Etrian Odyssey 5's Arken

There are some things you can say that Etrian Odyssey 5 is.  A video game, for example.  An installment of the Etrian Odyssey series, naturally.  A product being sold through the 3DS.  A dungeon crawler.  A way to spend a few dozen hours of your time.

But 1 of the things you can’t say that Etrian Odyssey 5 is, is a story.

Perhaps riding high off the mild success of the previous installments, the developers of EO5 gambled that their audience had by now been trained, over the course of the preceding 4 titles, how to play an Etrian Odyssey through to the end purely by habit and muscle memory.  Figuring that they’d use Pavlovian instinct to their advantage, the creators of Etrian Odyssey just decided to forego writing an actual, present narrative for the first 4 of the main game’s 5 dungeons.  I mean, there’s a bit of a subplot--and I do mean a bit, certainly no more than that--in the third dungeon regarding a side NPC and the duty of her heritage and whatnot, but certainly there wasn’t any story leading to that moment, nor any in the dungeon after it.

The EO series is not, of course, known for its strength in storytelling.  I realize that.  Still, the previous installments in the series DID actually HAVE a narrative sequence of events to drive the game’s actors forward.  Etrian Odyssey 2 had that stuff with Arianna’s quest and the rituals and Overlord and so on, EO4 had a running story with the empire and the different races connected by the world’s history and all that jazz, etc.  And I actually kinda liked EO1’s story; it was nothing unique, but the characters were decent and the story with M.I.K.E and the righting of past mankind’s wrongs and whatnot was pretty good.  In each game previous to the fifth,* you had a reason to be exploring dungeons.  Etrian Odyssey 5, however, just lazily decides that exploring dungeons is its own reason, and leaves it at that for 80% of the title.

Oh, they did try to be sneaky about it, I’ll admit.  Shameless though they were about the matter, the game’s writers at least gave a halfhearted effort, at the end of the game, to seem at least slightly less transparent about their sloth, and shot for a retroactive “THIS is what it was all about, all along” deal.  Unfortunately, though, this ain’t Startropics 1, and what, in the hands of competent writers and ideas-men, added a welcome and surprising gravity to a game that comported itself with levity and cheerful adventure in the early days of games as narrative vehicles, does not suffice in the hands of the inept and lazy for an RPG that acts like it takes itself seriously during an age in which RPGs have an established history and expectation of storytelling.  EO5’s Arken is just not equal to the role of Startropics 1’s Argonian children.

Nor does she have the significance and weight of personality that allowed Rucks and Subject Not Found to function adequately as the sole voices of Bastion and Transistor’s story and lore.  Arken is the closest thing to a character of plot significance in this game, and yet we learn nothing of her until the absolute end of the game, nor hear any thoughts or impressions of substance from her during the entire long, long lead-up to that point.  You can’t just have the only character who knows anything important to the story or directly connects to the core purpose of the game be a complete, blank unknown for 85% of your work!  And even when, at the end of the main game’s course, Arken finally does open up to any degree, she’s mostly just spouting exposition at us--a much-needed trickle of information after the long drought that is more than 4/5ths of Etrian Odyssey 5, to be sure, but she doesn’t have any personality to speak of, so we still can’t form a connection with her, and thus we as an audience still have no stake in anything we do in the game.

With only 1 character who really matters and presents any real plot, and with that character being closer to an impassive Wikipedia plot summary page than to a personality, the act of beating Etrian Odyssey 5 is about as exciting and rewarding an accomplishment as successfully doing one’s laundry.

Now, of course, Etrian Odyssey does love its post-game extra super dungeons, and EO5 is no different.  And since Arken decides to join you on your journey through this sixth dungeon, you’d think, naturally, that this is where EO5 is gonna turn it around, develop her as a proper character, get some actual storytelling going.

Nope!  Arken may be with you the whole damn time you traverse the sixth dungeon, but she’s only going to say stuff a few times throughout the whole trek.  Mostly just when you reach each new floor, in fact.  Just about the only reason you’ll remember she’s there at all is because she pops up to let you know she’ll be waiting in the dungeon every time you leave to resupply and heal back at the town.  The most noticeable presence Arken has as a character boils down to a parting “See you soon!” message.

It’s completely baffling!  First of all, the sixth dungeon in EO5 is an even longer and more tedious pain in the ass than the usual Etrian Odyssey post-game slog, so a more active speaking presence by Arken would have been a pretty positive countermeasure to the inevitable boredom.  And if she’s not going to do anything to entertain you, why not at least have her take part in battles as a guest character?  The tagging-along-guest-fighter bit was done earlier in the game, during the technically-part-of-the-main-game-but-in-reality-basically-just-amounts-to-a-sidequest stuff with the necromancer king.  They already had the mechanics in place for something like this, and Arken’s lived in the monster-infested fifth dungeon for a bajillion years so she must know how to throw a punch.  At the very least, you’d think she’d help with the fight against the Star Devourer.  The thing destroyed Arken’s entire species; you’d think that’d be personal enough to at least warrant her throwing a rock at it, or something.

Although she didn’t seem to dwell all that long or deeply on the news that her race was wiped out in a single stroke.  Maybe they were banking on her aloofness being a selling point of how alien she is, or something.  I dunno.  Still seems like a hell of an under-reaction to the situation.

Someone explain it to me.  If the character isn’t going to speak or interact with you for more than 5 collective minutes over the course of as many hours of exploration, and those few minutes of interaction still don’t result in much character development even in situations where they should, and she’s not going to assist in combat or have any other effect whatsoever on the gameplay...then what was the point of her even being there at all?

I don’t get Arken.  And I don’t think anyone who made Etrian Odyssey 5 gets RPGs.  She’s the only mouthpiece and actor in the game’s “plot,” so-called, yet only materializes in the last 20% of the game.  She’s supposed to function as the single, solitary character of importance to what is ostensibly a narrative, yet has no personality and rarely speaks even once she’s finally shown up.  Then, post-game, they have her accompany the party through a long, frustrating dungeon that desperately needed some factor of distraction to make it more palatable, and which had a difficulty high enough that a guest party member would have been welcome...and yet squander the chance to enrich her lacking character, add purpose to the game, make the tedious sixth dungeon more tolerable, and give players a token helping hand with especially difficult battles, by having her almost never speak, say and react very little when she does, and contribute nothing in any gameplay capacity.  I don’t know how much potential one can honestly say Arken had to begin with, but one can say, with certainty, that Atlus utterly wasted all of it.













* I think.  I actually haven’t played EO3 yet.  I suppose it could also be meaningless crap like EO5.  I guess I’ll see sooner or later.

General RPG Creator Aldorlea Games's Knack for Gameplay Features

I recently played Laxius Force 1, created by Aldorlea Games, an RPG creator that’s obscure even for an Indie developer, in spite of possessing a startlingly large catalogue.  And I’m not gonna mince words: Laxius Force 1 is a bad game.  It’s not terrible--even has a few moments that are kind of good!--but there’s little about its plot, characters, villain, events, or writing style that’s compelling for more than a moment, and there are a lot of elements within it (and its sequels) that are a strange and off-putting mix of uncomfortable and amateurish.

You know that feeling you get when you stumble into a particular corner of Fanfiction.net, or Deviantart?  Like, you’ve found someone who’s got some weird and vague-but-troubling unhealthy ideas about how love and/or sex works, even though they don’t seem like they have a lot of practical knowledge about the subject, and it’s all somehow made worse because the narrative or visual quality is so hamfistedly basic that it kinda feels like a kid made it?  There’s a lot of stuff in Laxius Force that gives you that same feeling.

Here’s the thing, though: even though I had no emotional investment in the characters (and, in fact, actively disliked the majority of the most important ones), and found the plot as a whole no better than passable...by the end of Laxius Force 1, I actually found a strange compulsion in me not to uninstall the game, beat a hasty retreat, and quietly forget I’d ever played it, as would be sensible, but rather, to keep right on playing into the second game.  A compulsion which, in fact, endured long enough to take me into the third Laxius Force, too, in spite of LF2 having ramped up that uncomfortable feeling I mentioned before.*  I’m not sure I’d say I wanted to keep playing this trilogy through to its end, but I did somehow feel the need to do so.

It’s not an entirely new sensation to me.  Witch Hunt and the Millennium quintology, the other Aldorlea Games works that I’ve played, had a similar draw to me as I played them.  I wasn’t sure what it was, but this Indie RPG developer was doing something right, apparently.  And since it sure as hell wasn’t the writing in Laxius Force’s case (and while I enjoyed Witch Hunt and Millennium while they were going well enough, they weren’t amazing, or anything), I had to assume there was something about the actual gameplay that was doing it.

Certainly it’s not the most noticeable part of an RPG’s gameplay, the battle system.  Aldorlea Games titles seem to inevitably devolve, sooner or later, into a game where you’re either effortlessly breezing by enemies with 1-hit-kills and no damage taken, or getting fucking wrecked by them.  They’re like Sailor Moon: Another Story most of the time: there’s no middle ground between being overpowered or underpowered in each enemy encounter.  Not all that fun even by RPG standards, and while I don’t mind RPG Maker’s engine the way some people do, I can’t say it adds much to the experience.

No, the magic touch of Aldorlea Games is not in the combat, but rather in the slightly more mundane portion of an RPG’s gameplay: the exploration and numbers-management.  It all boils down into a few points:


A: Thorough, and creative, exploration pays.  There is a fuck-ton of stuff to find in an Aldorlea Games title.  More, I think, than any other RPG I’ve ever played can equal.  Any piece of furniture can be hiding a sack of gold.  Any bit of shrubbery might provide a curative leaf.  Any given ice crystal might reward you with a stat booster.  Bookshelves are heavy with Mind-increasing items.  1 sword hanging on the wall might be lootable.  And beyond that, plenty of bits and pieces of the background may not provide an actual item reward, but may increase parameters if examined with the right character.  Examine torches with a Fire Elemental in your party, and she might just get an extra HP or point of Resistance from them.  Check the right bit of vegetation, and your pet might just eat it and gain some experience points.  The vast majority of screens in any given Aldorlea Games RPG have secrets to be found within them.

And it’s not always just straightforward searching, too.  Of course there are tricky little secret passages here and there, as many RPGs employ, but there are plenty of hidden treasures to be found that require more than just a normal check-everything approach.  On the rare occasion, for example, it pays to check a treasure chest more than once--a few of them actually are saving their best contents for persistent robbers.  And occasionally there are tricks to finding stuff that are so unusual and unexpected that it’s a wonder anyone ever finds them--there’s this 1 spot early into Laxius Force 1 where you make a quick hop from a cave exit to a little ledge, and if you hit the opposite direction at just the right moment, the leaping character will hesitate just enough to fall down into the crevice she’s leaping, which leads to you exploring a minor cave area with a few extra goodies within it.  You only get a single chance at this, and the timing has to be quite precise--it’s the sort of secret you’re surprised anyone could ever discover (I only know of it thanks to another player’s strategy guide, and Yveen only knows how he/she found it).  Aldorlea Games has an outright obsession with hidden loot, concealed treasure rooms, and obscure, rewarding easter eggs, and the constant feeling of every location in the journey being a treasure hunt helps keep the otherwise repetitive battle-heavy experience interesting.


B: The rewards of that exploration matter.  Most of the time, when you find stuff in an RPG, be it from a treasure chest or from examining a suspicious piece of pottery or whatever else, it’s a nice, positive experience, but you wouldn’t feel too upset at missing it.  The sword in a dungeon’s treasure chest that you happened to miss would have been handy for 20 minutes or so, but the next area will surely have it or a better weapon available for purchase or discovery.  Healing items found before the endgame are potentially useful, but usually you’ll have a giant stack of them in your inventory by the end that you never had need for.  For most of the game, the stuff you find in chests and through careful searching is a minor convenience and little more, with few exceptions.

In an Aldorlea Games work, though?  The stuff you find has significance.  First of all, a lot of the stuff you find is either a variety of permanent stat-increasing items that you can use on the characters of your choice, or minor events that will increase the abilities of a specific party member.  Every now and then, you may find such an event that teaches a character a new skill, even, or an item that can do so for multiple individuals.  This isn’t just happening to find a potion and thinking, “Eh, I guess that was worth the trouble of pressing the X button, maybe.”  This is stuff that permanently strengthens your team!  If you’re thorough, you easily find enough stat boosters in the course of 1 of these games to equal anywhere from 20 to 50 levels’ worth of growth in a specific parameter!  It’s a min/max player’s dream, and even less obsessive audiences are still going to feel substantially rewarded by it.

Even beyond the stat increases, though, there’s weight to the stuff you find in these games.  You’re gonna need healing a LOT, and inn-styled rest areas aren’t always easily accessible at some points in the story--or they’re expensive enough that you don’t want to be using them too often (more on that in a second).  Further, there’s enough lingering status effects in these games that it’s a real good idea to hoard all the curatives you can get, because you never know when you’re gonna be stuck in a part of the game where your party members don’t have a spell to cure a particular status ailment that indigenous enemies are fond of inflicting.** 

Items that cause temporary beneficial effects are valuable, too--not just for the combat utility, as you might normally think, but also because there are occasions in these games where your characters require a certain stat to be high enough to garner a reward from some event or quest, and beneficial status effects may be the only reasonable way to boost the characters up to that value at that point.  There are similar situations which also give value to items that give beneficial temporary boosts--there are some NPCs in the Laxius Force trilogy, for example, who will increase a character’s stats based on the values of a different stat, and you can manipulate this with beneficial conditions to get some amazing results. 

Lastly, items used for attacks in combat sometimes are stronger than what attacks your characters can muster, or possess elements/status effects that you don’t always have access to, making them a handy utility at times.  In fact, there’ve been a good few special boss battles in my time with this developer where the only reliable way to win was to use attack items.  So yeah, even just the act of finding basic items has more weight in an Aldorlea Games adventure than it does in most others.

Next: Money.  In most RPGs, money’s a backburner concern, something that’s rarely so scarce that you need to actively seek it, and even when it’s harder to come by, that usually just means a few minutes of fighting some enemies to get some more.

In an Aldorlea Games title?  Every goddamn cent counts.  There’s some variance of this (money is much tighter in the Laxius Force trilogy, for example, than in Millennium or Witch Hunt), but as a general rule, there’s stuff you’ll need a ton of money to buy that you will really want, or that’s required for a quest, or something like that, and you’ll always be scrambling to acquire said funds.  Enemies don’t tend to drop very much of the stuff, and the ones that do aren’t usually ones you can encounter repeatedly.  Limited-time offers on unique equipment are common, quests that require you to fork over large amounts of cash to complete them are common, exchanges of money for services that permanently improve party members are common, and hell, there are even moments where you’ll have a temporary opportunity to buy an expensive piece of equipment for a character you don’t even have yet that will turn out to be the best armor or weapon they can get.  And because money is so scarce, it makes finding it, in any quantity, almost more rewarding at times than the stat-boosts.

And lastly, the equipment.  With the varying needs of stat or elemental resistances for some battles, the utility of certain beneficial effects, the occasional requirements of 1 particular stat to be boosted to high heaven...it all means that whatever equipment you may come across in your explorations may be something that’ll be valuable for you not just now, but later in the game, too.  The best equipment in the game isn’t necessarily the stuff you find at the end of Aldorlea Games titles!  The Alchemist Hat you find somewhere in the middle range of the Millennium quintology has use throughout the series.  Some of the early Relics you can find in Witch Hunt stayed on my characters up to the very end.  The Luck Ring, Key of Heroes, and Legend Sword you can find in the first chapter Laxius Force 1 are all gear that you’ll have use for right to the end of the third game!  Whereas in most games the stuff you can find is pretty much always just scaled to be slightly better than what you’ve already got, and will be sold off shortly after as new gear becomes available, there’s every chance that the equipment you find in Aldorlea Games through careful exploration will be a reward you appreciate for a long stretch of the game, possibly its entirety.


C: The quest system is rewarding.  In most RPGs, doing sidequests leads to rewards of money, experience points, items, stat increases, new abilities, and/or, most preferably, story-related content like lore, character development, and so on.  And that’s usually it...sometimes a game will have sidequests be associated with some kind of jack-of-all-trades guild keeping track of the jobs your characters are taking, so there’s some satisfaction to climbing onto the top of that, but that’s about it.

Completing quests in some Aldorlea Games, however, has an extra dimension of reward to it.  You not only get whatever tangible benefits come with a quest’s completion, but the game also does a little song-and-dance bit when a quest is completed, in which each party member involved says a little line of reaction to the fact that they’ve helped complete X number of quests--dialogue which changes as the number goes up.  It’s cute, and in addition to whatever you got for the quest itself, the characters involved also get an experience bonus that gets larger depending on how many quests they’ve completed so far.

Additionally, some characters will get a bonus stat increase for each quest completed, which provides extra incentive to have them do so--the cockatrice character in the Laxius Force trilogy, for example, gets +1 HP every time he helps complete a quest, and since you get him very early, you can wind up, by the end of the series, with close to 200 extra HP tacked onto him.  Which is a lot, when the range of fully-leveled characters’ HP tends to be between 800 to 1200.  And considering he’s already a tanky character, that’s all the more handy.

Point is, doing sidequests with this little extra quest system in place makes it all the more enjoyable to complete as much of the game’s additional content as possible.  Admittedly, I usually don’t need extra incentive to do that anyway, as I generally want to get the most out of my RPGs, but it’s still a nice little extra to grow my party members’ strength that much more as the adventure goes forward.


D: The enhancements add up.  Sure, you may only get an extra +1 Strength or a couple more HP for a character from each bonus you collect, whether it be through a quest reward, examining the right spot in a dungeon, joining a guild, or whatever.  But these little increases to characters’ stats happen a lot, and as a result, they start seriously adding up after a while, even before you count the stat-boost items you can dole out at your choosing.  It’s not unusual, from what I’ve seen of Aldorlea Games, for the value of some characters’ most important stats to be 20 - 30% derived from the out-of-battle increases they get throughout the game.  Knowing that these little bumps upward will accumulate into a respectable total keeps them feeling rewarding and relevant, even when most of them are very small increases individually.


These points probably don’t sound all that impressive on their own, in text, and to be sure, they’re minor quirks of game design.  But they’re pleasant enough, compelling enough, that they make the experience of playing some of Aldorlea Games’s works stand out.

I like each area of the game having lots of stuff for me to find, rather than just being strictly defined by the obstacles of monsters and traps within it.  I like the fact that what I’ll find while doing this exploration will often have noticeable, lasting value to me.  When I realized that items carried over even when levels and applied upgrades did not from 1 Millennium title to the next, I started hoarding the stat-boosting items I found through the whole series, and I liked the act in Millennium 5 of using 5 games’ worth of parameter increasing items on Marine’s warriors (particularly since the whole point of the series is to find them and make them strong enough to win the tournament, so the extra emphasis on their combat capability gave a special sense of satisfaction).  Had I played on any setting below Hard, I’d have probably had a lot of trouble maintaining enough losses in that game to get the true ending, with how pumped up the heroes were.  And a min/max kind of player would probably have a field day with this stuff.  I like that characters keep track of their parts in the quests of the game’s course and comment on it, and can receive extra benefits from that involvement.  And I like that making characters stronger isn’t solely the domain of leveling up, but of all the parts of playing the game.***

They’re little boons to the act of playing, but they’re frequent, and they’re many.  It adds up to something that, if not fun, exactly, at least has a significant draw to it.

There isn’t a lot about Aldorlea Games that especially stands out (and what does, such as Indinera Falls’s takes on romance and on endings, is not always positive).  But I gotta give the developer credit here: they’ve figured out some ways to enhance the basic grit and glue of the RPG playing experience, and for that fact, it’s kind of a shame that Aldorlea Games is extremely unknown.  Because I think that some of these approaches to exploration rewards, character stat development, the economy and utility of items and money making them feel more valuable to find, and so on are ones that other developers should take notice of, and start implementing into their own works.  As ever, I firmly believe that what actually matters about an RPG is its narrative content...but it never hurts to make the packaging of that content a little easier and more interesting to deal with.
















* Although, in fairness, LF2 also introduces the last of the major 4 characters, and she’s actually kind of a decent character (in spite of the laughably empty and unhealthy romance she gets thrown into), so there’s some marked improvement over the first game, too.


** Granted, this is sort of more a case of finding a way to get around a design flaw than an actual virtue, but still.


*** Not to mention that it’s a little more logical, too.  I mean, it seems to me like it makes more sense that someone would get stronger and more well-rounded in their abilities from a wide variety of actions and experiences, rather than just having repeated the same strategy to kill a fish monster for the hundredth time.

General RPG Lists: Worst Endings

Well, all, you know how it is: it’s been what they call a hot minute since I posted this list rant, and I’ve played enough relevant games since publishing that the time feels right to add onto it, transforming this from a list of 5 to a new list of 10.  A little new, a little old, let’s see what my experience with the crappiest endings in the RPG genre looks like 8 years later.



Never actually intended to do a companion to my Greatest Endings List, but (at the risk of spoiling the below content) Bioware’s works alone more or less necessitate this compilation.

I explored what made a good ending in the other list. But what makes a bad ending, really? Sure, poor writing, stupid ideas, plot holes, these are part of it, but to me, the greatest crime an ending can commit is to disappoint. There are a lot of lousy endings to games out there. The ending to Suikoden 4, for example, is amazingly boring, and provides no particular satisfaction beyond a reassurance that the torment of playing Suikoden 4 is finally over. Yet you won’t see it listed below. Why? Well, it’s not that it’s of better quality than those below, necessarily. It’s that Suikoden 4 is already an insanely boring and unlikable game. You get a lousy ending to a lousy game, you’re not surprised. It’s no worse pain to experience than the rest of the game was until that point.

Sure Final Fantasy 8’s ending makes no goddamn sense at all, but neither did anything else in the game. Its ending is stupid and nonsensical, but not unexpected, so there’s not much reason for disappointment. Sure, Crystareino’s ending is so utterly forgettable that I have, well, utterly forgotten it, but it’s a Kemco game--the entire package makes no single mark upon the player’s sensibilities, not just the ending.  Sure, you can barely call Etrian Odyssey 5’s final events an ending, but then, you can barely call everything that preceded it a story.  Sure, The 7th Saga’s ending boondoggle of time loops/corrections and a cross-species rebirth that was totally unasked for by its recipient is brief, poorly explained, badly conceived, and incredibly frustrating, but, aside from its brevity, that means it’s completely on point with the game as a whole.  It’s when you have a bad ending whose effects are felt upon a game whose quality was better, that the ending truly becomes terrible.

The other major problem I think an ending can have is a lack of closure. Now, I’m not saying that every single detail needs to be wrapped up in a game’s ending. I’m not even necessarily saying most of them have to be. But if you don’t have some feeling of satisfaction, of completeness, after seeing an ending, then that ending has failed utterly. An ending must END a game in at least some significant capacity; it must reflect a closing of the story, or at least, a closing to this part of a story. I don’t necessarily mind an ending that is a transition, such as the ending of Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga 1. The SMTDDS games are 2 parts of a whole story, and the second picks up where the first left off. But the ending of SMTDDS1 still provides all the closure the gamer needs to enjoy it. Even if it’s not the end of the story (in some ways, it’s just the beginning), it’s still the end of the first major part of the characters’ journey, a turning point in their tale of great significance. It provides closure for how far the characters have come, even as it promises that there will be more trials for them ahead.  If a game has no closure in its ending, then it has no true ending, just a poorly executed stopping point.

Lastly, just as an ending needs to have comparable (or even superior) quality to the product it’s concluding, an ending should also be thematically consistent to everything that’s led to it. You don’t end a standard whimsical Pokemon game with a gritty, blood-soaked gorefest as the Pokemon Champion fights to the violent death against overwhelming odds, for example. A developer should have an ending kept consistent with the ideas, tone, and traits of the product. Otherwise you just get a mess. You’d think this would be patently obvious, but plenty of writers are so obsessed with having their work be edgy, unpredictable, and/or some gross misunderstanding of the word “deep” that they’ll throw such a curveball at the player that said ball loops full circle and winds up hitting them in the ass.

Anyway, that about covers the most major reasons an ending can be bad, at least for me. So let’s see which RPGs have the worst ones, which games trip and fall right at the finish line.

One note: at times, the last part of the game itself is fairly inseparable from the actual ending, so some of these picks may be more a case of the finale being terrible, not strictly just the ending. I doubt the non-distinction really matters to you, but all the same, just gonna state that in advance.

Other note: Spoilers. Duh.

UPDATE 11/17/23: Shin Megami Tensei 5 added; Final Fantasy 7 has been bumped off.  Additionally, Fire Emblem 15 added as Dishonorable Mention; Fallout 3 has been bumped off.



10. Shin Megami Tensei 5

Anyone who thinks that Shin Megami Tensei 5 is a good RPG needs to look into getting a more competent surgeon to handle their lobotomies, but even by this cheap, lazy slop's standards, its stable of endings are pretty shitty.  Nothing about any of its conclusions is any good, as I have detailed previously, but since you expect a shitty, careless game to have a matching ending, what really qualifies SMT5 for this list is the fact that whichever philosophy you chose to stand by, the game spends its final moments making sure that you know either A, You're Stupid, B, You're Wrong, C, Your Efforts Were For Nothing, or D, Any Combination Of The Above.  It's like Atlus wants you to feel like a loser for having played their game, and if you somehow were still feeling good about slogging through SMT5, this was their final resort to make damn sure you regretted the experience.


9. Millennium 5

Oh, yeah, sure, absolutely.  I’ve spent 5 games’ worth of time on this series, gone all in on a quest that fixates itself on the recruitment and participation of its party members, to the goal of a social revolution of upturning class inequality...but yeah, you’re right, Aldorlea Games, completely and totally.  You’re 100% correct that after over 80 hours of my time, being there every step of the way in the herculean effort to form and maintain a team of heroes for the dream of a new and greater society, all I want is a 4.5 minute ending of Marine making an inspirational speech and a little fade-to-black text saying that she succeeded, and everything was good times from then on out.  Not-quite-5-minutes’ payoff for almost 100 hours of my time, that’s the perfect ratio!

No, no, don’t trouble yourself, Millennium 5, I didn’t want to actually SEE the society that this whole goddamn quintology has been about creating for myself.  And don’t concern yourself, Aldorlea Games, because I didn’t expect to get even the slightest idea of what the 12 allies, to whom 90% of the journey was devoted to recruiting and training, wound up doing with their lives after the game’s events--let alone all the other party members who also were major participants in the story.  I mean, I got to know that Marine hooked up with a guy who’s been on screen for about 20 cumulative minutes, what more could I possibly want from the human interest angle?  That’s certainly better than knowing whether her father, whose failing health was the instigating event of this entire adventure, got better or not!

Really, Indinera Falls, don’t worry, I never expected you to put an ending into the conclusion of your game.  That’d just be madness.


8. Deus Ex 4

Hey, SquareEnix!  You think you could maybe deign to use your ending for the purpose of concluding the game, and not just as a fucking ad for the next?  I think I had more closure to the events of Deus Ex 4 before I started playing it!

Just about the only part of DE4’s ending that actually seems more interested in wrapping up the game’s events than being sequel bait is the part that talks about the outcomes of some of the sidequests that you did...and this stupid game can’t even do THAT right, because said outcomes are reported through the Picus News Network, which DE3, 4, and Breach have all gone out of their way to point out is untrustworthy.  So the most closure you can get out of any part of DE4’s ending depends on how well you can read between the lines of a fake news report on some (not all) of the sidequests you completed.  Awesome.


7. Squids Odyssey

There is no ending.  This is an unfinished game marketed and sold as a finished game.

And I don’t mean that it was just the first of a multi-part story, which never got completed because the sequels were never made.  This ain’t Anachronox, or Ash, or Mark Leung: Revenge of the Bitch.  Not every planned multi-part epic can be a successfully completed Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga, The Banner Saga, or Millennium, and I don’t count that against a game whose series never took off past its first step...as long as it’s still a finished game.  The Banner Saga 1 and Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga 1, for example, ended before their stories were complete, but they were finished works, each reaching a reasonable, organic stopping place in the overall tale to go out on, and await the next game’s continuation.

But Squids Odyssey?  Squids Odyssey isn’t that.  It does not end at a clear, natural stopping place in an overall journey.  There is no moment of transition from this first stage of the adventure to a theoretical second.  There is nothing.  It does not end, it just stops.  This isn’t a fade to black, this is just a succession of moments, 1 moment in which the story is being told, and the next in which it isn’t any more.  I’m not even sure it’s technically accurate to include it in this rant, because to say that Squids Odyssey has 1 of the worst endings in RPG history is still to credit it too highly, to exaggerate that the game possesses something that it simply doesn’t.

Not making the situation any better is the glib, arrogant attitude that the game’s creators, The Game Bakers, seem to have toward the situation.  Besides the fact that they sell the game for $15 without any indication that what you’re purchasing isn’t a complete product--not a huge amount of money, but $15 is still the full price one might expect to pay for a comparable simplistic, shovelware-esque title--their approach to inquiries about the game’s incomplete state leaves maybe just a bit to be desired.  To wit, when asked by myself whether Squids Odyssey would ever be completed, a representative from The Game Bakers responded with, and this is a quote from the actual fucking email,

“What is completed and what is not, that is the question.”

After waxing evasive for a bit on the matter, they concluded the email with a suggestion that maybe if I bummed them a cool $500,000, they might finish the game.  When it comes to customers daring to expect to receive promised goods they’ve paid for, apparently Bethesda isn’t the only developer whose knee-jerk response is, “We’re not planning on doing anything about it.”

So yeah.  An “Incomplete” is different from an “F” only if you actually have the opportunity and intention to turn that incomplete work in, and as it looks like no one at The Game Bakers has any inclination to bother completing what they’re selling as a finished product, the fact that Squids Odyssey’s ending couldn’t make it to the party makes it well worthy of its spot here.


6. Neverwinter Nights 2

You've guided the Kalach-cha through countless dangers on his/her quest, from humble beginnings in a rural swamp town to a crusade against a worlds-threatening being of antiquity. You've seen this protagonist through assaults on evil lichs, assassination attempts by otherworldly cultures, criminal trials by the highest court in the land, adventures both great and small. You've allied and formed friendships with people of many races and walks of life, creating lifelong bonds with many men and women of the greatest integrity and loyalty, and also that drip Qara. You've stood against the King of Shadows, stayed strong and defied the odds and fate itself to defeat him. And so, how does Obsidian decide to end this long, grand adventure? What is the reward for your culminated effort and investment into this story and its characters?

Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies.

Yeah, thankfully Mask of the Betrayer and Storm of Zehir actually do continue the protagonist's story, and clear up a lot of the missing details of the main campaign’s ending (otherwise you can bet that this would’ve taken the fifth spot on this list instead), but like I said with FF7 and its shitty knockoff continuations earlier, the fact that secondary media retroactively fixes a problem doesn’t mean that the original work doesn’t stand on its own as flawed to some significant degree.  And taken by itself, Neverwinter Nights 2 has 1 of the laziest, most dissatisfying endings ever conceived. It feels like the writers at Obsidian were angry with you for playing their game to completion.


5. Witch Hunt

I’m concerned that, in terms of ending its creations, Aldorlea Games may be the Bioware of Indie developers (this will make more sense once you see some of the occupants of the lower spots on this list).  I encourage you to read my rant dedicated to how bad Witch Hunt’s ending is, but I’ll try to summarize here.  Brief, disappointing, thematically contrary to the game as a whole, and utterly baffling as a narrative choice, Witch Hunt is what would happen if “But our princess is in another castle!” was actually just the end of the game.  The ending to Witch Hunt appears to be the result of Mr. Indinera Falls’s enjoyment of low-quality horror movie endings and his misunderstanding that they can be just as functionally applied to any other genre, and/or any other medium.  The creator has said emphatically that the ending to Witch Hunt was not a case of his simply wanting to wash his hands of the game and move quickly onto his next project, and I believe him--but the fact is that if that had been the case, the result would likely not have been very different.  Honestly, if I’d gotten as invested in Witch Hunt’s cast and story as much as I did some of the games below, there’s a very real chance it would have placed even further down on this list.

Indinera Falls, if you ever read this, please try to understand and take this to heart: a decent open ending is the careful building of a story's end around a planned and thematically consistent gap in the audience's knowledge.  It is not simply the absence of material.


4. Wild Arms 4

Now how is it, after all that yakking I did earlier about a bad ending needing to disappoint to be truly bad, that Wild Arms 4’s ending can be on this list? Surely if there is any game terrible enough that its ending cannot possibly disappoint, it is Wild Arms 4. Well, you would think that, logically, but WA4 is the worst RPG in existence for a reason, folks--it manages at every turn to confound your expectations and get worse. As unparalleled as its shittiness may be, WA4 still manages to find a curveball to throw at you with its ending to piss you off.

Basically, this ending is not just wretched in the ways you would expect, given the game. It is even wretched by the game’s own wretched standards. Throughout this shithole of a game, the repulsive little irritation that serves as its protagonist has never, not once, shut his yap about how grownups should be more like kids because kids trust each other and work together and grownups only destroy and blah blah blah SHUT UP JUDE JUST SHUT UP. He has reassured his friends time and time again how they will totally be BFFF (Best Friends Forever Forever) and how unbreakable their bonds of friendship are and so on and so forth. They make pacts to always be friends, to meet up together after the game’s events, to help each other always, and on and ON. It’s safe to say that a major theme of this game by the time of the ending has been that if you are friends with someone then you should HOLD THEIR HAND FOREVER AND NEVER LET GO EVER, NOT EVEN IF ONE OF YOU HAS TO GO TO THE BATHROOM, YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND GUYS THE GROWNUPS MIGHT GET YOU IN THE LAVATORY AND MAKE YOU EVIL LIKE THEM USING THE DIABOLICAL MIND-CONTROL MAGIC THAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU TURN 21.

So what does Mr. Codependent Friendship is Forever wind up doing in the ending? Why, he becomes a forest ranger, living a life of solitude in which he never sees his friends again.

What.

So...so you’re telling me that the game that would not stop harping on the immeasurable value of positive, lasting human connections of childlike innocence and solidarity from start to finish for 50+ hours...has its theme’s poster child become a fucking HERMIT!? Why...what the...how...but...

The.

This game’s ending is not only crappy from the player’s perspective, but it’s completely inconsistent and totally opposed to every annoying, unexamined value the game has held! Jude’s ending throws his character, his outspoken never-shuts-up character, completely out the window! You literally could not have an ending more opposite to everything the game has been trying, in its terrible and idiotic way, to say. Just...words cannot describe how completely unfathomable this decision by the development team is.

Hell.

Also, I hate the ending of WA4 for the fact that, after having had the game more or less promise to the player that Racquel, the one shining light of great characterization and innovation in the whole game, would live, it kills Racquel off, off-screen, using the same method (her illness) to do so as was explicitly stated would be prevented. Thanks a lot, WA4, and fuck you, too.

Wild Arms 4’s ending: it flips you off with one hand, and flips itself off with the other.


3. Mass Effect 3

Originally, Mass Effect 3 had, no exaggeration, the worst ending I had ever seen or conceived of, in any media form. I wasn’t alone in this belief, not by a long shot, and so Bioware released an addendum DLC package to the ending, altering it somewhat to improve it. You can read all about it in the 2 rants I did about it, but in short, they succeeded in improving it, by a LOT, and addressed each of the biggest problems I had with the ending. It's still unacceptably horrible, of course, one of the most spectacular failures in the history of human storytelling that still to this day makes me ill to think about, make no mistake! But, y'know, a little less than it was before.

I still can't believe this thing's not at the top of the list. What kind of species are we, that I cannot objectively say that the ending to Mass Effect 3 is the worst ever created?

Anyway, as it stands now, ME3’s ending is not the absolute worst I’ve ever seen, but it’s disappointing, stupid, out of place (feels like someone shoving a poor imitation of Isaac Asimov into Star Wars), and makes it impossible to achieve a victory that stays true to the ideals of the series and its protagonist. ME3’s ending basically gives you 4 options:

Destroy: You sacrifice an entire race of life, along with a cherished companion and friend of Shepard (the protagonist). Needless to say, this is unacceptable to anyone who ever played a good guy Shepard, who has, on multiple occasions, spoken out against any mindset that sacrifices innocents for a cause.

Control: Everyone but Shepard lives, but only by taking the action endorsed by the game’s main villain. In addition to making the game’s focus on opposing the villain largely meaningless, this option directly opposes a running theme of the Mass Effect series, which is the danger of finding and using advanced technology that your culture is not ready for yet. Major characters in the series like Legion, ones we’re obviously supposed to take seriously, warn against this. Events in the history of the series, like the shortsighted uplift of the Krogan people, warn against this. Hell, using technology that one’s society has not earned through its own discovery is how the bad guys of the series set their trap against the galaxy’s people to begin with! Sovereign, the main bad guy of ME1, says himself that by leaving ultra-advanced technology behind for people to discover, those people’s technological advancement follows the paths that the bad guys want it to. Sorry to go into too much detail, but I want to make my point clear--as attractively death-free as Control is, it is VERY much against this major theme of the Mass Effect universe.

Synthesis: The option that Bioware obviously likes the best and wants us to pick is quite definitely the worst. It’s morally repulsive (Shepard basically violates every sentient being in the galaxy’s right to bodily self-determination, and it implies that the best way to guarantee peace is to make sure everyone is the same), it completely disregards some important character development (Legion’s Geth and Javik would be philosophically and morally opposed to this, EDI claimed to have felt alive through Shepard’s influence in the game, yet in this ending acts as if it’s a new concept to her, and more), and it’s ridiculous and makes no sense in countless ways. It also doesn’t seem to solve the problem it aims to address, since the conflict of the created rising against their creators can be easily recreated by any of the surviving people in this ending who happen to want to build new machines. It also incorporates a very similar instance of the galaxy's people suddenly gaining access to technologies and knowledge they have not yet earned themselves, so it contains the same violation of series themes that Control did. And lastly, if the Reaper-ized beings regain consciousness, as the ending seems to imply in its cinematics, it’s just creepy and horrible--they live now as twisted, sad, freakish abominations. No thanks.

Refusal: This is the only option that allows Shepard to stay true to himself and that upholds the spirit and themes of the Mass Effect series. Unfortunately...everyone dies in it. Fucking hooray.  See above thoughts on Neverwinter Nights 2.

If there was ever a perfect embodiment of the concept of tripping at the finish line, it’s the finale of Mass Effect 3.


2. Dragon Age 2

Dragon Age 2’s finale is the one that put the thought of a list of Worst Endings in my head to start with. Whether or not you liked DA2 (a lot of people did, a lot of people didn’t), the game’s finale is terrible through and through. And I mean, perfectly. If you want a perfect example of how to make a lousy finale to your story, Dragon Age 2’s conclusion is a great guide. I may find Mass Effect 3’s ending to be far more disappointing and a greater betrayal of its game and audience, but objectively speaking, even I have to admit DA2’s ending is a greater storytelling catastrophe. Describing how bad, how utterly inept it is in detail would be a rant in itself. Which is why I already made a rant about it. Go read that if you want the details.


1. Valkyrie Profile 2

I’ve mentioned this one a couple of times, but man. This is so awful as to almost be inconceivable. Valkyrie Profile 1 is a legendary game, one of the most respected RPGs and arguably the biggest feather, artistically, in SquareEnix’s cap prior to the existence of Nier: Automata. On a system remembered for some truly groundbreaking and legendary RPGs, Valkyrie Profile 1 is one of the Playstation 1’s finest, and its original copies are some of the rarest, most sought-after RPGs out there, right up there with Suikoden 1 and 2, or an original copy of The Legend of Zelda. So, what did SquareEnix do in the long-awaited sequel?

Use the finale to kill off half the cast, including Lenneth, the unforgettable protagonist of the 1st game, and then make it so the original beloved, legendary, monumentally artistic piece of gaming history never happened. The ending of VP2 is slash-and-burn storytelling at its worst, its worst, not just eliminating most of the major cast of this game, but even rewriting the history of the VP world to prevent the possibility of the original game’s events from ever happening. Valkyrie Profile 1 was, from an artistic standpoint, one of the proudest moments of the combined history of SquareEnix, and they didn’t just disrespect it with a poor sequel, like they did with Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy 10--they actually decided to erase it altogether. Even Mass Effect 3’s ending only destroyed the intangibles of the ME series, the themes and spirit of its predecessors. This one does all that and more...this ending is not just a lousy ending to Valkyrie Profile 2, it’s also an active murder of Valkyrie Profile 1.


Dishonorable Mention: Fire Emblem 15

“Only one truth is clear: War will come again, when man grows proud and slothful once more, and its flames will devour one and all, raging until the very earth itself lies scorched and bare of life.  For whatever madness lay in the hearts of gods...a darkness deeper still beats wild in the hearts of man...”

..

...Is...is that...really what you want the last lines of this game to be, Nintendo?  

Seriously...?

Yeah, uh, thanks guys, super cool of you to end a 40 - 60 hour game about bringing peace to the continent and saving humanity from a mad god with the statement that a horrific world-destroying war is inevitable because humanity is actually even worse than the villain of the story.  You do a whole song and dance through the game about how important and better it is for humanity to be in control of its own destiny, take us through all the fanfare of Alm and Celica becoming joint rulers of a new united kingdom intent on leading humanity into a bright, cooperative future of self-reliance, and then you make THIS your parting shot?  It reads like Alm got depressed and left this as his suicide note, for Christ’s sake! 

I'm only sticking this in as a Dishonorable Mention, because up until this final passage, the ending of Fire Emblem 15 is...well, "good" would be a HUGE exaggeration, but I think somewhere in the range of "minimally passable" is at least reasonable, and you wouldn't expect much better of this subpar RPG.  But this IS the final, lasting sentiment that Nintendo imparts before dropping you, so yeah, it at least deserves recognition here.  Thanks, assholes, you really know how to leave your audience with a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment.



And that’s it.  Is there anything to take from this?  I contend that the answer is yes.  There’s a certain, fundamental wisdom to be gleaned here.  Something important, something with meaning and substance.  A truth of the heart and soul which we can take with us from here on out.  I think The Game Bakers put it best when they said, “When

















* Although, given its upper management as a whole, the removal of most of the current higher-ups from Shinra’s decision-making and overall operations could only be good for the company.  With self-important morons like President Shinra, Palmer, Heideggar, Scarlet, and Rufus in charge, all of them letting a thoroughly ineffectual, unfocused idiot like Hojo run wild with their budget while consistently producing no useful results, it’s a wonder they hadn’t folded well before FF7 even opened.


** And after seeing it, you may wish you had gone on not knowing.