So I finished playing Portal (which is an excellent game) but felt kind of depressed at the end, because after all I’d done, Chell still dies. This got me to thinking: are there any other games where the main character who you’re playing as dies at the end of the game? I don’t mean the “I got shot too many times and died, and turned the game off and never played again, so the main character died.” I mean it as an inevitability: no matter what you do, you still die at the end.
Baldur’s Gate 2, sorta/sometimes - Instead of being cleansed of your evil taint and returning to the world, you can choose to ascend to godhood and take over the role of your dead father, God of Murder - which will earn you a tearful/angry/cold/whatever goodbye from your lover if you’ve gotten involved romantically during the course of the game.
Planescape: Torment - The good ending is you dying and being sent to hell to fight in an eternal battle, to atone for the sins you committed in previous lives. :eek: IIRC the endings do actually get worse from there…
If you manage to drudge through the thing, **Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life ** (the boy version) - you die! It’s the only Harvest Moon (to my knowledge)where you cannot continue playing infinitely after the main storyline has ended. They released the girl version, and she doesn’t die at the end, but I just don’t feel like drudging through what is more or less the same game again. Plus, I think the marriagable men in that one are icky.
I think technically, the protagonist in D1 didn’t die until the end of D2, although he was probably glad by then, as his short life since that time had been composed of fighting Diablo in a terrible battle of the mind until he could no longer hold out.
The end of Phantasy Star II was left somewhat ambiguous. I was left with the impression that the characters were left to fight a hopeless battle to the death.
Maybe not quite the same thing, but in Chrono Trigger, at one point the main character dies, and you can choose to finish the game without reviving him.
In Soldiers of Anarchy, if you choose to help a group in an earlier mission, you end up with a choice in the final mission:
Become one of the mindless supersoldiers in the organization trying to bring order to the world. It is noted that you still have enough of a mind to hate your masters.
Refuse, try to fight them and get destroyed. Since the dialog and other interactions take place within the game, you can actually have some fun with this - call in an airstrike on your position just before the group arrives to give you your choice. The explosion will take out everyone. But you still get the same message that they took control, even though you presumably just took out their leader.
If you take the alternate earlier choice, the state of things isn’t much better than before (post-apocalyptic chaos), so things are not all that rosy either.
It’s certainly not quite the same thing, but things don’t end well for the protagonist in Fallout :
[spoiler]Upon returning to Vault 13 after first recovering the waterchip and then saving the world from the Master and his super mutant army, the Overseer tells you that if you were to return, your presence would encourage other vault dwellers to leave. Soon, as the best and brightest leave, the vault will no longer be able to function. So, to prevent this and save the vault, at least in his view, he refuses to let you back in. “You’re a hero, and you have to leave.” The last scene shows the vault dweller wandering off into the wastes.
Of course, in Fallout 2 we find out that s/he went on to lead a pretty good life afterwards, but the ending of the original still has an impact.[/spoiler]