I suppose it plays like Ogre Battle and your karma made you get burnt?
Valiant Hearts 2. Hated the game. Annoying battle system in every way (except for that “coffin” weapon… best THROWING weapon in the whole game, and had an insane range. I repeat, YOU TOSS COFFINS AT ENEMIES from across the ENTIRE battlefield!). Slow, depressing story - although I played it through simply because it pissed me off so much I had to see the villains die. Especially the pedophilic, sadist, rapist demon worshipper. And I got to kill him three times. Yay. Though I cheered when one of the main chars said, upon hitting him in the final battle, “I’m sorry. Please don’t come back anymore. OKAY?”
Anyway… after all that annoyance and hair tearing, what do I get? A list of what the characters did next, and how they all died. HOORAY.
While I’m here, I just finished Wild ARMs 4… that was quite a downer. All the heroes go on to be absolutely boring doofuses, except for one, who dies. What, you can dish out the kind of damage that can practically kill God, and you spend your life being a forest ranger or schoolteacher? Whah?
Actually, it has not real karma like March of the Black Queen (I hated that system. I sucked at getting people to like me :P), all it has are events where you can choose one of two answers, and which answer you choose will have some effect further along.
There are some things that are kinda annoying though, like in the beginning where you meet a girl that’s a member of some rebel group and if you treat her badly (or just fail to save her from the people attacking her) you’ll never have the chance to unlock some extra equipment and four massive mega-death spells at the very end of the game.
(The spells are crap, but getting them or not depends on what you say after the… Seventh battle in the game, or something like that.)
DDS1/Nocturne True Demon
FFVIII. I lost…
KotOR 2’s ending was by far the absolute worst piece of shit ending ever. Hard to believe I invested almost 30 hours in that game. I know it can be completed quicker, but I really wanted to build a badass lightsaber. After seeing the ending, I forever stammed my mark of undying hatred
SO3’s ending was definitely bullshit as well. It destroyed everything I once liked about Star Ocean. I have trouble playing any of the SO games after watching SO3’s ending.
While on the subject of crappy endings, Super Bowl XL had a shitty ending, also. Still not as shitty as Super Bowl XXIII.
At least that sounds doable with a walkthrough (pretty shitty when you first play the game, still). I’ve never gone past the half of MotBQ because every time my karma starts sucking for some reason or other and I figure beating whatshername only to be executed isn’t proper. But someday, I’ll liberate that stupid continent and the people will be throwing flowers at my feet. Just wait and see. Wait and see.
You were good at comebacks though.
Actually, most (if not all) of the stuff you miss are things that you never wanted in the first place anyway, so it’s actually not that bad.
Like those four mega-death spells.
There’s one for each element (wind, earth, water, fire) and they have some crazy descriptions like fire basically being a nuclear bomb, and wind somehow boils the atmosphere. (There is also a dark equivalence of those spells. It’s just called “Death”.)
The only problem with them is that they usually do MASSIVE damage to everyone but the caster.
Which includes your own units as well. So they’re pretty much useless since by the time you have those spells, you’ll have a lot of unique characters and high-leveled normal units that you don’t want to lose, much less kill them yourself.
I’ve found one item in the game that could make them useful. If you had nine of it, when only one exists.
(A shield that makes you immune to magic. Except that sucks too, because it makes you immune to all the positive magic as well, like e.g. HEALING.)
I’d say that 90% of all that stuff is just there to give the hard-core secret hunters something to do.
Take for example those four spells. You need to gather all the “four shaman sisters” to get them. One of which is the girl you meet at the beginning.
She is one of the easy ones.
A bit harder is one of her sisters that just doesn’t like you, so you have to jump through a few hoops.
The third pretty much just tags along.
The fourth is insane. When you first meet her, she is the “Kill the Leader” objective of a mission, and you have to beat her down to below 20 health (I think) without killing her. That’s really easy when your basic attacks do up to 100+ damage so you have to kill everything else, and then throw rocks at her, because they don’t do more than 10-12 damage without a crit, and even that much is pretty rare.
After you beat her to the brink of death and she escapes comes the fun part.
You have to go to a specific town, start a training battle, use an item that MAKES IT RAIN and then leave the battle and try to leave the town.
Cue event.
It has to rain so you can meet her sitting in the rain, soaked and miserable and then convince her to join you.
I wonder how the hell anyone was supposed to figure that out in the first place.
Sure, you could get a lucky hit and she doesn’t die so you get the “she escapes” end of the battle. Sure, you do a lot of training battles in that game. Sure, the weather can change on it’s own in battle sometimes.
But getting lucky enough to get the escape-end, just happen to go to the right town, decide you need a training battle, and it also starts to rain, just because?
No. Fucking. Way.
Hmm… I think you’re referring to Deneb. The witch who likes to replace people’s heads with pumpkins.
(And I think the proper “karma-choice” to keep your alignment up would be to forgive her and let her live, but then you loose a massive amount of popularity because of the whole kidnap-people-and-replace-their-heads-with-pumpkins thing.
So damned if you do, damned if you don’t.)
You know, if you just send high-ALI units to liberate everything and keep your Lord out of combat to protect his own ALI, you can pretty much do whatever you fucking want.
THAT’s the ending? I happen to have stopped playing the game just short of the ending (I hated both the constant banging of its Anti-War message on my head and much of the exploration action - damn, this game made me HATE jumping!) so I lost interest on it eventually. Then again, considering the message, perhaps “and they lived peacefully ever after” might have been fitting.
Another famous Bad Ending - though one that makes sense in context- was one of Asellus’ endings in SaGa Frontier: She becomes the new Lord of the Mystics, and “vampirizes” her human friend, claiming she’ll be worse than the previous one and have more “princesses” (female slave lovers). In short, a Lesbian Dracula. (Wasn’t that a movie? 
) It does make sense in that she had received a blood transfusion from the Charm Lord, and spent the whole game deciding whether to fall under its influence or not, though that ending might come up as a nasty surprise, especially if you don’t know what to do to avoid it.
Oh yeah, Vampyros Lesbos. Good movie.
I didn’t mind the game that much (it was a good time-waster), but it was definitely a low point in the series for me. Particularly the music; it’s the only WA game that actually disappointed me in that regard. The rest are uniformly awesome.
Saga Frontier 2.
I loved that game when I was younger. I never understood the battle system, but that game was just so beautiful. It had the Legend of Mana kind of style combined with Masashi Hamazu’s masterful music and a historical narrative that appealed to my historical nerdiness. It even dared to pull off something with it’s main character that Square Enix would never have the guts to do now.
But, that’s the thing. One story deals with a complex political conflict with characters I actually care about. The other with a group of adventurers that’s…not really interesting. The flaw is that these two stories almost never connect or relate; is possible to ignore this during the game, but in it’s final act of sorts it comes to a head.
Because guess which story the ending totally focuses on?
Here’s a few. Some are really pretty bad. One that extremely puzzles me is that someone actually spent time to beat Superman 64. The horror…
I remember Saga Frontier…i also used to play that several years ago when i was younger…i think it was about 10 years ago. I really liked that game back then and if i played it right now i could probably get into it again…
i agree with what you have said about it being a little weak in its story even if only on one side but it affects the ending and the whole game in general…it interupts the balance of it…
I am SO glad someone finally agrees with me. Maybe I hate that game a little too much, but really, it was the worst of the series in my mind. Also, I still don’t get Why the FUCK was there a puppy? Oh, and finding out that the man who may or may not have been your dad that you met throughout the game was a collection of fucking nanobots pissed me off so much. It definitely ranks as one of my least satisfying endings in a game, ever.
I might have said Blue’s Quest from SaGa Frontier at one point, too. Mainly because It end right in the middle of the last fucking battle. Of course, eventually I got the symbolism behind it and found it very fitting. But still, very annoying my first time through.
WA4 was alright. WA5 was a fucking disaster. I liked that they went somewhere different with WA4. The WA series was always 2nd tier in terms of quality. The WA4 music was pretty decent too. I really liked the overworld theme. What I liked most about WA4 is that they experimented with it and it felt a bit fresh compared to other games I’ve played. This is the main reason I hated WA5: not only was it compeltely not original, but it was filled with shallow stereotypes I hated.
WA5’s characters were, IMO, marginally less likeable than WA4’s. But in terms of gameplay I enjoyed WA5 much more. And in terms of music there are at least six or seven tunes in WA5 that I consider great or excellent (including one of the catchiest, most upbeat tracks I’ve ever heard), and not a single one in WA4.
Going in a new direction is not a bad thing if the direction chosen is a good one. WA4 tried something new, but generally speaking it just didn’t work, which is why they took some aspects of it and refined them in WA5, and threw out the ones that didn’t work well.
I was particularly disappointed to find the total lack of postgame material other than a bunch of bosses to fight. Every other WA has at least had an Abyss to explore!
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think WA5 is awesome (no WA games really deserve that) and it’s not as good as WA3, my personal favorite, but I had quite a bit more fun in it than WA4.
Fallout 3, only for the execution.
In essence, one must sacrifice oneself, or force an ally to sacrifice herself, to purify the water in the wasteland. This is fine, a massive gesture towards your messianic role thus far in the game, and a final karmic choice to make. The logistics, however, are quesitonable. Firstly, three of the game’s hirable partners could solve the problem without any injury to themselves; one would even heal himself, on account of being a Ghoul. While one is a robot, and arguably programmed, and another holds a great deal of spite and resentment towards whoever holds his contract, Fawkes, the noble-spirited super mutant who joins you to repay your for saving him/her, for some reason refuses to go into the radiation, to which Fawkes is wholly immune, and push a couple buttons so you don’t have to die. Really? Not only that, but it doesn’t take a long time to push the buttons, why can one not spam Rad-X and RadAway for the entire time one is trapped within the chambre. Additionally, the only way to ask Lyons’ to sacrifice herself, is petulantly. Nevermind that she is a professional soldier and you are a nineteen year-old kid who has already done most of her damn job for her useless organization while just trying to find his dad, who is now dead because they were busy shooting at peaceful ghouls because they look different and couldn’t be bothered to help purify everyone’s drinking water, you are a douchebag if you do not want to be the one who dies. Finally, even if you choose to live, the game still ends, breaking Bethesda tradition, meaning you don’t actually gain anything from being made to feel a douchebag. There’s no trade-off. The game goes, “Ha, pussy, you may as well be dead, anyway, because you may not continue.”
In my head I just retconned and said my character got all ghoulified and went to live in the underworld.