Summary
Free will is one of our best human traits, especially as gamers. Generally, a story mode has us go through story beats as the protagonist until we save the day. Eventually, games have become more complex, allowing us to choose where a story can be headed through our morals. Should we save the citizens? Or destroy everything in our path?
Choosing to side with the villains means getting a bad ending in video games. Despite usually not being part of the canon, these scenarios make a video game ending more enjoyable and replayable. We will take a look at a few games where we can side with villainy either by joining them or choosing the morally incorrect path.
Spoiler Warning: This article contains major story spoilers for the involved entries.
Infamous 2 follows a super-powered human named Cole, an ordinary delivery man who is accidentally given electricity powers. In an open-world setting, you fight through other super-powered people called conduits, which terrorize the city. The game also lets you choose what kind of conduit to be, whether using your powers for good or evil, measured by the karma system.
In Infamous 2, we continue the story of Cole, and if you played the first game, you can carry over your karma. In the bad ending and creator’s canon ending, Cole sacrifices millions to save his kind, succumbing to his bad karma and merging with the final boss, The Beast.
The Sega Genesis classic Streets of Rage takes you through the crime-ridden city of Wood Oak. Three police officers take matters into their own hands as their allegiance to the law has failed them. Now, as vigilantes, Axel, Blaze, and Adam must take down a crime syndicate and their leader, Mr. X.
Streets of Rage is a beat-up game in which you travel through stages fighting hoards of enemies. A second player can join you to beat down Mr. X. What if your partner decides to double-cross us? Well, before the final boss, either player has the choice to join Mr. X. Once defeated, the winner must fight Mr.X and take over the city for themselves.
Spider-Man has starred in many video games, but in 2008, we were treated to Spider-Man: Web of Shadows, which focuses on Spider-Man’s best villain, Venom. Venom returns to terrorize New York, but in the process, he gives Spider-Man his black suit back, which enhances his abilities but at the cost of his morality.
Throughout the story, you must choose how to handle situations, either heroically or maliciously, with the black suit. While selecting the black suit, Spider-Man acts like a jerk to the characters, cheating on Mary Jane, ripping Wolverine in half, and finally taking over New York with his fully controlled symbiote army.
Deep underground, you enter a world filled with monsters, many resembling anthropomorphic animals and ghouls. In Undertale, you play a human child who falls underground, eventually coming across a murderous flower. After being tortured, you are saved by Toriel, a goat monster who teaches you that the underground can be filled with many monsters, but you can overcome these encounters by talking instead of fighting. In this world, killing is unnecessary.
If you ignore Toriel’s teachings and kill every monster throughout your journey, you level up and sever relationships before they start. All your would-be friendships become boss battles, culminating in the infamous Sans boss fight, where you, the player, are reminded of all the unnecessary deaths you caused. After all the genocide, you are given a choice to erase this world or do nothing. One will erase your saved data to start fresh, while another will keep you in limbo.
Shadow the Hedgehogwas the character’s first solo outing since his debut and death in Sonic Adventure 2. After Shadow is mysteriously brought back from the dead in Sonic Heroes, we follow him sometime later, and he begins to question his purpose and amnesia. We meet Black Doom, who claims to be Shadow’s creator and promises to reveal his true purpose.
During the story, we can choose which route Shadow will take. Suppose you follow Black Doom by killing military men, collecting chaos emeralds, and fighting heroes like Sonic the Hedgehog. Eventually, Shadow will become more powerful than his creator and defeat him. With no one to stand in his way, he either vows to rule the planet or destroy it.
In Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, we play Darth Vader’s secret apprentice, Starkiller. Despite starting by hunting down Jedi, Starkiller becomes influenced by the light through the friends he makes along the way and begins to defect from his master. By the end of the story, we must choose revenge by killing Vader or saving our Jedi friend from the Emperor. Killing Vader sees the defeat of Starkiller’s friends and turns him into a cyborg slave.
In the Ultimate Sith Edition’s DLC, we continue the bad ending path by playing as Lord Starkiller, who is now fully consumed by the dark side. We play through a what-if story in which Starkiller is inserted in Star Wars Episodes 4 and 5 as he combats characters like Obi-Wan and Luke.
The Last of Us took us on a journey across the zombie-infested United States, hoping to find a cure through a girl immune to the cordyceps virus. Joel, a smuggler, is tasked with bringing the immune girl, Ellie, to a militia group. Joel and Ellie bond during the journey as they survive and reach the Fireflies, but things go south once Joel finds out they need to kill Ellie to retrieve a cure. Joel decides to turn against them and massacres them.
In The Last of Us 2, four years have passed as Joel and Ellie live a peaceful life until an outsider named Abby hunts and kills Joel to avenge her father, a former Firefly. When Ellie witnesses his death by Abby, she goes on a killing spree. After we finish Ellie’s story, we are forced to play Abby and her point of view in the vicious cycle of revenge,with its ending still being talked about years later.
Experiencing amnesia, we follow a former Jedi turned Sith lord named Revan, who is defeated in battle. With his wounds healed by the Jedi and his memory wiped, Revan is brought back to the Jedi view, fighting the Sith empire.
Through dialogue, we can guide Revan to remain on the light side or reclaim his mantel of Darth sith lord. One of these paths will lead Revan to kill his love interest, who also falls to the dark side.
2Fear And Hunger 2: Termina
Kill ‘em All, For One To Stand
Fear and Hunger 2 is set in the ominous town of Preheval, where 14 contestants are forced to participate in a battle royale survival game. Before arriving, each contestant is given a vision in their dreams where the organizer, Per’kele, instructs them on the game’s rules as he stands in front of the moon god, Rher.
Each contestant has to reach the center of the town to climb to the tallest tower with a time limit of three days, while a plague fills the city, making its inhabitants lose themselves and turn into twisted, demon-like figures. Throughout the game, it is recommended that you attempt to save contestants, but you can hunt all contestants and participate in Per’kele’s twisted plan.
Two hundred years after nuclear bombs fell on America, we are born living life inside a vault, underground bunkers that house expansive communities. At the age of 19, our father, the only parent we have, escapes the vault, leaving no clue behind. Now that he’s escaped, the vault’s overseer is after our head. After a shootout, we escape and end up outside in the wasteland to find our dad.
Fallout 3 isan open worldwhere we can choose what kind of wanderer we want to be as we gain good or bad karma, which affects the way the denizens of the wasteland behave towards us. One significant way to gain instant bad karma is when you are given a choice to side with one of the villains and detonate a nuclear warhead in the middle of a city, causing a ripple effect that’ll impact the wastelandthat makes us question our choices.
