Bad Endings vs. Non Endings

[Eacaraxe_v1legacy]

I really can't blame Konami for what happened to MGSV. Kojima had 5 years to work on the thing and even without Act 2 being woefully incomplete, the whole thing feels like a waste of potential(even leaving aside the big twist). Konami eventually had to call it and ship.

This...actually wasn't the case. Yes it's about PT, but this video actually elaborates a little on the backstory and Kojima's position within Konami.


Konami Holdings was in no financial trouble at all. KDE was posting "poor" earnings, but at the same time they were growing by acquiring smaller studios, not contracting. Konami didn't actually "have" to do anything, MGSV is what it is due to corporate politics, and the time and money spent developing the Fox engine (which is what "weighed down" MGSV's development) went to waste thanks to it.

 

[Seanchaidh]

Considering how fundamental the Ending is to the whole structure of a story

Is it actually, or is that just convention? Why should fiction require this structure when history clearly doesn't?

Because at some point, an audience likes to return to living their lives.

Life itself is not subject to such a restriction.

Why does this require an Ending with a capital E?

 

[CaitSeith]

The only reason people complain about bad endings is because good endings exist. I prefer the series to attempt to do a good ending than no ending at all.

 

[Squilookle]

I believe the classic adage of showbusiness is "Always leave them wanting more"

Lately it tends to just be "Always leave them wanting"

 

[Hawki]

Of course with games you never really know if they might try to resurrect it later- no ending is final enough to prevent that if the series is popular.

I'd say that's true of every media.

 

[Dalisclock]

I really can't blame Konami for what happened to MGSV. Kojima had 5 years to work on the thing and even without Act 2 being woefully incomplete, the whole thing feels like a waste of potential(even leaving aside the big twist). Konami eventually had to call it and ship.

This...actually wasn't the case. Yes it's about PT, but this video actually elaborates a little on the backstory and Kojima's position within Konami.


Konami Holdings was in no financial trouble at all. KDE was posting "poor" earnings, but at the same time they were growing by acquiring smaller studios, not contracting. Konami didn't actually "have" to do anything, MGSV is what it is due to corporate politics, and the time and money spent developing the Fox engine (which is what "weighed down" MGSV's development) went to waste thanks to it.

THere's no video there.

I'll watch it when I get a chance and while I respect Kojima to a point, the man does have a tendency to disappear up his own ass a lot. One has to question how one develops a game for 5 years and have half of it done. Yes, a substantial amount of it was devoted to the Fox Engine development, but seriously, ACt 2 was woefully incomplete and most of the good story bits were relegated to the audio tapes. The whole Cipher plot alluded to in Ground Zeros and the end of Peace Walker? Pretty much the only time it comes up in game is during Skull Faces fucking monologue in the jeep. XOF? Shows up in the Fortess mission and the hospital, and the rest of the time it's random mooks with some super parasite zombies tossed in. The Whole Premise of "This is the Fall of Big Boss/This is the transition between Naked Snake and Big Boss the Big Bad" pretty much happen off screen(and Peace Walker basically already did it). None of that strikes me as him having the dev time pulled out from under him.

Maybe if Konami had given him another 5 years, it would have been a complete game but as it stands, it was apparently 5 years of FOX Engine development and some great on the groundplay with a ramshackle plot and a empty open world bolted on. They didn't have to tell him it was time to ship and while I fucking hate to defend Konami in anything, I can only imagine they wanted to see a game ship and a deadline was set.

They can still fuck off for PT and MG:Survive was a pitiful use for the excellent FOX engine, but it's hard to blame them for telling the man to wrap it up.

 

[BrawlMan]

For me, it varies. Sometimes I prefer a non-ending over a shitty ending, if the shitty ending derails the plot, characters, or themes the show/game/manga was going for. Case in point, Shaman King (manga), Star Vs. TFOE, Gurren Lagaan, and Legend of Korra. Shaman King (manga version) had a gainax/non-ending in 2005, and we did not get an actual ending until 2009. Leaving the manga in a long hiatus. 4 years wasted, because the author got a bug up his ass about humanity/nature and all of sudden we're supposed to feel sorry about Hao Asakura (main villain) who has killed over 1000 people, because he lost his goddamned mommy. The manga got more preachy, certain characters were acting out the character, the stakes were less interesting since nearly every character would get revived instantly when killed, and a fuck you of an ending. This is one of those cases where the show is better than the manga. The anime had a decent ending, but looks even better by comparison.

Star and LoK had an suffered from having the bad or cliche romance take over at the expense of the actual plot or interesting side characters. Star suffered even more in this regard, thanks to losing the writer from season 2. Once he left, writing issues became more prevalent, and the whole git rid of all magic is written as a good thing when, there are many innocent beings composed a magic who will die. The only reason it's a "good" thing is because Marco and Star will finally be together. Raspberry noises with tongue! Cry me a river. Korra I've ranted enough times, so I will look for a link of all the things I've said later.

Gurren Lagann's ending was an ass pull and came out of nowhere and that is all I have to say to that. The only time a non-ending works is for Big O's 2nd season. There was supposed to be a third season that explains the craziness, but due to funding and ratings, they could not get one. While sad, I prefer it this way because trying to explain all of the craziness in S2 would feel unsatisfactory and destroy the mystery. Otherwise, S2 had a fitting end in my eyes.

And just as important, a story isn't told until it has an ending. That's why I prefer... say anime that has an ending as opposed to those shonen series that go on and on and on and on with no ending in sight. I can't stand that. That's (strangely) why I prefer episodic style tv shows as opposed to those with long story arcs. Episodic shows have proper story structure... every episode. Every episode has a beginning, middle, end. With long story arc shows they either break up the structure unnaturally with ending the story wherever time runs out for the episode... which is unbearably awkward, or trying (and usually failing) to give each ep proper structure WHILE keeping the arc going. Which is apparently VERY hard to do as few shows reliably do it well and most have to rely on the crutch of a "previously on" segment as an opening scene. So b is worse.

Shaman King's ending in the manga is pretty much why I dropped most shounen shows/manga in general. The only shounen I keep up with is My Hero Academia, and that is mostly, because I like Midoryia so much. Precious cinnamon bun. To me, the only shonen series with satisfying endings are Yu Yu Hakusho (anime adaption), Fist of the Northstar, the original Yu-gi-Oh, and JoJo Parts 1-4. Long running seinen and shoujo series can also suffer from this too, but I am well less versed in the latter. Gunsmith Cats being a big example.

A bad ending is at least closure, without which the story will always feel hollow. Of the endings i consider bad endings, it was usually because of the endgame, the plot adopting a pace that does not serve the narrative well, whether too fast or too slow. when i wish series had ended earlier, i usually wish that in the sense that I wish a earlier part of the story had lead more directly to the conclusion so that there would not be a need for the unsatisfying final arc inbetween, for example the Shinobi War Arc in Naruto. I've seen a fair few shows where, if asked how to improve the ending, my solution would have been to cut a subplot, or even an entire season to achieve closure at a better pace. Non-endings satisfy no one but narcicistic fan-fic writers who either think they alone 'get' the creator's mindset and could replicate a perfect carbon copy of the 'true ending' or view themselves as better writers who would have come up with something better no matter what. They are all wrong, every time

The funny thing is, I've seen fan fic writers pull off better endings for Naruto and others shows than the actual creators themselves.

 

[happyninja42]

It doesn't really bother me much either way these days. I don't know if it's just from getting older or what, but I don't invest my identity into my entertainment, so if it's bad or less than I hoped for, it doesn't really bother me much. Sure to some degree I'm disappointed, but for the most part I just shrug and go "meh, that was less than ideal."

So either outcome is pretty equally "meh" in my book. Maybe the Bad Ending carries a bit more weight, simply because it feels like a big wet turd flopping on the table at the end, but it usually doesn't make the rest of the show unwatchable for me.

 

[Eacaraxe_v1legacy]

Snip.

Oh, stupid video player, here's a link [https://youtu.be/yr4RvdREwl8].

The TLDR is Kojima's contract was for two-year periods, renewed on odd years. The video creator theorizes the actual shit went down in 2013; by that point the mobile gaming division's takeover was complete, and when Kojima's contract was up for renewal, Konami extended it one final time to save face and for him to complete MGSV. But, internally, Silent Hills was effectively canceled, and Kojima was all but "officially" fired having his influence and decision-making powers stripped, in 2013.

From there, the author theorizes PT was never actually intended to be released. Kojima repurposed the Fox engine tech demo and the proof-of-concept build he showed to del Toro, Refn, Reedus, and Mikkelsen to make a coded whistle-blow against Konami's management, and went over management's head to get it pushed to the Sony marketplace. That infuriated Konami's management, and that's when they restricted Kojima to his office, isolated him from his development team, and started the Big Brother shit.

I don't necessarily agree with all the author's conclusions, but we do know from other sources and third parties about the slapfight between Kojima and the mobile games division, and the mobile games division's takeover of KDE. And, that necessarily impacted MGSV's development, and everything does seem to have blown up around the time of PT's release.

I think a more likely scenario is Konami fully intended to move forward with Silent Hills, but not extend Kojima's contract in 2015. This way they'd have Kojima doing the heavy design lifting, but he'd be out before it was time to start development, letting them stick Kojima's name on the game without it being "his". Kojima went off the reservation remaking PT as the fuck-you letter, then Konami dropped the hammer on him.

The end result of this relevant to MGSV, was it had probably two years' less real development time than it actually appeared to have (once you account for Fox engine's development). Ground Zeroes was clearly not intended to be released as its own product and pushed out the door to recoup Fox engine development losses, and it was the start of Kojima's subtle anti-Konami messaging. Konami probably mandated KojiPro halt development on MGSV overall to polish the Guantanamo Bay segment and make filler content, so that it could be released separately. And, once PT came out and Kojima was separated from his development team, the order probably went out to halt development on further content, pad, and polish without direction.

Honestly, I think the "mission 51" content is something of the smoking gun there. The "Kingdom of the Flies" segment, as described, would almost have certainly required multiple missions (three or four maybe), and its own map at least on the scale of Camp Omega. Then you have the cutscenes in Chapter 2 that seem to have been intended to accompany missions of their own. Adding that together, plus the Camp Omega segment, it would have been a single game, with a cohesive narrative, with four major locations and about 50-51 missions.

I don't think this is one place where you can reasonably blame Kojima. Like his methods and development philosophy or not, he was drug into an office politics struggle nevertheless, and management did meddle heavily in MGSV's development process. This wasn't just a case of KDE's management telling him to wrap it up, and to be frank if Kojima had just been allowed to do his job it's entirely possible the game would have released, complete, in 2015 anyways.

 

[wings012]

As someone who watches too much anime, there's way too many incomplete adaptations out there which I inadvertently end up watching. Unless I want to get into the source material, there's often little recourse. And sometimes the source material itself is something unfinished, or a novel which may not have translations and I personally do not enjoy reading light novels.

It doesn't help that Japanese source material are largely serialized, and will pretty much only ever end if it gets axed. And typically the creator isn't given that much time to wrap up, so many endings are either left open or hastily concluded with many plot holes.

I get on with life by moving onto the next piece of entertainment. There is really little sense obsessing over it. I still need to occupy and entertain myself otherwise.

Depending on the nature of the "non-ending" I might be still okay. If they resolve all immediate plot threads and kinda do a whole "life goes on" - I'm typically alright. Also kinda depends on the premise of the show. If it is a light hearted play it loose sorta premise, these sorta endings can kinda fit and be okay. Something straight up and very obviously unfinished however is going to suck.

Bad endings however, always sour the hell out of me and completely repaint my opinion of the entire thing and will affect my decision to revisit the piece of media or not. Mass Effect and Game of Thrones comes to mind.

I think I'm more okay with non-ends since I think I'm more easily able to move on and typically forget about the entire affair. Bad endings kinda... stick and feel more hard to get over. But only if I liked it enough.

But overall, there's always more shows to watch. More games to play. There's long running stuff I actually started but couldn't be arsed to continue with or lost interest in, so in essence I have 'self inflicted' a bunch of non-endings upon myself.

 

[CyanCat47_v1legacy]

For me, it varies. Sometimes I prefer a non-ending over a shitty ending, if the shitty ending derails the plot, characters, or themes the show/game/manga was going for. Case in point, Shaman King (manga), Star Vs. TFOE, Gurren Lagaan, and Legend of Korra. Shaman King (manga version) had a gainax/non-ending in 2005, and we did not get an actual ending until 2009. Leaving the manga in a long hiatus. 4 years wasted, because the author got a bug up his ass about humanity/nature and all of sudden we're supposed to feel sorry about Hao Asakura (main villain) who has killed over 1000 people, because he lost his goddamned mommy. The manga got more preachy, certain characters were acting out the character, the stakes were less interesting since nearly every character would get revived instantly when killed, and a fuck you of an ending. This is one of those cases where the show is better than the manga. The anime had a decent ending, but looks even better by comparison.

Star and LoK had an suffered from having the bad or cliche romance take over at the expense of the actual plot or interesting side characters. Star suffered even more in this regard, thanks to losing the writer from season 2. Once he left, writing issues became more prevalent, and the whole git rid of all magic is written as a good thing when, there are many innocent beings composed a magic who will die. The only reason it's a "good" thing is because Marco and Star will finally be together. Raspberry noises with tongue! Cry me a river. Korra I've ranted enough times, so I will look for a link of all the things I've said later.

Gurren Lagann's ending was an ass pull and came out of nowhere and that is all I have to say to that. The only time a non-ending works is for Big O's 2nd season. There was supposed to be a third season that explains the craziness, but due to funding and ratings, they could not get one. While sad, I prefer it this way because trying to explain all of the craziness in S2 would feel unsatisfactory and destroy the mystery. Otherwise, S2 had a fitting end in my eyes.

And just as important, a story isn't told until it has an ending. That's why I prefer... say anime that has an ending as opposed to those shonen series that go on and on and on and on with no ending in sight. I can't stand that. That's (strangely) why I prefer episodic style tv shows as opposed to those with long story arcs. Episodic shows have proper story structure... every episode. Every episode has a beginning, middle, end. With long story arc shows they either break up the structure unnaturally with ending the story wherever time runs out for the episode... which is unbearably awkward, or trying (and usually failing) to give each ep proper structure WHILE keeping the arc going. Which is apparently VERY hard to do as few shows reliably do it well and most have to rely on the crutch of a "previously on" segment as an opening scene. So b is worse.

Shaman King's ending in the manga is pretty much why I dropped most shounen shows/manga in general. The only shounen I keep up with is My Hero Academia, and that is mostly, because I like Midoryia so much. Precious cinnamon bun. To me, the only shonen series with satisfying endings are Yu Yu Hakusho (anime adaption), Fist of the Northstar, the original Yu-gi-Oh, and JoJo Parts 1-4. Long running seinen and shoujo series can also suffer from this too, but I am well less versed in the latter. Gunsmith Cats being a big example.

A bad ending is at least closure, without which the story will always feel hollow. Of the endings i consider bad endings, it was usually because of the endgame, the plot adopting a pace that does not serve the narrative well, whether too fast or too slow. when i wish series had ended earlier, i usually wish that in the sense that I wish a earlier part of the story had lead more directly to the conclusion so that there would not be a need for the unsatisfying final arc inbetween, for example the Shinobi War Arc in Naruto. I've seen a fair few shows where, if asked how to improve the ending, my solution would have been to cut a subplot, or even an entire season to achieve closure at a better pace. Non-endings satisfy no one but narcicistic fan-fic writers who either think they alone 'get' the creator's mindset and could replicate a perfect carbon copy of the 'true ending' or view themselves as better writers who would have come up with something better no matter what. They are all wrong, every time

The funny thing is, I've seen fan fic writers pull off better endings for Naruto and others shows than the actual creators themselves.

Because they can just edit someone else's work using pre-established characters with the actual series already doing part of the the trial and error process for them. I sincerely doubt any of them would accomplish much on a weekly deadline

 

[BrawlMan]

For me, it varies. Sometimes I prefer a non-ending over a shitty ending, if the shitty ending derails the plot, characters, or themes the show/game/manga was going for. Case in point, Shaman King (manga), Star Vs. TFOE, Gurren Lagaan, and Legend of Korra. Shaman King (manga version) had a gainax/non-ending in 2005, and we did not get an actual ending until 2009. Leaving the manga in a long hiatus. 4 years wasted, because the author got a bug up his ass about humanity/nature and all of sudden we're supposed to feel sorry about Hao Asakura (main villain) who has killed over 1000 people, because he lost his goddamned mommy. The manga got more preachy, certain characters were acting out the character, the stakes were less interesting since nearly every character would get revived instantly when killed, and a fuck you of an ending. This is one of those cases where the show is better than the manga. The anime had a decent ending, but looks even better by comparison.

Star and LoK had an suffered from having the bad or cliche romance take over at the expense of the actual plot or interesting side characters. Star suffered even more in this regard, thanks to losing the writer from season 2. Once he left, writing issues became more prevalent, and the whole git rid of all magic is written as a good thing when, there are many innocent beings composed a magic who will die. The only reason it's a "good" thing is because Marco and Star will finally be together. Raspberry noises with tongue! Cry me a river. Korra I've ranted enough times, so I will look for a link of all the things I've said later.

Gurren Lagann's ending was an ass pull and came out of nowhere and that is all I have to say to that. The only time a non-ending works is for Big O's 2nd season. There was supposed to be a third season that explains the craziness, but due to funding and ratings, they could not get one. While sad, I prefer it this way because trying to explain all of the craziness in S2 would feel unsatisfactory and destroy the mystery. Otherwise, S2 had a fitting end in my eyes.

And just as important, a story isn't told until it has an ending. That's why I prefer... say anime that has an ending as opposed to those shonen series that go on and on and on and on with no ending in sight. I can't stand that. That's (strangely) why I prefer episodic style tv shows as opposed to those with long story arcs. Episodic shows have proper story structure... every episode. Every episode has a beginning, middle, end. With long story arc shows they either break up the structure unnaturally with ending the story wherever time runs out for the episode... which is unbearably awkward, or trying (and usually failing) to give each ep proper structure WHILE keeping the arc going. Which is apparently VERY hard to do as few shows reliably do it well and most have to rely on the crutch of a "previously on" segment as an opening scene. So b is worse.

Shaman King's ending in the manga is pretty much why I dropped most shounen shows/manga in general. The only shounen I keep up with is My Hero Academia, and that is mostly, because I like Midoryia so much. Precious cinnamon bun. To me, the only shonen series with satisfying endings are Yu Yu Hakusho (anime adaption), Fist of the Northstar, the original Yu-gi-Oh, and JoJo Parts 1-4. Long running seinen and shoujo series can also suffer from this too, but I am well less versed in the latter. Gunsmith Cats being a big example.

A bad ending is at least closure, without which the story will always feel hollow. Of the endings i consider bad endings, it was usually because of the endgame, the plot adopting a pace that does not serve the narrative well, whether too fast or too slow. when i wish series had ended earlier, i usually wish that in the sense that I wish a earlier part of the story had lead more directly to the conclusion so that there would not be a need for the unsatisfying final arc inbetween, for example the Shinobi War Arc in Naruto. I've seen a fair few shows where, if asked how to improve the ending, my solution would have been to cut a subplot, or even an entire season to achieve closure at a better pace. Non-endings satisfy no one but narcicistic fan-fic writers who either think they alone 'get' the creator's mindset and could replicate a perfect carbon copy of the 'true ending' or view themselves as better writers who would have come up with something better no matter what. They are all wrong, every time

The funny thing is, I've seen fan fic writers pull off better endings for Naruto and others shows than the actual creators themselves.

Because they can just edit someone else's work using pre-established characters with the actual series already doing part of the the trial and error process for them. I sincerely doubt any of them would accomplish much on a weekly deadline

You have point, but some of these shows or manga still fucked up due to deadline, regardless if they were on point or not. Me personally, I don't care much if the fic writers use the characters to their full potential better than the official creator(s).