Video Games That Ruined Great Endings With Sequels

While mindless shoot 'em ups are always fun and welcome, there's nothing like a video game with an engrossing story and an awesome, satisfying ending. The problem starts when the ending is no longer the ending, thanks to unnecessary sequels. Oftentimes, this "Wait, but what if..." is pointless and manages to muck up the perfect ending that came before it.

Since 1996, Resident Evil's story has been fairly straightforward: the psycho sillies at the Umbrella Corporation has been bio-engineering viruses that turn people into zombies. The good guys all have one goal — end Umbrella and the outbreaks. It took them forever to get there, but in 2007's Umbrella Chronicles, they finally got their conglomerate.

In the final part of the game, Chris and Jill — two major characters from Part 1 — invade Umbrella's main headquarters and destroy the final monster. Meanwhile, their arch-foe, Albert Wesker, sneaks in to steal Umbrella's documents and secrets. He apparently leaks them to the government, who react by freezing Umbrella's assets, shutting down all their research, and driving them to non-existence. Then, in Resident Evil 5, you kill Wesker before he can use Umbrella's data to create his own master race of murderous bio-weapons. With that, the story's over. The evil corporation is gone, the sociopath who stole its secrets is gone, and the world is saved!

Except, nope. See, 2005's Resident Evil 4 conspicuously had no Umbrella, without any explanation. Turns out, that was a dry run for what was to come. The virus just showed up on the black market, so anyone could become the new Big Bad. Oh, and a terrorist group calling itself Neo-Umbrella shows up in Resident Evil 6 with no ties to the original group other than the name. By 7, they didn't bother using any past characters at all, until you meet Chris Redfield at the very end ... in an Umbrella helicopter. This is very likely another off-shoot mercenary group, and Redfield is now randomly bad because Capcom has apparently given up on the narrative in exchange for just making zombie games.

Even the biggest Zelda fan has to admit the overall story makes no sense. It's almost entirely prequels, spinoffs, reboots, sequels to the prequels, prequels to the prequels, and alternate timelines. The goofiness began real early: with the second game.

In the original Zelda, you saved the princess and killed the villain, Ganon. Very straightforward, and very happy. Then, we got Zelda II, which wasn't straightforward. There was a Zelda, and you had to save her, but she wasn't the person you rescued earlier. According to the manual, the Prince of Hyrule issued a decree naming every royal girl Zelda in remembrance because that's how rational, right-thinking leaders operate. The story revolved around Ganon's minions trying to collect Link's blood to resurrect their master, but that only happens if you lose. If not, you face your own shadow for ... reasons, and the Ganon thing becomes a mere red herring.

What's worse, the game's side-scrolling setup was so misguided and broken it killed any hope of a straight follow-up. Think about it — we've had a ton of Zelda games but no Zelda III. That's how bad this attempt at continuing the original was. But everyone loved the original, so what to do? Simple: prequels and retcons galore. There are now many different Links and Zeldas. Some games exist in one timeline, some in others. Are the games awesome? Absolutely, but don't come to the Zelda party expecting anything coherent.

Once upon a time, Assassin's Creed made sense. It was a battle through the ages between the Assassins and Templars, as seen through the eyes of Desmond, a modern descendant of many different Assassins. His goal was to use the past to gain entry into a vault that the Templars would use to trigger an apocalyptic solar flare on December 21, 2012. (Yep, really.) At the end of Assassin's Creed III, Desmond saves the planet from the flare at the cost of his own life. That right there should've been it — a trilogy told, a selfless hero sacrificing himself for the good of billions, the villains' plans thwarted.

But that wasn't it, of course. The series sold ridiculously well, so you can't be angry about more games. But rather than tell a completely new story or ditch the modern-day Assassin part and focus solely on history, Ubisoft chose to half-continue the story of Desmond and the Templars. The Templars secretly extract DNA samples from Desmond's body so they can investigate his memories without him around. There's no new main character, just a series of unnamed people with no real ties to the past aside from how well they fit in the memory machine. The plot, as it were, has gone completely off the rails, with the modern-day Templars trying to find historical MacGuffins that'll help them rule humanity. Problem is, they've shown no signs of ever getting around to implementing their plans, whatever those plans actually entail.

It's almost as if Ubisoft wants to tell a story, but is refusing to write the ending because it's such a cash cow. Perhaps the only way to enjoy said story is to ignore it.

Fighting games are usually lousy with stories, but Mortal Kombat had a good one going for a while. It was weird, to be sure — an evil underworld runs a fighting tournament with their ultimate goal being to merge their world with Earth and conquer it — but it worked and ended well after Mortal Kombat 3. In it, the two worlds are successfully merged, but Earth's heroes drive back the evil, destroy their leader (Shao Kahn), and make Earth demon-free again.

Then everything else happened. From Mortal Kombat 4 on, the story got weirder and weirder and made no sense because there really wasn't a reason to keep telling it. In place of Kahn, new evil gods showed up to play (gods nobody had bothered to mention until just now), previously dead characters whose deaths were crucial to the original story were brought back to life through ridiculous means simply so we could play as them again, and new playable characters ranged from forgettable to atrocious. Oh, and Mortal Kombat 4 was a terrible stab at early 3-D fighting, which didn't do the terrible story the minimal justice it deserved.

Follow-up games weren't much better or more interesting, and it took until MK9 — a full-blown reboot — for the Mortal Kombat universe to make any sense again. Let's hope Midway learns from its previous mistake and ends the rebooted story because it makes sense to end it, not because it gets so ridiculous they have to reboot it again.