Witch Hunt's Ending is Horrible

You know, I’ve been playing video games, predominantly RPGs, for a good, long time.  Like, almost the entirety of my life.  In the years and years since that fateful day that I hamfistedly shoved a Crystalis cartridge into my NES and turned it on, I have seen the good and the bad of almost 400 different RPGs, and become intimately familiar with the genre’s ins and outs.  I have seen the good of RPGs, and I have seen the bad of RPGs, and though the nuances of each may change from game to game, it’s difficult, these days, for a game to truly just take me aback, completely boggle my mind.

But it does still happen occasionally.

Let me paint you a picture.  Let’s say you’re playing an RPG.  It’s a game whose premise is that a young woman, both a princess and a talented witch, has suffered the unfortunate indignity of having her boyfriend transformed, via another, more evil witch’s magical curse, into a chicken.  This princess, Cybel, thereby embarks upon a quest to lift the spell from her boytoy, renaming him Double 0 for her own amusement and bringing him along for the ride, assisted in her quest by her best friend and a small assortment of allies met along the way.  The plot is pretty straightforward, but enjoyable enough for what it is, as they travel through various settings on their way to confront the evil witch who’s been terrorizing the kingdom.  Fairly average, but pleasantly lighthearted overall, with a slight Halloween-ish vibe with its zombies and graveyards and creepy mansions and skeletons and whatnot.  Appropriate for a game about witches.  It’s even got a between-areas transition map that pulls up as you go from 1 part of the game to the next, very much like the transitions between stages in the Ghosts ’n Goblins, and Ghouls ‘n Ghosts series.  Neat!

Anyway.  The adventure proceeds well enough to its conclusion, with its adventurers determined and in good spirits throughout (well, most of them; 1 guy’s kind of the Shaggy of the party, but an appealing coward is good for levity, anyway).  The heroes confront the evil witch, clean her clock (somewhat literally; part of her deal is throwing a bunch of animated furniture and other household items at her foes), and the big twist is revealed of who she really is (another Scooby Doo-esque element, now that I think about it).  After her defeat and the reveal, the party as a whole gathers in a hallway, and the protagonist goes into the evil witch’s study to demand some answers, and a less avian look for her beau.  Some dialogue is exchanged that better explains why the evil witch was doing her evil thang, and then, at long last, the spell is lifted from Double 0.

And it turns out that it’s the wrong goddamn chicken.

Amusingly enough, seems that somewhere along the way, the party inadvertently switched their own cursed brother-in-wings with another similarly cursed guy.  The evil witch had a fondness for polymorphed KFC menu items, you see, and there was a whole monastery a little ways back filled with literal dumb clucks that the party had passed through, at which point the exchange was unwittingly made.  This ain’t Spirited Away; 1 Chick-Fil-A victim looks about the same as the next to Cybel.  They even have the same profile picture.

Anyway, the blacksmith who has now been uncursed runs around the room, amusingly swearing violent revenge upon the evil witch and, for that matter, all witches everywhere, which I found rather unfair given that 2/3 of the witches he’s encountered in the last few days have been trying to save him from his curse (if admittedly by accident).  The evil witch and Cybel shout at each other a bit about the mix-up and who’s to blame for it, and then...

Oh, wait.  There is no “and then.”  That’s it.  Fade to black, with a vague message questioning whether Cybel would ever see her boyfriend again, the end.  Over.  Done.

I thought I’d done something wrong.  Honest to Irori, I figured this was a feature.  I mean, the game’s treatment of legs of the journey like stages from Super Ghouls ‘n Ghosts had me convinced that there was more to this.  See, in SGnG, when you beat the game the first time, the princess tells you, essentially, “Yeah, thanks for stopping by, Arthur, it’s all great about the saving-me-quest and everything--but I can’t help but notice that you’ve come here without my bracelet on your person, and I am not going back to my castle looking anything less than a perfect 10.  Get your ass back out there and bring me my bling; the next time you show up here, you better be putting a bangle on it.”  And then you have to replay the entire game from the start, beating it with the inferior weapon that is Little Miss High-and-Mighty’s enchanted slap-bracelet, before you can see the real ending.

So when I beat Witch Hunt, and saw that ending, my first impression was that Aldorlea Games must’ve taken a page out of Capcom’s book.  No doubt I just had to play through the game a second time, perhaps at a higher difficulty or using the New Game+ carry-over items to enter a secret area inaccessible the first time around, or something like that, and then I could see the real ending to the game.  The idea that this could be the 1 and only ending to this game was so unreal a possibility to me that I had actually booted the game up again to go through it all a second time before I decided, just to play it needlessly safe, that I should probably post on the developer’s forums and get a confirmation that what I knew must be the case was, in fact, true.

It was not.

Indinera Falls himself (who, from what I can tell, basically IS Aldorlea Games all on his own) responded, and was good enough to save me another 10-ish hours on the game by letting me know that this is, indeed, the 1 and only ending.

Witch Hunt is a game which is, start to finish, about saving one’s boyfriend from being cursed to be a chicken.  Saving the kingdom from the evil witch that did the deed is an admirable side benefit, but ultimately, the entire purpose of the game is an NES-era-esque video game quest to save a dude and live happily ever after with him.  And then, after 10+ hours of pursuing that goal, that doesn’t happen.  Witch Hunt is about taking on a classic quest, and then completely failing it.

Except that even saying that isn’t accurate.  Witch Hunt is not “about” that failure.  There’s nothing about the game that prepares one for, that narratively or aesthetically lines up with the idea of, a game where the good guys don’t win.  Witch Hunt doesn’t carry itself like something with a message, or a point to prove, about the unfortunate realities of life, and how one lives with them.  It ain’t Rakuen.  Witch Hunt doesn’t comport itself with the gravity of a game to which a happy ending is questionable, or even unlikely.  It ain’t Shadow Hearts 2.  Sure, it’s got plenty of spooky stuff in it like undead-overrun graveyards and evil hell baby demon things and whatnot, but I can’t emphasize enough how much closer it is to the all-in-good-fun Halloween kind of spooky than it is to something actually frightening or disturbing.  Witch Hunt doesn’t conduct itself like, A, some study of humanity being gray rather than black-and-white, or B, some treatise about the possibility that one can’t change fate, or C, some argument that there are such things as lost causes which we have to accept.  It ain’t, A, Fallout: New Vegas, or B, Fallout 4, or C, someone extensively playing Fallout 76 in an attempt to induce a strong enough case of Stockholm Syndrome that he no longer regrets his purchase.  Witch Hunt just acts like a basic, straightforward RPG about a quest to cure a magically cursed chicken, throughout its entire course.  I won’t go so far as to say that the ending is as self-contradicting as Mass Effect 3’s was (because what possibly could be?), but there is absolutely no part of Witch Hunt with which this abrupt, You Failed ending has even the slightest shred of narrative symmetry.

THIS is the only ending to Witch Hunt.  This.  An ending which gives the player absolutely no closure whatsoever regarding the entire core quest around which the game is built.  An ending which leaves its protagonist’s happiness completely ambiguous.  An ending which won’t commit to whether some poor, innocent kid will or won’t live out the rest of his substantially shortened days watching over his shoulder for Popeyes workers.  An ending which leaves the entire rest of the party, all the other important actors to this play, just sitting patiently in a fucking hallway.  After an entire quest’s worth of trials together, interactions, and cooperation, these major characters are just stuffed into a hallway and written out of the story!

Here’s a freebie to any aspiring writers out there: if you’re not a pretentious foreign film director with ambitions of premiering in the basement of a family-owned antique shop to an audience of 3½, then the process of sitting in your dentist’s office as you wait to get called in for a root canal shouldn’t be an indistinguishable experience from the final moments for 90% of your cast!

Imagine if you went through all the trouble of fighting off an alien invasion in Startropics 1, only to find out that Mike’s uncle was actually kidnapped by an entirely different bunch of aliens and he’d missed his chance to save him.  Imagine if, instead of making a long ending montage of each party member summarizing who they were and as major components to the game’s story, Final Fantasy 6 did that only for Terra and everyone else just hung out in the airship’s lounge offscreen, unacknowledged, forgotten.   Imagine if you got to the end of Chrono Trigger, and beat Lavos, but it turned out that a giant meteor hit the planet 5 minutes later and the future was destroyed anyways, and before Marle, Lucca, Robo, Frog, Ayla, or Magus could even say anything about it, a big ol’ “BUT THE FUTURE REFUSED TO CHANGE” got slapped up on the screen and the credits began to roll.

Imagine if Toad said “But our princess is in another castle!” and it was actually just the end of the game.

Now, in the interest of giving the full story, I should note that Indinera Falls has explained his motivations for this ending as being rooted in an enjoyment of open-ended conclusions, a greater appreciation for unhappy endings than the alternative, and a wish to emulate the kinds of endings one may find within a horror movie.  I have...many thoughts on that, most of them strong, and very few of them complimentary.  But I try to go a little easier on Indie creators, and I already said my piece to him directly on his forums anyway, so I’ll just point out a few brief rebuttals:


A: As mentioned before, Witch Hunt is a far cry away from having the kind of dark, twisted style and sensibilities that could make a horror movie’s kind of ending work for it.  It’s a damn game about saving a guy from being a chicken with generally positive and determined, even plucky, party members, a good-natured and well-intentioned protagonist, a comical profile portrait of the chicken in question, a mildly Shaggy-esque complaining coward character, and so on.  Not a cynical, twisted tale by any means.*  I mean for heaven’s sake, the cause of this unfortunate ending is that someone grabbed the wrong chicken at some point--that’s the kind of setup you see for a gimmick in a sitcom.

B: Different media have different narrative conventions that do and don’t work for them.  Different media have different avenues of telling their stories, different levels of engagement in an audience.  What works well in 1 format doesn’t necessarily work well in another--just look at Cats’s transition from Broadway to film.  An empty, meaningless conclusion of doubt, despair, and loose ends may very well work for a horror movie, but a movie occupies its audience’s attention for roughly 2 hours and has to be, as a result, focused very strongly on the events that move it forward, in most cases.  Witch Hunt is a game that took me over 10 hours to beat, with lots of interactions between party members who established themselves and their personalities well, and a strong focus on its (many times) stated goal of saving a guy from being the prop to a Game of Thrones meme.  Completely abandoning these characters and this cause to deliver an “open interpretation” unhappy ending like this is a completely different thing for an audience who’s only given 2 hours to simply watching a bunch of events transpire around some lightly-defined characters than it is for an audience who’s invested over 10 hours into actively assisting a party of personalities that they’ve gotten to know with some relative intimacy!  Even if Witch Hunt HAD been a game akin to a horror movie in its tone, it’d still feel insultingly careless and stingy for its reward of its player’s hours of efforts and for its payoff for its developed, familiar cast’s involvement to be so ambiguous, empty, and curt!

C: Making something open-ended is not the same as just suddenly dropping it altogether.  Witch Hunt’s conclusion feels like a discourse that ends because your phone died, not because you intentionally ended a conversation to keep it short.

D: Unhappy endings can be truly great ways to conclude a work, to bring forth its message.  The sadness of Rakuen’s ending gives us inspiration in seeing that it’s possible to weather such tragedy and be all the greater for the memory of that which has been lost, and that a short existence can still be one that had great meaning.  The tragedy of Shadow Hearts 2’s ending is a testament to the character of Yuri, to the love between him and Alice, and to the idea of being able to die as oneself rather than lose what makes one the person one is.  Severed, Eternal Senia 1, Grimm’s Hollow, Children of Zodiarcs, each has an ending with at least a hearty dose of unhappiness to it, and each unhappy ending fulfills a powerful purpose of emotion and/or philosophy.  But Witch Hunt has an unhappy ending that’s only there for its own sake; there’s nothing it does, no narrative quality or idea put forth, nor emotional poignancy created.  An unhappy ending doesn’t have value just because it happens to be less common than the alternative; it still needs to do something useful to the work as a whole, like any other part of a story.


You may recall that while I found the overall finale to Millennium 5 to be pretty good, the ending itself was surprisingly, even shockingly, brief and meager, leaving the player starved for details of the outcome to a quest they’d invested 5 separate games’ worth of effort and time into.  I’ve always just assumed that this was an isolated case of tripping at the finish line...but now, after my second foray into the creations of Master Indinera Falls has found a similarly but more even more harshly flawed ending, I worry that this may be a signature flaw to the developer.  I’ll give the Aldorlea Games catalogue a few more tries, of course--heaven knows I’ve extended many more chances to less deserving developers in the past, so it’s only fair--and hopefully I’ll be proven wrong and bad endings aren’t a trend with Aldorlea Games.  But even if that does, hopefully, come to pass, the ending to Witch Hunt will remain a noticeably black mark on this developer’s record.














* And I think it’s probably worth pointing out here that Aldorlea Games DOES know how to create an RPG that’s got a level of darkness to it.  I’m almost done playing Laxius Force 1 as I write this rant, and although it is mostly of a fairly average fantasy atmosphere, there are a good number of moments in this game where some serious, shockingly gruesome shit goes down.  That’s not to say that an ending as awful as Witch Hunt’s would work at all as the ending of Laxius Force (and here’s hoping it won’t be), but at the very least it would have a more understandable thematic connection to a game that at 1 point has a surprise gunman start blowing heroes’ heads into gory chunks than to Witch Hunt, a game whose darkest characteristic is that its set design looks like something inspired by the shelves of a Spirit Halloween store.  Had Indinera Falls wanted to design a game whose story and approach could adequately accommodate his preoccupation with lazy horror movie endings, it seems reasonable to believe that he could have, making the disparity between Witch Hunt and its conclusion all the more baffling and inept.