most other fighting games have dedicated character stories and individual arcade mode endings (Street Fighter 4, Injustice 2, Mortal Kombat X, etc.). We wanted solo endings for Iron Man, Ultron, Mega Man X, Chris Redfield, and the rest of the crew; they deserved their own bookends and story resolutions. These characters are so rich and loaded with mythos that they all deserved better than a singular, bland, unresolved ensemble ending.

The Stanley Parable is a special game that isn't content to just have one ending; it's got well over a dozen of them, all varying degrees of preposterous. While some are fun and others are hilarious, there are a few that are downright abysmal. Knowing the indie developer Galactic Cafe, there's not a chance the trash endings weren't entirely deliberate efforts. Still, we can't help but laugh — and cry — at how rough some of The Stanley Parable's finales are.

Take the "coward" ending, for example. You literally close a single door at the very start of the game and then the experience is over. While the narrator's comments are funny, it's an ending that barely requires a human player. Then there's the "heaven" ending. You end up in a place where you endlessly press colorful buttons. There's no closure, no purpose, nothing. You just press buttons 'til you want to turn off the game. And of course, we can't forget the "divine art" ending. You press two buttons while a baby cries and a dog barks for four hours. FOUR HOURS. Then you receive a weird, one-minute powerpoint featuring a black brick and some inspirational text.

These endings are awful, but befitting of the ineffably quirky, self-aware experience that is The Stanley Parable. Go play it right away, if only so you can say you got the "broom closet" ending.