My current obsession, Dead Rising, at least for most of the endings (including the “best” one).
You play as a photojournalist who gets stuck in a zombie-filled mall. Depending on what you do for the 72 game hours you’re in there, you’ll either get picked up by a helicopter at the end (but the secret to the zombie plague is lost and it eventually takes over the country) or, in most of the endings including the “best” one, you manage to survive the 72 hours only to find out that you’ve been bitten and will soon become a zombie yourself. The game’s “Overtime Mode” is another 24 game hours where you can track down items that your friend the lab technician can cobble together to give you a little more time, but if you make it through that mode you go to “Survival Mode,” where the object is to survive as long as you can with limited resources until you run out of food and become zombie chow (or a zombie buddy, maybe). Still a fun game despite all that, though.
There was a controversial game named “Harvester” a number of years ago. It was actually banned in some countries.*
You play a normal boy transported to an idyllic 1950s town in middle America. As envisioned by the evil spawn of Rod Serling and David Lynch on acid. You work your way through the game with increasingly violent solutions to the presented challenges. At the end, you are presented with two endings, neither of which is particularly agreeable. However, there were a few puzzles that allowed non-violent solutions, and I have often wondered whether it was possible to get through the game without actually using violence. If so, there might have been another ending that I’m not aware of.
- It is a bit strange to think of what was once considered unacceptable when one can now watch a beheading on the Internet… :dubious:
Oh, I thought of another one. In Live A Live, each chapter is its own self contained story. In the knight chapter, you start out on a typical RPG quest to free the princess who has been kidnapped by a demon. You enlist a party of heroes and set out to the demon’s lair. However, after the battle, things go horribly wrong.
Half your party perishes when the demon’s lair collapses, and the princess was nowhere to be found. Dejected, you head back to the castle. While there, the king is found murdered, and you’re the main suspect. You are called a demon by the entire town and exiled. You decide to set out to the demon’s lair determined to find the real demon and set this whole thing straight. Once you get to the top of the lair, you find your old party member, who you thought perished, but was instead the one conjuring up the illusionary demon the whole time. You fight and defeat him, and win the princess. The princess however was in love with the magician, and kills herself right there. With nothing left to live for, you become the demon you set out to kill.
Well, God Of War starts off with your character commiting suicide…of course it turns out alright in the end, but damn Kratos has it pretty bad for 99.99% of that game.
Ok, so that’s not quite what the OP was looking for.
Blood Omen : Legacy of Kain. The main character in the end either must die, along with all other vampires, or raise up a vampiric empire and devastate the world.
I just remembered, Legend of Dragoon. At least one of the main characters dies, maybe two…my memory of the ending is fuzzy on that point.
In Final Fantasy X, the protagonist learns that if their mission is successful, he kinda disappears forever.
That’s gotta suck.
Durn it. I was going to say Pac-Man.
Most rpgs (old ones) requires a proper choice to start. They were very tough to finish if you didnt pick a magician in the beginning. If you pick warrior the beginning was easier.
Thinking of more RPGs, both Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross have at least less-than-upbeat endings available, depending on when you end the game. You can end Chrono Trigger so that Reptites rule the world, for instance. Also, you can’t get the good ending of Chrono Cross first time through.
Really? Where does killing actual humans become necessary?
You do know that it is possible to force Anna Navarre to open the locked door for you by throwing a gas grenade in just the right place and run past her, yes?
On the wild chance there are people who haven’t played the game yet…
[spoiler]You know all those guys you knock unconscious on the supertanker? The supertanker you then blow up? They probably don’t swim too well whilst unconscious.
And all those people at Area 51? There are a bunch of bodies lying around dead because somebody nuked the place. Now who’d do a thing like that?
Then, if you choose the Feudal State ending, where everybody goes back to a simpler life, I believe Tracer Tong was talking about a death toll in the billions due to loss of trade, power, pharmaceuticals, education, transportation…[/spoiler]