Final Fantasy XVI's ending
The ending is unsatisfying. The last act, or at least the later parts of it, consist mostly of Ultima's exposition, a mediocre spectacle fight before the final boss, an uninteresting final boss, and a final spectacle fight that's basically just Bahamut's but worse. This all leads to one of the worst conclusions I've seen in a game in a long time. The whole idea of the narrative, was, apparently, and to paraphrase the game itself, that "things are getting worse so that they'll get better". Thing is, and that applies to the whole game... things never ever ever look up, at all. At the tail end of the game, when the world is at its absolute worst, Clive just explodes, we see everyone assume he's dead, and... magically the world is better. We can infer the world is better because one interpretation of the final scene is that it's set long into the future, but we never see it. We never see it GET better, and we never see it BE better; not the world we know, not the characters living in it who we know. Just a nebulous future that might not in fact be said future. The whole game was setting up for that moment which has no payoff. Feels like they wrote themselves into a corner with that one, with no idea of HOW the world will become better.
The ending is messy. Ultima's explanations completely invalidates the entire narrative. He explains that the Blight happened to his home planet for no reason he could discern himself (I'll also point out we have no idea how Cid got the information that lead to his theory as to why it happens). I'll also add that he's an incredibly, incredibly boring villain. His scenes are flat and predictable, and he does nothing but talk and be untouchable. Beyond that, the final scenes that are open to interepretation are just ridiculous. A grounded, dark, supposedly mature story should not end on some esoteric, open-to-interpretation, pseudo-meta-intellectual bullshit. The words "Final Fantasy" should not appear inside Final Fantasy in any serious capacity, let alone in a story like XVI's.
The ending doesn't even have the benefit of resonating with the themes of the game. I completely fail to see how magicking the bad away from the world, and pretending the whole story was either told eons into the future or was just a child called Joshua's imagination fits with the game's emphasis on saving earthly resources, revenge bad, and slavery bad. To me it comes off as pretentious, as coming from the minds of people who think managing to put the title of the game into the game counts as smart writing, or who think ambiguity either makes things automatically deeper, or that the hero dying makes things more epic. It comes off as a checklist of things to put into an ending rather than a true evolution of the story at large