Worst Endings
There are many films, books, games, etc. that are quite good, or even extremely good, the entire way through, but then are let down by a bad ending. Now, whether this ending be too short, too anti-climactic, too predictable, too far-fetched, too rushed, too cheerful and happy [that you eventually start to feel that it's overkill, and actually get angry] , too long and dragged out, or just poorly executed in general, they all have the same effect. You're left either unsatisfied or with a bitter taste in your mouth. But, unfortunately, so many stories suffer from this.
So, here's a place for you to discuss what you feel to be some of your least favorite endings.
So, here's a place for you to discuss what you feel to be some of your least favorite endings.
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So I'm going to go with the Batman: The Animated Series episode "Over the Edge". That would have been amazing as a story arc. Death of a major supporting character leading into an arc with Batman as a fugitive from a police force headed by a vengeful Comissioner Gordon. THAT would have been badass. The ending they used felt so...cheap.
Monkey Island 2 -
Yes, I don't like it. One of my English instructors, who touched on creative writing in one of his lectures, once said: "Never, ever end a story with 'And then he woke up' ". It's the most uncreative ending ever, and MI2 ends on about the same note. I didn't much participate in the "what does it mean" discussions, because essentially, I don't think it there's meaning to be found in there.
Tales of Monkey Island -
Brilliantly told until that point, one last episode just wasn't enough to tie all the loose ends. So the ending was cut short, leaving the ambitious storytelling literally butchered. The designers must have bit pieces out of their tables in retrospect.
The Devil's Playhouse -
In Purcell's comics, the deus ex machina moments were played to maximum and hilarious effect. Purcell is literally telling you: "It's all BS anyway, so why not have the villain die through spontaneous combustion?". The same attempt didn't work in the third season of S&M, because there was a different, a closer emotional attachment to the characters, leading to massive disappointment with that kind of "solution".
Movies:
Inception -
One of the greatest movies in recent years ends with the oldest clichee in the book. I concede that there was a literal "twist" to that clichee, but still it felt massively misplaced and stupid. Furthermore,
The way the alien was taken out was stupid. I really have a lot of complaints about this movie overall.
7 Days A Skeptic
A barely hinted at, really stupid, really out of nowhere, really boring, really uninspired, really dumb, really bad ending that added nothing to the story or characters.
Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood
I liked the happy part of the ending, I liked that Edward and Winry hooked up (characters I've watched since I was a young teen) and had children, and I liked how most of the other stories wrapped up. I didn't, however, like how easily Envy was taken down compared to the first series (Arakawa really missed some potential for cementing his villain status for all time; instead he jobbed), I didn't like that Riza didn't die after HAVING HER THROAT SLIT AND GUSH BLOOD, and I didn't like the fact that the villain absorbed the Truth and then did absolutely ...nothing... with his power. He stood there. He did nothing. He was boring. The battle with Envy at the end of FMA was so interesting because emotions were so high and the fight was good, but the battle with Father in Brotherhood was a pain in the ass to get through. So much potential for pathos and huge themes to be explored with Father and Arakawa was rushed through it by the damn Brotherhood anime. That damn thing is an abomination; a homunculus of anime in general. An artificial adaption that should have been made better or not made at all.
Serenity
Wash died. I don't care if it was unconventional. Wash died!!!!
Inuyasha
I'm ashamed to admit I watched this shit. I watched every episode over ten times. Then I saw the ending, finally after waiting on the broadcast to get that far. Inuyasha can kiss my ass after I slap it in the face with my dick. What a stupid poopy ending. It's like it was saying "Oh, everything up 'til now has been pointless because we're going to keep chasing Niraku but you'll never get to see it. Nyah nyah! Thanks for wasting your life on our over-dramatic romance shlock and thanks for waiting for some development when it'll never come. You little shit." And yes, I know they finally finished it. I don't care. Screw Inuyasha. Screw Kagome. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, and you can suck a monkey's **** while he ***** an alligator's mother's ***** as she ******** ***********.
Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
I do like this movie. I really do. But the temple at the end is boring, especially from Spielberg. There was nothing in it! And the aliens were boring. Give me flying brains. Flying skulls. Blobs. Anything but what we got. They were trying to go for crystal men. Think about that. Crystal men from outer space sounds badass. I could draw over a hundred better concepts of that idea than what they came up with. Overall, a shitty ending to a good adventure movie.
I have others but I'll just go straight to the mother of all endings I hate-
NEON.
GENESIS.
EVANGELION.
Dungeon&Dragons -Now we go on a mystical quest to cast ressurection on our fallen friend
Puzzle Quest 2 - Now you have defeated the evil demon and saved the paladinpr maybe not vs. Parts of the evil god get eaten by a oger
Wow. I can't believe anybody even listed this of all things.
This. I actually read the version that got leaked onto the internet before the book was released, and I hoped that it was fake because it did seem really badfic-y. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. (and how exactly did Draco Malfoy weasel his way out of life-imprisonment in Azkaban given that he was a known Death Eater?) But I was pretty disappointed in the whole seventh book in general, since to me it seems like J K Rowling just went "hmmm, how will I resolve everything? I know, I shall introduce some random McGuffins completely out of nowhere!" Though I suppose in her defence, she's so rich now she didn't even have to bother writing the last book, but she did anyway.
I hate the ending to Villette by Charlotte Bronte as well since it's purposely ambigious, not in the grey sense, but in the sense of "oh yeah, by the way my husband might have died but you don't want to know about that, by the way everyone who's been horrible to me had fabulous lives afterwards THE END!" Oh well, at least it's not Wuthering Heights. Everyone in that book is an unsympathetic douche.
Heavy Rain
WHY DO YOU KEEP DOING THIS DAVID CAGE!?
^ This. I nerdraged after reading the Epilogue to Deathly Hallows.
Honestly, I have more movies/games/books that just generally pissed me off than just the endings bugging me but here are three that I can think of at the moment:
The Dark Knight
They killed Two-Face are you kidding me? This movie started to lose me about the point they had the joker wake up Dent, because it was clearly taking on more material than it needed to. If they'd left Dent comatose until the end or something and focused on the Joker plot this would easily be on my top 20 best movies ever list. But no, not only did they have to overcomplicate and excellent plot, they had to kill off one of my favorite Batman villains.
Godzilla (1998)
Bad attempt at a sequel hook in an already terribly painful movie.
Neon Genesis Evangelion just.... Neon Genesis Evangelion do I need to say more?
Both Assassin's Creed games had me yelling at the screen each time they cut to the credits. I wouldn't say they were BAD endings, just... incredibly frustrating cliffhangers. Which is probably the point, since I immediately ran out and rented AC2 after beating AC1 and am eagerly awaiting Brotherhood so I can find out what happens next. Well played, Ubisoft.
AC2 was a little nicer, since you can find Altair's codex and read about what he did after AC1, and you get a little more of Desmond's side of the story before the game ends. I felt really bad for Ezio, though- he really got a raw deal.
Beyond Good & Evil did it, too, and there's no telling when we'll see the next game.
My feelings on book 7 are perfectly summed up in:Book 8
Also, Ink Death, Cornelia Funke's writing just went downhill in that book.
EDIT: For the youtube link skip to 1:17
Worst ending ever? Probably The End Of Time Part 2, minus the regeneration and goodbyes.
I'm weird in liking sudden unexpected things in an ending, so I much prefer if something ends like Last of the Time Lords did. Especially when he got up and said exactly what the audience was thinking.
"Hell yeah! The Timelords are back!... And they're gone..."
I liked the whole The Master kills Rasillon thing, but that is the part that majorly gets me.
Dorothy!
I spent over 20 hours slogging through that game; side quests, party interaction, getting massacred, reloading, getting massacred again...I was so happy when I defeated the Great Evil and finished the game. And then I watched the ending movie...rocks fall; everyone dies. It's the only RPG I've never played more than once.
But then you get to that cliffhanger ending, also well knowing that it was supposed to be a Trilogy, but will never be finished because Majesco wont let go of the rights for it!
Ok, so more a shout at Majesco, but at the same time, that cliffhanger ending to a great game, you will never know how ends...
(Never finished the game myself yet, but I have read some reviews)
Legacy of Kain: Defiance. I hated that ending, no clue what was going to happen and I don't like what happened to Raziel.
Of course, metrics show that very few people ever finish games all the way. Steam's stats show that only 45% of Portal players completed that game, and Portal's what? Three hours long? So perhaps it's no surprise that game endings are (mostly) rubbish.
This was what I thought the moment I saw the thread. It was the most disappointing ending I ever saw. In the quite new series about Monty Python, Eric Idle confessed that he suggested this ending, (apparently the Llama team was not responsible for that,) and that his daughter never forgave him about it. With a better ending, this would have been my favourite film. Oh, well, at least the music at the end was nice.
Also, while I didn't play it, I heard that Fable (the adventure game, not the RPG) was supposed to have an ending in which you wake up in a psychiatric hospital. So you discover that the plot was not just a dream, but a dream of a psychopath. Fortunately, the developers were forced by the publishers to change it.
I agree with Secret Fawful. Wait, what?
I'm scared.
Worst endings? Well, there's the Planet of the Apes remake (a general WTF), Halo 2 (why has no-one else mentioned this?), The Longest Journey: Dreamfall (again, a complete WTF, plus they 'killed off' one of the best characters), Doctor Who: Trial of a Time Lord (Pip and Jane Baker can't write for shit) and Mystery Science Theater 3000 (for actually ending, if nothing else).
I loled when they escaped and ended up watching bad movies togeather anyway.
Well, that's that ruined on me
But yeah, seconding the ending to Harry Potter. While we're at it, Avatar: The Last Airbender, while it didn't have the worst ending, had a pretty disappointingly bland one.
Please tell me you mean the movie and not the show, because the show ended on a pretty good mark. Speaking of which, i heard there will be a new mini series of the show coming soon, takes place about 70 after the original series, with a new avatar on a quest to learn airbending.
That entire movie was terribly paced and felt like they were desperately cramming 3 seasons of plotlines into 2 episode's worth of time. That specific death was the most utterly random and terrible scene in the film, also. Just being stabbed out of nowhere for no reason was absolutely idiotic.