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The story's downhill slide to s**t begins when they hint that comstock is not the father. Immediately I feared that booker would be the father, after all there isn't hardly anybody else for it to be. But here's why this plot twist is ******** awful. Up until this point the game literally does just about everything to weave one of the most genuinely romantic relationships in gaming. I rarely ever see anything come this close to making you feel for a character. And its easy to tell that the game wanted this for you. Elizabeth is shown as being intelligent, innocent, useful, and overall just a beautiful person in an otherwise harsh and bizarre city. In a lot of cutscenes she shares a close proximity with Booker as well, from holding your hand to cupping your cheek, ect. To have the game suddenly throw a 180 in there that you are the father immediately sacrifices all of that romance and brings you down to the crashing conclusion that these two are never going to be a couple. And that...that just sucks. Its like the game pulls you along and teases you with the hope for the happy ending you're fighting for, only to turn around and slap you in the face in the end. And all for the sake of an unforeseeable plot twist. It was stupid. A game shouldn't betray the gamer like that. It had the potential to have something great, and instead brought itself down.

The next gripe I have with the game's story is Elizabeth's "evil" future possibility. I guess it does well to serve as an explanation for how she could be turned to being Comstock's heir, so I don't have that much of a problem with it, but I think it was unnecessary and only served to further destroy the image I had of Elizabeth as a strong and intelligent woman worthy of her protagonist role. Also she talks about all these evil creations she's made in her time of rule, but we only get that one guy with the summoning of benjamin-head minions. Overall I found it to be very lame. I guess you could argue that it serves to make you feel guilty or fearful about the possibility of failing her, or possibly more angry and motivated to seek revenge on her captors so that Elizabeth never has to suffer this, but those feelings are automatically set in the moment you find her being basically 'raped' in front of you with the electrotherapy. I call it rape because I think thats what the game developers were going for. I mean she's disrobed, in extreme pain and discomfort, surrounded by people she hates, and is being penetrated by the needle in her back. It just makes sense to me that the game developers would want you to feel as wrathful as possible in this scene, and what better way than to show Elizabeth being tortured right in front of you? But you didn't need to have the whole evil Elizabeth future right before this to feel that way. It happens naturally, and if anything it jeopardizes that reaction by making you question whether or not Elizabeth can or should be saved if she's so powerful that she can become such a threat in the future.

My third gripe is that the songbird dies without a fight. What is with this game and not wanting you to fight anybody? Seriously, EVERY major antagonist in this game just goes down either off-sceen or in a cutscene. Fink is found dead, murdered by Fitzroy. Fitzroy is murdered in a cutscene by Elizabeth. Comstock is killed in a cutscene. And then the songbird dies in a cutscene. Did this game just not have enough time and budget to give us some boss fights? I don't understand why they would give us such a crummy ending fight. I mean, the songbird was a perfect antagonist throughout the game. It's big, powerful, and serves as the power that wills Elizabeth to stay captive from the freedom that you're fighting for her. The game even builds this songbird up so much throughout the course of its plot. It attacks you near the beginning and elizabeth explains how she hates it for always being her warden. Evil Elizabeth notes that songbird always kills you, giving the impression that the clash between you two is inevitable. But then what happens? She takes control of it, and then kills it in a cutscene when it isn't useful anymore. What a shitty end to such an otherwise impressive boss. Instead of fighting it, what do we get as the big end fight? Instead of fighting the songbird we just kill off a small army of nameless vox people until the game tells us to stop. What a ******** let down. stare I mean I liked how Elizabeth gets to control the bird during the fight and bring closure to the hint that its a song that controls it, or even that the only way shown to destroy the songbird is by drowning it as its eye gets cracked the first time it tries to follow you into the water, but why couldn't we fight the songbird after the vox battle? I think we would've had a much more epic conclusion if Elizabeth somehow lost control of the songbird after it destroyed her 'cage' and we got to fight it, eventually ending with the transportation into Rapture.

But the last thing about this story that I hate the most is how Elizabeth kills you in the end. What a ******** disaster of a ending, to have all of this character development between you and Elizabeth amount to absolutely nothing. Even with the truth known, it seemed very out of character and a long stretch to go so far as to have Booker killed. Not that you really cared by this point, with the whole 'father' thing ruining any hopes you had for being together with elizabeth in the end anyways. But just that the entire game ends with different versions of this princess drowning you emotionlessly in the baptism water...just what were these people THINKING!? She doesn't even look sad as she mercilessly kills you, calling to question everything that she is and what you two have been through together in the game. Its...its bullshit. ITS BULLSHIT! scream And then, just to make it worse, it ends on a cliffhanger. We don't know if Elizabeth died with you or not, but even doing so seems completely unnecessary. Like, whatever happened to just having a happy ending in paris? Wasn't the whole point of this adventure to get out of columbia alive and start a new life in paris? What ******** use is it to throw that all away just to wipe everything out in the ending? It makes everything that happened in the game utterly meaningless, and that is why the ending is sooo ******** awful to me. Even the quick scene after the credits ends on a cliffhanger. They follow a cliffhanger with ANOTHER cliffhanger! At this point, I was just frustrated with the game. I felt like the game developers were just baiting me along only to slap me in the face every time I got too close to finding some actual ******** closure. So really, what a shitty ending to an otherwise awesome game. It really pissed me off and absolutely ruined the game for me afterwards. And anyone who says otherwise either just didn't have the same care for the story or these characters, or doesn't understand story-telling well enough to know that plot twists aren't everything, especially in a video game. There are many movies or stories where basically everybody dies in the end, but they're mostly used in horror and it only works there for one good reason, in those horror movies you aren't meant to care about anyone. Maybe you'll like a single character, but generally the role of the cast in a horror movie is to be killed off. You accept this probability, and so there's no real fallout when they do die. In this game its different. You spend the entire story living the nightmare with Elizabeth, fighting to save her, and then its all for nothing. It wasn't clever. It wasn't mysterious, or thought-provoking. It was disappointing. And disappointment is never how you want a gamer to feel after they finish playing your game.