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00:00The video game industry may be littered with cliché stories about gun-toting heroes saving the world from flesh-eating zombies and alien invasions,
00:07but there are some truly deep, meaningful tales told in this medium too, and it's often easy to not fully get them at first.
00:16I mean, there's no shame in it, I'm as bad for it as anyone, but with this in mind,
00:21I'm Josh from WhatCulture.com, and these are 7 Ambiguous Video Game Endings You're Totally Getting Wrong.
00:28Number 7. Alan Wake.
00:29At the very end of Alan Wake, we see Alan sacrifice himself in order to save his wife Alice,
00:36who's been trapped by the villainous Dark Presence.
00:39He dives into Cauldron Lake, where said ancient evil presence has been lurking,
00:44and Alice emerges safely, while Alan starts typing in an underwater cabin, saying that the lake is actually an ocean.
00:53Those are the game's cryptic final lines, and a lot of people kinda come out with this title scratching their heads.
00:59I did, for about 10 years.
01:02So, what does all of this mean?
01:04Well, the answer to this ending can actually be found in the game's DLC,
01:09but many never played this extra content, and as such were left perplexed by the game's ending.
01:16In the downloadable episodes, we learn that Alan did actually defeat the Dark Presence,
01:21but his own mind had been fragmented in the process, leaving him trapped in a creation of his own imagination.
01:29The two DLC episodes show Alan fighting back against a dark version of himself,
01:34a nutter called Mr. Scratch, in order to try and return to reality.
01:39At the end of the second and final episode, Alan starts writing a new book, this time called Return,
01:45signifying his return back to the real world, where he will finally be reunited with Alice and his friends.
01:52So yeah, it's a little happier than we initially thought.
01:57Inside's ending shows The Boy, who the player has been controlling throughout the game,
02:01integrated into a giant blob-like creature, which then breaks out of a shadowy facility,
02:08killing some of its captors along the way, and finally escaping to freedom,
02:12away from the dystopian city the rest of the game takes place in.
02:16While many assume that this is true freedom for the creature, finally getting a taste of the outside world,
02:21the final shot on the beach can actually be glimpsed in the lab as you smash through it,
02:27implying that this freedom is actually just another cage, a scenario that the scientists had already planned for.
02:36It's just another testing ground.
02:38More so than this though, this is actually only the first ending,
02:42as there's a secret finale that adds even more context to this story.
02:46In this hidden scene, we see The Boy unplug some kind of mind control device,
02:51and as he does so, he becomes uncontrollable by the player, symbolizing his escape from your control.
02:58This by the way is something that will pop up in a later entry as well,
03:01so many video game writers are obsessed with the idea of control, and I love it.
03:06Anyway, the theme of this entire game is control.
03:10We think we're playing as a boy with free will in a world where everyone else is brainwashed,
03:15but in reality, the Blob was in control of the kid all along, and by extension, the Blob was also controlling us.
03:22The game provides no real motive for the player, who simply runs along to see what happens,
03:27doing exactly what the Blob and the game developers want.
03:31Number 5, The Last of Us.
03:33I know, I simply cannot believe either that I am once again dipping my head into the waters of Last of Us discourse,
03:39but hey, sometimes you just need to stare into the abyss.
03:43While the original game avoided most of the controversy aimed at its successor,
03:47it still had a few points of contention, especially in regards to Joel's final actions.
03:53Now, for the five of you who don't know, The Last of Us follows the exploits of grizzled survivor Joel,
03:58and the teenage Ellie in a world where the majority of the population have been transformed into zombie-like creatures.
04:05Ellie, though, is immune to this virus, and so Joel ushers her across the country
04:10to deliver her to the Fireflies, a faction who claim to be able to make a cure.
04:15In the end, Joel is told that in order for the vaccine to be made, the surgery will kill Ellie.
04:22So, he takes matters into his own hands, killing all of the Fireflies, and whisking Ellie away while she was knocked out.
04:30The sticking point of this for some fans, though, is the idea of the vaccine itself.
04:35Namely, that the Fireflies wouldn't have been able to create one,
04:38and that Ellie's sacrifice would have been in vain anyway, so Joel did the right thing.
04:42The argument goes that the surgery was reckless, so hey, Joel didn't doom the world by saving his new daughter.
04:49And while these things can admittedly never be 100%,
04:53it is implied that the Fireflies had a 99.9% chance of crafting a cure thanks to Ellie.
05:01Not only does this thematically make the ending hit harder, as it makes Joel a far more interesting, compelling, and flawed character,
05:08but it also emphasizes the sheer scale of what he's willing to give up for Ellie.
05:13The choice just has more weight when he doesn't doubt for a second that a cure would be possible.
05:20The fact that the writers are said to have explained that the Fireflies would have definitely made a cure too,
05:25pretty much puts this one to bed.
05:29Returnal, admittedly, is a difficult game to pass.
05:32On the surface, it's about Selene, an astronaut who has crash-landed on an alien planet and finds herself stuck in a time loop.
05:39Each death at the hands of the planet's beasties, bringing her back to the moment of the crash.
05:45Throughout the game, you have to traverse this alien planet, plunge into its depths, and attempt to free yourself from this curse.
05:52It's not that simple a story, however, as there are hints along the way that everything might just be in Selene's head, maybe.
06:01She's haunted by a faceless astronaut while on the planet, has flashbacks or dreams about previous moments in her life,
06:08and finds her own car at the bottom of the planet's oceanic depths.
06:13All of this weirdness essentially hides the fact that Returnal is telling a much more personal and less literal story than first appears.
06:22Really, everything on this planet is a metaphor for the character's grief.
06:26After suffering through a car accident that took the life of her son, and maybe even herself,
06:31Selene is stuck reliving this moment over and over, unable to come to terms with her loss.
06:38Everything she sees on the alien planet reflects her cycle of blame, no matter how much time passes.
06:44A manifested hell of her own psyche.
06:47Everything in her real life has a parallel on this alien world.
06:51Hell, even Selene's mother, who she had a complicated relationship with,
06:55also shows up in the finale of the game in the form of a monstrous but kinda tragic creature.
07:02I am admittedly just scratching the surface here, so if you want to dive deeper,
07:05I would heartily recommend Jacob Geller's video essay on this game, which helped inform this entry.
07:12Seriously, this shooter has depths that I just didn't pick up on at all the first time through.
07:18Number 3. Shadow of the Colossus.
07:20Shadow of the Colossus ends when our hero Wanda is suddenly weak and weary, with cloudy eyes and horns sprouting from his head.
07:29He turns into a shadowy beast and fights off some hunters who manage to seal him away with a magical spell before escaping.
07:36Mono, the girl who has been asleep for the entire game that he was trying to save, then wakes up and picks up a horned baby.
07:43Now, while almost everyone will be in the comments saying that this story is obvious,
07:47for a lot of casual players, there is a lot to miss here.
07:51First up, the things that we all know.
07:53Essentially, in destroying the colossi throughout the game, you are actually liberating an ancient evil
07:59who appeared to be a helpful guiding presence earlier on in this adventure.
08:03He manifests as the shadowy creature at the end and is sealed away once again.
08:09The horned baby, of course, is Wanda.
08:12Some part of him survived as a baby, but you have to have played Ico to truly understand everything about this ending.
08:19That's because in that title, children are also born with horns,
08:24so it turns out that they were actually the descendants of Wanda from this game.
08:29Mono, meanwhile, lives forever and grows bitter over time, going on to become the villainous queen of Ico.
08:38Dark Souls' story is purposefully ambiguous.
08:41There is a huge mythology there that you can dive into, but the most basic summation of it is this.
08:48You're an undead champion on a journey through a dying world known as the Age of Fire.
08:53After besting your enemies, you have the option to kindle the first flame,
08:57prolonging this age and allowing the world to continue in its current form,
09:01or extinguish it, pushing the world into the Age of Dark.
09:05Now, on the surface, this choice seems pretty cut and dry, right?
09:09I mean, fire is good, the world ending and being plunged into darkness is bad.
09:15Surely, it's better to continue civilization as you know it, rather than team up with these serpentine little freaks.
09:22I mean, nobody with this face can be up to any good.
09:26The thing is, the series increasingly made it clear that continuing to light the flame
09:32and continue the Age of Fire was probably a bad idea.
09:36By the time you get to the third game, with the age extended to the point of breaking point,
09:40reality itself is collapsing and you have no sense of space and time.
09:45You are in a hellscape that nobody would want to live in.
09:50The point of these games, then, is that change isn't a bad thing.
09:54The unknown might look scary, but you need to know when to call it quits
09:58and realize that something isn't working, rather than simply continuing with the familiar.
10:04There are bigger reasons why the Age of Fire blows as well, of course,
10:07and for a better dive into that than I can give here,
10:10I would definitely recommend checking out Jim Stephanie Sterling's Dark Souls vid
10:14that they did on their Jimquisition channel.
10:17Number one, Metal Gear Solid 2.
10:19There's so much confusion surrounding the ending of Metal Gear Solid 2.
10:22Initially about Rookie Raiden stopping a terrorist plot,
10:26the game ends with the revelations that you've been controlled by an AI this whole time
10:30and that pretty much everything you were told was a lie.
10:34Your wife isn't who she said she is, the character you're playing as is way darker than you thought,
10:39and reality as you know it begins to crumble away.
10:42While most players, including me, initially took the ending at face value,
10:47it's actually a much more allegorical and metaphorical ending
10:50about the player rather than the characters.
10:54As chronicled in a few great pieces, primarily Super Bunny Hop's excellent critical close-up video,
10:59MGS2 is all about simulations.
11:02The game itself is structured almost identically to the first Metal Gear Solid,
11:07with the idea that Raiden himself had already played through that game's events in VR as part of his training.
11:14So you're essentially playing a game about someone else who has played a game
11:19about a game that you've played before.
11:22Still with me?
11:24The whole idea of this is to get the player thinking about what this all means,
11:28about the artificiality of what they're experiencing, and what they should be getting out of it.
11:33The characters question their own reality at the end and can't grasp it because it isn't real.
11:39It's all controlled by the player, who are themselves being controlled by the developers.
11:45In the end, in that super weird scene in Manhattan,
11:48the characters decide to reject the player's control and go to live their own life with their own agency.
11:54In that sense, MGS2's ending shouldn't be taken totally literally.
11:58You can do that, and obviously MGS4 follows up on that.
12:01But first and foremost, it should be considered in these meta terms
12:05as commentary on peeling back the layers of how games themselves are made.
12:10So that's our list. I want to know what you guys think down in the comments below.
12:12Have I been talking out my backside, or do you also totally click with these interpretations?
12:18Seriously, I would really like to know.
12:20And while you're down there in the comments, if you could, please give us a like, share, subscribe,
12:24and head over to WhatCultureGaming for more lists like this on the regular.
12:27Even if you don't, though, I've been Josh. Thank you so much for watching.
12:30Thank you for putting up with me, and I'll see you soon.