10 Exact Moments Video Games Should Have Ended (But Didn't)

There's no denying that value for money is an important factor when considering buying any game.

Nobody wants to drop £50 on a five-hour experience, but to the same token so many modern games are padded with outrageous bloat in a cynical attempt to justify their asking price.

And then there are more linear, story-driven games that just don't know when to end - they just keep going, and going, and going, until a large portion of players are utterly exhausted and eager for it to wrap up.

These 10 video games, all of them hugely acclaimed classics of their respective genres, all committed the cardinal sin of not knowing when to say farewell.

Perhaps they forced players through a lengthy, extraneous epilogue that really wasn't worth the time investment, or simply arrived at their natural climax hours before the end credits actually rolled.

In the final stretch, these games all distended themselves with extra bosses, tiresome exposition dumps, and so on that proved beyond any doubt that there truly can be too much of a good thing.

These great games would've been even better if they knew when to pack it up...

It's no secret that Metal Gear Solid V had an extremely troubled production due to internal struggles between director Hideo Kojima and Konami executives, causing the game to effectively be released unfinished.

The result is a game that doesn't have much in the way of a satisfactory ending, but does one worse by forcing players to slog their way through hours of copy-paste missions to unlock the "true ending," which contains a literally game-changing revelation regarding protagonist Venom Snake.

The Phantom Pain's campaign is divided into two chapters. The first is the main story missions that conclude with a boss battle against the new Metal Gear model, Sahelanthropus, while Chapter 2 consists of 19 extra missions, many of them recycled from Chapter 1, to unlock additional morsels of story and the big climactic twist.

And yet, it's such a chore powering through Chapter 2 to see out the remaining story scraps that many simply resorted to watching the pertinent clips on YouTube.

Clearly the game's dramatic crescendo comes when Skull Face dies and you battle Sahelathropus at the end of Chapter 1, and Hideo Kojima could've easily rolled Chapter 2's story elements into this part of the game.

Chapter 1's climactic cutscene is a far more effective stopping point for this story than the utter chore that is getting through Chapter 2 and reaching that wildly divisive big reveal.