One of the great headaches of game reviewing is the challenge of finishing an entire game in time to write your review, especially when you’re on deadline, and the game is, say, Grand Theft Auto IV. With that game shipping to many critics only days before their eagerly-awaited reviews had to run, a lot of us actually had a chance to admit we hadn’t played it all the way to the end before filing. But the rest of the time, there’s a presumption that we actually will make it to the end. And if we didn’t, that we’ll be very, very quiet about it.
I don’t want to get into the lengthy backs and forths on this issue here. Instead, I just thought it would be fun to take a survey of the games I played this year – most of which I reviewed, for one venue or another – and try to determine if the ending actually mattered. Did my overall impression of each game change significantly once I got to the end? And why?
I tried to write this with minimal spoilers, but if you’re concerned, you might want to skim.
Here are the results:
THE ENDING MATTERED
Far Cry 2 – I was impressed that the game ultimately addressed the protagonist’s atrocities.
Fable II – Almost every major event and choice in the game feeds into the final scene of the game. How can you assess it – or appreciate it – without seeing the end?
Braid – Nothing stirred as much discussion as the epilogue, or had as much impact as the final sequence of platforming.
Rise of the Argonauts – … because I couldn’t believe that in an ostensible Greek tragedy, the ending was so cut-and-dried.
THE ENDING DIDN’T REALLY MATTER
Fracture – The story was inconsequential, and the bad boss fight was no worse than what came before it.
Dark Sector – Again, I was asleep long before the ending.
Condemned 2 – The conclusion was disappointing and inconclusive, but so was the rest of it.
Gears of War 2 – The last act was no better, or worse, or more eventful than any other part of the game. Even the penultimate act, and the resolution of Dom’s search for his wife, didn’t really change my overall impression of the game. Though I guess the lack of a bruising final boss fight, and the fact that the story gets more muddled instead of more interesting, might turn some folks off.
Noitu Love 2 – The final twist in the story is neat, but also feels tossed off.
Fallout 3 – If anything, I cut the final scene some slack in spite of a mindbogglingly bad bug that made the final sequence nonsensical (specifically: there’s a life-or-death decision – but the sidekick standing right next to me rendered the whole problem moot. Nice way to screw up the end of a brilliant game, guys)
So, there’s a limited sample. So far it suggests that the ending only matters if it makes a great game even better – otherwise, it’s either too little too late, or it’s worth overlooking. But this needs further research.
How about y’all? Which games really changed for you after you got to see the end?
I thought Fable 2 was a marvelous game but the ending didn’t hit home the way I expected it to. The “wish granting” was a bit of a cop out; it felt more of like a device to get you to play more of the game post-credit roll than a real meaningful choice. And if you started playing Fable with the intent on role-playing a character with a specific moral leaning, the choice of wish is almost automatic.
I was more impressed with the issues of self-sacrifice in the final quests leading up to the climax. It challenged the traditional notions of RPG high-level elitist vanity, even though the actual consequences were quite trivial. In my case I already had all the combat abilities I needed and looked like a corrupt, corpulent bastard anyway.
And yes, the Fallout 3 ending was very unsatisfying.
Far Cry 2, definitely; the major plot beats in that game were all great, but the fact that the ending was not just a two-minute cutscene, but an hour-long, carefully stage-managed climax that took in a lot of the map, most of the characters, and tied up every loose end (not least of which was the transformation and transgressions of my character, and the final bargain with the Jackal) was really, really impressive. I was particularly surprised by the way they hid the final area from me in plain sight, ready to be used for the final sequence.
I was frustrated by how much I wanted the ending of Mirror’s Edge to matter; in the end, it was a franchise-friendly ending, but I wasn’t convinced it was a decent pay-off. Still, given where the story went (downhill), it seemed a decent stab. The final, climactic in-engine cutscene is stunningly good, though, and just made me want all the game’s cutscenes to be produced as effectively.
@Tom “The final, climactic in-engine cutscene is stunningly good, though, and just made me want all the game’s cutscenes to be produced as effectively.”
That’s exactly what I was going to mention. From a narrative standpoint, I didn’t particularly care about the ending of Mirror’s Edge. But as a climactic set piece it was absolutely brilliant. If all action games ended even half as well, I’d be quite content.
I actually somewhat liked the ending of Fallout 3 as far as the plot goes, but I was tremendously disappointed by the lack of epilogue. In Fallout 1 & 2, there was that exposition discussing the fate of all the places you interacted with. I really missed that in Fallout 3.
I like this idea a LOT. However I tend to disagree with your assessment of the Fallout 3 ending – it was ATROCIOUSLY bad and was well and truly enough to put me off the game entirely.
So I don’t think that it ‘didn’t matter’, on the contrary, it mattered a great deal and for all the wrong reasons.
Like Ben, I was actually put off by the ending of Fallout 3 and haven’t picked up the game in at least a month (not really the game’s fault so much as tons to play).
Otherwise, no recent game ending has really affected me much. Mirror’s Edge’s story was pretty inconsequential so the ending was pretty much on par. Valkyria Chronicles ended quite well and I wished it didn’t have to end, but it didn’t change my perception of anything in the game.
Oh, here’s one. The end of Professor Layton actually made people giving you puzzles make (some) sense. And for that matter The World Ends With You. Wow, two of my favorite endings (and stories) were from the beginning quarter of the year and were on the DS!?!?! That’s crazy.
Noitu Love 2 – The final twist in the story is neat, but also feels tossed off.
Something here seems wrong…
Not one of this year’s games, but the ending of Overlord upgraded a game that I’d about to give a C+ into something more like a B+ or A-. Great conclusion to an otherwise inoffensive game.
Conversely, as much as I loved the gameplay in Mirror’s Edge – and I seem to be alone in that – the plot, we can all agree, was torrid. The laughably unsatisfying end scenes of that game were like a final punch in the kidneys, to make sure I’d go away remembering how much I’d hated it every time someone opened their mouth.
Both games had Rhianna Pratchett as scriptwriter, so I don’t know what the hell was going on there.
@GregT
I agree with you on Mirror’s Edge. I, too, loved the gameplay, the greatest virtue of which was how different it felt from every other game I’d been recently playing. As for the plot, it was, at best, of basic-cable-premiere-movie-of-the-week quality, but I didn’t find it offensively bad. The dialogue never made me cringe, at least, which is the number one occupational hazard of playing a lot of narrative-based games these days. I also kinda liked the cartoons. If you’re going to do a cutscene at this point, you might as well play around with it a little. The one thing that drove me crazy was that after wall-running and sliding and slow-mo-ing dudes to snatch away their assault rifles, the only thing it gave you to do in the terminal scene was jump off a roof and toward a helicopter, which you’d already done (in the first act, no less!)? For a game with level design as sneakily experimental as Mirror’s Edge’s, that seemed like a catastrophic failure of imagination.
Clinton, I agree about the self-sacrifice in Fable II – those choices were really engaging.
I still haven’t gotten around to finishing Mirror’s Edge. So far (I’m at chapter 6), the story has only worked for me in the first chapter. The whole game is either about sneaking in a place, or running away, and in Chapter 1, the scene with the sister and the sudden arrival of the cops did a great job of jolting you from one mode to the other. Other than that, it’s just been a lot of dimestore spy stuff.
Agreed too that while Overlord’s dialogue never got me worked up, they did a good job of setting up the story and the seven heroes/villains. Funny how amnesia stories, which are bottom-of-the-barrel in any other medium, always work so well in games.
Paul – I agree especially on Professor Layton – I was surprised that they even bothered to explain all the contrived puzzle-making villagers, and while the finale was pretty bizarre, it worked. Can’t wait ’til the sequel.
Ah, but, Chris–it’s really *fun* and often thrilling dimestore spy stuff. I really liked running away. I looked forward to running away. I thought about how to run away more effectively. The story was meh, yeah, but, as you know, I am all over the map about how I feel about narrative in games, and while playing Mirror’s Edge I kept thinking that maybe the less there is the better. (Then I played something else that completely reversed that opinion.) I liked the relationship between Faith and what’s-his-name, the plot-point-providing guy. Nice to see a wholly sexless relationship between a hot chick and the closest thing the game has to a leading man.
Did anyone else really regret taking the paths they did during the weird stormtrooper-in-training sequence in Fable 2? I didn’t do anything untoward at all, and I’m kind of curious what happens if you do. Weirdly, that was the one point in the game where my conscience kicked in, probably because in the real world I’m kind of an anti-torture nut. (Yeah, I know. Controversial, innit?) I massacred everyone is several towns. By the end of the game, my face was almost fully aglow with that evil, neon, Tronlike blue.