Your most memorable game ending?

[+Mirumir Subscriber¹]

Prince of Persia (the original, 1989).

 

 

[Xahid]

Prince of persia (Sands of Time)

 

 

[dragontology]

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. Trust me, play it with a controller even though it's possible to play with a keyboard on PC. A controller with rumble/vibration. Major endgame spoiler for those who have played it:

 

Spoiler

It's not the fact that the older brother dies. That part might wreck you. It's when you go back and the younger brother won't cross the creek alone, but pulling the older brother's trigger will make him do it anyway. Man, I get chills just thinking about that scene. What an amazing game.

 

Someone already mentioned it, but Secret of Mana. Back then, beating a game generally meant beating a big bad guy and saving a princess. In Secret of Mana, you do beat a big bad dragon, I think it is, and you do sort of save a princess, though she helps you throughout the game, and is at least your equal in combat. Fun fact: Did you know they had names? They do. Apparently it's in the manual if anyone cared to read it (I didn't). The boy is Randi, the girl is Primm, and the little sprite girl is Popoi. (Yes, girl... it's weird, the game mostly calls her an 'it' most of the time, and 'he' once or twice... but come on! Green dress and pigtails. Yeah, that's a girl. Also, there's a character in the sequel who uses the same sprite but a different color that is also female, so I chalk it up to poor translation. Not that her gender really matters, it's just a weird detail that seems to have been messed up for the American version of the game.) Endgame spoiler:

 

Spoiler

It's the fact that, although the little sprite child is also your equal in combat, if not superior (she gets the offensive magic), it's the fact that, although the princess has a boyfriend early on, the game sort of innocently sets you up as this pseudo-couple. And then pretty much right away you get a child, and though she fights as well as either of you, she's still a little punk you can't help seeing as like a younger sibling, at least. So at the end when she sacrifices herself to save the other two characters... damn. And then if you stick around for the credits, there's a scene where Randi and Primm are sitting on a bench or a log or something looking up at the stars, and she phases in on a tree branch looking down on them. I was not ready for those feels at 14 or 15 or however old I was at the time.

 

Oh, I almost forgot. Final Fantasy VII (7). The only one I finished, though I got XV (15) for Christmas, and I hope to finish that eventually. Huge setup, huge payoff. Final Fantasy 7, for the two people who didn't play it, was about a terrorist/freedom fighter group who enlist a former special agent of the city-government's special forces to blow up a nuclear reactor. The city is harvesting a green spectral substance known as Mako, which powers everything in the city. However, the group tells this new mercenary (Cloud) that Mako is actually the souls of the dead. Anyone who's ever died, their life force returns to the Mako stream, from which new life is drawn. He doesn't care, he's in it for the money. Then he meets a girl who is wanted by the government, and they capture her. This is all very early in the game. You meet with her mother, and she tells you this heartbreaking tale of how her husband went to war when she was very young, and every day she would wait by the train for him. And every day, he wouldn't come home. Until one day there was a baby in a basket there. A little girl. The famous character Aerith (or Aeris in the US). So she raised the child as her own, and her husband never came home. I think he died in the war and they notified her, but I can't remember. (And I think we all know what happens to Aerith at the end of the first disc... but that's not really relevant.) Anyway, the main villain, Sephiroth, plans to use this ancient magic called Meteor to destroy the planet, with the theory that the planet will use the Mako to defend itself, and that the convergence of all that life energy will make a person such as himself, enhanced with the Mako energy to be a super soldier (and some other spoiler things), into something like a god. After defeating him, you get treated to this nearly ten minute video where...

 

Spoiler

Meteor arrives, pretty much as expected, after a harrowing escape from the cave where the Sephiroth fight was staged. We see the airship turn into a jet, because why the hell not, right? And then rather than crashing into the planet, it just kind of hovers there about 50' up (call it 16m for the rest of the world) and causes earthquakes and tornadoes and such, but you can safely view it from the next town over like it's nothing. Oh, there's this hail mary magic everyone's been fighting over called Holy that is supposed to repel Meteor. And it gets deployed. And lo and behold, it's too late. In fact, it makes matters worse. Then, what Sephiroth said would happen, happens. While everyone's saying their prayers and counting down the minutes until the world is destroyed and everyone dies (it's really starting to look like a Bad Ending), the Lifestream starts sprouting up from the ground, and converging on the red (Meteor) and blue (Holy) energies. And it looks like it's going to make everything even worse, when it fades to white, and Aerith (who, by the way, got killed earlier on), looks up at the camera and smiles. After the credits, 400 years have passed, and we see a pack of dogs racing through a canyon. They gallop up a pile of rocks and look out to the city where Meteor was going to strike, and everything is covered in vegetation. Until the movie Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children came out (which you must watch if you played the game), we had no idea if anyone actually survived. It sure looked like a TPK (D&D term; Total Party Kill) to me.

 

Now I'm not sure what anyone else took away from that ending. But what it said to me is that peace won't be achieved by good and evil's constant fighting one another. It will be achieved by people coming together, from various different backgrounds, and deciding to put the things that matter ahead of petty wars. I dunno. John Lennon said it better in Imagine. I think that's what they were going for.

 

[darkgtx]

 

[REM2000]

Zelda a Link to the Past on the SNES

 

I was hacking away at the final boss Ganon managed to finally kill him, fully expected to go into another world or somewhere new when all of a sudden the triforce comes together fades out to black and then proceeds to wrap up the story completely, showing all of the people youve helped along the way. Really blew me away with the music and the visuals. Don't think ill ever forget that feeling and memory of that. 

 

Super Mario on the SNES weren't a bad ending either. 

Recent'ish games would be Fallout3, Bioshock and most of the telltale games like batman etc.. 

 

Ive completed a lot of games however by the end the story is usually worn so thin that the ending is pretty forgettable. 

[Brys]

Amongst "recent" games I can think of the first few assassin's creed - well actually mostly assassin's creed 2 although the 1 was cool too - for the shock value I guess. That said there are games that got me excited at the end but I somehow can't remember them right now.

 

On another kind of excitement I remember the "ending" of metal gear solid 3, well more the final boss than the ending, mostly because it was so looooong. I think at least 5 times I've been thinking "that's it I beat the final boss  - WHAT HE'S STILL NOT DEAD ??? WHY... WONT... YOU... DIE" (imagine me shouting that while mashing randomly at the gamepad)

 

 

EDIT : oh sh*t just thought about Monkey Island 2 !!!!!

[PGHammer]

DC Universe Online - Brainiac Sub-construct (8-player raid)

 

The end is rather anti-climactic - because you know you will face him again; as opposed to taking his disassembling like a villain, he retreats into a *bottle* of his own making - literally. (And you don't get to take it back to your own base, either.  Darn.  Rats. Shux and other comments.)

 

Here;s a video of it from it from YT -

 

[margrave]

I'll never forget when I learned that Samus Aran was a girl the whole time.

[DConnell Member]

Duke Nukem 3D - after promising to rip off the alien leader's head and **** down its neck, at the conclusion Duke proceeds to do precisely that. While reading the newspaper.

[jnelsoninjax]

Far Cry 5 has a WTF ending!

[Emn1ty]

Mass Effect 3 (pre-patch).

[+virtorio MVC]

Deadly Premonition