10 Video Games Where The Bad Ending Is Canon – WhatCulture
These bad endings turned out to be THE ending.While the fair majority of video games serve up a happy ending as a reward for players who’ve invested the time and effort to reach the climax of their story, it’s hardly a new trick for games to offer multiple endings of varying degrees of satisfaction.If you play “poorly” or make some questionable ethical decisions in your playthrough, perhaps you’ll be “rewarded” with a bleak ending reflecting your performance, in turn encouraging you to do better next time.These bleak downer endings are very rarely canon because they aren’t usually particularly satisfying in of themselves, but rather serve as encouragement to get back out there and seek out the happier ending.And yet, every so often a game’s “bad” ending might actually be revealed to be the canon one in a sequel or spin-off – a completely bewildering revelation given how usually we’re encouraged to work towards earning a happy ending above all else.Yet it was all for nought in these games, as the sequels revealed the happy endings to be mere illusory echoes of another potential future, rather than the grim reality that actually went down…The first entry into the beloved Legacy of Kain franchise, Blood Omen, ends by offering players a choice – sacrifice yourself to ensure the vampires are rendered extinct and the land of Nosgoth is saved, or selfishly embrace your vampiric curse, leave Nosgoth a decrepit hellscape, and bask in your own all-powerfulness.It couldn’t be any clearer which ending is good and which is bad, and yet, sequel Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver opted to unexpectedly take the hellscape ending as canon, picking up with Kain having expanded his tyrannical influence after refusing to lay down his life.The big rub, however, is that we don’t play as Kain this time around. We instead control his lieutenant Raziel, who Kain kills at the start of game, before Raziel is resurrected by The Elder God and sets off on a roaring rampage of revenge.Making the protagonist of the first game the antagonist of the sequel is certainly a fun hook, and it’s pulled off quite brilliantly here.
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Source: https://whatculture.com/gaming/10-video-games-where-the-bad-ending-is-canon
