The strangest endings in video games, ranked

Being enjoyable throughout no longer suffices. Great games require a memorable ending. They often stick in the mind for the wrong reasons. Some games end on a straight-up bizarre note, so let's have a laugh and reminisce, now that you're hopefully no longer mad at them.

Heavy spoilers to follow, of course.

https://youtu.be/2bVV9VR8kzo The Sonic The Hedgehog series of games never scored high marks for gripping drama or epic climaxes, so you know this is going to be bad, bad. By the end of Sonic and the Secret Rings, the inexplicable Arabian Nights-inspired entry, Sonic gets to make three wishes. He uses one to bring Shahra, one of the many human women he somehow has falling for him in every game, back to life. That's a good wish, but once he's all out of wishes, he realizes an immense sadness is consuming Shahra.

He attempts to fix this by asking Shahra for one final wish. Does he wish for her sadness to go away? For some smart material or immaterial change that would help with her condition? Well, no. He asks her to spawn a literal mountain of handkerchiefs so that she has something to wipe her tears with forever. This is so devoid of empathy that it'd be a great choice of wish for a cheeky villain, but Sonic does this earnestly, and it plays out as if this truly is a heartfelt way to end a story.

https://youtu.be/lwW3GV9kE84 Imagine being on the cusp of finally unraveling all the mysteries in a game and finding an emotional conclusion to your narrative, then seeing your main characters being taken away by a UFO, never to return, and never getting any sort of explanation as to why the hell that happened. That can totally happen to you in Silent Hill: Homecoming, which I assume can only be one of the most jarring experiences in gaming for anyone unaware of the series' famous UFO endings.

Silent Hill games have always had joke endings, most of which have to do with aliens and UFOs. I love them all, except for one. The thing about these endings is that they're extra. Players can only get them on second or further playthroughs, and only when players make some really bizarre choices that lead them to an equally eerie conclusion. This article won't judge the merits of optional endings in games, but Silent Hill: Homecoming's UFO conclusion isn't optional at all. The string of decisions one must make to get abducted isn't far-fetched at all, meaning it's actually pretty easy to get this bonkers but completely unfunny ending by accident.

https://youtu.be/tzpgMzP9pIg There's no more dramatic ending to a story about saving the world than when the hero sacrifices their own life for a greater cause, but that applies only when that's by the hero's own choosing.

In Fallout 3, a game that belongs to a series known for excellent experimentation with player agency, we don't really have that choice. To save the world, you are forced to enter a chamber where you'll be irradiated to death, even when accompanied by a friend who's totally impervious to radiation, who could've easily performed that task in their stead, preventing anyone from dying.

In case you're wondering, you can even actually ask your radiation-immune friend to take your place, but he'll reply with something that translates to "you know plot armor? Well, now you have the opposite of that. Time to die!"

Fans found this ending so silly that the devs decided to fix it—for anyone who'd acquire the Broken Steel DLC, that is.

https://youtu.be/Cmrq0V8Hlxw All Tomb Raider games end with Lara taking what she went to get, then stylishly running into the sunset, all except for Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, where she just dies from getting crushed after a fall. And sure, that's easily the most game-accurate death Lara could have, but it's just bizarre to see such a beloved hero meet their demise in such an abrupt manner.

It turns out that the reason for this choice was even wilder. Back in the Late '90s, the Tomb Raider series' success could only be compared to how much its devs hated making the games. What had begun as a really cool endeavor quickly turned into grueling work hours with no time to rest for years on end, so the developers took a stand.

The devs decided to kill off Lara at the end of the game because they could no longer take it, believing that the execs would just be unable to force the devs into another development cycle, since Lara was dead, and no way that capitalism would have the power to resurrect her on the fly, right?

Interesting try, but as soon as they were done with TLR, the devs had to immediately begin work again on Tomb Raider Chronicles, where we played in various past adventures as Lara's friends reminisce about her during her wake.

Now that's how you pay your respect to beloved heroes and to your developers at the same time.

The first two Mass Effect titles remain some of the most interesting sci-fi of all time, and in no small part because they truly do make the player feel like their decisions will impact the destiny of the entire galaxy. Mass Effect 3, which was made after the departure of the series' main writer, seems to forget that important lesson.

Even though it supposedly features multiple endings, which players will reach depending on their decisions, they all bring about the same underwhelming conclusion . The only real difference between them the different-colored strobes hitting the player's eyes throughout the entire thing. This is not just a bad ending to one game; it's a terrible way to wrap up a once-great series about choice.

IT so much backlash that the developers had to remake it, and somehow managed to remain bad.

https://youtu.be/HuYUoLM8BNA Video game tie-ins tend to suck, but The Lost World: Jurassic Park is special in the sense that it'd be better than the movie it's tied to, even if that movie didn't suck. It's a truly fun title that's also way superior to the Lost World tie-in for the Sega Saturn, a console featuring hardware leagues ahead of the Genesis.

Still, because this version only came out for the Genesis once most saw that console as even more extinct than the dinosaurs (in our world, not in Jurassic Park world), few know about that, or about the game's bizarre ending where Jeff Goldblum—yeah, the guy himself, not his Dr Ian Malclom character—takes one second to congratulate players on beating the game, right before going full '90s dad and telling them to go outside and try to get in touch with someone of the opposite sex.

A true masterclass in backhanded complimenting.

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