Please note this post will contain spoilers for Breath of Fire III.
As you may recall, I’ve been playing through Breath of Fire III lately. Well, last night I got to the end of it, and I did something I never have in the other times I played it – I chose the ‘bad’ ending. What you’re intended to do is fight and overthrow the Goddess, who is keeping the world in a static place, in the belief that change can only make things even worse. There are hints of this throughout the latter part of the game, and she admits as much herself – but in my adulthood I’ve found her case rather more seriously presented, and compelling, than I did when I played through when I was much younger.
Now, to be clear, the game suffers from what I would suggest are poor writing decisions. One of the characters is implicated as being very much more important than you presume, but they only actually reveal this when you are talking with the final boss before deciding whether to acquiesce or to fight. Therefore I can as a player understand it all and deduce that this character is probably speaking sensibly – but it should be rather less convincing to my character. Indeed, some of the other reactions to what they learn in the very last room of the game are a bit weak as well, though it’s somewhat more forgivable because the characters really couldn’t have time to develop more complex opinions at that point.
It got me thinking about it all though. The ‘bad’ ending isn’t really presented as being all that terrible, as long as you keep in mind what the characters know rather than what you know about tropes. And what the Goddess said about the possibilities of the alternative mean it’s quite believable that they would be happy enough with the outcome. Despite this it feels a bit lacking – it’s clearly the “bad” ending because if nothing else, there’s a good deal less to it than the “good”. A lot of games seem to suffer from this sort of thing; sometimes an alternative ending is acceptably given less time, or is quite clearly the worse option to take, and very often it’s not left up to the player to fully decide whether their course of action was right. Games try to do this sort of thing, and for many “player choice” and the like is very vaunted, but a JRPG nearly 15 years old seems to make a better stab at actual ambiguity and leaving it to the player to decide the worth of what they did than a lot of modern ones with their binary DOUBLE GANDHI/EVIL LINCOLN dichotomy.
These days I would normally load up a save towards the end of a game and see the other ending(s) just for completeness. I’ve decided not to with this playthrough. It feels satisfactory leaving it where it is.
Cool. I like it when games leave the alternate endings up to choices you make, as opposed to how many stars/hidden enemies/whatever you managed to collect.
Of course, I’ve goota mention Chrono Trigger, it did this masterfully. After you beat the game, you get a “New Game +” option, where you can start again with all your previous levels and items, for the sole purpose of getting more endings. Depending on when you choose to defeat the final boss (whom you can challenge at any time) over the course of the game, you could get a ton of different endings.
But, for modern games…the modern one that stands out to me was Metro 2033.
!!Spoiler!!
Throughout this postapocalyptic game, you are being overrun by all sorts of mutants who are attacking human settlements with every increasing frequency. Some speculate that a group of super-mutants, who have evolved into psykers, are behind the attacks. That they are, in effect, “pushing” the mutants to attack through psionics.
You mount daring mission to a)re-active an old pre-nuclear war missile silo, and b) train a tracking laser on the psykers’ home to blast them into oblivion.
At the very end of the game, you have climbed to the top of a tall tower, have trained the laser, and are about to fire. At this point, the psykers invade your mind to stop you, and you find yourself in surrealistic maze. If you fail to find your way out, they force you to walk off the edge of the tower. If you do escape, you receive one of two endings.
If you kill enough people or made enough poor moral choices, you activate the missile guidance system and will destroy the psykers (who it turns out could potentially help your cause). If you sneak by enough human enemies rather than kill them, and/or make enough good moral choices, then you realize that the psykers are not the cause of the attacks, and they have been trying to tell you this through the strange visions you have been receiving throughout the game. You knock the guidance system off the tower, and the humans forge an alliance with the psykers.
Just kinda cool. I might have to go play BoF3 now lol XD
Oh wow, I’ve not had the pleasure of playing Metro 2033, but it sounds like it does that in a really awesome way! I like how the gameplay influences the outcome rather than just letting you decide at the end to completely ignore how you’ve acted throughout.
Yeah, if you’re into survivalist stuff, then Metro is a great game. The premise is you have your standard nuclear war, and the citizens of Moscow move into the subway tunnels to survive. The game map is actually based off of the real life Moscow metro system.
And, guess what you use for money? The only hard currency of any value anymore: bullets. That’s right, bullets. You can run out of ammo just buying stuff. The ambiance is really well done, and the story is cool (it was actually based off of a Russian bestselling novel of the same name). I’m not normally one for shooters myself, but this one was pretty slick IMO.
And no, you can’t just choose what to do at the end of the game; you have either fostered a capacity for mercy which allows the psykers to communicate to you that they are not the enemy, or you have fostered a capacity for ruthlessness that pushes you to value your survival above all else. You also get a subtle warning (just a screen flash) whenever you are about to make a moral choice, so you aren’t left guessing about what does and does not change the ending.
How are you? Because I am a
potatoonion.I always wonder how different games would be if the player didn’t get to see this cutscene between the bad guy who is actually your brother or whatever. Having to make decisions using only the knowledge that the character would have seems like a far better idea, really.
And multiple endings are awesome. I would love them to be alternates though, rather than just a good/bad or something.