If you haven't completed this game through to its conclusion, be warned, there will be spoilers.

So anyway, just beat the game tonight. Got both endings, and I have to say, I think this is a really clever way to end the game by Rockstar. I have read quite a few articles and blogs from people who said the endings sucked, and only one that was praiseful. But I think there might be a bigger picture behind this ending.

For years now, Rockstar and video games in general have been getting flak for supposedly "glamorizing and encouraging violence and crime." I think Rockstar might have taken this to heart when they wrote this game's story, because it does the exact opposite. To me, it seemed that the whole game long, there was the recurring theme that "Crime does not pay." Niko comes to America on a quest for revernge, but also (at least subconsciously), he wants to start a new life, and get away from the horrors of Europe. Throughout the entire game, you are given the choice to be a cold-blooded killer or be the bigger man and walk away, and I kept getting the impression through dialog and so forth, that the "bigger man" plot seems to be the direction that Rockstar WANTS the player to drive Niko (The mission "That Special Someone" its the best evidence). But throughout the entire game, all the people that Niko encounters end up setting themselves up for disaster, and every time Niko tries to make the right choices, crime and violence keep coming back to bite him in the butt.

In the end, no matter what choices you make, Niko ends up losing. Either Roman dies or Kate dies. Granted, Rockstar didn't do a good enough job of building-up the Kate-Niko relationship. But on the other hand, making their relationship entirely optional meant that for those of us who took the time to build the relationship, realizing that she was the woman who Niko really wanted to be with, winning her respect by not selling yourself out for money, only to have her killed the next day, does have a tremendous emotional impact. If you never cared about Kate before the final missions, then you probably won't care what she thinks of you, and you'll go through with the deal to make Roman happy, but this will end up getting Roman killed, and he's the ONE person in the game who you are FORCED to emotionally bond with.

In fact, most of the people who were disapointed with the ending were the also people who confessed to looking up the consequences of their choices online before making the decision.

But in the end, this game is a dramitic departure from previous GTA games in that instead of making yourself rich and living in a huge mansion or restoring your gang to its former glory, this time, all your hard work comes back and ruins your life. So just like all the characters you meet, even for Niko, crime does not pay off for him.