Respectful disagreement #2: Why bad endings to games do not always ruin them

Ok, so undoubtedly since the rise of story-driven game titles in the late-1980s particularly with the Castlevania and Legend of Zelda franchises, there have been those few special games for whom many are enthralled by until they get to the ending and are crushingly disappointed either by the final boss or the conclusion to the games' overarching story.  Perhaps the greatest examples of this in recent years are Mass Effect 3 (2012), Halo 2 (2004) and the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy (2009-2014).  Now for the first two I have to say that the anger towards their controversial endings was somewhat misguided.

Out of these three examples, Mass Effect 3, the final segment of the massivley popular trilogy of space-adventure epics featuring what many call one of the best video games of all time (Mass Effect 2 (2010 for PC & Xbox 360, 2011 for PS 3)), probably gains the most disproportionate hatred for its admittedly pretty weak ending.  Now don't get me wrong, while I didn't perhaps get into the franchise as a whole (with exception to the final level of the first game and most of the second game of course), I do freely admit and firmly beleive that the three not-all-that-dissimilar endings of the third game were pretty bad and didn't represent the full potentional of how the developers and designers could go about ending this truly epic storyline.  I don't think its as much a mishandling of the material as it was a struggle to find a suitably epic ending to the story of the franchise and while the epic aspect in this case was more than acheived, the actual excecution and meaning of it was cluttered, flimsy and each different ending on its own and also compared to each other were pretty weak compared to the enticing end of the third game and the heart-stoppingly action-packed ending of the second one.

But did the ending of Mass Effect 3 really ruin the game as a whole?  Okay sure, the ending was a pile of crusty wank but the game itself was still suitably epic up until that point, the gameplay was almost as good as in Mass Effect 2 and the impact of your choices in previous games as well as in the current one had a deep, meaningful set of both moral and philosophical implications to them.  Regardless of how you look at it, even with the shitty ending, Mass Effect 3 still works as a game and experience.  Think of it like having the best 3-course meal you've ever had but when the waiter offers you an after-dinner mint he/she instead sucks on an imperial mint for 30 seconds then spits it at you but then apologises for doing so.  ....Ok...that metaphor might be a bit extreme but you get my point.  People applauded the game itself for staying true to its predecessors while allowing for a more epic story and more difficult and challenging circumstances within which the refreshingly simple game mechanics could truly flourish.  Combining this alltogether with the series' recurring aspect of allowing decicions made in playthroughs of previous games to impact the story of the current one and you have am experience that is emboldened by so many well received strengths even going so much as to include.

Of course this is just the opinion of one person, a man who in fact has never been any good at any of the Mass Effect games.  Regardless, even as soemeone who sucked as bad at playing these games as Square-Enix are at convincing everybody that the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy was worth any good will, I have to admit that the story of the Mass Effect series is something so bombastic, large and epic that you have to admire it for its scope as it just manages to elevate itself above the crappy ending at the end of the thrid game.  Yet sometimes there might be a bad ending which when looked at closer, actually reveals a clever thematical and narrative ploy to raise the plot of a game from average to hihgly enthralling.  Take a step forwards, one of the most famed and popular FPS games of all time, Halo 2.

Image taken from: http://www.avwproductions.com/techheads/wordpress/why-halo-2-is-the-greatest-game-of-all-time/

To all extents and purposes, one could just as easily argue that the Halo Series (2001-) has as much of an epic storyline and plot as that of the Mass Effect games.  In Halo as in Mass Effect, we follow an elite corps (in this case the mighty spartan marines) as they combine with the united forces of either humanity or an allied galaxy to fend off the advances of an enroaching alien speacies hellbent on total annihalation.  I was perhaps never that into the Halo games as much as my two best freinds Brendan and Sam (aka Thunderrunner487 and Telescuffle respectivley) perhaps best shown by how a good chunk of their millenial memorabilia is tied to the original Halo trilogy while mine was tied to games like Spyro: Year of the Dragon (2000) or Company of Heroes (2006).  Regardless, I have to admire the Halo series for combining its likewise bombasitc and enthralling storyline with its refreshingly simple gameplay and sometimes very relatable characters particularly in games like Halo Reach (2010).  It is perhaps not too hard then to see why the series as a whole has gained such a widespread following in the mainstream gaming public and why my freind Sam (aka Telescuffle) has pointed out to me that his favourite game in the franchise to this date is Halo 2.

Image taken from: http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/File:Halo_2_028.jpg

But what about the ending to Halo 2 that has so many people up in a tizzy when they talk about it?  After all, the game was released in 2004 and so its been quite a while since the initial controversy about Halo 2's ending has died down.  If you don't know however, Halo 2 ends with Master Chief (the main character of the series) boarding a battered warship headed towards a swirling sapce battle around planet earth asked by the character Admiral Hood what he is doing before Cheif calmy replies "Sir, finishing this fight" as the game then fades to black after which the credits roll.  In a purely thematical sense, I can perhaps see why people were pissed by this ending when the game first came out as it is indeed very abrupt, leaves little closure on the story of the game individually and leaves us unsure about the fate of Master Chief other than his oncoming glory in the fight that he's yet again heading towards. 

Now to be fair, this would be frustrating to a first time player.  However, contextualised within the game itself and the original trilogy as a whole, the ending to Halo 2 makes a twisted sort of sense.  The game itself rides narrativley upon the idea that humanity is in a desperate struggle with the alien forces known as the covenant and the flood,  in order to defeat this threat, Master Cheif and the player are repeatedly thrown into harsh and bloody missions throughout with many citing Halo 2 as having some of the hardest in the franchise to date.  Therefore, the openess of the ending leaves it up to the player to realise that as the initial threat has been dealth with, there is still much to do and it is only up to Master Chief (and in turn the player, thus creating a narrative connection between Chief and the player) to deal with it and thus 'finish the fight'.  This in turn creates an interesting advertising and narrative hook as 'finnishing the fight' was the general tagline of Halo 3 (2007) resulting in a strong narrative link between the two games.

Image taken from: http://www.avwproductions.com/techheads/wordpress/why-halo-2-is-the-greatest-game-of-all-time/

Now personally, my favourite game in this particular franchise will always be the orignal Halo: Combat Evolved (2001) which revolutionised the idea of the modern FPS after the era of Doom and Quake and before Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007) came along years later and came to dominate the culture of modern FPS games in the 7th game generation.  Arguably, next to games like COD4, Unreal Tournament (1999), Serious Sam (2001), Resistance 2 (2008), Battelfield Bad Company 2 (2010), Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2 showed that simple gameplay combined with a straightforward plot intertwined with large scale situations and stakes and threatening situations that challenged your abilities as a gamer and hero could not only create for a grabbing game that shook you to your bones but drew you into its gameplay and story to play more and pay more attention to it.  I've certainly experienced this with some series that I've had alot to complain about such as the original Dawn of War (2004-2008) quadrilogy or the Supreme Commander games (2007-2010) but Halo 2, out of most of the games that seemed to define late-6th generation storytelling and gameplay acheived this more than most as Halo 3 went on to become one of the most highest-grossing games of all time and one of the best reviewed and most popular FPS games of recent memory.

So with Mass Effect 3's ending expained in a technincal sense and the ending of Halo 2 explained from a standpoint of narrative storytelling and player interraction through gameplay and dialogue, where does this leave the also controversial ending of Final Fantasy XIII developed by Square Enix and released in 2009?

Image taken from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_XIII

Now in comparison to the Mass Effect  and Halo series, with exception to Final Fantasy VI (1994) and Final Fantasy IX (2000), I've never had a huge amount of interest in the Final Fantasy (1987-) series as a whole or even for most of the individual games.  However, as a (for the most part) indifferent game to the franchise, I can understand the attraction of the series within itself as a whole and within the individual games thanks to the enthralling RPG elements, the usually epic storylines, the engaging struggles of the characters and the inclusion of some of gaming's most iconic and nastiest vilains like Final Fantasy VI's Kefka or VII's (1997) Sephiroth. 

But anyway, enough contextualising, what about Final Fantasy XIII's ending.  Well, this might sound bad, but I really can't remember much about what the ending was like or what it represented.  This might stem from how unengaging the plot of the game was or how much I disliked the main protagonist Lightning or how much the game seemed to drag later on or how disinteresting the main vilain was but I really can't remember much about this game's ending.  At the end of it all (a nice little reference to Final Fantasy Dissidia's (2008) final boss there for you all) Final Fantasy XIII is a perfect example of not involving your player through some means or another (for me it was mainly the grinding length of the game and the unlikeable main protagonist) which in turn kills the involvement of a player in the game's ending and story.  Now I've played good games with one or two aspects that have killed the prospect of a good ending such as Darkstar One's (2006) ending being incredibly cheesy and going against the style and ethos of the game or Max Payne 3's (2012) ending which was severley weakened by the suprising unlikeability of the main character souring the ending.
However, whereas those games were still enjoyable for the most part and were only partially soured by their endings, I didn't enjoy Final Fantasy XIII for the most part, wasn't drawn into the main protagonist's main struggle despite their shortcomings like in Darkstar One and as a result, combining this with the excrutiating length of the game and its disgustingly sequel-bait ending, I couldn't bring myself to remember or care much about the ending after I finished slogging though the game as a whole.  Subsequently, when I found out how much of a sequel-bait ending the game had with the onset of overly-expensive paid-DLC and a trilogy that not even the most devout Final Fantasy fans asked for, I felt deflated and disinterested by Final Fantasy XIII's ending.

As a result, I think that the evidence is pretty clear from looking at these three games that it isn't a bad ending that ruins the game, its a bad ending combined with either a bad or unengaging game that ruins the game.  Mass Effect 3, despite the ending that essentially went against the entire series and all it stood for, did not ruin the overall experience either I nor many gamers had with the game itself.  On top of this, the prospect of cheap DLC soon after the game's release that sorted out some of the narrative problems of the ending sweetened the deal a bit and besides, from my viewpoint at least, I would argue that the ending of Mass Effect 3 was not just down to bad writing but perhaps a great deal of admirable but misplaced overambition.  Halo 2 in turn is perhaps a greater example of misinterpreted storytelling a-la the ending to Dawn of War 2: Chaos Rising (2010) that tried something ambitious, pulled it off, but could've perhaps done with being a bit clearer and more elloquent as telling from the general reaction to it.  Final Fantasy XIII in turn is an example of how even with great production value and design as well as graphics, a game that does not involve the player on a personal level or interest them as such will fail regardless of the ending and even if the ending is good (which it wasn't in this case), the game will still struggle to rise above it's flaws, especially if it's a poor follow up to a series of very popular games.

But hey, even if you still don't get it, let me sum it up to you guys with this analogy.  Mass Effect 3 and Halo 2 are like classy dinners with great service and music where the starter is a 5 star meditteranean tapas and the main course is a perfectly seasoned and well cooked moussaka but the pudding is just a bag of jelly beans served on a paper plate.  Final Fantasy XIII on the other hand is a takeout from a crappy 2-star chicken 'n'chips shop where your order is late and wrong, the only music on hand is the same 5 tunes all day from Capital F.M radio and the server has left a hair in your vanilla milkshake when you clearly asked for chocolate.

Game review #8: World of Tanks

In this modern day and age, video games have come along way from when they were simply pixelated adventure quests about unlucky-in-love Italian plumbers or matches about tennis as shown by moving white blocks that had to captivate their audiences with little else besides retrospectively primitive graphics and game-play with little pretence towards a story of sorts.  In this modern day and age we now have games that are able to focus on all of these holy tenets of video games by combining increasingly realistic graphics with more extensive writing and immensely more advanced game-play on consoles that are a world apart in sophistication compared to the consoles of the 1970s and 1980s.  However, with this advancement also comes the possibility that some games such as Final Fantasy XIII or Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots will focus more on the storyline and eschew game-play in order to advance the plot which let me tell you, is far from the best method of immersing the common gamer in your game.

That's where games such as World of Tanks, made by Wargamming Studios and designed for use on computers, comes in as this particular MMO (Massively-Multiplayer-On-line) has no story whatsoever and virtually, if not entirely, focuses solely on game-play and the development of game-play over story.  Now I am most certainly impartial to both story and game-play-biased games, but when a game such as World of Tanks concentrates solely on game-play and manages to do it so well as the first Mario land games in a day and age when story holds such a strong reign over much of modern gaming my black, bitter heart soars to the heavens above.  Now if you don't know what an MMO is, its a game where you advance slowly in a large-scale on-line community by participating in adventure quests in small parties and battle against mythical creatures as shown by the much-acclaimed World of Warcraft series in order to achieve higher ranks and better equipment and skills.  In World of Tanks you advance in tiers rather than ranks and most of the game-play rather than some of it is based around harnessing your personal skills in combat.  Initially you start off with a slot for a vehicle in your garage filled by the first tier vehicle of each of the playable nations which include; the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, America, France, China and Nazi Germany.

As expected with all MMO's, when you start off in World of Tanks you will be very weak and most likely die allot  however, the more you battle, the more you will inevitably learn the weaknesses and strengths of each tank and earn greater amounts of experience points and in-game credits to advance to higher tiers of tanks.  On top of this, the relative ease with which you will be able to advance up the first few tiers of vehicles will allow you to try out different tank types (specifically; Light tanks, Medium tanks, Heavy tanks, Tank destroyers and Self-propelled artillery) from each individual nation to properly sum-up what the play-style of your garage will inevitably represent.  As is also the case with allot of MMO's, some content in World of Tanks can only be bought with real money with which you can by in-game 'gold' which allows you to create more garage slots and buy 'premium' tanks which are unavailable by other means except as a gift to be bought outside of the game itself.  However, the good thing about this is that it is not always necessary to advance without buying gold and that when it is necessary  most 'premium' tanks and other similar actions that are only available through paying real money don't cost too much money unless you buy higher tier 'premium' vehicles or a year-long 'premium' account.

That's enough for the technicalities, let's now move on to the glorious, tread crunching, armour-smashing, cannon-blasting tactics and types of game play that are to be found in this world of steel beasts!  As mentioned before, there are six nations and four types of tanks, the differences between the different types of tanks are in themselves, very notable, but what is even more important to take into account is the play-style attributed to each tank tree of each country.  One of the foremost countries in the game is Germany: these tanks are generally good for their wunderbar-tough armour, range of their main guns, ability to penetrate heavier armour and, in the case of heavier heavy tanks, tank destroyers and self-propelled artillery vehicles, fearsome damage output.  On top of that, the Germans also have some of the highest amounts of health points on their top/tenth tier heavy tanks and tank destroyers.  The one problem with the Germans however is their speed and manoeuvrability   despite having tanks on their medium and light tank trees, many German tanks lack the speed and manoeuvrability of their main rivals, the Soviets.

The Soviets are largely at the other end of the spectrum of tank design in the sense that they seem to mostly focus more on the damage output of their main guns, speed, manoeuvrability and well-designed rather than simply thick-as-mushroom gravy armour.  therefore, unlike the German tanks which excel at holding flanks and sniping, Soviet tanks equally excel at ambushes due to their low profiles (heights), flanking attacks and close-range assaults.  In contrast to the Germans, the main weaknesses of the soviets are lighter armour on many tanks (excluding the frontal armour on the most popular soviet tanks amongst the heavies and tank destroyers such as the KV-5 heavy and Object 263 tank destroyer), lower penetration and accuracy on the guns of many heavies and some artillery and some tanks that take the Soviet penchant for speed so far that they take a great deal of taming in order to prevent crashes.

Similarly to the Soviets, the tanks of the Chinese also centrally focus on speed, well-designed rather than heavy armour, manoeuvrability and damage output on the main guns.  The reason for this is that seeing as how all of the tanks are from the years between 1917 and the end of the 1960s, and this was the period that communist China and Russia were very close allies, it is only natural that the communist Chinese government which came about much later than the one in Russia holds some influences of Soviet tank design.  The one thing that sets out the Chinese apart from other nations however is that whereas the other nations all have individual tank trees, all Chinese tank trees share the same first 5 tanks imported from other countries; the French FT-17 (tier 1), the British VAE type B (tier 2), the Japanese Type 2597 Chi-Ha (tier 3), the American M5A1 Stuart (tier 4) and the Soviet T-34/76 (tier 5).

Similarly, the French also start off their tank trees rather oddly in comparison to other nations.  Whereas the tanks of other nations are generally slower the higher the tier they are, French tanks oddly enough start off snail-like slow while the higher-tier French vehicles go faster than an ice-cold bottle of French white wine on a warm summer's afternoon. On top of this, tanks of tier 5 and below for the French tend to have very tough armour for their tier while the higher tier tanks have comparatively weak armour for their tiers.  However despite these oddities  the French combine well-designed armour, guns with great penetration and rates of fire, heavier tanks with both crazy top speeds and auto-loaders (loading chambers that allow you to fire in quick succession) to create lower tier tanks that excel at defending and higher tier tanks that can overrun the enemy superbly through flanking attacks.

In comparison to all these nations, the American tanks may seem to be the most balanced and perhaps suit players with a generally flexible and freestyle approach to this type of game.  Lower tier American tanks on all branches and higher ones on the medium branch follow the speedy, raider-like approach as most Chinese and Soviet tanks, many American artillery vehicles rival German and Soviet ones in damage output, the Americans have great frontal-armour like the Soviets and French and also like the French, have guns with great penetration, accuracy and rate of fire.  What makes the American vehicles stand out from the crowd however is the terrifying range of their main guns, damn tough turret armour and finger-licking' good acceleration.  With these advantages in play, many American vehicles are able to find de-elevated positions,  dig-in, snipe away the enemy's health and move with immediate alacrity when danger rears its ugly-ass head. However, the one downside to these fine examples of American ingenuity is that for the most part, the hull armour on American tanks is pathetic meaning that they are best used in sniping positions and on un-defended flanks.

Lastly we come to one of the most talked about nations of them all, the tea-drinking, roast beef-scoffing, pint -guzzling, queen-glorifying bejewled sceptre that is Great Britain.  Naturally, as it was the British who invented the battle tank you would expect British tanks to be the best designed and most powerful in the game, but as it is they are not the most damaging and have some rather odd designs indeed my old-chaps.  For the most part, the British tend to have some of the lowest damage outputs for their main guns and have only just been introduced into the game recently meaning that they only have tank trees for mediums, heavies and tank destroyers.  Furthermore, the British heavy tanks are compounded by nail shatteringly, irritatingly un-couth and downright 'I dare say!' slow speeds between tier 4 and 8 while medium tanks of the same tier have armour that is notably easy to penetrate.  However, the British are surprisingly versatile for a number of play-styles in the sense that all British tanks have good accuracy, guns with great penetration, 10-year-old-Christmas-cake-tough frontal armour on higher tier vehicles and in the case of most light, all medium and some heavy tanks, the British are superbly mobile with truly splendid top speeds.

Subsequently, it might be a good idea to fight up the first few tiers by yourself or with just a couple of friends by creating a temporary 'platoon' to go into battle with each other.  However, as your garage and kill-ratio progresses, you may find it more preferable to join the many number of clans that are constantly battling across the world, specifically ones centred in the country you live in.  There is no reason to do or not do this depending on your viewpoint but if you take one bit of advice on how to play World of Tanks it is this; always co-operate with your team-mates and promote teamwork through your actions otherwise it might not only be the enemy team you find firing armour-piercing shells at you.

In conclusion; I strongly recommend this game.  I know it may seem daunting with all this speak of multiple play-styles and nations to be found in the game but that's all part of the fun of playing World of Tanks as it allows you to be creative and have fun playing the same game in an uncounted number of different ways.  What makes this game truly fabulous aside from the increasingly sophisticated physics engine, increasingly refined graphics and increasing variety of vehicles is the fact that it is totally free!  OH FREAKING YEAH!!!     This game is so free I could write an essay about how marvellous it is to simply go onto www.worldoftanks.com or .eu, click 'play for free', wait to download the game for 2 minutes and make yourself a well-earned cup of mint tea while the game takes its time to install which despite the wait is well worth it as you then venture forward into the World of Tanks.

Oh and BTW: congratulations to the World of Tanks European server on it's 2nd birthday!