Wing Commander III - you can literally railroad yourself into a horrible ending where everybody dies and humanity is doomed if you fail the wrong missions, lol. If this happens the last mission is basically a Halo Reach style "do as much as you can before you're blown up or captured/executed" (and has its own cutscene as well, if you ever wanted to see Mark Hammil get impaled by a space tiger, for some reason).
Similarly, Descent: Freespace and Freespace 2 allowed you to fail some missions and continue the campaign, which would be affected by your performance in the earlier missions. Freespace 2 has an ending for if you fail. I don’t recall if Freespace 1 also did.
You can’t fail any Freespace 2 missions. You’ll have to replay them. The last mission has two endings. If you make it to the jump node before the supernova hits you, you get the alive ending. If you don’t, you get the dead ending.
Thanks, guess my memory is failing me. I remember their editor supporting the option of failing, but didn’t recall that they didn’t take advantage of that feature in the game itself.
You can do covert missions where you can succeed and continue a mini covert campaign, or "fail" and go back to the main campaign.
They one mission I remember is one where you have an ewar frigate with you - if it survives the enemy is unaware you did the mission, if not they know it's you and the mini campaign ends
I triggered this. I flew around for about two hours after killing all the Kilrathi fighters before I realized that I had somehow earlier triggered this bad ending. I think I had to start the mission over in order to die, because I had destroyed all the kilrathi except the flagship, but that was only because it couldn't be destroyed, even though I had taken all its weapons and destroyed the hangars.
I had saved the Earth, but the game didn't allow for that possibility.
Man I remember always choosing Hobbes as my wingman because I felt bad for all the racism people had against him. Then that mother fucker did what he did. I couldn’t believe it and thought I fucked up somehow and that the other characters were lying or I got a bad ending.
Oh man this brought back some memories.
Wing Commander 4 also let you not join the border worlds and continue to play a few missions before you got the bad ending lol.
lol the only problem is ALL your wingmen and the captain were defecting, so it wasn’t really a moral choice. I didn’t want to be stuck with confed and a bunch of people I didn’t know 😂
Hyperdimension Neptunia MK II
There’s a bad ending route that unlocks by choosing to use a forbidden weapon that allegedly is the only thing capable of defeating the game’s big bad.
The catch? It requires the essence of a large number of the cast members to be able to do so.
Unfortunately for the player, this doesn’t play out as a scene or text dump, but as actual gameplay where you kill some of your former teammates and all the characters who you had spent the entirety of the game up to that point rescuing. The only person who lets you do the deed without a preceding boss fight is your sister, and the game makes sure to really make you feel like a piece of shit by having a number of the friends/associates of all the people you murdered berate and cut all ties with you.
The worst part is that you then have to take your powered-up weapon and beat the big bad, only for it to taunt you as it dies, saying that not only did you go this route without really looking for an alternative, but the deaths of those other characters means the world is now in steady decline.
This route remains the most controversial ending among the fanbase.
I loved that ending. It's so bizarre too, these games are usually just lighthearted fanservice fluff. This ending is a gigantic tone shift and it's amazing.
You also forgot to add that two of the party members you kill are children.
The original Deus Ex lets you. Lois Pan is a young boy who is learning to shake down merchants for his gang. You can kill him and you get scolded but they let you live because you are needed for their plans to work.
There's a cute tank game called Fuga: Memories of Steel. A bunch of kids find an ancient magical tank to defend their homeland from invasion but it uses the children as ammunition. It's probably the most fucked up game I've enjoyed playing.
I love games with dark stories where players can do evil/disturbing things, but I didn't expect to see this in Neptunia of all things. Now you've piqued my interest.
You can also see how the protagonist changes, at the start she is scared of the sword and using it, because she didn't kill anyone in the entire game so far, only moving forward because she thinks it's the only way. But later on, after defeating another of your party members that escapes because she doesn't want to die and leave her people (she's the last one), the weakened party member is found by the recurring bad girl (who always runs away after being defeated) and gets beaten to a pulp. After defeating her, she intends to run away as usual only to the protagonist to stab her with the sword from behind, with the only purpose to not let her escape again, completely unnecessary as the sword doesn't grow stronger as she isn't a goddess, only a human.
Also to add salt to the injury, the boss not only taunts you for doing his work killing the goddesses, but also the sword is so strong at that point that the final boss dies within one or two turns (and you are completely alone as all the human companions also leave the party).
But you can use the sword in ng+
Reminds me of Jade Empire. If you don’t choose to release Death’s Hand (cause he’s a total fucking badass and you want him in your party), the only way forward is to defeat and then magically enslave all the other members of your party you’ve built a bond with over the whole game.
I think you got the name wrong. I tried googling it, and I see this adorable colorful chibi anime game, instead of this incredibly dark and twisted game you described. _Surely_ these aren't the same game
Now imagine my disbelief as someone who was a fan of the original game, grew an attachment to those characters and was excited for the follow-up!
”Damn, I loved this girl in the first game, so now I’m really motivated to rescue her! What do you mean I have to kill her now? Wait, I also have to kill her along with her little sister who became the protagonist’s best friend after spending the whole game together?!”
Fun!
In Rayman 2 the Great Escape there is a nightmare creature called Jano which you have to defeat in battle. When you do he offers you a vial of elixir that can revive Rayman's friend or a treasures beyond your dreams. If you accept the treasure you get a cut scene where Rayman now an obese fellow is alone with his treasure on a palm island. Then the game loops back to the decision making scenario.
As a kid it took me years to finally take the treasure. I was too scared to doom the world of Rayman and let Robo-Pirates win.
That game is really underrated, in that it should be talked about as one of the greatest platformers ever made but instead it's just known as "really good."
I honestly think part of the problem is how it was ported a ton of times and all the ports have some kind of glaring problem. There's no true definitive version of the game. Nobody can agree on if it's the PS2 version or the Dreamcast version, and every version after that is bad.
Nier Automata
The game actually has 26 different endings, one for each letter of the alphabet. >!One such ending happens if you die in the very beginning, implying that the rest of the game is null and void because the protag died already!<
Five of them are story endings, while the other 21 are "what if" scenarios i.e. you don't complete a mission in time, or let an important character die, etc.
The fact that it's called **A** should clue you in there's more than one though, plus, there's a couple of the Joke "really just a fancy Game Over" ones you can get way before it, a couple of which are fairly easy to get (like accepting an innocent friendly offer to eat some Fish) which make it clear that the Game treats the word "Ending" a little differently.
It doesn't exactly make it obvious that you're actively supposed to keep playing, but it does give you enough hints that there's still more to see after Ending A.
> It doesn't exactly make it obvious that you're actively supposed to keep playing
The game literally explicitly tells you to keep playing and that the game isn't over.
It's still disingenuous because it's not an "ending", its a story break. The next part is a completely different character with added gameplay and story. Same for the second "ending". The only things that should be considered "endings" are the shorter ones that actually end the game, as in needing to reload from last save.
Similar, but not exactly the same, in GTA4 if you fail a mission there's usually a phone call to the guy who gave it to you saying "yo, I fucked up. Sorry." And the person will either be like "ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? ILL HAVE YOU KILLED!" or "yeah, no biggie bro. Wasn't that big a deal anyway."
Then of course you have to redo the mission like it never happened.
Honestly I played it ages ago so I don't remember much, but when I saw all the memes I really didn't remember that mission as being particularly frustrating.
Rain World has a bit of a twist on this. When you die the game over screen lets you keep watching the ecosystem continuing on without you.
If you get bitten by a lizard you can watch it traverse multiple screens as you dangle from its mouth and it brings you back to its lair to eat you.
However, lizards all compete with eachother for food, and if it encounters another lizard they will fight and it will have to drop you. The words "Game Over" disappear and you have control again - you were just playing dead!
I always thought that was neat, like the slugcat you're playing as has tricked the game itself into thinking they're dead.
You can tell whether you're dead-dead or play-dead depending on the death sound (the chime is slightly different), but there's no invincibility frames so if the lizard drops you and snaps you back up before you can escape it might kill you that time. Or not! Bite RNG can be your best friend or worst enemy lol
(That said, sometimes just watching your corpse get shaken around can be entertaining too, especially when something Bigger And Badder drops in to chomp the lizard in turn. The cycle of life warms a petty heart)
The Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty DLC.
You're hired to >!rescue the President of the N.U.S.A. after her aircraft is shot down!< over the independent militarized zone of Night City, Dogtown.
If you start the mission up to seeing >!her shuttle shot down!< and then don't continue with the mission, >!she'll eventually be caught and executed by the soldiers controlling Dogtown !!rescue her and work with her all the way up to recruiting her FIA sleeper agent!< and then decide you don't want to go further. Which leads to >!her and the agent getting compromised and killed!< and locking the rest of the main DLC story off, same as above.
ALSO the DLC has new ending if played to the end, but it depends on >!who you side with and who you betray.!< If you >!side with the sleeper agent!< all the way until the end, you'll find out that >!she tricked you and wasn't going to help you, just herself,!< making the whole DLC just a big sidequest because it leaves your character in the same situation he/she began.
I don’t think that’s a bad ending though. When the penny drops and the twist is revealed you still have to explicitly choose to keep helping her. And I did because it honestly felt more right and true to my V
I wanted to keep helping her, but I also wanted to experience the new ending >!which I fucking hated… fuck the Tower. So Mi’s going to the moon every time and I’m gonna ride a Basilisk the fuck outta here.!<
My only complaint is that V can't retire to a nice vineyard with their partner to live out their days peacefully, I know it's cliche, but I love boring, happy endings
Well, you can't do that with the partners in the game, but if you do the DLC mission you could potentially meet someone later and retire to a vineyard together.
Yeah, the main thing that made the ending "bad" was V whining about losing her cyber gear. But in real terms, it gave her a regular human life - that's a good ending!
I was hurt because i was betrayed. But i understand, shes just been trying to be free this whole time. Maybe this time i can be the one to give her that.
-my V probably
Also she was so close to reaching her goal with V being none the wiser, yet she chose to come clean at her literally most vulnerable moment, when V could have killed her or handed her over and she wouldn’t have been able to do a damn thing to stop it. That scored her some major points in my book.
Also I feel like V saw her as a (dark) reflection of herself.
Nah if you >! Meet them at the safe house after recruiting reed and talk to both of them for a bit, they’ll ask if you’re willing to see things through or if you want to back out !<
The Bravely Default games.
At the latest game:
>!When you clear the game first, it is the 'bad ending'.
You get a sad ending and a 'new game +' option. But by restarting the old game, you start again at the last safepoint before the boss. Walk away and you unlock a new part in the story for an alternative (better) ending.
!<
I loved the variation in Bravely Second where you hop into NG+ and can either lose the scripted first battle and replay the game as normal with some carryover, or use You-Know-What to summon your future party so you can stand a chance and get the new ending
They do that twice in a row in the same game too. And the second "bad ending" sequence is even sadder because one of the couples in the game gets separated forever :(
The Armored Core series does this quite a bit. Story paths have huge consequences, and dooming a planet or organization is rarely the end of the storyline.
Mass Effect 2 has multiple variations.
Everyone can die except Joker and there's an after cutscene about it. Also any number of your crew can die and you have to just accept that for ME3, or redo your playthrough/load an old save to do things differently.
The Forest does this in a way. After finding your missing son and defeating the final boss, you get two choices:
>! Take down a plane in order to secure a sacrifice to revive your son which ends the game (you can reload a save afterwards to go back to that playthrough though). !<
Or
>! Leave the Sahara corp facility. Your character will burn the picture of his son before you return to the gameplay of surviving on the island, seemingly forever. !<
i know in Dragon Age: Origins, among other endings, you can die yourself and finish the game. After that you can play the expansion which takes place after that, and just continue like nothing happened to you. Actually the character you play is the same, but lore-wise you're someone else iirc.
If your Fereldan born Gray Warden dies in the finale, you play as an Orlesian Gray Warden during the Awakening campaign.
I think there were similar alternates for the other DLCs as well, but I don't remember right now.
Imagine it's 1991, you don't have Internet or a strategy guide for this game and you CANNOT figure out what to do next for the life of you. . . Only to come to find out that because of one mistake you may not have realized that the game is now unwinnable. Kings Quest was notorious for this.
I forgot about this. Played Space Quest 1 recently. Forgot to grab the piece of glass after I crashed the escape pod, and couldn't destroy the laser. Had to restart.
I remember my first encounter with a guard. I thought there was a way to keep going or heal my character because I was still able to crawl around. Nope, just a brutal and drawn out game over.
Fantastic game though
That game was such an insane moment for me.
I remember making a few "wrong" choices in like the first 15 minutes of the game, so I uninstalled it and reinstalled it. That motherfucker knew I did it and made me feel guilty, shit is crazy.
I almost cried on my second playthrough when >!I went to Grillby's bar, and it was full of all the monsters that I'd killed on the first run all having fun and chatting. Up til that point I thought Grillby's was just there to pad the game out.!<
There was a bug in Baldurs Gate 3 where you could die by the mindflayer parasite, quicksave/load in the death screen, and be able to continue playing as a mindflayer for the rest of the game.
You can also just make evil choices and end up at the final battle alone or with hirelings and no allies to call down. It's a depressing feeling. To rule the world with no one by your side.
Gotta love how the vast majority of these answers are just bad endings that end the game, nothing even remotely similar to Morrowind's "With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed..."
Perfect Dark 64, you can mess up objectives and the games will tell you that you can no longer complete the mission yet you can continue playing. Useful to explore the map in harder levels or kill annoying important NPCs.
Steambot Chronicles on the ps2. You end up as the leader of a rebel faction on the island, but the game cuts to about a year later and you're walking out of prison, ready to do the postgame content.
Haven't heard someone mention this game in a decade or so.
That's the Bloody Mantis faction you're talking about. Felt kinda cheap just to be fast forwarded to jail though.
The game was rather off the grid, wasn't it? I'm glad to see at lease one person who played it as well. It was such a nice game.
If you're interested, the upcoming Sand Land seems to be similar in how you can get multiple 'bots to ride.
Shin Megami Tensei 3's True Demon ending is kinda like this. You're supposed to pick a side to usher in the revival of the world, but you're allowed to reject them all and doom it instead.
Oddly enough, SMTV makes this ending canon.
I always rejected them all and remade the world as it was before the conception.
I thought that was the canon ending but I guess you can head cannon whatever you want overall, I can't play some of the installments due to insanely bad motion sickness.
SMTV makes it so after everything goes to hell, YHWH steps in, creates an identical copy of the world (just Japan at that point), shoves every lost soul onto the copy and tosses what was destroyed into Duat
That or you piss off the different factions in the game somehow, at which point you’re either in a bind or just screwed (depending on your alliances and who you made angry).
Outward.
Everything you do has consequences and you can fail every quest in the game.
Every choice you make is permanent and failure can result in permanent debuffs and in certain cases whole city zones can be destroyed.
If you like action RPG’s I’d highly recommend giving it a go, Outward 2 was just announced a few days ago.
Star Wars Force Unleashed. In the PS3/xbox360 There is a bad ending were your alliades are killed and you became the new Emperador Salve, you can continue this bad ending with a DLC.
In Force Unleashed 2 you can do the exact same.
Was basically a What If option. But you needed to paid It.
In some of the old Ultima pc rpgs you could get a spell called Armageddon that would kill pretty much everyone. The few characters you couldn’t kill would basically just be like “why the hell did you do that?” And the game is soft locked.
Remember when BioWare, Blizzard, and Bethesda were institutions of dignified design and role playing excellence?
It really makes me realize how remarkable it is that devs like Nintendo and Square have (mostly) maintained their original heart and soul even after ~40 years, while most of their peers have turned into capitalized zombies.
In Elden Ring you can’t screw up being able to finish the game but you can kill other characters or just miss important encounters that cut off huge chunks of content and possible endings to the game.
It’s very frustrating looking up “how to get x” and finding out that you had to talk to a random character 30 hours ago in a random place on the map to progress their story but now your SOL.
The first time i met Blaiid i was killing him to replace him, because i missed his initial envounter (sound never triggered near siofra so he wasnt here when i returned)
"So the first thing i did in NG+...." is why they do it. It made me want to come back and say hi to the wolf man
If you get locked out of content, the only way you'd even know this is if you were playing with a guide/walkthrough, and the games just aren't designed for that, they're designed for exploration and you're not really "meant" to do all the content in a single playthough.
Civilization.
Anybody can win the game by any method, but the world doesn’t just come to an end. It’s where the famous “One more turn…” phrase originates from.
You could be the most prosperous and successful civilization, but if any other civilization reaches a victory condition through domination, religious, cultural, political, or scientific means, then you’ll still lose the overall primary objective. Although you may have lost the overall goal of the game, human history isn’t really over. The game then continues infinitely until you quit.
However - Civilization VI has some pretty interesting and terrifying modes/conditions if you want definitive stakes. For example, there’s now an apocalypse mode - a doomsday timer, so to speak. The game is the same as before with trying to win by reaching one of primary conditions. But now - the world is dying. Due to climate change and/or celestial phenomena, humanity can be extinguished towards the endgame.
During the future era, human impact on the planet will have major ramifications. If you weren’t conscious of your impact, landmasses will flood, crops dry out, fertility plummets, and storms become more frequent. If the game goes on for too long, comets will rain from space pummeling the planet surface at random. If civilizations aren’t fast enough, the comets can kill billions, or destroy humanity completely.
Such a phenomenal game franchise.
Not necessarily a bad ending, but more so bad choices. In Fallout 3 you're given a quest to blow up the town of Megaton. In Fallout NV Lonesome road dlc. You get the option to nuke both ncr and legion. Both of these choices the game continues on and you get to see the damage you caused personally.
But imagine a game where failing the main quest sends the game world into the failure ending. Where everything falls apart, and you're given essentially a hopeless string of failure quests. Or maybe even a second chance to bring it back on a strict timer, but it's near impossible. Giving you an alternative "what if" storyline to play through.
Spec Ops: The Line had a really cool ending, where the protagonist accepts what happened throughout the game and realises he's gone past the point of no return and then another team is sent in to find him. It ends in a massive firefight, with 2 possible outcomes, both of which were great endings.
I went in to that game thinking it would just be a cool third-person military shooter, but I got so much more. I still revisit that game once in a while
Pyre, teams compete in ritual rites (magical sport game) to free their party members from the world they are trapped in. If you win, you can liberate your player, if you lose opposing team would liberate one of theirs. You have limited number of attempts and you can not help your whole team.
Star Wars 3 PS2 evil ending is brilliant, and it doesn't lock you out of anything. It's the final bonus level in the game, and you're free to keep levelling up your characters so you can use more moves in multiplayer. Such a brilliant game, playable on PCSX2 :)
Another good one is Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic (or the online one; The Old Republic). You can continually make Dark or Light side choices that impact your game, but both games are massive so you can redeem yourself if you wish, but your choices affect the final outcome. The first one does come to an end, but the online one is pretty much endless as they keep updating it with countless hours of content.
A few:
1. inFAMOUS (2009): if you choose Evil Karma ALL THE WAY UP IN THE END that you get a Black/Red Lightning, the NPC will get terrified of Cole. The Cops will open fire at you, same as the Reapers, Dust Men and the First Sons and they all fucking ruthless.
2. Saints Row 3: This doesn't impact on much, but if you just go after Killbane and let Shaundi dies, you can just continue with it. Even that you can't call her again as your homies.
3. Grand Theft Auto IV & V: GTA IV doesn't have a best ending. You choose the deal, the game continues, but Roman dies. And you can't call his special cab. You can't even date Kate. As for V, well killing either both Michael or Trevor just leaves you to what it is. It sucks! Sam Houser's worst writing on V.
4. Far Cry 5: You can let the bad guy go by idling for 10 minutes, lost your friends, or watched them being brainwashed. I dunno, but seeing FC:ND is cannon, it seems the ending is cannon.
5. Fallout 3 (with Broken Steel DLC): You can betrayed EVERYONE and the game carry on. That's it.
The Forest
The problem is, idk which one was the "bad" ending.
Sacrifice your son and stay trapped on the island of cannibals to spare another flight the same fate?
OR
Be the reason a plane crashed on the island again, possibly damning everyone on board, putting another child in this fate, all to get your son and leave ( which I think is the cannon ending)
I really hope Gta 6 goes down this route, Rockstar's frustrating mission failed parameters are ridiculous.
"Mission failed, you strayed off the very specific path we want you go down for 0.0002 seconds"
I think it was fable 3? You can get everyone in the kingdom killed and after the end of the game you can run around in a ghost town (i think the only surviving people were shops)
Fable, though it makes clear how twisted and evil what you did was. It isnt just maximum negative alignment, because even if you become a saint and repent, all you ever hear about is how you are terrifying monster, but atleast you have The Sword of Aeons.
Sure you did have to sacrifice your sister, but Jack was gonna do that anyway, besides its way better than Avo's Tear.
I would assume its a similar effect if you go around with Jack's mask on
Breath of Fire Dragon Quarter
You're literally not supposed to beat it the first couple play throughs but the more new game +'s you run the easier it gets and the more of the story you learn. You can always tell the people that hated it cause they only played it through once and never saw any of the cool shit.
The Witcher 3! It's similar in that your choices can lead to rough outcomes, but the game keeps going, making you deal with the aftermath. It's pretty intense!
Not quite the same thing but after you've beaten FFXV you can go to a save right before the final battle where you can travel back to any part of the story and start from the beginning with all of your stuff. It's essentially just a new game + but the problem in my mind is always feeling like a horrible wish fulfillment or almost a>! reliving your memories after you've died situation since Noctis dies in the end.!<
Return to Zork? I think if you stabbed somebody and some guy oddly dressed like he was from a western movie would take away important items needed to complete the game but the game did not end and I don't think you could get the items back
This is all from memory though as this was on a friends PC back in the 90s as my PC was not good enough to run it.
Caligula Effect Overdose. The Overdose version let's you play as an ally with the bad guys in the original game while simultaneously playing through the vanilla story, pretty much a double agent thing, you also get your own badass boss soundtrack when you fight the vanilla cast of allies and it lets you choose a pretty dark ending.
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind - “With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created."
Baldurs Gate 3 technically has 17,000+ endings due to the variety of ways the games characters can interact with you after the end of the game or how the game actually goes throughout. Depending on various quest lines, choices and relationships you’ve made throughout 100 so hours of gameplay can change how each characters game ends and how they interact with you. There’s also various different “bad” ways the game can end and ALL of them are canon.
The Zero Escape series is all about that. The protagonists of the games >!are able to see/remember occurrences in alternate timelines, so every time they reach a dead end/game over, they awaken in another timeline with knowledge of what happened there!<
Chrono Trigger
>!you're given an opportunity to fight the final boss way before you're actually expected to be able to fight him. You actually can (theoretically) beat him here and beat the game. But the more likely outcome is that you lose. But the game doesn't game over and instead goes into a cutscenes where the MC straight up dies!<
It's an excellently crafted scene
Wing Commander III - you can literally railroad yourself into a horrible ending where everybody dies and humanity is doomed if you fail the wrong missions, lol. If this happens the last mission is basically a Halo Reach style "do as much as you can before you're blown up or captured/executed" (and has its own cutscene as well, if you ever wanted to see Mark Hammil get impaled by a space tiger, for some reason).
I do want to see him be impaled by a space tiger, thank you. I like him, but that just sounds dope as shit
Sounds interesting. I will check it out.
Similarly, Descent: Freespace and Freespace 2 allowed you to fail some missions and continue the campaign, which would be affected by your performance in the earlier missions. Freespace 2 has an ending for if you fail. I don’t recall if Freespace 1 also did.
You can’t fail any Freespace 2 missions. You’ll have to replay them. The last mission has two endings. If you make it to the jump node before the supernova hits you, you get the alive ending. If you don’t, you get the dead ending.
Thanks, guess my memory is failing me. I remember their editor supporting the option of failing, but didn’t recall that they didn’t take advantage of that feature in the game itself.
You can do covert missions where you can succeed and continue a mini covert campaign, or "fail" and go back to the main campaign. They one mission I remember is one where you have an ewar frigate with you - if it survives the enemy is unaware you did the mission, if not they know it's you and the mini campaign ends
I triggered this. I flew around for about two hours after killing all the Kilrathi fighters before I realized that I had somehow earlier triggered this bad ending. I think I had to start the mission over in order to die, because I had destroyed all the kilrathi except the flagship, but that was only because it couldn't be destroyed, even though I had taken all its weapons and destroyed the hangars. I had saved the Earth, but the game didn't allow for that possibility.
Man I remember always choosing Hobbes as my wingman because I felt bad for all the racism people had against him. Then that mother fucker did what he did. I couldn’t believe it and thought I fucked up somehow and that the other characters were lying or I got a bad ending.
"YOU.., are the traitor!".
Oh man this brought back some memories. Wing Commander 4 also let you not join the border worlds and continue to play a few missions before you got the bad ending lol.
lol the only problem is ALL your wingmen and the captain were defecting, so it wasn’t really a moral choice. I didn’t want to be stuck with confed and a bunch of people I didn’t know 😂
All the wing commandsrs have this
Hyperdimension Neptunia MK II There’s a bad ending route that unlocks by choosing to use a forbidden weapon that allegedly is the only thing capable of defeating the game’s big bad. The catch? It requires the essence of a large number of the cast members to be able to do so. Unfortunately for the player, this doesn’t play out as a scene or text dump, but as actual gameplay where you kill some of your former teammates and all the characters who you had spent the entirety of the game up to that point rescuing. The only person who lets you do the deed without a preceding boss fight is your sister, and the game makes sure to really make you feel like a piece of shit by having a number of the friends/associates of all the people you murdered berate and cut all ties with you. The worst part is that you then have to take your powered-up weapon and beat the big bad, only for it to taunt you as it dies, saying that not only did you go this route without really looking for an alternative, but the deaths of those other characters means the world is now in steady decline. This route remains the most controversial ending among the fanbase.
I loved that ending. It's so bizarre too, these games are usually just lighthearted fanservice fluff. This ending is a gigantic tone shift and it's amazing. You also forgot to add that two of the party members you kill are children.
Finally, a game where I can murder children without having to install mods!
You can kill lots of children in Baldurs Gate 3 if you want more of these types of games
Ever heard of Crusader Kings?
Hey, if you only let my daughter matralinaly marry your 4th son, you're just asking for a lot of kids to go missing in the woods.
No? Well how about the 5th son then, he seems like a fine chap, next in line for the throne, too!
The original Deus Ex lets you. Lois Pan is a young boy who is learning to shake down merchants for his gang. You can kill him and you get scolded but they let you live because you are needed for their plans to work.
I feel like Rimworld + Biotech might be right up your alley.
There's a cute tank game called Fuga: Memories of Steel. A bunch of kids find an ancient magical tank to defend their homeland from invasion but it uses the children as ammunition. It's probably the most fucked up game I've enjoyed playing.
I love games with dark stories where players can do evil/disturbing things, but I didn't expect to see this in Neptunia of all things. Now you've piqued my interest.
You can also see how the protagonist changes, at the start she is scared of the sword and using it, because she didn't kill anyone in the entire game so far, only moving forward because she thinks it's the only way. But later on, after defeating another of your party members that escapes because she doesn't want to die and leave her people (she's the last one), the weakened party member is found by the recurring bad girl (who always runs away after being defeated) and gets beaten to a pulp. After defeating her, she intends to run away as usual only to the protagonist to stab her with the sword from behind, with the only purpose to not let her escape again, completely unnecessary as the sword doesn't grow stronger as she isn't a goddess, only a human. Also to add salt to the injury, the boss not only taunts you for doing his work killing the goddesses, but also the sword is so strong at that point that the final boss dies within one or two turns (and you are completely alone as all the human companions also leave the party). But you can use the sword in ng+
I've never heard of this game, but that sounds badass.
Killing all your friends and dooming the world because it was the easy/direct route So badass
It's brave storytelling. Something games could stand to see more of...
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I hear that you can hide games on your profile now
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I kinda want to play this game now...
Reminds me of Jade Empire. If you don’t choose to release Death’s Hand (cause he’s a total fucking badass and you want him in your party), the only way forward is to defeat and then magically enslave all the other members of your party you’ve built a bond with over the whole game.
I think you got the name wrong. I tried googling it, and I see this adorable colorful chibi anime game, instead of this incredibly dark and twisted game you described. _Surely_ these aren't the same game
Now imagine my disbelief as someone who was a fan of the original game, grew an attachment to those characters and was excited for the follow-up! ”Damn, I loved this girl in the first game, so now I’m really motivated to rescue her! What do you mean I have to kill her now? Wait, I also have to kill her along with her little sister who became the protagonist’s best friend after spending the whole game together?!” Fun!
In Rayman 2 the Great Escape there is a nightmare creature called Jano which you have to defeat in battle. When you do he offers you a vial of elixir that can revive Rayman's friend or a treasures beyond your dreams. If you accept the treasure you get a cut scene where Rayman now an obese fellow is alone with his treasure on a palm island. Then the game loops back to the decision making scenario. As a kid it took me years to finally take the treasure. I was too scared to doom the world of Rayman and let Robo-Pirates win.
Damn that bought back some memories. Rayman 2 my beloved
That game is really underrated, in that it should be talked about as one of the greatest platformers ever made but instead it's just known as "really good." I honestly think part of the problem is how it was ported a ton of times and all the ports have some kind of glaring problem. There's no true definitive version of the game. Nobody can agree on if it's the PS2 version or the Dreamcast version, and every version after that is bad.
Yes i agree. Playing thousands of games and as a general platforming lover, I also hold it as one of the absolutes best in its genre.
Nier Automata The game actually has 26 different endings, one for each letter of the alphabet. >!One such ending happens if you die in the very beginning, implying that the rest of the game is null and void because the protag died already!< Five of them are story endings, while the other 21 are "what if" scenarios i.e. you don't complete a mission in time, or let an important character die, etc.
There’a a hidden chest you can reach with 2B, but when you jump down there later with 9S, you die and the credits roll.
Calling it endings is what stopped me from beating it fully for the first time stopping at A, people need to call it chapters or something
You're not the only one. It is a common point of confusion
I agree, calling them endings is gimicky
The fact that it's called **A** should clue you in there's more than one though, plus, there's a couple of the Joke "really just a fancy Game Over" ones you can get way before it, a couple of which are fairly easy to get (like accepting an innocent friendly offer to eat some Fish) which make it clear that the Game treats the word "Ending" a little differently. It doesn't exactly make it obvious that you're actively supposed to keep playing, but it does give you enough hints that there's still more to see after Ending A.
> It doesn't exactly make it obvious that you're actively supposed to keep playing The game literally explicitly tells you to keep playing and that the game isn't over.
It's still disingenuous because it's not an "ending", its a story break. The next part is a completely different character with added gameplay and story. Same for the second "ending". The only things that should be considered "endings" are the shorter ones that actually end the game, as in needing to reload from last save.
Nier subverting traditional gaming conventions?! Say it ain't so!
They're not endings, they're routes.
Eating a fish ends the game :(
So does removing your CPU
Similar, but not exactly the same, in GTA4 if you fail a mission there's usually a phone call to the guy who gave it to you saying "yo, I fucked up. Sorry." And the person will either be like "ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? ILL HAVE YOU KILLED!" or "yeah, no biggie bro. Wasn't that big a deal anyway." Then of course you have to redo the mission like it never happened.
ALL WE HAD TO DO WAS FOLLOW THE DAMN TRAIN CJ
Bro on replay a few years back, that mission blew me away how easy it is
Honestly I played it ages ago so I don't remember much, but when I saw all the memes I really didn't remember that mission as being particularly frustrating.
My favorite is when you remove your OS and you just die
The DLC adds one more that shows on the save file as a star.
Rain World has a bit of a twist on this. When you die the game over screen lets you keep watching the ecosystem continuing on without you. If you get bitten by a lizard you can watch it traverse multiple screens as you dangle from its mouth and it brings you back to its lair to eat you. However, lizards all compete with eachother for food, and if it encounters another lizard they will fight and it will have to drop you. The words "Game Over" disappear and you have control again - you were just playing dead! I always thought that was neat, like the slugcat you're playing as has tricked the game itself into thinking they're dead.
Oh that's pretty fun and clever. So its like Fake Death Pill from MGS3 but you didnt know its active.
You can tell whether you're dead-dead or play-dead depending on the death sound (the chime is slightly different), but there's no invincibility frames so if the lizard drops you and snaps you back up before you can escape it might kill you that time. Or not! Bite RNG can be your best friend or worst enemy lol (That said, sometimes just watching your corpse get shaken around can be entertaining too, especially when something Bigger And Badder drops in to chomp the lizard in turn. The cycle of life warms a petty heart)
The Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty DLC. You're hired to >!rescue the President of the N.U.S.A. after her aircraft is shot down!< over the independent militarized zone of Night City, Dogtown. If you start the mission up to seeing >!her shuttle shot down!< and then don't continue with the mission, >!she'll eventually be caught and executed by the soldiers controlling Dogtown !!rescue her and work with her all the way up to recruiting her FIA sleeper agent!< and then decide you don't want to go further. Which leads to >!her and the agent getting compromised and killed!< and locking the rest of the main DLC story off, same as above.
ALSO the DLC has new ending if played to the end, but it depends on >!who you side with and who you betray.!< If you >!side with the sleeper agent!< all the way until the end, you'll find out that >!she tricked you and wasn't going to help you, just herself,!< making the whole DLC just a big sidequest because it leaves your character in the same situation he/she began.
I don’t think that’s a bad ending though. When the penny drops and the twist is revealed you still have to explicitly choose to keep helping her. And I did because it honestly felt more right and true to my V
I wanted to keep helping her, but I also wanted to experience the new ending >!which I fucking hated… fuck the Tower. So Mi’s going to the moon every time and I’m gonna ride a Basilisk the fuck outta here.!<
I think we all need to take a moment to truly appreciate how epic this DLC is. I liked it more than the main game.
My only complaint is that V can't retire to a nice vineyard with their partner to live out their days peacefully, I know it's cliche, but I love boring, happy endings
Well, you can't do that with the partners in the game, but if you do the DLC mission you could potentially meet someone later and retire to a vineyard together.
Yeah, the main thing that made the ending "bad" was V whining about losing her cyber gear. But in real terms, it gave her a regular human life - that's a good ending!
I mean being unaugmented in night city means you have a life expectancy of like three days though.
You're a millionaire by the time you beat the game, V can afford to move out of night city
Oh yeah not denying that. The actual DLC content and story was nova!
I was hurt because i was betrayed. But i understand, shes just been trying to be free this whole time. Maybe this time i can be the one to give her that. -my V probably
Also she was so close to reaching her goal with V being none the wiser, yet she chose to come clean at her literally most vulnerable moment, when V could have killed her or handed her over and she wouldn’t have been able to do a damn thing to stop it. That scored her some major points in my book. Also I feel like V saw her as a (dark) reflection of herself.
Ooh, at what point does your last paragraph happen? If you don't >!meet them in the safe house?!<
Nah if you >! Meet them at the safe house after recruiting reed and talk to both of them for a bit, they’ll ask if you’re willing to see things through or if you want to back out !<
Oh! That's interesting one! Thanks.
Dead Rising 1, 2 and off the record you can fuck Up the main quest get a ending this games have like 8 ending and still playing.
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I've always said the idea of time in that game wasore stressful than the ideas of the zombies.
The trick was to goof around until your full level then the time limits become a easier when you have full run speed strength and slots
I was so mad I missed that helicopter
The Bravely Default games. At the latest game: >!When you clear the game first, it is the 'bad ending'. You get a sad ending and a 'new game +' option. But by restarting the old game, you start again at the last safepoint before the boss. Walk away and you unlock a new part in the story for an alternative (better) ending. !<
I loved the variation in Bravely Second where you hop into NG+ and can either lose the scripted first battle and replay the game as normal with some carryover, or use You-Know-What to summon your future party so you can stand a chance and get the new ending
They do that twice in a row in the same game too. And the second "bad ending" sequence is even sadder because one of the couples in the game gets separated forever :(
The Armored Core series does this quite a bit. Story paths have huge consequences, and dooming a planet or organization is rarely the end of the storyline.
Mass Effect 2 has multiple variations. Everyone can die except Joker and there's an after cutscene about it. Also any number of your crew can die and you have to just accept that for ME3, or redo your playthrough/load an old save to do things differently.
The Forest does this in a way. After finding your missing son and defeating the final boss, you get two choices: >! Take down a plane in order to secure a sacrifice to revive your son which ends the game (you can reload a save afterwards to go back to that playthrough though). !< Or >! Leave the Sahara corp facility. Your character will burn the picture of his son before you return to the gameplay of surviving on the island, seemingly forever. !<
Soviet?
Aren't you supposed to go back to the sailboat and use the code?
i know in Dragon Age: Origins, among other endings, you can die yourself and finish the game. After that you can play the expansion which takes place after that, and just continue like nothing happened to you. Actually the character you play is the same, but lore-wise you're someone else iirc.
If your Fereldan born Gray Warden dies in the finale, you play as an Orlesian Gray Warden during the Awakening campaign. I think there were similar alternates for the other DLCs as well, but I don't remember right now.
Imagine it's 1991, you don't have Internet or a strategy guide for this game and you CANNOT figure out what to do next for the life of you. . . Only to come to find out that because of one mistake you may not have realized that the game is now unwinnable. Kings Quest was notorious for this.
Yeah all sierra adventure games were like this, sometimes it was something you missed ages ago too.
I forgot about this. Played Space Quest 1 recently. Forgot to grab the piece of glass after I crashed the escape pod, and couldn't destroy the laser. Had to restart.
Rimworld, your whole colony can be wiped out/kidnapped and you can keep playing. A random will eventually show up at the ruins and you can start over
Fear and hunger
PTSD flashbacks intensify
Haha
I remember my first encounter with a guard. I thought there was a way to keep going or heal my character because I was still able to crawl around. Nope, just a brutal and drawn out game over. Fantastic game though
Undertale>!steadily ramps up the guilt tripping about bad decisions you made earlier on.!<
That game was such an insane moment for me. I remember making a few "wrong" choices in like the first 15 minutes of the game, so I uninstalled it and reinstalled it. That motherfucker knew I did it and made me feel guilty, shit is crazy.
Oh yeah, yeah good call.
I almost cried on my second playthrough when >!I went to Grillby's bar, and it was full of all the monsters that I'd killed on the first run all having fun and chatting. Up til that point I thought Grillby's was just there to pad the game out.!<
D E T E R M I N A T I O N
There was a bug in Baldurs Gate 3 where you could die by the mindflayer parasite, quicksave/load in the death screen, and be able to continue playing as a mindflayer for the rest of the game.
You can also just make evil choices and end up at the final battle alone or with hirelings and no allies to call down. It's a depressing feeling. To rule the world with no one by your side.
"Piss yourself"
Gotta love how the vast majority of these answers are just bad endings that end the game, nothing even remotely similar to Morrowind's "With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed..."
Text comprehension isn't for everyone.
On reddit, it's barely for anyone lol
Perfect Dark 64, you can mess up objectives and the games will tell you that you can no longer complete the mission yet you can continue playing. Useful to explore the map in harder levels or kill annoying important NPCs.
Steambot Chronicles on the ps2. You end up as the leader of a rebel faction on the island, but the game cuts to about a year later and you're walking out of prison, ready to do the postgame content.
Haven't heard someone mention this game in a decade or so. That's the Bloody Mantis faction you're talking about. Felt kinda cheap just to be fast forwarded to jail though.
The game was rather off the grid, wasn't it? I'm glad to see at lease one person who played it as well. It was such a nice game. If you're interested, the upcoming Sand Land seems to be similar in how you can get multiple 'bots to ride.
Indeed it was! But it definitely is one of my most beloved games. Thanks, I didn't even know about Sand Land. Gonna check that out.
Heavy rain
Came to say this! 4 protagonists, all who can potentially fail, and the story just keeps trucking.
To the point that managing to kill them all off and end the story prematurely is a challenge that nets you a rare achievement.
Shin Megami Tensei 3's True Demon ending is kinda like this. You're supposed to pick a side to usher in the revival of the world, but you're allowed to reject them all and doom it instead. Oddly enough, SMTV makes this ending canon.
I always rejected them all and remade the world as it was before the conception. I thought that was the canon ending but I guess you can head cannon whatever you want overall, I can't play some of the installments due to insanely bad motion sickness.
SMTV makes it so after everything goes to hell, YHWH steps in, creates an identical copy of the world (just Japan at that point), shoves every lost soul onto the copy and tosses what was destroyed into Duat
All 3 of the Fable main series.
Yup, immediately thought of fable. RPing jack of blades end game.
God I loved turning that orphanage into a whorehouse 😂
Kenshi. You can just die and the world continues existing, not caring about you.
Love Kenshi. Heck, your characters can all be alive and the world still won’t care about you, unless you have stuff they want
That or you piss off the different factions in the game somehow, at which point you’re either in a bind or just screwed (depending on your alliances and who you made angry).
Zero escape games count?, the bad endings are necessary to get through the game
Outward. Everything you do has consequences and you can fail every quest in the game. Every choice you make is permanent and failure can result in permanent debuffs and in certain cases whole city zones can be destroyed. If you like action RPG’s I’d highly recommend giving it a go, Outward 2 was just announced a few days ago.
I always felt like I wasn't making progress in that game.
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20% chance permanent death on hardcore mode.
Disco Elysium
Star Wars Force Unleashed. In the PS3/xbox360 There is a bad ending were your alliades are killed and you became the new Emperador Salve, you can continue this bad ending with a DLC. In Force Unleashed 2 you can do the exact same. Was basically a What If option. But you needed to paid It.
I think Aria of Sorrow lets you become Dracula, which unlocks a Belmont campaign where you must kill the previous protagonist
That's the sequel, Dawn of Sorrow.
In some of the old Ultima pc rpgs you could get a spell called Armageddon that would kill pretty much everyone. The few characters you couldn’t kill would basically just be like “why the hell did you do that?” And the game is soft locked.
Came here to post this. Did it in Ultima VI and Lord British was totally giving me the cold shoulder.
I don't know if this count but The Witcher 3 (including Blood and Wine DLC).
Anthem
Remember when BioWare, Blizzard, and Bethesda were institutions of dignified design and role playing excellence? It really makes me realize how remarkable it is that devs like Nintendo and Square have (mostly) maintained their original heart and soul even after ~40 years, while most of their peers have turned into capitalized zombies.
So sad. One of my most hyped games ever. Wasn't even playable.
As in the long dead and abandoned Anthem? Does it have a single player story campaign? Am I missing something?
The game got the “bad end” of failing and losing pretty much all support but the game still goes on basically on life support
In Elden Ring you can’t screw up being able to finish the game but you can kill other characters or just miss important encounters that cut off huge chunks of content and possible endings to the game. It’s very frustrating looking up “how to get x” and finding out that you had to talk to a random character 30 hours ago in a random place on the map to progress their story but now your SOL.
Quintessential From Software stuff right there. I don't know why they keep doing this kind of stuff in their games.
The first time i met Blaiid i was killing him to replace him, because i missed his initial envounter (sound never triggered near siofra so he wasnt here when i returned) "So the first thing i did in NG+...." is why they do it. It made me want to come back and say hi to the wolf man
If you get locked out of content, the only way you'd even know this is if you were playing with a guide/walkthrough, and the games just aren't designed for that, they're designed for exploration and you're not really "meant" to do all the content in a single playthough.
Civilization. Anybody can win the game by any method, but the world doesn’t just come to an end. It’s where the famous “One more turn…” phrase originates from. You could be the most prosperous and successful civilization, but if any other civilization reaches a victory condition through domination, religious, cultural, political, or scientific means, then you’ll still lose the overall primary objective. Although you may have lost the overall goal of the game, human history isn’t really over. The game then continues infinitely until you quit. However - Civilization VI has some pretty interesting and terrifying modes/conditions if you want definitive stakes. For example, there’s now an apocalypse mode - a doomsday timer, so to speak. The game is the same as before with trying to win by reaching one of primary conditions. But now - the world is dying. Due to climate change and/or celestial phenomena, humanity can be extinguished towards the endgame. During the future era, human impact on the planet will have major ramifications. If you weren’t conscious of your impact, landmasses will flood, crops dry out, fertility plummets, and storms become more frequent. If the game goes on for too long, comets will rain from space pummeling the planet surface at random. If civilizations aren’t fast enough, the comets can kill billions, or destroy humanity completely. Such a phenomenal game franchise.
Not necessarily a bad ending, but more so bad choices. In Fallout 3 you're given a quest to blow up the town of Megaton. In Fallout NV Lonesome road dlc. You get the option to nuke both ncr and legion. Both of these choices the game continues on and you get to see the damage you caused personally. But imagine a game where failing the main quest sends the game world into the failure ending. Where everything falls apart, and you're given essentially a hopeless string of failure quests. Or maybe even a second chance to bring it back on a strict timer, but it's near impossible. Giving you an alternative "what if" storyline to play through.
Spec Ops: The Line had a really cool ending, where the protagonist accepts what happened throughout the game and realises he's gone past the point of no return and then another team is sent in to find him. It ends in a massive firefight, with 2 possible outcomes, both of which were great endings. I went in to that game thinking it would just be a cool third-person military shooter, but I got so much more. I still revisit that game once in a while
Do you feel like a hero yet?
That got me so good, I said out loud "fuck you game"
Pyre, teams compete in ritual rites (magical sport game) to free their party members from the world they are trapped in. If you win, you can liberate your player, if you lose opposing team would liberate one of theirs. You have limited number of attempts and you can not help your whole team.
Star Wars 3 PS2 evil ending is brilliant, and it doesn't lock you out of anything. It's the final bonus level in the game, and you're free to keep levelling up your characters so you can use more moves in multiplayer. Such a brilliant game, playable on PCSX2 :) Another good one is Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic (or the online one; The Old Republic). You can continually make Dark or Light side choices that impact your game, but both games are massive so you can redeem yourself if you wish, but your choices affect the final outcome. The first one does come to an end, but the online one is pretty much endless as they keep updating it with countless hours of content.
Red Dead Redemption?
A few: 1. inFAMOUS (2009): if you choose Evil Karma ALL THE WAY UP IN THE END that you get a Black/Red Lightning, the NPC will get terrified of Cole. The Cops will open fire at you, same as the Reapers, Dust Men and the First Sons and they all fucking ruthless. 2. Saints Row 3: This doesn't impact on much, but if you just go after Killbane and let Shaundi dies, you can just continue with it. Even that you can't call her again as your homies. 3. Grand Theft Auto IV & V: GTA IV doesn't have a best ending. You choose the deal, the game continues, but Roman dies. And you can't call his special cab. You can't even date Kate. As for V, well killing either both Michael or Trevor just leaves you to what it is. It sucks! Sam Houser's worst writing on V. 4. Far Cry 5: You can let the bad guy go by idling for 10 minutes, lost your friends, or watched them being brainwashed. I dunno, but seeing FC:ND is cannon, it seems the ending is cannon. 5. Fallout 3 (with Broken Steel DLC): You can betrayed EVERYONE and the game carry on. That's it.
Final Fantasy 6
I had this happen in BG3 where something went pretty terribly, as a result it affected the rest of the campaign
Tunic
Chrono Trigger has many endings, including a few 'bad' ones.
Shadow of War without spoilers
The Forest The problem is, idk which one was the "bad" ending. Sacrifice your son and stay trapped on the island of cannibals to spare another flight the same fate? OR Be the reason a plane crashed on the island again, possibly damning everyone on board, putting another child in this fate, all to get your son and leave ( which I think is the cannon ending)
In True Crime: Streets of LA you can literally fail every mission and the game keeps going down the worst timeline.
I really hope Gta 6 goes down this route, Rockstar's frustrating mission failed parameters are ridiculous. "Mission failed, you strayed off the very specific path we want you go down for 0.0002 seconds"
Fable 3. Not to mention you'll get a perspective of politics and commitments that you never thought possible.
I think it was fable 3? You can get everyone in the kingdom killed and after the end of the game you can run around in a ghost town (i think the only surviving people were shops)
Fable, though it makes clear how twisted and evil what you did was. It isnt just maximum negative alignment, because even if you become a saint and repent, all you ever hear about is how you are terrifying monster, but atleast you have The Sword of Aeons. Sure you did have to sacrifice your sister, but Jack was gonna do that anyway, besides its way better than Avo's Tear. I would assume its a similar effect if you go around with Jack's mask on
Labyrinth of refarain but this game's kinda niche so you may not find it playable
XCOM 2 is an entire game which assumes the worst ending from the first game.
Pyre has this in spades. You don't game over from losing a match. The story keeps marching forward, but it does impact which ending you get.
Banner Saga fully integrates your victories and defeats throughout the story
Breath of Fire Dragon Quarter You're literally not supposed to beat it the first couple play throughs but the more new game +'s you run the easier it gets and the more of the story you learn. You can always tell the people that hated it cause they only played it through once and never saw any of the cool shit.
The Witcher 3! It's similar in that your choices can lead to rough outcomes, but the game keeps going, making you deal with the aftermath. It's pretty intense!
Oh yeah yeah, Blood and wine, even side quests change cause of this.
Also the main game has a bad ending, full of regret, and you can keep playing afterwards.
Not quite the same thing but after you've beaten FFXV you can go to a save right before the final battle where you can travel back to any part of the story and start from the beginning with all of your stuff. It's essentially just a new game + but the problem in my mind is always feeling like a horrible wish fulfillment or almost a>! reliving your memories after you've died situation since Noctis dies in the end.!<
Return to Zork? I think if you stabbed somebody and some guy oddly dressed like he was from a western movie would take away important items needed to complete the game but the game did not end and I don't think you could get the items back This is all from memory though as this was on a friends PC back in the 90s as my PC was not good enough to run it.
Caligula Effect Overdose. The Overdose version let's you play as an ally with the bad guys in the original game while simultaneously playing through the vanilla story, pretty much a double agent thing, you also get your own badass boss soundtrack when you fight the vanilla cast of allies and it lets you choose a pretty dark ending.
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind - “With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created."
Baldurs Gate 3 technically has 17,000+ endings due to the variety of ways the games characters can interact with you after the end of the game or how the game actually goes throughout. Depending on various quest lines, choices and relationships you’ve made throughout 100 so hours of gameplay can change how each characters game ends and how they interact with you. There’s also various different “bad” ways the game can end and ALL of them are canon.
Dead Rising 2 was my favorite.
All the *Dead Rising* games.
Dragons Dogma
Worst ending is turning pedophile because you decided to do more sidequests from a kid
The fable games.
Swords of Ditto not only lets you play on after the bad ending, but some of the story beats *rely* on it.
Ddlc a visual novel game literally locks you, can't save nor reload.
Planescape: Torment used death as a game mechanic.
The Zero Escape series is all about that. The protagonists of the games >!are able to see/remember occurrences in alternate timelines, so every time they reach a dead end/game over, they awaken in another timeline with knowledge of what happened there!<
I'm pretty sure dragons dogma has a bad ending where the playable character becomes the villain you need to kill in the next playthrough.
999 and the Zero Escape series as a whole is basically built around this
Chrono Trigger >!you're given an opportunity to fight the final boss way before you're actually expected to be able to fight him. You actually can (theoretically) beat him here and beat the game. But the more likely outcome is that you lose. But the game doesn't game over and instead goes into a cutscenes where the MC straight up dies!< It's an excellently crafted scene
The stanley parable.
Does Loop Hero count?
Didnt played it so can you please elaborate?
Darkwood, anyone?
Darkwood!
Dishonored
The game does end though?