If you're suggesting that those intermediate details don't matter because the game always ends the same way, I'd argue that's tantamount to saying people's lives don't matter because everybody dies eventually. Now that's depressing. (:
I am, actually, and yes, it IS depressing. But at least when reliving the stories of the great men and women of history, be that in film, book or game, those tend to end with at least something accomplished above and beyond that man or woman's own lifetime, something which has significance past their death. Something, more specifically, that has an impact I can trace all the way up through history to something that I immediately care about. What that means is I stick to people with largely heroic stories in history and avoid the tragic ones. Eaxmple:
The WW2 "Convoy of Sailors," the epic adventure of a German navy landing team whose vessel was destroyed while they were on shore securing a British outpost near Australia, who proceeded to sail a rotten tall ship into Africa to Africa and embark on an epic journey across the desert to reach back to their own front lines over the course of around a year. It's an amazing story of courage, perseverance, ingenuity and personal strength, something which can serve as an inspirational story for so many. It ends with their triumphant return to the fatherland as heroes, showered in flowers the entire way. If you end the story there, it's a feel-good tale. If you extend the story just a little further, most of these soldiers are sent back to the front lines and wind up dead within weeks. What, really, was the point of their entire epic journey if they ended up as cannon fodder in the end anyway? As Yahtzee says about Modern Warfare 2: "Would it have honestly made a difference if I'd died 10 seconds earlier?" when recounting his experience in retrying a really tough fight only to succeed and die as part of a cutscene anyway.
I realise that Aquaria is an interactive experience, but it is an interactive experience bookended by non-interactive mandatory plot points. Yes, you can engage in sequence-breaking and other types of unintended behaviour, but that's the sort of meta-game I abhor. The game's creators had a certain experience in mind for me to go through, and I'd like to stick as close to that as I can, with "interactivity" taking place only where a rigid course of action isn't predefined. For instance, Aquaria REALLY seems to want me to go to Mythalas as soon as I hit the Open Waters. There's a fallen statue, my path to the deeper Open Waters is blocked by currents and the game essentially funnels me into the entrance to the city. Only I don't have to go in there, and me being the kind of gamer I am, I try to do EVERYTHING ELSE I have access to before reaching a plot point and advancing a story, partly because I'm used to losing access to old content and partly so I can be as overpowered as possible for the actual gameplay.
But Aquaria still has a rigid story, one that I cannot see past. Yes, it has some interactivity, but that only extends to its setting. The story itself is not interactive, not even faux-interactive like your typical Mass Effect game where events are still carved in stone but the game pretends like you have a choice anyway. Or, actually, I have a better example - Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. If you play the game normally, you get the "bad" ending: The Prince kills Kyleena and is freed from his curse, but still alone. If you find all the secrets, you get the Water Sword, and you get to fight the Dahaka, the REAL villain, and then the Prince and Kyleena return together. THAT is a choice, and THAT determines the ending. Aquaria doesn't even have that. If you fail to find all the lost memories, you don't get a different ending, you just get half of the same ending.
This, really, comes down to personal opinion. I'm not saying that you're wrong or that Aquaria is terrible for it. Again, I love the game. But to me, story supersedes gameplay and setting. I've never been interested in being given just a world to sort of exist in like practically every MMO ever made seems to approach things. I'm highly unlikely to take much away from such an experience. That's largely why I can't stand Hayao Miyazaki movies. I want a consistent plot which ends in a culmination climax where all plot threads are resolved. If a sequel is necessary, then that sequel can start off of resolution, rather than taking one story and snapping it into two parts over your knee. "The experience" of Aquaria, such as it is, is amazing, and I really have Alec to thank more than anyone else for the AMAZING musical score that moves me even to this day. But I can't take the experience alone out of the entire package, because if I want to re-experience it, it comes packed with the cooking and the combat and the plot and the graphics (not as much a fan, really) and all of that. I want to like the ENTIRE package, the ENTIRE game, and without a worthwhile climax, that leaves me down right at the end, right at the point where I should be at my ultimate high.
I LOVE Aquaria all the way through, right up until the end. But instead of thinking "That was great! That was awesome! I want to do it again!" I'm left thinking "Man that was depressing. Yeah, I want to have some time before I do that again. And I'm not really sure I want to go through that another time." When a game is over, I want to end it excited over how good it is and anxious to do it all over again, not down and depressed. That's what I mean when I say the ending takes away from the experience - the final fight against "the god" ends on such a high note, and the happy portion of the ending makes it even higher. I couldn't be more excited about the game. And then as the final scene unfolds, my excitement tanks almost all the way down, undoing almost everything good I had to say about it. THAT is my source of disappointment.
One thing I would like to suggest considering: You say that the secret ending bothers you because Mia has taken away everything Naija accomplished. But what, then, of Lucien? As we see in the same ending -- and as is also made clear by the final voiceover in the regular ending -- the framework for the entire story is that Lucien is reliving Naija's memories. In other words, Naija has succeeded in reconnecting with her son and passing on the story, despite Mia's attempt to seal her away. While it certainly does not qualify a classic fairytale ending (and I imagine we could spend an entire thread debating the merits and demerits of fairytale endings), I also think that viewing it as a purely negative ending is a somewhat selective analysis.
I would agree with you if a sequel to Aquaria existed. If the son's story were inextricably tied to Naija's fate in such a way that his story could not happen without her losing her memories, then I would be far, far more forgiving. I can live with a negative plot twist or ten if that is integral to the positive plot twists later down the line. But a sequel doesn't exist, and from the looks of it never will. To be honest, I consider it incredibly bad taste to end a story on a "TO BE CONTINUED" screen if you're not sure you'll ever get around to making a sequel to continue it. That's not to say sequels should be banned, but you can ALWAYS end a story on a firm conclusion between the acts of the greater epic. There's always room to put in a calm moment with no real open threads if one cared to do this. What Aquaria does isn't so much not striking such a pause between acts, it does the complete opposite of telling the very beginning of the NEXT act in the current one, and this is such blatant sequel baiting it ain't even funny, especially knowing that a sequel will never be.
FEAR games do the same thing. FEAR ended on a cliffhanger, but I could kind of excuse it as the game didn't have much of a story anyway. But then FEAR 2 HAD a story, and it ended on not just A cliffhanger, but essentially THE SAME cliffhanger as the prequel. And now I hear about FEAR 3 being developed, and if that ends on a cliffhanger sequel bait I'm going to kill people.
I have no real problem with Aquaria ending on Naija just telling her story, leaving us with the impression that she was telling it to us - the players. Then when Aquaria 2 starts or whatever that may be called, we refresh players on the events of the prequel then open on Mia's mind-wipe and immediately drop the player in control of the son. THAT would have given us one complete story with a clear hook open for a sequel, and even the depressing points of that story would have been mitigated for the most part.
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Really - a sequel would fix everything
