The Japanese gaming industry's contributions to the role-playing game genre have provided players with a litany of classics across several generations of gaming. From time-travel thrill-rides like Chrono Trigger, to charming fantasy epics like Grandia, JRPGs helped pave the way for where the RPG has gone over the years.
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Of the many great JRPGs out there to discover, a select few have stuck in the minds of gamers for many years for one intriguing reason: their dark ending. Many RPGs over the years have provided players with several endings to choose from depending on their choices in the story. The multiple choice has allowed writers to throw caution to the wind, ensuring some truly horrendous outcomes for gamers to play through.
5 Phantasy Star 2
Shocking players for decades
Phantasy Star II
This seminal Sega release hits players with a surprisingly harrowing ending. Phantasy Star II takes gamers to the Algol Star System, where a thousand years have passed since the original’s conclusion. The game’s plot sees the immensely powerful Mother Brain, a terraforming AI, prove to be darker than initially expected.
As the plot wears on, players discover that many of the world’s problems are in fact the machinations of the original game’s demonic villain, Dark Force. Not only does this reveal put a dampener on the original’s more upbeat finale, it also leads to a war-focused conclusion. As players discover a conspiracy of greed and corruption at the very top of the game’s interstellar society, an all-out war breaks out. With no resolution, the game simply ends in catastrophic war and societal collapse, making it a stark contrast to the original and a remarkably pessimistic game by the standards of the time.
4 Persona 3
Players can make a potentially world-ending decision
Persona 3
This wildly imaginative epic introduces players to the Specialized Extracurricular Execution Squad. The outfit serves as a high schooler investigation squad, looking into the Dark Hour, a time-related threat.
Toward the end of the game, players must decide whether they will kill transfer student Ryoji Mochizuki. In a glum twist, it turns out the player character is the inadvertent host of the dreaded Death Shadow. By bringing the evil Nyx into the world, the destruction the Shadow will bring upon the Earth is seemingly inevitable, and Ryoji offers a way for the player character and everyone else to at least live peacefully until the end of the world arrives: kill him and have their memories of the events in the game removed. Should players go ahead with this, all of humanity is doomed, and a cut scene shows them living normally when Nyx decimates the world.
3 Tales of Xillia 2
A tough moral decision
- Developer: Bandai Namco Games
- Initial release date: November 1, 2012
- Platform: PlayStation 3
The fourteenth primary chapter in the well-regarded Tales series has several dark ending options for players to uncover. The action kicks off with a wild train hijacking, leading to an unpredictable narrative covering everything from medical debts to the cruel games of mighty spirits testing humanity.
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The grim ending choice sees protagonist Ludger Will Kresnik forced to decide on the fate of Elle Mel Marta. If players opt out of saving her, she perishes with a host of alternate dimensions. If they choose to help, it’s Ludger who perishes instead. Either option guarantees a sad death before the end credits. A far darker option players can surprisingly choose, however, is to kill their whole party. In doing so, the world will not be saved, and one of the spirits testing the Earth will ultimately destroy it as the arrival of new dimensions gets out of hand.
2 Soul Nomad & the World Eaters
A blood-thirsty ending
- Developer: Nippon Ichi Software
- Initial release date: February 15, 2007
- Platform: Nintendo Switch, Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 2, Playstation Network
In order to discover the evil ending on offer here, players are forced to walk down a villainous path from nearly the start of the game. The result is an extinction-level event due to the player character following the horrible whims and suggestions of the demonic Gig.
Throughout the game, Gig often lends some of his powers to the player, and frequently suggests taking grim action to move forwards. In order to get the dark ending here, players must go along with Gig’s ideas, ultimately wiping out everyone else in the world. When it’s just the player and Gig left, a dispiriting nervous breakdown story kicks in for the protagonist who, now racked with madness and nihilism, decides Gig must die as well. With no one in the world left, the protagonist collides with the gods, and defeats them as well, ensuring there’s seemingly no life left in the world in the process.
1 NieR
Rethink everything you thought
Nier
Regardless of whether players choose the Replicant or Gestalt versions of this 2010 game, an incredibly bleak ending is waiting in the wings. The game sees players take control of a protagonist living in a future world overrun by monstrous entities.
The complex plot eventually leads to players encountering the Shadowlord. This dangerous figure leads to a series of unfortunate plot twists that call much of the game into question, as players discover a disturbing conspiracy concerning the potential extinction of humanity. Despite the Shadowlord’s death all but guaranteeing this apocalyptic scenario, the player character moves ahead with taking him down. As if these stakes weren’t glum enough, it also turns out that the player character is simply a Replicant of the Shadowlord. While the game has a few potential endings to discover, the miserable nature of these plot twists and this initial finale can make for a bleak, world-ending conclusion.
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