Golden Ending

Some games have bad endings, good endings, and one, shining, wonderful Golden Ending; the best possible ending out of all the good ones. The Golden Ending may or may not be the Canon Ending, sometimes Word of God will directly state which one they consider to be so. (And then make a sequel based on a different ending.)

See also: Road Cone, Multiple Endings, Nonstandard Game Over, Everybody Lives and Earn Your Happy Ending.

May overlap with Easy Mode Mockery, 100% Completion, and Golden Path. In cases like these, the Eleventh-Hour Ranger might pop up as well.

Has nothing to do with Golden Moment, even though a Golden Moment comes at the ending of a story.

And of course...


 * Most Nippon Ichi games, most notably the Disgaea games. The endings vary from depressing, to horrific, to downright loony. The funny thing though is that it's usually harder to get the bad endings than the good ones: to get the very worst endings, you usually have to win a Hopeless Boss Fight, beat an incredibly hard Bonus Boss, solo the Final Boss with one specific character at a high level or carry out a feat that requires incredible amounts of grinding through optional content. The notable exception is the original Disgaea, where it was a challenge to attain the Golden Ending due to how frustratingly easy it was to accidentally kill one of your ally characters (immediately knocking you down to the Normal Ending).
 * Due to the series' strong meta elements, defeating the Bonus Boss of most games effectively makes the player characters into the new Bonus Boss rather than the protagonists and the story has a good time playing with the fact.
 * To get the bad endings, you usually have to go Up to Eleven to get anywhere in bad behavior (despite being a demon). Disgaea 2, for the worst ending, needs you to get ally kills and waste over 100 gameplay hours combined with story to get the amount of Felonies; 99. Pay in mind that you need to: 1) Get a felony; 2) Go to the high-risked Item World, and 3) Go to the random level, which are often 1-30 and get to the door, then either escape using a rare item or go to the 10th floor.
 * Phantom 2040 purportedly has 20 different endings. However, only two of those possible outcomes don't feature this.
 * Numerous sources discussing the game even called the "Things don't go boom" endings "Golden Endings".
 * And good luck doing everything right to get one of those two endings. Oh, and there wasn't a strategy guide, so you had to figure it out on your own.
 * Prince of Persia: Warrior Within features two endings—one where you destroy the Dahaka and get the girl, and another where the girl dies and the Dahaka still exists but is no longer after you. The bad ending results from you not getting all the life upgrades and the Infinity+1 Sword.
 * Particularly infuriating because many of the life upgrades are really well hidden, sometimes in places you have to backtrack to without any indication whatsoever that anything would be there, and quite a few of them can be Lost Forever. Made worse by the fact that failing to collect them also means a less effective weapon and a smaller life bar in the final stretch.
 * Bypassed entirely on the Gamecube, which gave out life upgrades as you progressed through the game. This caused a major glitch which could make the game unwinnable: the glitch goes unnoticed until the very end of the game, when the doors in the Dahaka's room never open.
 * STALKER has 7 endings. 5 are bad, and are based around the "Wishmaker", the alien device that lures people who get inside the nuclear reactor, like a genie twisting wishes. The other 2 are based upon rejecting the Wishmaker and going deeper, finding the true plot endings. The 6th is a true ending but not a good ending (it's a neutral Status Quo (band) option), whilst only the 7th resolves the plot and saves everyone.
 * The 7th ending is the canon one, according to the sequel The Call of Pripryat.
 * Princess Maker has many possible endings, but since the goal is for the girl to become a princess, most of them technically represent failure.
 * Despite the name, in Princess Maker 2, the objective is to . The Hero endings are just as good as the Queen Regnant ending for Scoring Points, though arguably less cool.
 * The 11th Hour has three possible endings, only one of which is good.
 * The Castlevania series has had this several times. In five games (Simon's Quest, Symphony of the Night, Harmony of Dissonance, Aria of Sorrow, and Dawn of Sorrow), it takes the form of a neutral ending, a bad ending, and the best ending. Oddly, the neutral ending is often the 'worst' ending, in that it takes the least work to acquire. Others have usually just had two endings, a bad one and a good one.
 * Breath of Fire, of course. The second installment has a best, fair, and bad ending too.
 * Star Trek: Bridge Commander has three endings: good (you save the day!), bad (you save the day but are destroyed in the process), and horrible (a sun goes supernova, destroying you, an inhabited world, and several Federation ships, including the Enterprise. Oops.)
 * Valkyrie Profile combines this with Guide Dang It, as the steps to get the best ending are mostly nonsensical and/or counterintuitive.
 * Covenant Of The Plume, though, has a a much more straightforward way of determining it, basing the ending on how often you use the Plume. Given that the Plume effectively murders your close friends and allies when you use it, take a wild guess what you have to do to get the good ending.
 * Except the best ending pits you against a ridiculously powerful boss, and the allies you kill will rise to fight you again in the bad ending. Without using it moderately to gain some powers in the first playthroughs, it can be pretty difficult.
 * Kana: Little Sister Has SIX endings, only one of them has Kana live, and it's bittersweet!
 * Though admittedly, being a Downer Ending doesn't necessarily mean that it's a bad ending. This trope is, however, played straight with the "Snow" and "Memories" endings, which are essentially shortened versions of "Live Now".
 * Inverted in Chrono Trigger with the DS remake. The 'real final 100%' ending is actually the one where they reveal that you screwed up big time, tying it to Chrono Cross. All the others are pretty cheery/cheesy.
 * Chrono Cross, meanwhile, has two different endings depending on how you beat the final boss. The bad end simply treats you to a cutscene of the final boss escaping through a portal. If you jump through a few very well hidden hoops, then you get the Golden Ending.
 * Riven has at least seven different bad endings. Most notably, one of them punishes Sequence Breaking by having the character get shot and then fall into primal chaos as the world ends around them. Not for the faint of heart.
 * In fact, all the Myst games are like this. Myst has four different endings, following the 3 Bad 1 Golden formula. Myst III: Exile has four endings where you die, one really stupid mistake ending, one What the Hell, Player? ending, and one Golden Ending. That's a total of no less than six ways to screw up and only one correct solution. Myst IV: Revelation is much tamer, having only three endings (two of which are bad and one of which is Golden), and Myst V: End of Ages also has three (One causes immediate, noticeable failure, one's effects aren't apparent until you realize you can't use the MacGuffin anymore and have no choice but to meet with the baddie, whom you have failed, and the final one, which is rather unapparent at first, is the Golden Ending).
 * Most Choose Your Own Adventure books have a best ending. In some of the really annoying books, only one of the endings is good.
 * And the Golden Ending in Inside UFO 54-40 can't actually be reached from any option in the book. When the Fridge Brilliance finally breaks through (it's a book, you can go there any time you want just by turning to that page), it can be quite mind-expanding for a seven- to ten-year-old.
 * The Sonic the Hedgehog series has had always had good and neutral endings since the beginning, usually boiling down to whether or not Eggman successfully got away with the Mineral MacGuffins after his defeat. As of Sonic Adventure, there's usually a series of misleadingly happy endings at the end of each character/team's storyline, only to reveal the True Final Boss and real good (though usually somewhat bittersweet) ending once you've gotten all Emeralds or completed all story paths.
 * The (arguable spinoff) game Shadow the Hedgehog has many endings ranging from good to bad to so-so depending on what objective you took (help the good guys defend the aliens, help the aliens wipe out the good guys, or just plow on and ignore all of them). The only way to get the true ending is to replay the game repeatedly and get all ten of the endings. Once that's done, the Last Story will become available, and the True Final Boss will reveal himself.
 * , continuing the tradition of having the final battle consist of the superpowered hero going up against the superpowered villain/CosmicHorror the villain unleashed Of course, the Last Story throws out the whole "you decide Shadow's moral path" gimmick, although this is justified by the fact that the Status Quo would be radically altered if Shadow, and the possibility of a sequel would be totally murdered if Shadow sided with the Black Arms.
 * The first Pikmin game has multiple endings—one if you die, one if you fail to collect everything in time, one if you collect enough to get off the planet but not everything, and the golden ending if you can get everything in time.
 * The RPG Maker game Alter AILA appears to have three paths through the game. None of these paths, however, leads to any resolution for the Crapsack World you're in; in every case, the war continues with a new resistance and a new tyrant. However, if you complete all three paths via New Game+, you unlock a fourth path to the true ending, where you Take A Fourth Option that lets you discover and resolve the real secrets of the setting, including just why was destined for a Face Heel Turn if he survived, and why Green's allegiance was a Schrödinger's Cat in the other paths.
 * Completing King's Quest VI ends at the same place (Alex marrying Cassima), but varies wildly depending on whether you took the long path or the short path. The golden ending requires the long path, which means solving more puzzles, and ends with Alex discovering . In that ending, the wedding hall is crammed.
 * Persona 4 features 3 endings, with a variant on the "worst" ending (one version of it doesn't actually seem that bad). You first have a choice of thinking you've solved the mystery when you haven't, and this end might actually fool people who didn't look up a guide, or realize something was wrong. You then get an ending where you beat up some monster that supposedly "tests" humans. This ending seems even more complete, again fooling more people. Finally, though, if you're persistent enough to ignore the game's claims that it's all over (and by this point, who isn't?), you can discover who's truly behind it all, unlocking The Very Definitely Final Dungeon and the best ending.
 * In the Suikoden series, you have to find all the Stars of Destiny to have a shot at the best ending. Some of the games make this even more elaborate.
 * Suikoden II makes the player race against the clock to secure one character's happy ending, has you complete a series of face-offs to help another, and backflip through metaphorical hoops to earn the right to see the game's true ending. On top of that, said ending saddles you with several final choices that greatly affect how things play out.
 * Suikoden V has a hidden Relationship Value that can lock you out of the best ending during the first few hours of the game.
 * A rather minor case, but collecting all 29 audio files in the Mombasa Streets level of Halo 3: ODST changes a short section of the Data Hive level; namely, you can access the 30th and final audio file of the game. If you get all 30 audio files, you will actually end up knowing more about what's going on than the intelligence officer who gave you your mission! However, the actual ending doesn't change at all if you collect no files, or all 30. It does help the ending make more sense, however.
 * Mass Effect 2: you must have upgraded the Normandy to full and have done everything right to make sure everybody lives. This includes . Everyone, up to and including Shepard, can die.
 * It can be said that Mass Effect 2 is also has a Golden Bad Ending. It's extremely difficult to kill Shepard off, to the point where you actually need to actively try to get it.
 * Mass Effect 3 has a similar premise. At the end of the game, Shepard is presented with 2 options for ending the war, both of which carry a heavy price and can be downright disastrous if you have a low "Effective Military Strength" (and you may not be given a choice at all if your "Effective Military Strength" is below minimal). However, if you take your time to build up your forces and build enough alliances, you open up a Third option that allows for a peaceful resolution to the conflict (and it's implied that this also brings a permanent end to a cycle that has lasted for several hundred-million years). That being said, it's still a bittersweet, somewhat ambiguous end to the series; it is up to the player to decide which ending is the "Best" ending.
 * And although the third-way ending is presented as the most peaceful, only the 'Destroy' ending with an extremely high "Effective Military Strength" leads to.
 * A very large portion of fans believe there is no Golden Ending at all, as all three options are bittersweet at best.
 * While the Dragon Age series does its best to keep its endings ambiguous, the Expansion Pack of the original game, Awakening, had a Golden Ending wherein.
 * The live action game Bad Mojo has four endings; only one is good, though, and to get it, you have to meet certain conditions near the end of the game.
 * Ever 17: three bad endings, four "good" endings (some of which are still tragic), and one spectacular, all-revealing ending that you can only unlock after clearing the four good endings.
 * There are three endings in Cave Story: The bad one, where everyone but you and one other character dies, the good one, where you stop the villain but many main characters still die, and the best one, where only a few main characters die and the cycle of evil is permanently stopped.
 * Infocom's Planetfall has three endings, one where you fail to save the planet and it is doomed to plunge into the sun, another where you save the planet but fail to fix the communication system or the planetary defense system and therefore are stuck there (but given the consolation prize of an unlimited bank account and a home in the country), and the best ending, where not only is the planet saved and you are found by the Stellar Patrol, but all the loose ends are tied up: Your Robot Buddy (who earlier made a Heroic Sacrifice) is repaired, your Jerkass boss is demoted to toilet scrubber, and the game's red herrings are lampshaded.
 * Another Interactive Fiction example: Plundered Hearts, Infocom's first and only attempt at a pirate-themed historical romance with a set female protagonist, has four different endings; one where you as the heroine flee from the final showdown (abandoning everyone else to presumably die), take over Captain Jamison's vessel as "Pirate Queen", and vow revenge on the villains, another where you as the heroine thwart an attempt on Captain Jamison's life by startling the attacker but are mortally wounded in the process, another where you thwart the attacker with a slingshot but the heroine's father dies in the process, and lastly the best possible ending where the bad guys are defeated, the heroine's father reclaims ownership of the island from the now-deceased villain, and the heroine and Captain Jamison sail off together happily.
 * Infocom's Deadline has a number of endings where you arrest a suspect, but fail to get a conviction due to not enough evidence. There's also an ending where you arrest the murderer and get him convicted, but after he's murdered his accomplice. And there's a variant of that where he's only found guilty of the accomplice's death because you didn't have enough evidence to link him with the original murder. The best ending has both the guilty parties behind bars, and an optional summary of the case outlining the murderer's motive for the crime.
 * Similiar to Deadline, Infocom's Suspect also has one clear Golden Ending and two not-so golden endings. In two of the not-so golden endings, you spook the two guilty parties, and they attempt to leave the grounds to avoid being arrested. Depending on your timing, this leads to two variants of the not-so golden ending: One where one of the parties is accidentally killed trying to escape while the other gets away, and the other while the first one is still killed but the other one is caught. The best ending, of course, is when both are arrested before they try to leave the grounds, and you get a lengthy epilogue text summarizing the case.
 * Telepath RPG: You can choose whether you serve Tastidian or not to rescue your brother in the first part. The second part begins in the shadowling empire, and you have been his servant for 3 years.
 * Titanic: Adventure Out of Time: the best ending (where you get all the vital historical items) results in a world of peace and prosperity, where WWI, the Russian Revolution, and WWII never happened.
 * The objects you find prevent Archduke Ferdinand from being assassinated, the names of Russian Revolutionists being handed to the Czar, and for Adolf Hitler continues his career... in painting.
 * In BioShock (series) I and II, this happens. Three bad endings in each, resulting in Little Sisters being killed, with only one good ending.
 * The Neverwinter Nights 2 expansion Mask of the Betrayer has four major endings (with minor variations). Although whether it is the "best" ending is debatable, the only ending where you end the curse without sacrificing yourself requires completion of a few minor side-quests that it is quite easy to miss out on by not taking the right companion with you to areas you can beat the game without visiting at all.
 * The ending of Storm of Zehir depends on your interaction with Sa'Sani. You can kill her, which causes yuan-ti throughout the land to execute their plots haphazardly; you can just say farewell to her, in which case you get a mostly-good ending but with sinister hints about her plans; and in the Golden Ending, you can extract a promise from her to never harm anyone again, which eventually leads to her redemption.
 * The Half Life mod Afraid of Monsters has three bad endings and one good ending.
 * Sigma Star Saga has four different endings based on . All of the endings in which you don't involve . To make matters worse,.
 * In Resident Evil and its remake, either character path had four endings—one in which the player alone survives; one in which the player rescues the other main character but the support character is killed; one in which the support character survives but the player fails to rescue the other main character; and one in which both main characters and the support character get away.
 * Interestingly, none of them is the canon ending. According to canon, Jill, Chris, Rebecca, and Barry all escape the mansion alive, but it's impossible to achieve that in-game because Rebecca and Barry never show up in Jill and Chris's games, respectively.
 * The endings in Heavy Rain show what happens to each of the game's playable characters. The best ending combination is usually with.
 * However, writer and lead designer David Cage has said he personally prefers the ending where Everybody Dies.
 * Vandal Hearts 2: Want the golden ending? Find the Infinity+1 Sword, and save all three of your childhood friends. Fail at any of that, and it's some form of bad ending, which depends on a question you were asked when you were a child, and then asked again just to make sure. If you do not get the IPOS, you can save at most one childhood friend, and that means you will live alone.
 * Vampire: The Masquerade Redemption has two bad endings and one good ending, depending on your actions with the Final Boss.
 * Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines follows down to the precise count of unquestionably bad endings. Siding up with In many other endings, things will work out just fine, tho.
 * This basically boils down to the player determining which of the
 * Fallout: New Vegas has several endings where you join up with a faction to help them control the titular New Vegas and Hoover Dam.
 * No matter what you do, the recruitable companions, Arcade Gannon, Lily, and Veronica, will never receive a truly Golden Ending. They will always be varying degrees of Bittersweet. This is due to the game's Grey and Grey Morality.
 * CROSS†CHANNEL to an extent. However, when your golden ending is only bittersweet, you know that the rest must be horrible.
 * Ogre Battle, the original, has a ridiculous set of requirements to get the Golden Ending, which incidentally is canon. You need to collect 12 Zodiac stones, which is a Guide Dang It in itself, have the sword Brunhild, have recruited every character except for two nonessential ones and one which changes the ending to the worst one. And a full Chaos Frame.
 * Aoi Shiro has five heroines, each with their own set of bad/normal ends and one good end. Reaching the unlock points scattered throughout those routes unlocks the Grand Route, at the end of which (the 56th ending) everyone teams up, solves all their problems, and survives.
 * A.S.P. Air Strike Patrol (known in Europe as Desert Fighter) featured multiple endings (including one if you fail the final mission). Which ending you get depends entirely on your Force, Supplies, and Opinion meters. If any of these meters are lacking, you merely get an "okay" ending depending on which meter was the lowest (beating the game with a low Opinion rating means that the war is a political disaster, viewed as a second Vietnam). To get the very best ending, all three meters have to be high, which is infamously hard to achieve—but it's worth it for the hero's welcome you're given.
 * Inverted in Drakengard; The first ending is the happiest and things rapidly go downhill from there. The final ending that requires 100% Completion is a Shoot the Shaggy Dog story. And then it gets even worse in NieR.
 * Of course, it may be a question of which ending is best for the world, not the heroes, since ending one is the one that leads to the sequel, which shows that not all is well just because you got the golden ending...
 * And in the second game, the last ending you'll get is actually positive and upbeat. But you literally have to earn the ending by beating the highest difficulty in the game, Extreme Mode.
 * Conquests of the Longbow had four different endings, each for a different level of player success. Having been captured by the Sheriff of Nottingham, the game's hero Robin Hood is tried for outlawry by the newly returned Richard the Lion Heart. In the worst ending, Robin is convicted and hanged for his crimes. In the two intermediate endings, Robin and his men are pardoned, but he is not allowed to marry Maid Marian, and the wicked Sheriff remains in office. In the best ending, though, the Sheriff of Nottingham is arrested for his treason and replaced by Little John; Robin is ennobled as the Earl of Huntingdon; and Friar Tuck presides over the wedding of Robin and Marian, with King Richard in attendance as a guest.
 * Tsukihime has nine endings (and a bunch of Nonstandard Game Overs). The Golden Ending is Kohaku's True ending, where everybody is happy and sunshiny. Except Satsuki.
 * Fate/stay night has five endings (one for Fate, two for UBW, two for HF) and a bunch of Nonstandard Game Overs. Its Updated Rerelease, Realta Nua, has a sort-of Golden Ending accessible only after unlocking and finishing all three routes' true endings, which takes place far after the events of Fate.
 * The Fatal Frame series usually have these. The first two games added very evident Golden Endings in their Xbox release.
 * Radiant Historia has a touching Golden Ending.
 * Streets of Rage had two endings. One being the obviously good ending where you defeat Mr. X and save the city, setting up the events for the sequel. The other ending can only be achieved by reaching Mr. X in a 2-player game and have one player accept Mr. X's offer to join him and the other player refusing the offer. This will force both players to fight each other to the death. The winner can then fight Mr. X to overthrow him and become the new crime lord, making this a bad ending. The 3rd game had several endings ranging from "you suck for playing on Easy mode so no good ending for you" to "you stopped the bad guy but not quick enough to save the city." The golden ending here is when you defeat Mr. X within the time limit, preventing the bombs from blowing up the city.
 * Another interactive fiction example is Matches and Matrimony, a PC game which mashes three of Jane Austen's novels (Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Persuasion) into one surprisingly well done game. There are nine possible outcomes to the story, and the player is encouraged to unlock them all. Two involve the Player Character remaining unmarried, and the other seven marry her to one of the potential suitors she meets. Most of the endings are good, but the one that is considered best is the one that follows the full plot of Pride and Prejudice to the marriage of the player character to Mr. Darcy.
 * The Code Geass RPG for Nintendo DS (which covers only the first season) has quite a few branching paths. You can get the standard ending, which is technically kind of bad, you can get a number of terrible Non Standard Game Overs (including ), an "I Guess This Is A Happy Ending", and the Golden Ending.
 * The elusive S Ending in Clock Tower: First Fear (not initially present on the ending list) which involves taking a more specific, careful path through the game, since to get it, one of your friends (Ann or Laura, Lotte is unsavable) must survive, you must free the crow in the cage room, not get caught by Mary and thrown in the shed cell, and pay a visit to the secret room (especially since said room would be empty under different circumstances). However, this ending is considered non-canon, since the sequel establishes that Jennifer was the only survivor.
 * Nine Hours Nine Persons Nine Doors has Multiple Endings; although only one can really be considered a good ending, the game is distinct for having all of them actually happen.
 * The Witcher 2 has numerous possible endings, but the best one is usually agreed to be the you get by saving Saskia, Triss, creating a free Upper Aeidrn, and sparing Letho. Roche's path, on the other hand, has most of the downright depressing endings.
 * The Black Cauldron is a peculiar inversion. If you do everything right and win a completely flawless victory, i.e., get Hen Wen to safety without her ever being captured, never get captured yourself, and still defeat the Horned King, you end the game with a less than perfect score. This is because once you get captured, you can get points for escaping that you cannot earn in any other way.
 * The white chamber has four "You have died" endings and four standard ones, but the only one that gives a remotely happy ending to the protagonist is the "Redemption" ending.
 * Marriage with Marian and all three allies alive in The Adventures of Robin Hood.
 * Most of the endings in Date Warp range from downer to bittersweet until you unlock the Golden Ending. Before that, the closest to "happy" is Linds' good ending, in which no one in the main party dies and might be saveable in the future, but  is still missing.
 * Frozen Essence is notable in that its "True End" is a Bittersweet Ending with . However, the True End differs from all other endings in that it's the only one in which . Additionally, many players consider the Water Path's Light End to be another "true end" of sorts because it's the only one in which the mysteries surrounding Mina's identity and her dreams that remain unexplained in even the True End are resolved with.
 * The Way of the Samurai series has roughly 7 endings per game (Plus more than double that in variations and the odd end for Off the Rails, such as waiting for the time limit to end, or killing the Big Bad early), but "ending 1" is always the best, rewarding both the highest "samurai point" total (which awards unlockables) and Shaggy Dog Story thanks to historical events. They involve a path of getting all the warring sides to unite against a common foe, with the exception of the 2nd game (which ignores them both). These ends are however, the trickiest to get, and often have a way to screw up that leads to an outright Downer Ending.
 * Little Busters! has the ending of the refrain route which is unlocked when all the other routes have been completed, where
 * In Wario Land, if one were to get 99,999 coins in total, Wario would
 * In "The Force Unleashed", there is the canon one, where the Rebellion is saved, and another.
 * Parasite Eve has two endings. The one seen by completing the game is a total Mind Screw, as it shows the threat from mitochondria is not over. The true golden ending deemed canon by Square-Enix comes from beating the Bonus Dungeon where Aya defeats the original Eve and she loses her powers after the battle.
 * Parasite Eve II has a total of three endings, ranging from the vague hints on what the President of the United States plans to do after the events of the game, an expanded version of the President scene, and the true golden ending that shows closure with Aya after the events of the game.
 * The ending of the final route is the only unambiguously happy ending in Symphonic Rain where even the good endings are bittersweet at best.
 * Any Compile Heart game is going to follow this route:
 * Cross Edge may be the most infuriating of the bunch because you will need a guide just to even know whether you're supposed to kill said character during said battle, view said event at said place, all while having a high random encounter rate. Fail or miss even one of them and say goodbye to your Golden Ending.
 * The first Record of Agarest War game was infuriating considering that to get the Golden Ending for each generation, you had to be at a certain Karma Meter with all three Love Interests at maxed out value at the end of the generation.
 * The other two Record of Agarest War games are a lot easier because it doesn't employ the Karma Meter anymore and you also have a way to track down as to what percentage your Love Interest is at. And even then, you could still get your screwed in the third game because every single event is time specific.
 * Hyperdimension Neptunia may be a bit easier than the previous Compile Heart game examples, but it's still a Guide Dang It because you wouldn't know how the Share system works the first time you play it. Nor does the game ever mention that if Neptune dies too many times in a battle, the share drops quite a lot. Said shares are needed to recruit the goddesses. Fortunately, it's obvious that you need all the three goddesses to get the Golden Ending, but the how part is another story.
 * Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2 is the easiest of the bunch, but without looking up a guide, it's still pretty damn hard because you could accidentally screw yourself with one of the goddesses endings.  Anything else below that, and say goodbye to your Golden Ending. Although ironically, getting the Downer Ending is the hardest of the bunch because you'd need to do a lot of stuff. It does give Nepgear her Infinity+1 Sword at the end of it and you do get to keep it in a New Game+.