The Bad Ending

It's pretty common for games to have multiple endings.  Generally, certain endings in said games will have better or worse outcomes for the characters.  In that sense, players tend to view some endings as "good" while less satisfying endings are typically seen as "bad".  It goes without saying that there are a lot of perfectionists who play video games.  So, more often than not, the good ending in any particular game is what most people want.  Unfortunaly, a lot of game designers like to hide these good endings behind some very esoteric requirements.  Let me illustrate with a couple of examples.

The original Silent Hill had it's best ending dependent on the player exploring a tucked away side area and finding a particular item (the "Aglaophotys").  This is actually an atypical way game designers gate off their best endings; acquiring a weird item that needs to be used in an unclear way.  On the plus side, this juncture doesn't come up until near the halfway point.  A few games (such as the SRPG Hoshiguma) have the ending dependent on a decision the player makes very early in the game.

Blasphemous is another example of the good ending being nearly impossible to achieve without a guide.  In fact the true ending is post-launch DLC which was added once the devs figured out what they wanted to do for the sequel.  Normally, I'd say this is poor design, but as someone pointed out online, it's not at all strange that a game about the Catholic path to righteousness is so inscrutable and easy to irrevocably screw up that nobody could ever be expected to successfully do it without the hand of god guiding them.

Fatal Frame 2 is especially meanspirited when it comes to endings because it's impossible to get anything other than the worse ending on the first playthrough.  Hence, the game requires subsequent completions in order to see anything other than a really downer conclusion.  Of course, the counterpoint to all this is sometimes the supposed good ending not actually much better.  The default ending to Vandal Hearts is (outside of a congratulatory message in the credits) the same as the "Vandalier" ending.  Plus, you don't have to grind through a bunch of side missions to get it.  Similarly the very-difficult-to-get 108 stars true ending to the original Suikoden isn't much different than if you just played the game normally.

On a final note, there are games like Bloodborne that has three different endings (none of which are particularly satisfying).  Sometimes you just got to choose what you want and stick with it (warts and all).  I defiantly feel like this applies to games that will have whole lot of subtle variants on a single ending based on what players chose to do throughout the game (see The Quarry for a recent example).  Sure...it might be fun to do another run using an entirely different approach just to see how things play out and note changes, but then again it can be good to accept what happened, leave it behind and simply move on to other games...either that or just watch the alternate endings on Youtube and call it good.