Esoteric Happy Endings in Video Games.
- Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation has a handful of initially-unrelated plotlines, chief among them a fighter pilot upset over having to retreat and abandon his family, and a refugee (who believes her fighter pilot husband was killed in the failed defense of the city) searching for her missing daughter. When allied forces finally liberate the city, are we treated to a heartwarming scene of the fighter pilot husband reunited with his refugee wife and newly-found missing daughter? Nope. The refugee's husband is actually dead, and so is the fighter pilot's family (they were killed during the initial invasion, so have been dead the entire time he was fighting to liberate them). The pilot briefly becomes a Death Seeker, but ends up a Wheelchair Woobie instead after his probably-unnecessary Heroic Sacrifice doesn't work out how he wanted. But wait, it's okay! The pilot meets the refugees after the war and they become each other's Replacement Goldfish.
- In Amnesia: The Dark Descent, you have the choice between two of these or a straight-forward Downer Ending when you finally face Alexander. If you disrupt the ritual and allow The Darkness to devour Alexander, Daniel is allowed to go free and presumably pursue a normal life... despite the countless people he helped to torture and murder as part of Alexander's plans. More closely fitting to this trope is the alternative, where you send Agrippa's head through the portal. Alexander and Daniel are both devoured by The Darkness, but Agrippa is apparently able to somehow rescue Daniel and draw him through to another dimension... which brings with it the Fridge Logic of how this is supposed to save Daniel from being tracked down by The Darkness again, which is explicitly mentioned in an In-Universe document as being why Alexander was going to simply abandon Daniel when the ritual was complete.
- In Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, Fridge Logic turns the Bittersweet Ending of Oswald Mandus making a Heroic Sacrifice to destroy the titular machine into this; yes, London was saved, but how much damage did the Machine and its Manpigs do to London before Oswald defeated it, and what effect will it have on the coming future?
- Bastion's Restoration ending, which hits the Reset Button on the entire plot and goes back to before the Calamity happened. However, it's heavily implied (especially in the New Game Plus, where Rucks starts having moments of deja vu during his narration) that history will simply repeat itself and the Calamity will just be triggered again, trapping everyone in a "Groundhog Day" Loop until the Kid chooses not to reset everything.
- Battle Golfer Yui has two different endings
depending on what you choose to do with the Big Bad's Mind-Control Device. Using it, obviously results in a bad ending where the heroine becomes the new Big Bad. Choosing to destroy it, however, frees the heroine's friend from its effects. Just as they take each other's hands, however, a bomb goes off that destroys the golf course the game takes place on, killing 20,000 people...but hey, at least the bad guy was defeated, right? - This applies to one half of the ending for BioShock 2. The part determined by how the player treats the Little Sisters akin to the previous game remains as straight as an arrow, this time with Eleanor Lamb's moral fibre being determined by this. The contentious factor comes in the form of how the player addresses three other characters with their own motivations and reasons for antagonising the player (Grace Holloway, Stanley Poole, and Gilbert Alexander), and how this plays a role in the other half of the ending. The alleged "purely good" ending requires the player to spare these three characters in addition to rescuing the Little Sisters (this nets an achievement too). However, the fate of these three characters only determines what happens to the Big Bad Sofia Lamb, Eleanor Lamb's Evil Matriarch. A lot of players would accuse Sofia Lamb of becoming a Karma Houdini should Eleanor Lamb save her, and would much prefer the ending where Eleanor Lamb kills her own mother (the factor with the Little Sisters is thankfully independent of Sofia Lamb's fate, making it possible to still have an overall good outcome while punishing Sofia Lamb). The only catch to this is that the player must kill Grace Holloway to make this possible, in addition to slaying Poole and Alexander.
- While there are several variables in Chrono Trigger that ultimately work out for the best (ie: Robo existing in the future, Crono being brought back even if you don't do so yourself, etc.), the fate of Schala is left both mysterious and yet soul-crushingly unoptimistic. Worse yet, despite her good nature, she is surrounded by and associated with many of the game's cruelest villains, to where an uninitiated person might just assume she is one of them. Even in the main ending, Marle only mentions her in passing, asking if she factors into another party member's plans—everyone is just supposed to accept that their victory came with only one lasting sacrifice (Chrono Cross does address this, but not in a way that holds much significance in relation to the plot of Trigger).
- Crusader of Centy: In a game which not only breaks its Aesop, but jumps on the pieces, a lot of time has been spent setting up that monsters aren't evil, and just want peace, except when you have to fight them, which you spend the entire game doing (again, really Broken Aesop), with scenes with them begging you to find way for humans and monsters to live in peace... You go back to before humans existed and send all the monsters off to their own world, because Humans Are Bastards, and will never, ever accept them. This is meant as a happy ending, evidently. Though one could argue that the alternatives are worse...
- In the original Devil Survivor, some consider the Silent Revolution ending this, as it gives exclusive control of the Demon Summoning Program to the Japanese government. In a game that pulled no punches in showing how the police quickly got Drunk with Power and took Police Brutality to horrifying extremes once they got their hands on the summoning app, and also showed the government was planning on wiping out everyone in Tokyo in a Final Solution if the crisis got out of control. The ending narration also mentions the government weaponizes the app to turn Japan into not only an economic superpower, but a military one as well.
- Its sequel Devil Survivor 2 has Multiple Endings, but this specific one is the Liberator ending. In this ending, Polaris has been killed and the world is no longer being swallowed up into a void, and the people still around are doing their best in managing the situation now. But the rest of the world hasn't returned, so all that is left is what little of the surface remains and the rest is simply a huge ocean full of undrinkable water. And by killing Polaris, the world has lost all supernatural aspects that were, yes, trying to kill them, but also removed all possible benevolent help they could have gotten. Humanity is now likely doomed to die of starvation and this situation could cause people to go back and become violent again. The only Hope Spot is that the next person in line for the Heavenly Throne will arrive and fix things, but how soon that will happen... Record Breaker pushes the Inferred Holocaust angle even further by revealing that Canopus, the ultimate head of the Administrator System, deems humanity as a threat to universal order after the party kills Polaris. As mentioned above, if the next set of invaders, the Triangulum, appear in the Liberator world, humanity will have absolutely no way to fight them back.
- Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest's Golden Ending—in terms of both canon and meta. Crocodile Isle's destruction is treated as the ultimate Moment of Awesome for the Kongs; however, along with the Inferred Holocaust, this also means that many beloved levels are gone as well.
- As if the gameplay in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (NES) wasn't bad enough, there are two possible endings to the game should the player have enough patience to go through all its levels. Go through all of them as Jekyll, and the player gets a standard "End" screen at the church. However, the more complete ending requires Hyde to reach where the end goal for Jekyll would normally be once Jekyll reaches the final stage (normally, getting any further than Jekyll has upon turning into Hyde results in a Nonstandard Gameover, as the Hyde levels are auto scrollers), culminating in a unique stage for Hyde and a boss fight. Completing both of these results in Hyde turning back into Jekyll and being able to go through the rest of the stage unimpeded, and an extended ending cutscene. However, the "End" screen for this ending has a thunder flash and an ominous image of Hyde in the background, suggesting that he's still at large. What would normally be the Golden Ending is undone by this implication.
- Dragon Age has become infamous for this among mage and/or elf fans. Every game, the Player Character protects the local Andrastian human kingdom or religious organization from crumbling due to their own incompetence and/or corruption. note However, these same Andrastian human kingdoms and religious institutions have deeply ingrained Fantastic Racism against mages and/or elves. Even if the Player Character is an elf/mage, saves the world, and is exalted as as a hero at the end, within a few years the society you saved goes back to mistreating your people.
- In Dragon Age: Origins, a City Elf Warden can lampshade this trope at the very end, after using their new status as hero to grant the alienage a bann to represent them at court. Your father is thrilled that humans are praising an elf as their hero, while the City Elf PC can cynically reply that it's only a matter of time before they start treating elves like crap again. A Mage Warden also can say as much to their mentor regarding mages. Both turn out to be right.
- In Dragon Age: Inquisition, a player who chooses to aid elven rights activist Briala co-rule Orlais with Gaspard or Celene is presented as a happy end to the civil war for elves. Reuniting Briala with Celene is especially presented as the "ideal" happy ending for all parties. However, a lot of players note that both outcomes look shaky and short-lived at best, since Briala's power lasts only as long as Gaspard is alive and under her thumb, or her relationship with Celene continues to go well, since Celene still has all the power and hasn't hesitated to use it to screw over Briala and the elves before. Basically, despite the game framing Briala co-ruling with Gaspard or Celene as a happy ending for elves, many players are waiting for the other shoe to drop.
- Even when you take helping elves out of the equation, those who've read The Masked Empire feel that the game resenting the reconciliation between Celene and Briala as the most ideal happy ending to the whole Orlesian Civil War as this. While the game treats the reunion as a heartwarming example of love triumphing over hard feelings, those who've read the book know how toxic, imbalanced, and even abusive their relationship was, and how this "reunion" doesn't address the power imbalance that allowed Celene to hurt Briala as badly as she did. Many players don't see it as a heartwarming reunion so much as convincing an angry, emotionally vulnerable abuse victim to go back to her abuser.
- The ending of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind with its add-on Tribunal. Okay, "the false gods" are gone, which is represented as a good thing. However, those "false" gods were the beings which essentially created and shaped Dunmer society as it is, and cared about the Dunmer people. And the "true" gods are Daedra, who are notorious for their Blue-and-Orange Morality, petty vengefulness and the fact that their idea of good and righteous Dunmer society is tribalism. Not to mention the entire big floating rock debacle which led Morrowind to a slight local apocalypse. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim confirms that the aftermath of Morrowind did indeed result in the near complete destruction of Dunmer civilization.
- Discussed In-Universe in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim:
- The ending to the main questline seems at first glance to be a positive one. After all, Alduin is defeated, the dragons are now somewhat pacified and following the Way of the Voice, and the Skyrim civil war is either finished or at least at a ceasefire. However, as Paarthurnax says, the Dragonborn's attempt to defeat Alduin might have prevented him from destroying the world... or it might have sped up the ending of the world, since it is Alduin's role to be the one who eats the world so it may be reborn, and all that Alduin desired in this timeline was to rule the world. In defeating him, the player may have simply put him back in his place as the World-Eater.
- Also, depending on how the Civil War itself was ended, this could be the case. If the Stormcloaks win, then the Empire is shattered apart, leaving the continent at risk of being once more invaded by the Thalmor. If the Empire wins, however, Skyrim is still devastated by the war and the worship of Talos will be further suppressed, which will further weaken the metaphysical forces holding the world together, which is what the Thalmor want.
- The good ending of Eversion plays this for laughs—the princess still turns into a monster, but the hero becomes a monster as well, and the two live happily ever after.
- There's a strange variation in Fallout 3. The regular ending has two choices: You sacrifice yourself to save the wasteland by activating Project Purity (which will flood the activation room with radiation), or you get Lyons to sacrifice herself for you. The ultimate effect is the same, but the game chews you out if you choose to sacrifice Lyons. Thing is, you don't even have the option of say, sending Fawkes, the explicitly radiation-immune Super Mutant to do it, or Charon, the ghoul who's healed by radiation, using a robot, surviving by use of the copious amounts of Rad-Away you've most likely accumulated over your journey, or even poking the activation buttons with a pole from far away. Severe fan backlash got Bethesda to release the Broken Steel DLC, which allows you to take the obvious third option and send Fawkes to do it. The wasteland has pure water, Everybody Lives, And the Adventure Continues. You still get called out for it, though, due to the ending dialogue not changing.
- Fallout: New Vegas:
- Yes, the threat could be overplayed by an Unreliable Expositor, and yes, it could be dealt with by a prepared force, but if Ulysses wasn't lying and if the player's machinations left the Mojave without anyone able to deal with it, then it's only a matter of time before the area gets overrun with Tunnelers, rendering everyone's efforts moot.
- One of the options to talk Lanius down boils down to getting him to return east to chase a bluff, and has Lanius proclaim that he will return with a bigger army once he's done. Considering the NCR's ineptitude up to that point and the fact that two out of three endings that have you oppose Lanius also have you backstab the Republic, making them unwilling to help down the line, that particular ending can feel like you just kicked a can down the road.
- Final Fantasy:
- The Compilation of Final Fantasy VII suggests that humanity switched from Planet-destroying Mako energy to... fossil fuels, which are destroying our own planet in real life. Fans tend to assume that people are reverting to fossil fuels as a stopgap to keep society going while looking for more ecologically sound alternatives, but there's no evidence for this in the text, and - as we know from real life - switching over is unlikely to be easy.
- Final Fantasy VIII ends on an upbeat note, with Squall having made substantial progress in overcoming his emotional issues, Ultimecia defeated, and Time Compression thus prevented. Unfortunately, the Stable Time Loop means that Ultimecia's rise in the future, and her subsequent reign of terror up until her death at the hands of the protagonists, are inevitable.
- Final Fantasy XV: Episode Ignis's Golden Ending gives a happy ending to the bros (and Ravus) and screws over Ardyn's plan, but Ardyn's still a pile of demons biding his time, Lunafreya is still dead, and Lucis is still an absolute monarchy with all its sins of unchecked privilege, imperialism and apathy. Your opinion on Ardyn and your own political views will probably influence whether a good guy being in charge of that institution is a happy ending or not. On top of that, Ardyn's only been given another couple of millennia to think about his plan before another candidate for the prophecy is born... And as Dawn of the Future revealed, Bahamut was manipulating both Noctis and Ardyn into killing each other, and the two being alive only delays his plans of wiping Eos clean of life as he needs the two dead to enact it without any opposition.
- Final Fantasy XVI: Averted hard. The final task of the party is to slay the tyrannical god puppeteering the entire planet and destroy the accursed source of magic that was used to divide the world for so long - which means most of Valisthea's technology tree will cease to exist, the Blighted Lands will still take centuries to recover, and humans have proven they don't need a narcissistic god to be selfish, racist rulers. The heroes discuss these three topics with their crew in detail and conclude that this is an inevitable and grim future, but collectively agree that humanity having the choice of whether or not to live in such a world is better than being forced by a self-centered god to lay down and die.
- Like a lot of works that feature both reality warping and a "face reality" Aesop, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance ends with the characters returning to the real world and facing all the problems they'd previously tried to escape from. This makes a certain degree of sense in the Japanese version, but the English translation puts less emphasis on how many people are suffering in Mewt's world (which is implied by the fact that three zombies/vampires share the same names as Mewt's bullies), and more emphasis on the idea that perhaps said world is just as real as their own, making the whole thing somewhat pointless. What's more, Doned is still crippled.
- Fire Emblem: Awakening has two endings: depending on who you choose to deal the final blow to the final boss. Chrom's version is generally considered to be one of these by most players, as it merely seals Grima away for another thousand years, meaning that while the main characters get to live their lives happily, Grima will one day return to terrorise the world again and to the protagonists that's just Somebody Else's Problem. The Avatar's ending kills Grima permanently, seemingly at the cost of the Avatar's life, which would make it a Bittersweet Ending... were it not for the fact that the Avatar is revealed to have survived. As such, since the latter is a Golden Ending with no drawbacks, most players consider the first ending choice pointless.
- The story mode of Fire Emblem Warriors ends with the Original Generation twins being crowned co-Regents in the ruins of Aytolis castle, having defeated Velezark and sending the many heroes back to their own realms. Except the twins committed a character-flaw-driven mistake, the sort most Fire Emblem Lords learn to overcome, in the last three chapters of the game, and many people would argue that it's indicative of poor priorities for a ruler. Further, the neighboring kingdom of Gristonne is now completely lacking a royal family and any sort of armed forces. Finally, with what can be learned about Aytolisian succession, both twins are going to have firstborns with an equal claim, making a Succession Crisis and civil war all but certain. Small wonder the final cutscene doesn't actually address the plot's aftermath at all.
- The Hero has beaten the Big Bad in Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon and is set to journey with the heroine to find other survivors in the empty world. What makes this an example is the ending dialogue features a voiceover of the aged hero, with many implications he's at the end of his life, his female companion has died and he's back to square one of being alone again. The game ends following his monologue.
- Applied to the first two God Eater games. It was made very clear that everything the titular God Eaters did was a stopgap, humanity was running out of resources in this arms race, and eventually an Aragami would form that was simply too powerful to stop and this Grey Goo variant would reach its logical conclusion. The third game finally tackled this with an ending that conclusively ruled out an apocalypse, though humanity still had a lot of rebuilding to do. Because of this, it also applies to stealth prequel Code Vein.
- God of War III: After killing anyone and everyone who has ever even vaguely pissed him off until there is nothing left of the world but a charred, storm-swept wasteland, Kratos discovers that he has accidentally become the physical repository of the concept of hope, released from Pandora's Box. Instead of giving it to the ghost of Athena to rebuild mankind on her terms, he commits suicide to release it to all of mankind... The currently busy with drowning, being riddled with plagues and locust swarms, tormented by the dead returning from the graves and having no afterlife, having to escape fire falling from the sky, ravaged by constant lightning strikes and uncontrollable storms and living in a world without sunlight, order or gods of mankind. Literally, the only thing they have left is hope. The only bright side is that without the tyranny of the Olympians, the world can finally heal and start over and Kratos can finally start a new life in Scandanavia including marrying and having a new son by his side.
- According to IGN, the whole thing is supposed to play out as a Twisted "Comedic" Tragedy, where the main character makes all the wrong decisions; fighting the gods, killing the gods, feeding innocent people (more than one in this game) to death traps, and leaving the power vacuum without a successor. It's heavily implied that this is not any kind of happy or downer ending; Kratos WON... and that's a bad thing.
- Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak: Hurrah! Your faction has defeated the evil religious fundamentalists who were standing in the way of your civilisation redeveloping hyperdrive and seeking out new life and new civilisations... Except that this is a prequel, and in a few decades everyone is going to find out that those fundamentalists were right about the terrible doom and catastrophe that will befall Kharak as a result.
- Parodied with I'm O.K, a response to Jack Thompson's "Modest Video Game Proposal" featuring a vengeful father out to slaughter video gamers and devs over the death of his son. After gorily massacring a multitude of bystanders (including children. Many, many children,) industry employees, and eventually destroying the building E3 is hosted in, the game gives a generic "Congratulations! You killed every game designer in the world! America is saved!" ending.
- The main story ending of Rayark’s Implosion is supposed to be bittersweet, but the Fridge Horror implications seem to much more bitter than sweet. Jake ends up with total amnesia in hospital after his brain gets operated and put an AI-related device to wake him from unconsciousness after he performed a Taking You with Me attack on the Queen when Jake controls Warmech-III "Avalon" by using his subconscious. It's heavily implied that Jake can't remember anything, including his identity, his family, his world-saving mission, and others. XADAs Warmech-III "Avalon" killed were once humans and animals before they were infected and corrupted into zombies and Queen-obeying Eldritch Abominations by XADA pathogens, and it's heavily implied that they're much greater in numbers than XADAs from their home planet. The XADA infections/corruptions have no cure at all, so killing them is the only solution. Even worse, the story suddenly ends and then is followed by a credits roll right after the scene of the wheelchair girl who wants to name him since he is amnesiac. We also don't know whether the rest of XADA aliens are still on Earth, although it's implied that they're completely obliterated, while it's not clear that XADA pathogens are airborne and still on Earth.
- The first ending to the original Kingdom Hearts mildly fits this trope, as the ending was intended to be bittersweet either way. The final cut-scene shows Sora and Mickey sealing the door to (then referred to as) Kingdom Hearts with Riku's help, and Sora has a sort of spiritual talk with love-interest Kairi, desperately getting out that he will indeed find his way back to her somehow, before they are symbolically and spiritually separated as the fragments of worlds realign to their original places, and Sora has saved the universe! Fridge Horror sets in when one realizes that a defenseless best friend Riku and King Mickey have been trapped permanently in a dimension populated entirely by an army of Heartless monsters, and that Sora and the party are either in some zero-space between worlds (since they were not restored to their "proper homes" as the end montage shows for everyone else, even making a point of showing Kairi alone on the island), or at worst, since their final showdown was on a patchwork planet made up of what was left of the worlds devoured by Heartless, they may have been left in cold, dark space to die without a planetary body to sit on, and their spaceship, made up of the old barriers between worlds? Yeah, that barrier has been restored, presumably with their spaceship. This ending disturbed the American representatives at Disney so much that they made Square add on an epilogue (made with game footage due to lack of time), signaling that Sora and co. may not be home, but they're at least alive and "looking for Riku and the King" implying they too survived. Square rolled with it and made that coda lead directly into the intro of Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories.
- The Legend of Zelda:
- The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has a beautiful, uplifting ending... unless you play Majora's Mask and prefer to take a darker interpretation of the Word of God stating that OoT-Link eventually becomes Twilight Princess's Hero Shade. Things might not have gone so hot for Link after the ending. There's also the knowledge that even though Link went back in time and created a new timeline where Hyrule wasn't burned and conquered by Ganondorf, the original timeline is still going on, one where the people are finally free, but a lot of them are dead, the castle is completely destroyed in a lake of lava, and the Hero of Time has vanished and thus can't help them anymore, leading to the flooding of Hyrule when Ganondorf resurfaces.
- The worst might be from Link's Awakening, where our hero causes a Dream Apocalypse and wakes up stranded in the middle of the ocean... with a big smile on his face and triumphant music playing. Hyrule Historia noticed this disconnect, and gave its retelling of the story a more explicitly downbeat ending stating that Link's fate was unknown, only for Zelda Encyclopedia to go the opposite route and confirm his survival by moving the Oracle games from before to after this game.
- Life Is Strange: While both endings are bittersweet to varying degrees, the ending in which Max chooses to allow Chloe to die to stop the storm from destroying the town seems to be intended as the "better" of the two and is definitely the one the developers put more effort into. Players on the other hand often have a great deal of criticisms of it, pointing out what while more characters explicitly survive in this ending and Jefferson and Nathan are busted, as far as anyone can tell, Arcadia Bay is still a Dying Town run like a fiefdom by Nathan's amoral real estate mogul father, Chloe dies alone and unloved at her absolute lowest point (with the last words she ever hears being "Nobody would miss your punk ass!"), and Max has lost the love of her life and/or best friend, may be traumatized for years, if not for life, and has essentially learned the heartwarming message that going on her adventure in the first place made everything worse.
- Little Nightmares ends with Six killing the Guests who caused her so much torment, and escaping the Maw where she was being held prisoner. However, in her escape she stooped low enough to Kick the Dog by eating a sentient creature alive. Plus, promotional materials for the first game imply (and the second game outright confirms) that the outside world is arguably worse than the Maw.
- Mass Effect 3's original ending is an infamous example of this trope, with an ending that had so many unanswered questions and apparently-fatal consequences for its setting (some of which was foreshadowed in earlier titles) that it caused massive backlash among fans, prompting a Rewrite in the form of the Extended Cut DLC released several months later. Sticking to just this trope:
- Regardless of the main character's actions, the Mass Relay network (the primary method of travel and growth of civilization within the Milky Way Galaxy) is destroyed. Previous games in the series more-or-less stated that there is no one in said galaxy that knows how they fully work, let alone be able to repair one, and it's treated as a surprise that a once-extinct race knew how to build their own relay. That's without the previous game's DLC mission, Arrival, showing that the destruction of a Mass Relay causes a supernova-level disaster for an entire system. All of 3's endings show a scene (viewing the Milky Way as a whole) with the entire Mass Relay network going down, which causes massive explosions or waves of energy (depending on the interpretation), implying galactic civilization as the player has experienced it for three games is essentially destroyed. The Extended Cut would Rewrite this scene by stating that the galaxy rebuilt/repaired the relays, though how it did so without any such knowledge is handwaved.
- In the original ending, a large number of named characters are last seen near Earth as the Crucible fires (and, as above, implying that the Mass Relays were too damaged/destroyed to rebuild). As such, it creates a situation where several fleets of ships, who are all carrying races (i.e. the Quarians) who rely on specific "dextro"-based food to survive, are now permanently cut off from their homeworld(s) and may starve if they are unable to access necessary farms/foodstores (nevermind the named characters/companions who were left in ambiguous circumstances on Earth's surface the last time they were seen). The Extended Cut avoided this by showing several characters returning back to their homeworlds.
- Commander Shepard's companions seemingly survive the initial eventnote , but wind up stranded on an apparently uninhabited planet, with no clear understanding of where they were going, what the status of the ship is and if they're permanently grounded. In addition, only three (seemingly randomly chosen) characters are definitively shown to survive. note The Extended Cut addresssed this by definitively showing Admiral Hackett order a full retreat just before the Crucible fires, with Joker regretfully piloting the Normandy through a Relay as a wave of energy chases the ship. The EC then shows the crew repairing the ship and leaving the surface of the planet as the game ends.
- Even with the Extended Cut DLC addressing a lot of issues, the Synthesis Ending is still an example. While Control and Destroy are controversial in their own ways, they're presented as Bittersweet Endings and are fairly upfront about their pros and cons. But Synthesis is treated as the game's Golden Ending even though it involves Shepard effectively forcing a massive change on the entire galaxy and granting the Undead Abominations of the Reapers sentience, none of which fans can imagine going over well.
- Max Payne:
- In Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne, Max lays in the destroyed Inner Circle manor and mentions a dream about his dead wife, who is dead but "that was alright". But the closest thing he had to a living spouse/girlfriend/what have you is dead, and anyone who can explain anything is dead including the extremely powerful Alfred Woden, who had connections to senators. His death, and the death of Detective Winterson are going to be in all likelihood put squarely on Max's shoulders. So not only is he going to be a scapegoat for the death of these powerful people, but also justly prosecuted for the death of a detective with a blind son, who is now an orphan. An Ex-Cop is going to be sent to jail, and we all know how well they go over there. This was probably intentional given the narrative, but it's something of a miracle that a sequel was produced at all that did not involve Max getting shanked to death in the first thirty minutes. If you finish the game on the hardest difficulty, the final Noir cutscene ends with Mona waking up, implying that this could be an Earn Your Happy Ending, but the third game runs with the "Mona is dead" ending as canon and goes out of its way to point out how unhappy Max was, with or without her.
- As for the events of Max Payne 3, apparently Max managed to talk his way out of any murder charges, but that's about the only way his life didn't completely self-destruct: His career's in ruins, he's slowly killing himself with alcohol abuse in an attempt to self-medicate for post-traumatic stress disorder, and just to add insult to injury he's been forced to move out of New York and into a crummy apartment in New Jersey. Surprisingly, by the end of the game he's actually a little better off: He has to go through yet more awful shit to get there, but the bad guys are definitely getting theirs this time and he's at least started the process of getting his life back together.
- Mental Omega: This is invoked. The Epsilon Act 2 Ending portrays the activation of the Mental Omega Device and the brainwashing of nearly all humanity in a positive fashion despite the implications. It's a clear example of how twisted the Epsilon's morals are, to be able to consider the situation as an opportunity, rather than a problem.
- Mother 3 ends with the corrupted world being destroyed by a benevolent Eldritch Abomination, and then cuts to total blackness. However, you can still walk around in it, and you soon discover that everyone made it out alive. You can talk to the other characters, who are apparently right there with you, and most of them seem relieved that they no longer have to live in that Crapsack of a world. However, given the fact that you're all in a black void, and the world was just destroyed, you all may very well be floating through space. Plus, nothing can change the fact that Lucas's Mother and Brother are dead. However, supplementary material published decades after the game's release reveals the cast, including Claus and Hinawa, survived in a new world.
- Aribeth's story in Neverwinter Nights ends with her spirit earning its way into heaven by helping the wounded in the aftermath of Mephistopheles' attack in the second expansion pack, but it's pretty ambiguously 'happy' given the degree of crap she had to go through and the magnitude of the fight she put up to remain a good person that apparently didn't matter to whatever authority consigned her to hell based on actions taken under mental influence in the first place. Not to mention that the leadership of Neverwinter doesn't answer for unjustly executing two staunch champions of the city as scapegoats, which means none of the wrongs anyone ever did Aribeth were addressed.
- In Neverwinter Nights 2, there are hints that the Hero of Neverwinter had a severe falling out with Lord Nasher and walked away from the city. If you accept that the Hero of Neverwinter is also the same person as the protagonist of the last expansion pack, then it's likely he walked away due to the fact that the city was demonizing his two good friends, Fentwick and Aribeth, who he knows are generally innocent of the crimes laid against them.
- This is a Deconstructed Trope in Nier. The first playthrough of the game shows the protagonist working to save his daughter/sister (depending on the version) and then getting a standard happy-looking ending by finally vanquishing the evil Shadowlord, the master of the monsters known as Shades, that lets his daughter/sister come back to live with him. The second playthrough onwards makes it abundantly clear that this was, in fact, not a happy ending at all because what you actually did was render humanity totally extinct, while also senselessly killing completely innocent sentient beings along the way, and as a direct result the protagonist's sister is going to die anyway along with everyone else.
- Made a Discussed Trope in NieR: Automata. As they're reconstructing the protagonists' bodies to give them a final chance at a free life, the Pods speculate that since they're going to be using a complete image of each android's personality at the time of their death, it's entirely possible they'll just repeat the same mistakes that lead to their end in the first place. However, they conclude that they feel the androids deserve that chance, and the fact they themselves have grown beyond their programming enough to contemplate and make said decision is proof the androids can avoid past mistakes.
- Pikmin 3: All the cheeriness from the ending fizzles away when you realize that even though Olimar makes it off the planet alive, he still failed his mission, left his partners to die, and ultimately screwed over his employer. In short, it's a happy ending for Koppai, but not for Hocotate... At least until the Switch port added the "Side Stories" DLC, which acts as an epilogue to the main game, tying up its loose ends and giving Olimar and Louie their own Happy Ending.
- Portal 2:
- At the end, Chell is finally set free by an emotionally exhausted GLaDOS and dropped off in the middle of a wheat field, the Companion Cube from the first game by her side. Good for her!... Except the Portal games take place in the same universe as Half-Life, meaning that Chell is likely now living in a post-apocalyptic world ruled by tyrannical aliens from another dimension, overrun by monsters and zombies, with no weapons or knowledge of how to handle herself in a Combine-run society. Given, there is some timeline confusion between Portal and Half-Life, but the fact that the Borealis is missing from its loading dock in Portal 2 confirms the Combine Invasion has already happened in Portal's timeline.
- Invoked in the co-op campaign. It ends with GLaDOS telling the bots "you saved science!" and the robots starting dancing with joy as the very upbeat electro song "Robots FTW" starts playing. How did the robots save science? By rescuing thousands of humans preserved in cryogenic storage, who are now going to be put through dangerous tests like Chell was, until they die painfully. Just to twist the knife further, the robots get blown up by GLaDOS due to being made obsolete, the happy music still plays because the robots only cared about science, so it was a success to them, and the Peer Review DLC reveals all those humans died off in less than a week.
- While Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney's story ends happily, the whole thing being a successful attempt by the British government to alter memories and brainwash people on a large scale goes unremarked on, despite the potentially horrific ramifications for the world's future. The sheer amount of trauma many characters go through can also prevent the ending from feeling as happy as it's presented, especially concerning Espella, Darklaw, and Jean.
- The best ending in Puella Magi Madoka Magica Portable has Madoka successfully avoid a contract while the other four girls defeat Walpurgisnacht. The story then ends with the girls having a Ship Tease-laden tea party, happily smiling and joking at each other. However, since Madoka didn't make a contract, millions of girls are still dying of despair, humankind is still plagued by witches, and the main characters are probably going to all die in a few years after their Soul Gems start to run dry.
- [PROTOTYPE 2]: Heller defeats Mercer (the protagonist of the 1st game turned the Big Bad in this one), cures the outbreak and reunites with his family. All is well, except... Heller is now in almost exactly the same situation as Mercer was in the end of his game, and Mercer went completely megalomaniac-crazy afterwards. Would Heller be able to resist the same fate?
- Rampage: Total Destruction's ending is a likely deliberate example meant to be funny. The monsters destroy several cities and kill and eat countless people, but the company that accidentally created the monsters makes a ton of money selling their mutagenic soda due to the free publicity that the monsters give them, so everything is alright.
- Resistance 3 seems to end on a pretty triumphant note, with the Chimeran war finally over after almost 20 years with their wormhole to their homeworld closed and humanity rising up to finally eliminate the last of them. The problem is humanity, after all that fighting, has been reduced by 90%, either killed or converted by the Chimera. A population decline like that would be borderline impossible to recover from, especially with the loss of so many people who would be necessary for things like labor, industrial work, science, medicine, etc. Human society has essentially regressed by several hundred years. And that's not even getting into the Hostile Terraforming that the Chimera have done to Earth, trying to plunge it into a new ice age. An act that, even if it has been undone by the loss of their terraforming machines, has likely led to the extinction of countless species and permanently damaged the Earth's ecology.
- The RuneScape quest The Brink of Extinction has you saving the TzHaar race from going extinct. You eventually defeat the villain responsible and solve the cause of the problem. However, if you go back to the villain after the quest to confront him about the reasons for his actions, he reveals that the TzHaar are slowly growing weaker with every generation due to losing their racial memories because they were never intended to reproduce. By taking away their ability to reproduce, he was trying to force them to return to the Elder Kiln so they could be properly reborn as intended. So although you have saved the TzHaar in the short term, you have doomed them in the long run, although the situation is not quite as bad as it was before because now the TzHaar are aware that their bodies need to be returned to the sacred lava after death so their souls can be freed from And I Must Scream, and the Ga'Al (TzHaar born without any memories) are no longer being killed on birth.
- Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell plays this for laughs: Its Multiple Endings run the whole gamut of "happy": from Johnny (re)gaining personal happiness, gaining immense power, securing his friends' happiness, to hitting the Reset Button on the entire franchise. The last ending, however, is decisively esoteric: Johnny gains the answers to all questions in the universe and just stands there for a bit, going "Ooooh!" with an incredibly satisfied smile, before the credits roll.
- Samurai Jack: Battle Through Time: While treated as the Golden Ending as such by fans, Ashi living with Jack in the past ignores one of the biggest (unintentional) reasons as to why she had to fade away in the first place: She has Aku's essence as part of her body. It is one thing for them to live happily ever after. But if they ever decide to have children, which is highly likely since Jack is the crown prince of Japan, let's hope the method used to keep Ashi alive also purged Aku's influence from her, or that the sword can act as a baptism tool...
- The ending of Sands of Destruction is unambiguously meant to be happy: Kyrie has control of his Power Incontinence, the Sand Sea is now filled with water (and therefore much more livable) and it's no longer trying to swallow all the continents to help end the world, humans are no longer oppressed by Ferals, and best of all, he and Morte (who no longer wishes to end the world) are a happy Official Couple. Well, great, except the epilogue doesn't show any Ferals except Taupy, Rhi'a, and Naja. What happened to the rest? Rhi'a is seen chasing after a house cat who resembles Felis Rex, so perhaps they've been turned into ordinary animals - a fitting end to those who were oppressive, sure, but the game points out that Ferals are as diverse as humans in personality; some are cruel and some are kind. On top of that, the only reason Kyrie has control of his powers is The Power of Love, and he and Morte are teenagers: what happens if they break up, like so many other teenagers tend to do? Worse yet, the Crimson Sun gave Morte the Destruct Code that controls Kyrie's powers, and the only reason she's no longer interested in ending the world is because Kyrie is Worth Living For; she's still shown to be temperamental and prone to acting before she thinks. So if Kyrie ever falls out of love and breaks her heart, she's likely to end the world in a fit of anger because she now knows exactly how to do it, and he'd be powerless to stop her. Oops.
- Schizophrenia Simulation has two endings. The "good" ending, which involves solving the final puzzle before being caught by the demon, has the protagonist shoot themself in the head. This is followed by narration from the protagonist describing how they killed their demons, which is significantly happier sounding than the narration given if the demon catches them. In both endings a statistic about schizophrenia is giving, with the "good" ending giving the attempted suicide rate.
- All four main endings in Silent Hill 2 leave open this possibility (a lot of the story is open to interpretation by design and each of these can also be counterargued, so YMMV):
- 'Leave' tends to be viewed, by most, to be the game's happiest ending, as Mary forgives James, and James leaves town along with Laura, seemingly escaping the nightmare. But, it's also possible that James is really still in denial, and has 'conjured' Mary in order to forgive himself, leaving town with a clear conscience that he only has because he has convinced himself he deserves it.
- 'In Water' is often viewed as a Downer Ending, in which he commits suicide by driving his car into Lake Toluca, though it can also be seen as a final end to his torment and an escape from a life that has been broken beyond repair, to spend eternity with his wife in a place where death maybe isn't the last word.
- 'Maria' is an ending most people consider to be bad, in which James decides to choose the Silent Hill construct Maria over his wife, and ending on a potentially sinister note with Maria displaying symptoms of Mary's fatal illness. However, instead of this being an example of a careless James rejecting his wife in favor of her doppelganger, it is an ending you get by being a good person, defending and taking care of a person who claims to be helpless and actively seeks your protection. Rather than rejecting Mary, the final battle may simply be a reflection of the guilt he feels for doing the right thing for Maria when he failed to do the right thing for Mary.
- 'Rebirth' has James attempting an occult ritual hoping to physically revive Mary. The ending implies that the ritual is a success (and Silent Hill 4 demonstrates this same ritual definitely succeeding). We do not see this take place and we are given no hint of the outcome. It could be that James gets exactly what he wanted, or that he got way more than he bargained for, or that he's so out of sanity at this point that nothing happens at all and he just believes otherwise.
- The "Bogeyman" ending in Silent Hill: Homecoming, which involves Alex being transformed into one of the Pyramidhead-like Bogeymen, initially seems like a straightforward bad ending... but when you think about it, becomes this instead. The actions that trigger this ending involving acting in the role of Silent Hill's executioner and tormentor (by deliberately causing pain and suffering to those who broke Silent Hill's laws), which means that the transformation could just as easily be Silent Hill's idea of "rewarding" Alex. Furthermore, given that Alex by the end of the game has been left mentally scarred and permanently crippled, with all of his paperwork lost in the now-haunted Shepherd's Glen, he doesn't really have a life left worth living amongst humanity. Becoming a monstrous avenger of evil and tormenting the wicked for all eternity is an honest step up from where he'd otherwise be left as. Furthermore, it fits with the recurring motif of Sins of Our Fathers present in the game; the machinations of the Shepherd's Glen cult made monsters out of all of Alex's peers... and end up making a monster of Alex, too.
- Unabashedly used in SOMA; due to the nature of how Brain Uploading works in that universe, after all the effort of trudging through the monster-riddled ruins of PATHOS II and launching the ARK into space, protagonist Simon is left stranded in his cobbled-together Artificial Zombie body at the bottom of the oceanic abyss, as he was only able to make a copy of his mind aboard the satellite's artificial reality, rather than directly transferring himself. As he argues with his only companion, a previously uploaded engineer who created the ARK, about this fate, the imperfect computer she's been forced to use to host her consciousness finally overloads and kills her, leaving him completely alone, the last vestige of human sentience, under miles of water on a planet where the surface has been scorched clean. Up above, the duplicates of Simon and Catherine enjoy a happy reunion in the ARK... although how long it'll actually survive is anyone's guess.
- Done on purpose in Spanish for Everyone!. After hitchhiking his way through Mexico, Shawn is finally reunited with his best friend, Miguel, and his lost Nintendo DS! Oh, and Miguel's family, which is implied to be involved with The Cartel, was most likely killed shortly afterwards. Meanwhile, Shawn is also given a package containing "puffy dolls" and instructions to take them to France as part of the Sequel Hook, all but outright stating that he's been manipulated into becoming a drug mule. The game's developers were apparently well aware that they were making a terrible shovelware title, so they decided to fill the game with Fridge Horror and dark themes in order to have some fun.
- Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions has this feeling occur in-universe after 2099 Spider-Man defeats his version of Scorpion; Scorpion took the tablet at the bidding of another villain, who promised to turn him back into a human (his backstory is that he was turned into a scorpion-like mutant) if he found it for her. Consequently, Spider-Man feels sorry for him and wishes there was something he could do. When Madame Webb congratulates him and assures him that the day is his, he glumly asks, "Yeah? Then why do I feel so bad about it?"
- In-universe in Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People, everyone complains about Strong Bad's ending for Dangeresque 3:Coach Z: What happened to the part where Dangeresque swoops in, rescuing me from danger and carrying me off into the sunset?
Strong Bad: Oh, yeah... Renaldo dies now.
Coach Z: (dismayed) WHAT?! Oh, but I only had two weeks 'til retirement!
Marzipan: (upset) Yeah, and you fast-forwarded through the eight minutes of educational content I provided!
Bubs: (upset) And what happened to my nude scene?!
Strong Sad: Where is the artistic noir cinematic stylings you promised?
(Everyone crowds in close to Strong Bad, who climbs up on the couch to elude them)
Strong Bad: Now calm down, people! Every great film has to make some creative editing decisions in order to make me look better.
(The outcry doesn't stop, it only intensifies.)
Strong Bad: Uh-oh, this is starting to turn into an unruly mob. And not the good kind like I start at Strong Sad's poetry readings. For real this time... looks like I'm gonna have to JUMP...!
(He tries to jump off the couch and out of reach of everyone - and the image freezes there as the end credits roll.) - Depends a little bit on your interpretation of the epilogue in Tales of the Abyss. If you think/support Luke coming home, and Tears' tears being from joy, then you win. If you support Asch coming home, and Tears' tears being from the realization that she'll never again see the man she loved, then this fits it pretty well. Either way, though, Natalia has lost someone close to her. You can Take a Third Option and choose to believe the person who came back was a Split-Personality Merge of Luke and Asch, either of which leaves the ending happy but complicated. And while Van's plan of wanting to destroy the world and every single person alive (to replace them with Replica to take their place and hence prevent the Score's predetermined end of the world) has been thwarted, the Planet Storm has been stopped, meaning that any fonic arts are growing weaker and will likely cease to exist soon, leaving the inhabitants, who are somewhat reliant on fonic arts for various machinery and similar to be completely useless... until they perhaps find a substitute, which could take years, if not decades or centuries.
- Tales of Xillia 2:
- The game has Multiple Endings and the 'semi-good' ending is this. Elle became the millionth divergence crystal, humanity has successfully completed Origin's trial and he has removed all fractured dimensions, as was the party's plan. Everyone's doing fine and Ludger is shown to meet Lara, with implications that they will fall in love, get married and have Elle. However, this ending implies that Ludger could go down the same path of his alternate self in the fractured dimensions, turning into 'Victor', who murdered the majority of the Xillia past when they tried to use Elle. Considering how this ending is called 'Fate Repeater' and it's the only ending that gives you the Victor Costume, the implications are definitely there.
- Even the best, true ending is this. The entire plot of the game involves destroying alternate universes, and the game doesn't hide that everyone in those universes dies. While there are some scenes of party members feeling bad about it, they quickly get over it and the party just accepts this as a necessary evil. By the time of the ending, everyone is long done feeling bad about destroying alternate realities, which means that not only does the ending involve killing trillions of people when all the remaining realities are destroyed, but nobody even cares.
- To the Moon ends with Johnny fulfilling his wish of going to the Moon with the love of his life, River. But... it's all a Dying Dream, Johnny's twin brother, Joey, remained dead in the real world for most of Johnny's life, the real Johnny dies without knowing what his wife, River, was trying to tell him, while the real River died knowing Johnny never remembered his first meeting with her, something she was desperately trying him to do so for most of her life. The whole uplifting ending never happened in reality.
- Transistor ends with Red finally stopping the Process, but not before all of Cloudbank and its citizens have been processed. At this point, she has the power to remake the city however she wants, but instead chooses to return to the man in the Transistor's body and kill herself with it. But then the credits sequence starts getting surprisingly upbeat until it's revealed that Red killing herself with the Transistor resulted in her getting processed as well, and she can spend the rest of her life with the man in the Transistor in the Country. However, like Bastion, it's implied the game's events will repeat themselves inside the Transistor world.
- Valkyria Chronicles ends with the war being won, the bad guys being defeated, and the good guys going back to their rescued hometown to live their peaceful lives. That's all well and good for them, but it doesn't acknowledge the fallout: one, it's possible to replicate Valkyria powers artificially. Max's attempt was blown up, but it worked, and it's not-so-subtly implied that it failed primarily because Valkyria are exclusively female and Maximillian is a man. Sure, Max is gone, but everyone who produced that technology is still in the Empire. Two, Alicia proves that any random orphaned little girl may be descended from the Valkyrur, and practically any non-Darcsen woman in Europa could easily claim the same thing: the entire game is about how Ambition Is Evil and some people will do anything to control the power of the Valkyria, and the most viable potential Valkyria are an extremely vulnerable demographic that have to be nearly dead to awaken their powers. And three, the Princess of Gallia just openly declared that the entire history of Gallia is a big fat lie and she is a Darcsen, a minority race that is widely reviled. The sequel examines the consequences of most of these. Valkyria Chronicles 4 picks up the slack on what it doesn't cover, too. Specifically, the empire has known for a while anyone can have Valkyrur blood and has been going a massive amount of genealogy research to narrow down possible candidates. The Federation's guilty of exactly the same thing, too.
- World of Warcraft has several of these already underneath its belt because of the Player Characters' actions in each expansion. With the most prominent of them being in Warlords of Draenor where we wound up going to an Alternate Timeline version of the planet Draenor to chase down Garrosh Hellscream; the Big Bad from the previous expansion who united the Orcish Clans there to militarize them into fighting the Alliance and Horde on Azeroth as the Iron Horde. Only to later have the plot be hijacked by a returned Gul'Dan whom we end up defeating, only for Gul'Dan to be sent through a collapsing demonic portal towards a Legion-controlled world; where he would end up becoming The Dragon of the next expansion Legion. Despite it seeming like a happy ending for the Orcs and Draenei who decided to make peace, there are underlying details missed out on.
- During the Iron Hordes conquest of Draenor, many powerful groups on Draenor such as The Breakers, The Evergrowth, the Ogre Empires, and the Adherents of Rukhmar were mostly toppled, and later collapsed completely because of the Alliance and Horde players chasing after the Iron Horde; resulting in a massive power vacuum to form on the planet.
- The Draenei had lost their spiritual leader Velen, and that Yrel was left in full control over their people. Yrel has already shown instances of her being emotionally unstable due to the deaths of her sister Samaara, her mentor Velen, and of her friend Maraad by the actions of the Iron Horde.
- Because the Draenei civilization in this timeline didn't fall; they would never get a spiritual awakening and learn the path of Shamanism and how to commune with the Elements, thereby leaving many of the Draenei closed off to other means of thought or acceptance of other practices and beliefs.
- Battle for Azeroth would later make the negative implications canon, as all of these factors combined together resulted in the Draenei of the alternate Draenor falling towards extremism and trying to start forcibly converting every other sapient race on the planet to the Holy Light as The Lightbound; sometimes even against their own will. This results in The remaining Mag'har Orcs banding together to try and stop the threat of the Draenei and of their High Exarch Yrel. In many ways, it just shows exactly how similar the Draenei are to their Eredar cousins: where one managed to poison their people into an obedient slave army with the Fel and Demonic Magics, the other is doing the same with the Holy Light.
- By the time Xenogears is over most of the world's population is dead or worse. The ending focuses on the fact that you've saved Elly and taken care of the forces that'd been working against you, and more importantly destroyed Ouroboros, which freed humanity from genetic subservience to Deus, but does it really matter at that point?
- Yes, Your Grace: The player can engineer different endings for various characters. The good ending for Asalia, the Player Character's middle daughter, is obtained via allowing her to run off with her girlfriend when given the option to do so. Did we mention that both Asalia and her girlfriend are around twelve years old, and that Asalia picks up a sword for the very first time during the year covered by the game? Her girlfriend is heavily implied to be a decent fighter and able to live on her own despite her young age, but that's about all they have going for them in terms of cumulated survival skills as far as the player knows. On top of this, one of Asalia's bad endings consists of running off with her girlfriend without permission and never contacting her family ever again. The only thing that's different in the good ending is that the Player Character gets letters from her and knows she's still alive. The part where he never gets to see her again remains.
- In addition, Atana will remain antagonistic towards Davern and will always remain a thorn in the nation's side. Even if Eryk executes Ivo to remove his influence, the best this does is delay Atana's eventual retribution.
- Not in regards to the actual ending, but in Yo-kai Watch for completing a Side Quest the player gets a "Bonus Scene", a little animation that plays out one of three ways, "Boo" which is the worst ending with no prize, "Bingo!" which is the good ending and a small prize, and "Jackpot!" which of the best ending with the best prize. However one scene shows the demon cat Jibanyan trying to help the kappa Walkappa up the mountain, with the "Boo" ending being they both fall off and the "Bingo!" ending being Jibanyan helps Walkappa up the peak. For some reason, the "Jackpot!" ending has Walkappa missing Jibanyan's hand and falling down the mountain, with Jibanyan just standing there and shrugging in confusion.
