What were they smoking?

WOw, that last post was WAAaay too seriouS and FuLl of Spellcheck. Let's reflect on a much less serious, but much more aggravating topic. Endings. Endings to anything, books, movies and games. lets talk about endings that suck.

Now, I'm not opposed to endings where the main character dies, or endings that are tragedies, or even endings where everyone forgets what happened, I'm open to almost any ending there is, the only endings I'm opposed to are endings that completely destroy the entire point of playing the game, watching the movie, or reading the book.

Ex. In a movie, everyone forgets what happened. you might as well have not watched it in the first place, because for the average amount of 2 hours, movies usually have a hard time making you really feel the experience, when you finally are inside, you then find out nothing mattered, because nobody remembers what happened, and things go to the way the were before the movie started, the only way this is countered is if it was a psychological thriller designed to make you think, but some movies now seem to think this is a good idea.

Books are a lot harder to mess up, but still possible, Ex. the entire book is based around one, or two characters, and then in the end they kill one or both characters. This just makes me want to strangle someone or burn the book. When you try your best to get the person to sympathise with a character, only to kill them off, shows nothing.

Not to say that this can't be done well, it can, certain series that i've read have shown that, but the majority of the series that do this ending are not dark or gritty, and having the character die is a massive shift from where they previously were, to tragic, a change that will alienate any previous reader.

and finally the last one to look at: games. Now it is almost impossible to get a games ending wrong, but some people were determined to find a way, and before now i believed it to be impossible for a game to be destroyed by it's ending, until I played a certain game by a certain company, and found it ended with everyone forgetting what happened, with the exception of the main character, who gets killed in the final battle, and everyone lives their lives as they would have if the game didn't happen.

I shouldn't have to explain why I wanted to burn the game, especially when the game took over two days of game time (48+ hours) to beat. This is the type of game where you DON'T want your name on the credits.

There many other ways to screw up a good thing, but this post is long enough already. I might post them in a shorter list if I find more people who don't know how to end something.