top 10
10. Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver
Here we have another example of a game that deserved a better ending than it got. The concept and main character of Soul Reaver were so freaking cool that it could only be a disappointment to finish of Raziel's first adventure by conquering a mediocre - at best - boss fight, and then seeing your anti-hero avatar more or less walk through a door. Sure, it was a door in the fabric of time, itself, but trust us - it's not any more exciting to see someone walk through for it. Thankfully, a lot of loose ends and incongruities were tied up in the sequel, but that doesn't completely eliminate the sour taste of a downer ending.
9. Return to Castle Wolfenstein
Sure, you get to dispatch an evil, resurrected warlord at the end of this id Software first-person shooter, but your reward for keeping the world safe for freedom and the living is underwhelming, to say the least. You get to see Nazi boss Heinrich Himmler...WALK AWAY LOOKING DISAPPOINTED! ZOMG! And then, as if that weren't thrilling enough, you get TWO GUYS IN SUITS TALKING FOR A COUPLE OF MINUTES! Will your head explode? It just might! You know, for a company called id, these guys make a pretty subdued finishing cinematic.
8. Jade Empire
Jade Empire is kind of the red-headed stepchild of the Bioware lineup. Blessed with a cool Asian setting and the nifty concept to make its role-playing-game combat more action-oriented, it just fell down in the one are in which Bioware usually shines: Storytelling. And, unlike previous and subsequent Bioware efforts, it failed to provide at least one satisfactory ending, whether you chose the good or evil path. Some flashy lights, a ghost and an applauding crowd or two do not a rousing send-off make.
7. Silent Hill 2
The second installment in this survival-horror series is the anti-Chrono Trigger. It has multiple endings, and all of them are lame. Not that we can't see the humorous appeal in finding out that some random sadistic puppy has been responsible for all the pain and suffering you've endured throughout the game, but let's just say that it makes wading through hordes of monsters and horrible scenarios feel like it might not have been a worthwhile endeavor. Plus, the fact that Konami has never really declared any of the endings canonical chafes, a bit. Boo, uncertainty.
6. Tomb Raider
Lara Croft is an icon, and Tomb Raider is a third-person action-adventure classic ... but though the first game in the franchise has many excellent qualities, the ending is not one of them. Lara escapes an exploding island (which explodes, we might add, rather unimpressively), gets in her boat, and sails it away. It's not exactly the Ark of the Covenant being carted off for storage in some infinite warehouse, is it? Then again, any Tomb Raider ending would have had a hard time topping the game's T-Rex encounter.
5. Medal of Honor: Allied Assault
Why is it that some of the best games have the worst endings? Case in point is this World War II first-person shooter, one of the best in its class, but with an ending that makes single-handedly sticking it to the Nazis feel about as exciting as jumping onto a train while some guy says, "Would you look at that?" Oh, wait - that is the ending of Allied Assault. Wow, way to bring the thrill of victory home, Electronic Arts. We hear that's kind of how things went down on V-E Day, too.
4. Assassin's Creed
This third-person stealth and action title from Ubisoft had a killer premise, setting the player up as a badass, parkour-enabled assassin in the Holy Land during the Third Crusade. And then the ending reveals that it was all bull, part of a virtual reality DNA memory simulation thingie. Sigh. To add insult to injury, Assassin's Creed finishes by letting you wander around the futuristic facility, presents you with a few cryptic symbols and messages and then cuts abruptly to the credits. Whee. Any chance you could hook us back up to that machine and help us remember when this game was cool?
3. Halo 2
There's setting things up for a sequel, and then there's the ending of Halo 2, which was meant to get us pumped to plop down money for Halo 3, but which instead felt like a disc error abruptly ending a cutscene right when it reached the good part. It's a credit to how good the rest of Halo 2 was that there wasn't a bigger uproar about this, and that Bungie didn't engender a whole heaping buttload of bad faith among fans of the series. Good thing they finished the fight in the third installment.
2. Knights of the Old Republic II
Knights of the Old Republic II had a thematically deep and moving ending ... unfortunately; it was left unfinished and buried in legacy code thanks to a push to get the game on shelves sooner rather than later. What was left was a game that delved into some great philosophical questions about the Force and relationships in a universe in which it exists, and then just kind of said, "Meh," at the end and switched off the lights, leaving threads and characters dangling everywhere. It was a disheartening storytelling failure, especially when compared to the climax of its predecessor.
1. Jurassic Park (SNES)
Rarely has there been such a disconnect between a movie and its video game tie-in. The Jurassic Park movie wowed audiences with the revolutionary special effects it used to bring realistic dinosaurs to life. Jurassic Park for the Super Nintendo is widely panned as one of the worst games on the system, and the credit for some of that goes to its ending, in which gamers persistent enough to battle their way to the finish are treated to ... a flyover of a giant Jurassic Park logo and a hearty text congratulations. It's the antithesis of seeing that brontosaurus for the first time in the film.
http://www.gamedaily.com/articles/galleries/top-25-worst-endings-of-all-time/?page=22
