do video games EVER have satisfying endings?

xpost

The beginning for FFX2 was the best part. It set the mood and general stupidty of the game in motion.
I haven't finished Quake 3, but the first 10 or 15 minutes of that game are fantastic.

Final Fantasy VII had a pretty fulfilling ending as I remember, what with the cinemas and the lions having taking over the verdant green future world after a bit of credits.

I always liked the endings for Street Fighter II. They were dinky, but always had some funny little thing about the characters, like Gorbachev welcoming back Zangief or Blanka's mom.

http://www.vgmuseum.com/end/snes/

I don't know if non-members can see these:

http://www.gamespot.com/features/tenspot_bestending/

http://www.gamespot.com/features/tenspot_readers_endings/index.html

as are the ones in the article andrew farrell linked to (the first article--didn't read the second one yet). now THAT's the kinda shit i was looking for.

http://www.vgmuseum.com/end/snes/d/cro1a-117.gif

There are a few other things like this in the ending. I won't bother listing them all. That ending is like a giant puzzle, with no real reward for solving it. I love it.

Okay, well, here's one more thing from the ending: there's a doctor in the rainforest. On your first trip through, when the enemies are relentless, you'll no doubt be pretty beat-up. The doctor there will treat you; however, he won't do it for free. At this point, you're pretty far from civilization, and an attempted walk back isn't possible due to your physical condition. Here's where the man snorkeling in the river comes into play. He'll loan you some money, acting as an ATM. He'll also charge you a five-hundred-dollar fee for each transaction. Somehow, you end up owing this guy money. You have to pay him back at some point in the future, or he assures you he'll track you down.

Well, most people forget to pay him back. This results in your father calling your house after the credits to tell you that some man from the rainforest called him about some money owed. He informs you that he paid him back, and then hangs up, and that's how the game ends.

When the final boss is defeated, Mother 2 riffs on the original Dragon Quest one last, long time. In that game, when you defeated the Dragon Lord, you had to walk all the way back to the first castle. Normally, walking any distance in a Dragon Quest game is a kind of chore. You're going to get into battles, and that's going to deplete your hit points, no matter how strong you are. If you're strong enough, of course, you'll be able to conquer your main goal with no trouble. So the battles on the way to a goal take on a feeling much unlike the battles you fight in order to gain levels. However, at the end of the game, none of this is relevant. On your final walk to the first castle, all of the poison marshes have been replaced with flowers, and all of the enemies are gone. Mother 2 repeats this kind of device in its ending, only it lets you walk literally anywhere in the game world in your journey back to your mother's house, where the credit sequence begins; all of the places you visit provide interesting experiences, and every townsperson says something new. Should you so choose, you can walk all the way from the town of Scaraba and into the Deep Darkness Jungle. Around this time, you might remember that you have a bicycle somewhere. And you might also, finally, realize that your three partners have gone back to their respective homes. You're free to ride the bike. You might have put it away, into storage, so you'll have to call your sister from a payphone. You probably don't have any money, so you have to use your cash card to withdraw some from an ATM before you can call your sister. She'll send the bicycle via the curious courier service she runs out of her bedroom, and you can then ride your bike through the desert and into the waters of the rainforest. The sound of the bike pedaling through the water is eerie. It's something you've never heard in the game before. Not only that, it's something you could have very well played the whole game without ever having heard.

There are a few other things like this in the ending. I won't bother listing them all. That ending is like a giant puzzle, with no real reward for solving it. I love it.

Okay, well, here's one more thing from the ending: there's a doctor in the rainforest. On your first trip through, when the enemies are relentless, you'll no doubt be pretty beat-up. The doctor there will treat you; however, he won't do it for free. At this point, you're pretty far from civilization, and an attempted walk back isn't possible due to your physical condition. Here's where the man snorkeling in the river comes into play. He'll loan you some money, acting as an ATM. He'll also charge you a five-hundred-dollar fee for each transaction. Somehow, you end up owing this guy money. You have to pay him back at some point in the future, or he assures you he'll track you down.

Well, most people forget to pay him back. This results in your father calling your house after the credits to tell you that some man from the rainforest called him about some money owed. He informs you that he paid him back, and then hangs up, and that's how the game ends.

i remember that monkey island 2 also felt very satisfying and bittersweet?

and that is hilariously otM

(Jordan, BWT is on ps2 I think! I'm not sure what mother2 is on)

Fuck everything else that happens, the key is a very challenging but defeatable last boss character who doesn't feel cheap (cheap meaning the fighting isn't intense inasmuch as just requires you to run through the process a half-dozen times or more to "figure out" the way to win) and/or multiple final boss forms slash minibosses or what have you, so that when you DO actually win you feel like you BEAT something, you didn't just compulsively continue to press A/click a button just to see some different graphics and hear different music.

Katamari Damacy is fun but totally fails on this point since the white-knuckle bitch stage was in the late middle of the game and "make the moon" is a cakewalk. Kind of like how Bionic Commando for the NES is cheapened by putting the FUCKING JUMP AND DIE ONE MILLION TIMES stage (area 6) smack dab in the MIDDLE of the game and after that it's pretty much all downhill by comparison.

Anyway.

Also, the ending of Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time on N64 is nigh-on perfect.

Chrono Trigger has lovely epilogues but it's really kind of a wash as far as excitement goes. All this fantastic buildup and plot thickening and then "Oh, well here you are at the end of time. You can finish the subquests on the side or you can go to the final villain right now. Oh look, big bad Lavos is a piece of cake at the level you've reached, as long as he doesn't do that one thing he randomly does sometimes. Guess you should just save and fight him multiple times until he doesn't do that." BOFUCKINRING. LETDOWNRAMA.

Trying to think of turn-based RPGs that DIDN'T have an ending like that and I can't, the only ones with good challenging climactic battles are all "action RPGs." The FF series in particular seems to excel at completely inconsequential, mediocre final bosses.

A game with good bosses is Sonic Adventure.

xpost

The closest I can come up with to non-narrative closure would be going to a stand-up arcade machine and beating the high score, but that's still got all the elements of a narrative in it. I think if something has closure then it MUST have narrative by default, but now we're getting into totally lame PHIL 410 territory and I'm not interested today.

I think the difference here is whether the narrative in question is about YOU, and the experience YOU had spending time with the game and getting good at it and finally beating it, or whether it's about some dude in a really really poncey outfit who never goes to the bathroom ever finding his way back home after saving his unrequited love interest from being turned into an obsidian monolith or some shit.

F = Freeze,
D = Defrost.

(or assigned to the extra side buttons on my USB gamepad)

this all reminds me of this story thread on achewood. you won't be disappointed if you click! it's funny, promise.

I have a messed-up way of approaching video games though, I would much rather play on a moderate difficulty and win than challenge myself with the hardest difficulty and maybe win but probably lose. I worry that this says something about me on a really deep level.

Getting to see/hear/do new things in a game is a huge source of satisfaction and enjoyment but I think next to overcoming a nice challenge it's not up there. Engineering difficulty properly in a game so that the last levels are tough enough without being cheap or nigh-impossible has got to be excruciating, though, drawing new pictures is a much simpler way of building in satisfaction in a game.

Sometimes I think game stores should have a genre category for "Frustratainment." Brought to you by GameFAQs.com.

It was pretty fun. It kind of stagnated when we got cease and desisted by Square for using some of their tiles in a demo.

Is the original Chrono Trigger worth getting? I have never played it....

Anyone ever play Earthbound? It was targeted at a younger audience but it was still fun (according to my roommate):

http://outerspace.terra.com.br/retrospace/materias/consoles/imagens/parte26/earthbound.gif
http://www.flyingomelette.com/reviews/snes/screens/ebonett.gif

My roomie also LOVES the fan translation of the FF5JP (3US was 6JP, FYI) ROM. A lot of the combat text is totally broken, but the game is genius. Essentially, your party never changes throughout the game, except sometimes you loose people. The characters have to wear "costumes" and maintain a separate level in each class they have a costume for. I'm told the PS2 games are like this, but not as well done. The graphics for each character in each class are great and it adds a great strategic element to the game. Additionally, some classes have abilities that work outside of battles, like the ability to detect secret passages (at a certain level). I want to play it once it is fully translated.

i guess i'm trying to distinguish between games that end by resolving their story in a really satisfying way, and games that end by giving the player a really satisfying final gameplay experience.

not that two are mutually exclusive.

but that's what i was getting at with the narrative vs non-narrative idea.

Earthbound is one of the most annoying RPGs I've ever played!! Fuck that kid!!!

Chrono Trigger is pretty essential. In the future, Chrono Trigger is going to be another one of those games where you have to know about it to be able to talk about games with other people. They will have 100-level courses at public universities where all the students have to learn about Pacman, Donkey Kong, Metroid, why Mario 2 was so bad & hated (I liked mario 2) and Zelda 3 and Chrono Trigger.

I need to go get Secret of Mana again maybe. The SNES had so much GOOD SHIT. I can't believe I never owned one.

Metroid for SNES was another good game. The only thing that sucked was if you fell into that area with one energy tank, a savepoint and the only way out was to do that next-to-impossible wall bounce shit. I could never get out there properly and I lost one game thanks to saving down there. UGH

I really need to start backing up my ROM collection so I can stop re-DL'ing shit every couple of months when I want to play it again.

Properly hard turn-based RPGs for consoles, the one that comes to mind right away is FFT, though since the storyline (non-random) encounters are all fixed-level you can still pump yourself up at the beginning and screw up the difficulty. Personally I don't seek out grinding and try to just fight through as best I can which is probably why I spend half of every battle (and most of my money) tossing phoenix down like nobody's business.

FF1 was properly hard, if you ask me, for the NES. And Earthbound, above, was a pain in the ass. But usually "properly hard" in the context of a battle system where your decisions are "fight, magic, item, flee" just means "fucking annoying as shit" if you ask me.

I've wanted to check out fft for ages tho, I will now!

FF5J has been completely translated for some time now, hasn't it? There was a version floating round for a while that had all but the ending done, but I think that got fixed.

There was also a PS1 port, but it's disappointingly awful. I think I switched off in disgust when I realised they'd turned Faris into a comedy pirate. Also, the music is *wrong*. I think they used a different midi instrument set for the playstation version, and it just feels *off*, somehow.

In terms of time and effort put into playing vs quality of ending, Capcom's Breath Of Fire 3 is perhaps the worst offender. 50 hours plus playing time = a twenty-second animation and some credits. I would've preferred it if they'd at least stuck in a caption saying "THANK FOR PLAYING!! YOU ARE BEST ONE!!"