Four of the worst videogame endings in recent memory. No, Mass Effect 3 is not on the list.

There's nothing worse than ending on a bum note. Well, maybe getting diagnosed with influenza of the arse wins the gold, but flubbing the finale of a story people were invested in takes the silver for sure.

I'm not talking about games that that take a dip in quality in the last act, such as teleporting to Xen in Half-Life or parachuting onto the second island in Far Cry 3. Why, Knights of the Old Republic II falls apart mechanically in the last level owing to the game's turbulent development, yet I hold that adventure near and dear. No, what I'm talking about are endings that retroactively taint the preceding journey to the point that the whole thing is ruined. You don't feel the urge to replay them, despite their good qualities, nor can you ever recommend them to another player.

The ending might be an inconclusive cliffhanger that never gets followed up on, a twist that negates the premise and selling-point, a complete absence of any resolution, or a total nothing-burger that reads as disingenuous and hollow. I've got all four here without any spoilers.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (2016)

I missed the boat on the original Deus Ex, only playing it nearly two decades after the fact. The game is best known for the sheer level of reactivity that accounts for any decision the player makes, as well the social commentary that remains sadly relevant. Less well known is how the graphics are hideous, the gunplay is arse, and the progression-system awfully lopsided. The story is a stew made of every 90's conspiracy theory which was cute at the time. But I can only look back on it and wince, given how over the years the scene in question has mutated into an awful, all-encompassing zeitgeist. Anyway, I preferred the third game, Human Revolution, as it was a fun cyberpunk thriller where you repeatedly punched people in the face.

Human Revolution got a direct sequel in Mankind Divided and it had... issues. On the gameplay front it was excellent. The bulk of the story takes place in a dense district of Prague, home to countless sidequests to solve and apartments to burgle. However, the story falls into the same pit X-Men often does by trying to link real-world segregation with fantastic superpowers. Setting aside that bisexual people really can shoot fire out of their hands, I can't help but groan whenever an author tries to draw comparisons to the plight of sexy smurfs to that of marginalized indigenous folk. "Aug lives matter" is a real eye-roller.

Not helping matters was Square-Enix's meddling, as was common with all their western properties. In came micro-transactions, a half-hearted multiplayer mode nobody wanted, and worst of all, the promise of an expanded universe. Mankind Divided ends on a soft cliffhanger that never goes anywhere. There's no catharsis in taking down the terrorist who initiates the plot, as you know long in advance he's a low notch on the Illuminati totem pole. There's another act or two left for a sequel that will never arrive. When you factor the campaign and DLC together, Mankind Divided is much longer than Human Revolution was, but covers far less ground.

Ys: Memories of Celceta (2012)

Ys is the long-running series about a red-headed dude called Adol who ventures across an alternate version of Europe. The games are Action-RPGs with an emphasis on the hack-and-slash action over nerdy number-crunching, all scored to an excited electric guitar. To keep with the times the later games opted to be larger, giving Adol a party and peppering the main route with sidequests. The first two results of this shift are mixed. I never bothered with Ys Seven as the opening bored me to tears. Celceta is an improvement but otherwise a bog-standard JRPG. You move from town to town, recruiting new party-members, scouring dungeons, and fighting bosses. The game tries it hands at various systems, like a cartography sidequest and item-crafting, to limited success.

As soon as you defeat the villain, whoever he is, the game ends. There's no epilogue, no goodbyes to Adol's new friends, nothing is tied up. It just stops at the worst possible moment. Maybe it was a budget thing, but that last minute choke overshadows what few good things the game had going for it. The arc of the game is about Adol recovering his lost memories, ironically for this adventure to be in itself utterly forgettable.

Thankfully, the next game in the series was the brilliant Lacrimosa of Dana which makes an excellent jumping-on point for newcomers. It's a game with everything. Adol and a band of castaways are holed up on a desert island after a shipwreck. There are dinosaurs, time-travel, a lost civilization, and a big ape to slap. It's one part Metroid, the other part RPG, and with a sprinkling of Dynasty Warriors. Yes, there is also a fishing minigame. Most important of all, it has an actual ending that ties up every loose thread and cranks the waterworks hard to bursting. Celceta sank so Dana could swim.

The Sexy Brutale (2017)

When you think about it, there was probably at least one loop in Groundhog Day where Bill Murray grabbed a load of arse. The Sexy Brutale has a genius premise. You play a preacher who wakes up trapped in the titular casino. To progress you need to avert the deaths of each of the masked guests in attendance. Your stopwatch allows you to relive the day over and over until you get it right. However, you are limited by the fact that you can't be seen by either the guests you save or the gas-masked servants engineering their demise.

For the novelty of the premise alone I was able to forgive the game's rather shallow puzzle-solving. All you need to do is select the right hotspots in a scene in the correct order. More often than not you'll save a guest by complete accident. However, what kills the game is the turn it takes towards the end that effectively nullifies the entire premise. Imagine an adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory where it turns out there is no factory. No fat kids getting stuck in pipes, nor do multi-colored midgets sing while rolling away a girl inflated like a balloon in a scene that sparked the fetish of at least one kid watching. There was never a monster called Douglas. There was nothing in the tunnel but the puzzled men of courage, who suddenly found themselves alone with shadows and darkness. The Sexy Brutale ends on a moral that is completely wrongheaded, bringing to a close a story that's like a broken pencil; pointless to everyone but John Wick. I suggest Ghost Trick and The Forgotten City for those looking for time-traveling puzzlers that won't leave you flaccid.

Fallout 4 (2015)

It's common knowledge that Bethesda games haven't used a design document since Oblivion. This has led to their games since then being kitchen sinks of random elements that often fail to intersect. The climax of Fallout 3 railroads the player into sacrificing themselves in a poorly justified scenario where they have to flip a switch in a room full of radiation. This conflicts with the fact that three of the companions you can recruit are immune to radiation. In the original game they refuse to help, as they say ripping off the ending to Star Trek II is your destiny. In the expanded game the companions begrudgingly follow your orders, and then the narrator calls you a bitch.

This is but one of the many pitfalls of throwing darts at a board and making shit up as you go along. That's a valid way to write, hell I'm doing it right now, but it's a less valid way to develop a multi-million dollar game worked on by hundreds of people. Without a concept, idea, or theme to tie every element together, you end up with a box of half-finished toys called Fallout 4.

Fallout 4 is a "competent" sandbox game. You shoot enemies, scour loot, craft equipment, and occasionally build a shitty house. Bethesda games have been on a downward slide ever since they gravitated towards randomly-generated quests, and Fallout 4 is no exception. The ending to the game isn't by itself bad, but it shows how little Bethesda care at interrogating or advancing the setting.

The climax of the game has you align with one faction and then blowing up the other two. While there is some choice and consequence to be had, it's virtually nothing next to New Vegas. Instead of a proper ending where Ron Perlman narrates the effect of your actions, the game instead opts for a vague speech by your regrettably voiced protagonist who shoehorns in the "War never changes" line, as if to imply there was an actual theme to this story. Then you're plopped back in the wasteland and encouraged to scavenge for more junk until you're bored.

What made New Vegas so good was how much new stuff they added to the mix that defined the game. Mr. House, the Legion, the Burned Man, Fantastic, the Sierra Madre, etc. Your actions mattered in that game because there was a definite ending to the entire experience. Meanwhile, Bethesda is too safe and just shoe-horns in the same elements into every new story, regardless of logic. They care more about the iconography of the series rather than the intent behind them. Even their new ideas suffer thanks to their haphazard design-philosophy. A good writer would have made the Institute work as an antagonist simply by giving them an understandable goal.

I hated the ending to Fallout 4 because it hammered home that the series doesn't have a theme anymore. It'll always have good ideas, but those ideas will have to play second fiddle to some hot new Radiant AI shit.