Trippy Finale Syndrome

In long works involving some form of magic, many creators seem to decide that the universe they've so far established is much too prosaic for the big finish their project surely deserves, and as a result, send their heroes into some uncharted realm resembling a whacked-out dream sequence.

Overlaps with Gainax Ending when it gets particularly symbolic. Video games tend to make this an Amazing Technicolor Battlefield. If the gameplay goes sour, it's Disappointing Last Level.

See also Final Boss, New Dimension.

Anime and Manga

 * Akira. Most of the movie makes sense enough, but good luck deciphering the ending on the first viewing once the plot jumps its ball hitch and takes off without you. Somewhat justified in that the movie takes a manga that ran for 8 years and tries to cram it all into a 2-hour-long movie, although the manga's run was only halfway when the movie was made. Read the manga if you want the whole story.
 * The last three or so episodes of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann - whenever that space ocean shows up.
 * TTGL actually runs the gamut of types of this, from the over-the-top special effects epic, to a homage of the most memorable part of Neon Genesis Evangelion's Gainax Ending, to the biggest Amazing Technicolor Battlefield ever.
 * The ending of the first Fullmetal Alchemist anime could be called an inversion of the trope. The ending takes place
 * Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch has its final battle in Michel's realm, which appears to be the dream of a drugged-up Evilutionary Biologist: the pillars in the sky are DNA strands, fish are flying, and everything has wings grafted onto it.
 * Inverted in Futari wa Pretty Cure: after spending a couple of episodes in another dimension, the heroines return to the Garden of Rainbows (i.e. Earth) for the final battle.
 * Neon Genesis Evangelion. Not one, but two Gainax Endings. The End of Evangelion contains several minutes of images zipping by so fast they could be seizure-inducing, many of them vaguely disturbing (the series had already had much shorter sequences like this). The series ended with a lot of navel-contemplation, some of it trippy; the film basically had trippy graphics for most of the latter half.
 * Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha pulls out all the special-effects stops and headache-inducing magical locations for its Final Battles, despite the battle fields (in the first two seasons, at least) normally being pretty low-key.
 * The final battle of Outlaw Star borders on an action-packed Mind Screw, what with Big Bad Hazanko and protagonist Gene Starwind apparently merging with their ships to fight each other both physically and in Cyberspace. Of course, the final few episodes are made up of the characters basically running around inside what amounts to God, so all this isn't coming completely out of left field.
 * Shadow Skill ends with a bizarre near-death dream sequence involving giraffes and lions, with lots of Fauxlosophic dialogue. It's pretty clear what is going on, but the way they choose to illustrate it is decidedly trippy.
 * The finale of RahXephon had several characters running around inside Yolteotl (something approximately like Nirvana) with lots of trippy symbolism whilst  tried to figure out how they wanted to retune the world.
 * The manga version of Chrono Crusade takes the heroes to the demon world Pandaemonium for their final battles against Aion., so it's filled with demon technology that's completely anachronistic for the setting, architecture that's obsessed with hexagons, demons who've had and Pandaemonium herself, the demon's Hive Queen.
 * The Grand Finale of the first season of Darker than Black was very clearly inspired by Evangelion. However, unlike Eva, they had the decency to give at least a little explanation. It's possible to piece together all the groups' motivations, even if the Gate-induced Mind Screw is totally incomprehensible.
 * The second season, well... If you think you know what happened, you're wrong.
 * Serial Experiments Lain's had shades of this.

Card Games

 * The Invasion story arc from Magic: The Gathering ends with "enemy" colors (white/black, blue/red, black/green, red/white, green/blue) being allies, an alternate win condition where all you have to do is have one creature of each color and one basic land of each basic land type, and the essence of Dominaria itself forming a tribe called Kavu. Also, Rath has become one with Dominaria; don't ask how that happened.

Comic Books

 * Breakdown: One's character is brainwashed by a computer and sees himself where he was trained. Everything is now filled with a green haze, the steam shoots from random places, and the television screen is filled with static. He has to shoot all of his partners, then is attacked by large, half naked men while a light flies around him.

Film

 * Perhaps the archetypal example and the source of the image for this page, The end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, as astronaut David Bowman goes Do not pretend to understand it.
 * Although Arthur C. Clarke's companion novel offers an explanation, if you really must have one.
 * The otherwise conventional western Blueberry (aka Renegade) ends with the hero and villain taking peyote and entering the spirit realm to do battle. The hero then has an epiphany that is visualized with trippy abstract images and Native American chanting. It has to be seen to be believed.
 * Busby Berkeley's movie musical numbers often border on the surreal, but the finale of The Gang's All Here, "The Polka Dot Polka," is easily as bizarre as the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Its kaleidoscopic patterns will make your eyes bleed in Technicolor.
 * In Brazil, the climax of the film is a sort of fever dream. It's ultimately revealed that
 * The 1979 Disney science fiction film The Black Hole ends with
 * The 1974 ant thriller Phase IV ends with
 * John Boorman's deranged post-apocalyptic sci-fi film Zardoz ends with
 * The Quiet Earth (1985), a rare post-70s example, ends with the main character
 * At Play in the Fields of the Lord. Moon gives the Indians the flu, they all die, Randy dies, and in the novel, Moon is (metaphorically) the only man on Earth. Gainax Ending indeed.
 * The Tree of Life
 * Enter the Void

Literature

 * The King's Cross sequence in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
 * Dragon Ultimate, the seventh and final volume of Christopher Rowley's Dragons of the Argonath series, sees heroes Relkin and Bazil transported to the Sphereboard of Destiny, an abstract representation of the multiverse, to inhabit a pair of giant constructs (reminiscent of the piloting of giant Japanese robots) and battle a golem for the fates of all oppressed peoples in all realities. Needless to say, it's a bit of a departure from the series's usual, relatively traditional, fantasy setting.
 * In Perfume, Grenouille finally uses his perfect perfume
 * Sherlock Holmes: The Missing Years (previously called The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes, which is altogether more preparatory for the madness) spends its first two acts as a reasonably diverting fusion of Doyle, Kipling, and the sentiment of a Tibetan exile. Then it abruptly introduces bona fide magical powers, and once that can of worms is opened, said magical worms manage to crawl all over everything else in the story with alarming speed. Once you find out about the ninja with the levitating swords, you will probably be shouting "what the fuck" at least once a minute until the very last page.
 * The Book of Revelation in The Bible.
 * The "Great Dance" sequence at the end of C.S. Lewis' Perelandra, a trippy and colorful spiritual vision which takes a year and shows the protagonist the meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything. (No, not the Douglas Adams book.)
 * Almost every Stephen King book, at least those that include the supernatural.

Live-Action TV

 * "Fall Out" in The Prisoner
 * "Forever Charmed".
 * Legend of the Seeker, the television adaptation of Sword of Truth, pulled a time travel stunt in the first season finally, then had a rather anticlimactic... grappling sequence for the previously Dismantled MacGuffin between Richard and Darken Rahl.
 * Lost, somewhat inverts this: it ends in a mysterious imaginary realm whose events are far more prosaic than the supernatural ones on the Island. Yet it contains a few mindscrews of its own with its inconsistent timeline and trippy memory flashes.
 * In the finale of the series "Twin Peaks", the Black Lodge is represented exclusively through trippy dreamlike sequence, complete with strobe lights, maniacal screaming and a doppelgänger chase scene.

Video Games

 * The Final Fantasy series suffers from this, in general.
 * The Very Definitely Final Dungeon of Final Fantasy I is a past version of the castle ruins in which the party originally fought Garland at the beginning of the game. Not so trippy, until you realize that you're unable to leave the castle (which is probably stuck in a time loop).
 * Final Fantasy II involves traveling to the capital of Hell. Though it makes sense, as the final boss has used his own demise as a stepping stone toward dethroning and replacing the Devil as King of Hell.
 * Final Fantasy III finds the player's party in the World of Darkness, a dark temple floating in an endless void.
 * Final Fantasy IV, of course, during the final boss fight.
 * Final Fantasy V has the "Cleft of Dimension," a twisted landscape of everything that has been trapped between the worlds for a thousand years, as its final dungeon. Part of it is a town that phases in and out of time and space. The final battle itself takes place in the very heart of the Void where the villain consumes and regurgitates himself, twisting the laws of reality. Somewhere during the fight, the world may have ended once.
 * Final Fantasy VI has a relatively tame final dungeon constructed from the wreckage of an empire, but the end boss is preceded by an enormous tower of vaguely Renaissance-esque statues(?) of nude men and women, usually in bizarre positions, which all want you dead. Fighting your way through them looks like you're ascending towards heaven to confront God above the clouds.
 * Final Fantasy VII has the party traveling through a crater down into the heart of the planet, through strange and varied underground landscapes. The strangeness hits a fever pitch towards the bottom, which is just a series of floating rocks surrounded by flowing Lifestream. Cue final fight with an Eldritch Abomination, One-Winged Angel, Ominous Latin Chanting, a supernova that destroys the solar system every time it's used but can't kill you (since it takes 9/10 of your HP, rounded down) but does give you time to make a sandwich, Clipped-Wing Angel... And once the heroes return to the normal world, something spectacular happens, but you can't really be sure what it was just by watching the end movie(s).
 * Final Fantasy VIII involves the party being sucked through time to the far future, where the main villainess' castle waits floating ominously over a destroyed world. The rest of the world as the party knows it becomes like this as well due to Ultimecia's "time compression".
 * The actual battle against Ultimecia is plenty this as well. She conjures an imaginary creature, wields planets, and begins to merge with the universe. Defeat her and time decompresses into a bad trip.
 * The Very Definitely Final Dungeon of Final Fantasy IX is a collective mishmash of ancestral memories, taking the party to locations from the entire world's history and ending with the origin of the universe. And for some reason, after you win, there's a play.
 * Book Ends. The game starts with a play.
 * Final Fantasy X sends the party into the innards of Sin for the final dungeon. The first section is basically a bunch of tubes filled with shallow water and floating magical symbols (which maybe makes sense because Sin is a creature created by magic). The next section is the ruins of an ancient city that is inside Sin... for some reason.
 * The city is probably some part of
 * Final Fantasy XI has the Chains of Promathia expansion end in
 * Even the first film loses coherence by the end.
 * The finale to Crystal Chronicles takes place in the Nest of Memories, an abstract realm that's home to the memory-eating demi-gods Mio and Raem.
 * In Chrono Cross, the Final boss is fought in The Darkness Beyond Time - the place where things go when they no longer exist. The finale also seems trippy just because all the dialogue on Disc 2 is dedicated to explaining the back story of the game... and even after reading it all, you still need a Master's Degree in Strange Back Story-ology to understand it.
 * Even its predecessor, Chrono Trigger, doesn't escape from this. Once you enter Lavos' outer shell and initiate a battle with the "real" Lavos (The Core), the background graphics just goes all hippie on you, occasionally combined with semitransparent images of places you've been to in the past, present and future.
 * Kingdom Hearts. Especially noteworthy because of the escalating levels of trippiness the closer you get to the end.
 * The Legend of Dragoon has The Moon That Never Sets.
 * Devil May Cry and Devil May Cry 3.
 * It's the same. Probably weirder than the original.
 * The final battle in 3 takes place in a river. A river in Hell. It doesn't appear to be Styx...
 * This is after traversing a road that assembles itself before your very feet, a giant chessboard, a roomful of stairways that would make M. C. Escher's head hurt, a lake of of blood, a broken time space warp connected via mirrors made of mercury, and a chamber made of purple flesh that is situated at the feet of a statue of a godlike figure so tall you can't even see its knees.
 * And the final battle in 4 takes place in the normal-by-comparison, surprisingly-squishy innards of a giant demon made of animate marble.
 * The final levels of Devil May Cry takes place in the Underworld, which looks like the innards of a giant monster, complete with a giant pulsating heart, which you enter through a mirror and the broken window roof of an upside down cathedral.
 * Stage 18 of Devil May Cry 4 is an apocalyptic battle, held on floating platforms, against a mobile statue and a combination of animated suits of armor and superpowered knight templars in the same armor.
 * Technically, you are in a different world by the end of Drakengard, and it definitely shows. This trope applies most literally to the fifth ending however.
 * The final area of The Legend of Zelda : Majora's Mask takes place inside the monstrous moon itself. Which, in fact, appears as a vast and beautiful green field with a single large tree in the center, surrounded by children at play.
 * And then Link goes to fight the boss in a room painted like an acid trip...
 * As the "Perfect Guide" writers put it: "Calling the next part of the game 'surreal' would barely be scratching the surface."
 * They were already established outer planes in the Forgotten Realms setting, but Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark has its final chapter in the, and Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer has its finale in
 * And in Planescape, well...you skip around a bit, and end up in
 * The final stages of Mega Man X5 are some sort of unexplained crystal holographic disco thing.
 * The final part of Lands of Lore 2 involves Luther entering the Chamber of Voices in the Huline Temple, there raising the city of the ancient gods and travelling through Belial's mother beast to the rebirth chamber.
 * Metal Gear Solid 2: The Colonel makes insane comments like "I hear it's amazing when the famous purple stuffed worm in flap-jaw space with the tuning fork does a raw blink on hara-kiri rock! I need scissors, 61!" He then reveals that he is within the A.I. that is actually the collective consciousness of the spirit of American freedom that controls the White House. Raiden's girlfriend is also a part of the A.I. but she appears in reality. Then things get weird.
 * And in Substance, one of Snake's missions is an outright parody of this aspect of the original game, as well as Raiden's status as a Replacement Scrappy.
 * Half Life goes from a somewhat realistic physics lab with No OSHA Compliance to the alien world of Xen, a bunch of Floating Continents. There you fight a 4-legged giant testicle, and a huge 3-armed floating baby. The gameplay likewise suffers.
 * The R-Type series' final stages got progressively trippier as the games went on. Most notable of all, a Bydo dimension filled with crystal-encased human fetuses, strands of DNA, free-floating sperm the size of the ship, and fertilized ova... And that's not even mentioning the neutral ending of Final, in which the screen-filling silhouettes of a man and a woman embrace and make love in the background.
 * The first alternate ending of Final has you trapped in a really trippy dimension, fighting a space slug thing, and mutated by the Bydo, then forced to fight your allies. You can see the mutant ship from this ending fly past in the first stage.
 * Eternal Sonata had the Elegy of the Moon zone. In contrast to the bright, colorful, and vibrant zones previously seen, the Elegy of the Moon is a rather... odd zone which is essentialy purgatory for the souls lost to the mineral powder.
 * Wild ARMs 3 has its final battles literally take place in a trippy dream sequence.
 * Baten Kaitos: Origins: The final boss is pretty standard, but if you Then, afterwards, you're back in Tarazed Core, like all that never happened. Granted, it does make for a hell of a boss fight.
 * This is basically a requirement for Shadow Hearts. In the first one, set before World War I, the heroes head into space for the final battle.
 * EarthBound's final area before the final boss battle looks like a giant bizarre vagina, leading into a maze of tentacle-like pathways over a void. If that's not bad enough, said final boss battle sure is.
 * The final battle was in part inspired by the time the director walked into a porno movie when he was a kid.
 * Close enough, but if you check the facts it's an old-fashioned CSI-esque movie that starts (well, not immediately, but you get the point) with a close-up of the soon to be victim's face, suggesting a sex scene, we never see anything though. (and Itoi was a kid at the time, so he mis-interpreted it.)
 * Well, every single battle in the game has background graphics that're ripped straight out of a bad acid trip. And of course there's Moonside. But the final dungeon which you'll face the Big Bad in really hits it home. Couple with weird monsters and bizarre weapons (yoyos, baseball bats, etc), and you have yourself an acid trip without the acid.
 * The sequel, Mother 3, does this as well. You're in a cavern miles below the city, when...whoa! What's the deal with the dropoffs? And the animate crystals and balls of electricity flying around?
 * The last race of every Mario Kart game, Rainbow Road.
 * Most Kirby games end this way, usually with Eldritch Abomination Final Bosses.
 * Phantasy Star IV features an ethereal crystal world inhabited by a disembodied voice named Le Roof who arms you before sending you off to a huge hole in the ground, where you enter a twisty-backgrounded epileptic-rainbow maze to fight the personification of evil. PS Online does a shorter version by having you arrive in a flower-filled field that quickly turns into a desolate wasteland when the Big Bad arrives.
 * In Robopon 2, the final battles take place in an unexplained, creepy location called the Robopon Graveyard. All you know is this is where the souls of Robopon go when they're scrapped, and the graveyard is totally filled.
 * In the finale of Prince of Persia 2, Jafar warps you into a weird otherworld with giant chess pieces, Kryptonite crystals, and an MC Escher-esque battleground.
 * The finale of Ys V: Lost Sand City of Kefin is quite mind-screwing, especially if you don't know Japanese.
 * If the trippiness of Psychonauts wasn't already cranked to maximum, the last level presents the Meat Circus.
 * Fear Effect. It seems normal enough at first, and then suddenly it starts turning into a precursor to Eternal Darkness....
 * Solatorobo's true final boss fight takes place, which is full of floating squares in various shades of pink or purple.
 * Pretty much every single Super Mario World hack ever to some degree. Examples include VIP 2-5 (which have a ridiculously psychadelic looking rainbow coloured final level filled with random gimmicks), Brutal Mario (second part of Bowser's Castle especially), An SMWC Production's void level, ASMT's void level and probably a whole lot of others.
 * The finale's of Hellsinker are noticable for being incredibly surreal and wierd even by the game's standards.
 * Pretty much every single Super Mario World hack ever to some degree. Examples include VIP 2-5 (which have a ridiculously psychadelic looking rainbow coloured final level filled with random gimmicks), Brutal Mario (second part of Bowser's Castle especially), An SMWC Production's void level, ASMT's void level and probably a whole lot of others.
 * The finale's of Hellsinker are noticable for being incredibly surreal and wierd even by the game's standards.

Web Original

 * Bionicle: The first seven chapters of Brothers In Arms focus entirely on Mazeka and Vultraz. Once the two finally meet in battle, they fly through a portal that randomly opens in front of them, sending them to an alternate reality where Spherus Magna was never destroyed and the Matoran Universe was never created. The conflict between the two is never resolved, due to this.

Western Animation

 * The climax of the Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends special, "Destination Imagination", has the characters escaping from an imaginary world that exists within a toy box. As they escape, the imaginary friend that controls this world causes everything to explode into a hallucinogenic void around them. Of course, the entire episode is pretty trippy anyway.
 * Pretty much every episode of Superjail.
 * In the end of My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic's Season 2 premier,