A Tale of Two Endings [CW]

Content Warning: This blog post includes mentions of suicide as it exists within the scope of Doki Doki Literature Club.

As games have become more complex and started incorporating player choice in more integral ways, the practice of diversifying the player experience by providing two or more different endings to the same game has become more commonplace. We saw one example of this in BioShock, where the player’s decisions to either “harvest” or “save” the Little Sisters led to different endings based on the level of morality that the game assigned to each option. "Harvesting" the Little Sisters leads to the bad ending while "saving" them leads to the good ending, therefore designating "harvesting" as immoral and "saving" as moral within the context of the game. More modern games like Red Dead Redemption 2 also incorporate similar structures. In Red Dead 2, the player has the ability to either gain or lose “honor” by acting in certain ways towards NPCs, which causes them to move either up or down an “honor scale” that they can view at any time during the game. The player’s placement on the honor scale by the end of the game determines whether or not they’ll see the good ending (which correlates to high honor) or the bad ending (which correlates to low honor).

Above all else, these multi-ending structures depend on one key mechanic: player choice. The player has to have choices to make in order for the game to be led towards one ending rather than another. More often than not, this adds a moral message to the game; by associating bad endings with certain actions and good endings with others, the game is subtly influencing the values of its players, asking them to look more closely at the choices they made and the ending they got in order to (potentially) change the way they think about morality. Without the player being able to make his or her own choices, this message would not be effective.

That being said, the last game that I would expect to have multiple endings is Doki Doki Literature Club (DDLC). Although most dating sims are all about choice — the main character first chooses a girl to pursue, then continues making choices that strengthen his relationship with her over the course of the game — DDLC is not your normal dating sim. It becomes clear early on in the game that although it may seem like you have choices, those choices don’t actually influence the course of the game. No matter which girl you choose to pursue, Sayori will become more and more depressed and eventually confess her love to you. And, no matter what you say when she does so, she will end up committing suicide the next morning. The game even explicitly explains your lack of choice to you at one point by revealing that Monika has been editing the code of the game itself, tweaking the character profiles of the girls to drive them down destructive paths no matter what you do to try and stop it. It could not be made more clear that you as a player have no control over where DDLC is taking you.

You can imagine my surprise, then, when I was browsing the Internet looking for fan discourse about the game and ended up discovering that DDLC has two possible endings! The first ending is the one we’re probably all familiar with, where Monika deletes the game because it becomes clear to her that “there is no happiness to be found in the Literature Club.” The second ending, on the other hand, is much different (though it may not seem like it at first). To get it, you have to play through the first act of the game three times, focusing on a different girl each time and reloading the game right before Sayori’s suicide. On your playthrough with the third girl, continue through the game as normal until you get to the point where you and Monika are alone in the clubroom after she has deleted everyone else’s character files. Delete Monika’s file, and the game will restart with Sayori as club president… but this time, instead of Sayori adopting Monika’s obsessive habits and Monika stepping in to delete the game as a whole, Sayori remains her normal, sweet self. She still becomes aware of the fact that she’s in a video game, and even thanks you for spending so much time caring about each of the girls by replaying so many times, but there is no final parting note of horror like there is in the first ending. Instead, you see a heartfelt note from the developer thanking you for playing the game. (Read more about the second ending and how to get it here.)

Just like with BioShock and Red Dead 2, DDLC’s two endings have been assigned the labels of “good” and “bad” by fans. The ending where Monika deletes the game is the “bad” ending, while the ending with the note from the developer is the “good” ending. Because the structure of DDLC differs so much from the normal choice-based foundation of most multi-ending games, however, I think these labels are misassigned and even slightly problematic.

Think about it this way: the “bad” ending is, in many ways, the default ending of the game. Players who don’t know that Sayori is going to commit suicide can’t know when to reset the game — and even if they randomly get it right, the chances of them also randomly fulfilling the rest of the conditions needed to unlock the “good” ending are very slim. In this way, the game funnels most of its first-time players through this so-called “bad” ending, which is a significant departure from games like BioShock where players have to deliberately choose the bad ending through their actions. This isn’t really an issue for DDLC, though, because the game isn’t meant to explore the concept of player choice. It’s a critique of the genre of dating sims as a whole, and the “bad” ending is essential to that critique.

Even before the ending, the game incorporates countless design elements that challenge the common tropes of dating sims and expose how problematic they can be, but that’s another blog post. In the end, it’s the ending that really drives the game’s message home. When Monika restarts the game with her own character file deleted and the player finds that her obsessive infatuation has transferred to Sayori, the new president of the literature club, it becomes clear that unhealthy representations of love are not embedded in individual characters, but in the game itself. No matter who takes the role of president, they will become unhealthily obsessed with the player; it does not matter what their individual personalities and philosophies on relationships are. This type of obsessive love is usually portrayed as normal in dating sims, but when it’s juxtaposed against the horror elements of DDLC, it becomes painfully clear how abnormal and wrong it is — and the game wants you to recognize that.

The existence of the “good” ending, however, is contradictory to this goal. Because Monika’s obsessive infatuation never transfers to Sayori, it becomes associated with just Monika (reference not intended) as opposed to the intrinsic structure of the game. The player is able to come away from the game feeling both relieved and righteous for having unlocked the “good,” cutesy ending after all of the horrors that the game included, which renders the work that the game has done critiquing the genre of dating sims completely obsolete. Monika was just a bad apple in a group of cute, eligible girls, the "good" ending seems to say, and now that she's gone, you shouldn't worry about that anymore! The dating sim itself is fine, just so long as she's not in it! This stands in opposition to the message that the "bad" ending portrays, and it renders the game less effective as a result.

In my opinion, DDLC is not a game that players should come away from feeling like they’ve done the “right” thing at any point. This is why there are no true choices in the game, and why there shouldn't be a multi-ending structure that allows players to think that one path through the game is more "correct" than another. By having a “good” ending anyways, the game gives players a way to feel validated regardless of everything else that happened in the game up until that point — and that shouldn’t be an option, at least not if Doki Doki Literature Club wants to be effective about the message it's trying to impart to its players.