The night has turned into morning, you’ve traversed through open worlds for hours, and after all that hard work you reach the final battle. You develop your perfect strategy, you take down the final boss to beat the game — and then all you get is a short cut scene saying “GOOD JOB THE END GAME OVER!”
Just about any who plays video games has had this experience at one point. Experiencing the most disappointing video game endings in gaming history is almost a rite of passage.
Mass Effect series
Good role-playing games react to the player’s choices by delivering tailored consequences. The Mass Effect series did this well right up until the most important moment. Then Mass Effect 3 blew it by offering three endings that rendered every choice over 40+ hours completely meaningless, becoming the poster child for bad video game endings.
Halo series
Halo 5, the most recent installment in the long-running series, disappointed fans who were looking to see Master Chief and Locke go at it. Or, for that matter, any kind of ending. Instead they were left hanging, hoping for Halo 6 to wrap up the series in better fashion.
Batman: Arkham series
Players agree that the previous entries in the Batman: Arkham series – Arkham Asylum and Arkham City – are great games. They generally liked Arkham Knight, too, but for many the anticlimax at the end of it was too little reward for the hundreds of hours they spent playing as their favorite comic book bat.
Final Fantasy VII
When it was released in 1997, Final Fantasy VII was hailed by players around the world as one of the greatest stories in gaming history. But after they all spent hundreds of hours playing the game, the ending explained nothing about what happened to the characters they’d grown to know and love.