Disappointing Last Level/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A bad ending to a good game.

  • Straight: The first 14 levels of a game are ultra-fun, but the last level feels more like work than play.
  • Exaggerated: The final boss deletes your save data. And no, it isn't because you pirated.
  • Justified:
    • The developers wanted to experiment with the last level.
    • The developers ran out of time and had to skimp on something.
  • Inverted: "Sure, this game is terrible at first, but just wait 'til you get to the end!"
  • Subverted: The last level seems like it's going to be filled with Demonic Spiders and horrible physics, but then you get superpowers...
  • Double Subverted: that make you slide around like a hockey puck on a greased rink.
  • Parodied: The game falls into Stylistic Suck at the end. Upon beating it the hero complains vigorously that it was a total waste of his time.
  • Deconstructed:
  • Reconstructed: The creators realize going in that they won't be able to maintain the degree of quality/difficulty of the first levels in the last, so they purposely make the last levels too Nintendo Hard by design, albeit (hopefully) with a "carrot" to make it worth it.
  • Zig Zagged: The last level has good and bad parts, interchangeably.
  • Averted: The whole game is the same quality.
  • Enforced: Since the developers had to rush the game out the door, and the final levels had to be redone late in development, well, this is the result.
  • Lampshaded: "Oh great, the last part of the game. Bear with me, folks..."
  • Invoked: The villain can manipulate the game itself and, as he can't defeat the character up till now, tries to force the player to quit using a terrible endgame.
  • Defied: A quarter of the way through a terrible endgame, the protagonist gives up in frustration, reveals himself and everyone else to be Animated Actors, punches through the scenery, and fights the director.
    • The developers plan for the last 15% of the game to be a Playable Epilogue, so that if they don't have time to do it right, they can just drop it entirely and still have a complete game.
  • Discussed: "The last part of the game is usually the bad one, so I'll try to make this quick."
  • Conversed: "Have you ever noticed how a video game starts to really drag down near the end?"

I go through endless pages of Tropes just to get to Disappointing Last Level!?