The Big Finish

I just finished playing Dragon Age: Origins, the console game, to its conclusion.  For the fifth time.

While I like this game a great deal— enough to go through the sixty or so hours of gameplay no less than five times— it must be said that I truly hate the finale.  It’s a brutal slogfest in which your hero and his/her companions battle the Ultimate Evil and hordes of its minions, and nothing really interesting happens in it.  It’s just a long, long fight that you’re almost guaranteed to lose, the odds being so heavily tilted against you.  Even if you prepare properly, chances are you’re going to lose, and have to play the finale again.  And again.  And again.

When you finally win, it’s going to be pretty much a matter of luck.  Either the ball of blue fire falls from the sky and extinguishes you and your companions, or it won’t. It’s a roll of the dice— or whatever number comes up on the random number generator, whichever applies.

In the five times I’ve played this game, I’ve never once enjoyed the finale.  Not once.  It’s just something I have to drag myself through in order to say that I’ve completed the game.

This sort of ending isn’t really uncommon in video games.  The last big scene is often just more of everything from the previous scenes— more enemy, shooting more weapons, with more invincible leaders, and more hopeless odds, and fewer choices, and maybe you have to complete the mission before a deadline, otherwise the dragon wins, or the hijacked ICBMs take off and the world gets nuked, or Sauron gets the Ring . . . whatever.  I drag myself through these scenes, knowing that I’ll eventually try everything in order to find the something that may work, assuming of course that the random number generator is kind and doesn’t kill me in some stupid and arbitrary way, which it is almost guaranteed to do.

In these final scenes, the rewards for cleverness just sort of disappear.  Dragon Age, for most of its length, is a game that rewards intelligent play.  It’s full of interesting characters that you can interact with, and your choices affect the way those characters view you, and whether or not they’ll cooperate with you in achieving your goals.  You can talk your way around or through a number of situations instead of battering your way into them.

But none of that really matters in the finale.  It’s just you and the night and the random numbers generator.  Keep smashing your head against the console, and eventually (you hope) the console will give way.

It’s not just console games that have endings like this.  Blockbuster movies have endings like video games— or vice versa— and they just go on forever, in equally brutal, pointless scenes of combat.  Even clever movies end like this.  I rather enjoyed Mr and Mrs Smith, which was surprisingly funny and character-driven, until the protagonists were provided with a choice: either run away and live happily ever after; or fort up in a home store and have a 25-minute combat with every CIA killer in the world.  (Can you guess which they choose?)

And quite often these long scenes have no actual suspense.  You know who’s going to win, so why drag it out?  And in the recent Thor, the final battle is between two immortal gods who can’t die.  You need a powerful lot of special effects to distract the audience from realizing how incredibly dull this is.

(I will say one thing for Thor: Chris Hemsworth really looks the part.  When I see Christopher Reeve as Superman, I think “There’s a really buff actor in a Superman costume.”  When I see any of the Batmen, I think, “There’s an actor walled up in Batman armor.”  But when I saw Hemsworth, I thought, “Holy crap!  It’s Thor!“)

What most annoys me about these scenes is that they eliminate the clever.  Because if your hero’s smart, You don’t have to do the big slogging fight scene at all! You’ll do what great leaders have done throughout history: worked out a way to fight on your own terms, to put your enemy at a disadvantage, and to win without breaking much of a sweat.

Instead of fighting the dragon, you’ve already prepared your net-flinging catapults to snare it and hold it ready for the beheading.  Instead of charging headlong into the trench with enemy soldiers shooting at you from three sides, you go around it.  Instead of walking up to the Supreme Evil Magician and daring him to do his worst, you pick up your sniper rifle from 1000 yards away and shoot him in the head.  Instead of charging into the enemy fortress to face a thousand evil minions, you just call in a cruise missile attack and blow it the fuck up!

(You don’t think gamers would be stoked if they had this kind of option?   “Holy crap, once I deduced the codes to the B-52, I was able to wipe out the bad guys from six miles up!”  I think they’d be shrieking with delight in their own cleverness.)

But no, neither games nor movies are really into rewarding intelligence in this way.  You’ve gotta have the big blockbuster climax, even if your hero seems to lose most of his IQ getting there, and the action is suspiciously like that of the last twelve big blockbuster climaxes you’ve seen.

Sigh.  I feel great nostalgia for those old movies in which Bogart just produces a pistol, shoots the bad guy, and walks off down the rainy runway while the sound track plays La Marseillaise.  (Which is the best ending ever, am I right?)

So— now I’ve made my point— I’m not going to drag this out.  Imagine that final pistol shot just ringing in your ear.

Into the fog I go, walking slowly in the rain.

Swelling music.

Fade.

The end.

What’s not to like?