Though it typically only accounts for a small portion of a video game, nailing the ending is absolutely paramount.
Get it right and it places a cherry on top of a fantastic gaming experience, but screw it up and it can colour a player’s entire time with the game in a new, unfavourable light.
It’s clearly enormously challenging to do narrative justice to a medium that invites player choice and often involves an epic, sprawling scope encompassing dozens of hours of play-time, and so it’s little surprise how many games miss the mark.
But even more frustrating than an out-and-out bad ending is one which very nearly arrives at the conclusion fans wanted to see, but takes a sharp left-turn towards something else entirely.
Whether a result of budgetary or scheduling constraints, creative bankruptcy, or sheer laziness, these 10 games all had the perfect ending within their sights, only to ditch it for a more cynical, corny, or straight-up disappointing one.
These endings didn’t necessarily ruin the game outright, but each nevertheless left fans exasperated at how close they got to greatness…
