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  • Batman: Arkham Series:
    • Though it initially seems like the climax of Batman: Arkham Asylum, fighting the Titan-infused Joker is going to be a challenging battle, it ends up being yet another fight against waves of Mooks. The only real combat against the Joker's monstrous form is minute-long segments of him throwing easily-dodged swings at Batman, before he exits the arena for another wave. Defeating him is far too easily done as well, as Batman just has to wait for Joker to become distracted by a helicopter's spotlight, then pulls him off a balcony onto a weakened section of floor three times. The fight is ultimately a repetitive slog, one among several weak boss battles that the game was highly criticized for.
    • Everything after the final boss encounter in Batman: Arkham Knight comes off as unsatisfying.
      • After Batman stops Scarecrow and finally purges Joker from his mind once and for all, a short ending plays where Batman delivers the final villain to the GCPD lockup and tells Oracle that he is going to initiate the "Knightfall Protocol". However, the ending doesn't actually unlock unless you go back and complete a number of the Most Wanted side missions (if you haven't already completed them). This is a marked change from Batman: Arkham City where you can complete the game and obtain a definite ending without completing the majority of sidequests, and forces the player to go back and do the repetitive Most Wanted missions to get a fuller ending. The twist that Bruce Wayne's identity as Batman has been revealed to the world doesn't translate well to gameplay, as the only thing it changes are a few sentences after Batman apprehends each villain and transports them to the lockup. It's up to individual players as to whether this effort is worth the ambiguous final cutscene.
      • The 100% ending forces the player to go hunting for all 243 Riddler trophies to view it, which can be tedious without a guide. Your reward for hours of repetitive searching and scouring the map for every Last Lousy Point is a short epilogue that ends on a vague Sequel Hook and sets up more questions than it answers.
  • Beyond Good & Evil ends with a Bleak Level in an otherwise colorful game, with a grand total of two enemies before rushing the player into the climax. Somewhat compensated by the exciting penultimate boss and Final Boss, but then swerves back with a Deus ex machina reveal out of nowhere, and a cliffhanger that hasn't been resolved.
  • Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night ends with the Glacial Tomb, a bog-standard ice level as a reference to the Ninth Circle of Hell. The area is very generic and devoid of any interesting architecture, props, tricky platforming, or environmental hazards, with everything just being abstract ice shapes. It's almost devoid of enemies, and the enemies it does have are nothing more than Palette Swaps of previously-encountered enemies who offer nothing new in behavior or appearance and aren't even harder to fight. It's also very short, very linear, and feels less like a Very Definitely Final Dungeon and more like a sleepy stroll from boss room to boss room. Making matters worse is this is the only area where a number of Rare Drops can be found, so you can expect to keep running back and forth like an arsehole through this area for a very long time if you're trying to max out a few of your best shards or, god-forbid, aiming for 100% Completion. The only thing that can be said in the Glacial Tomb's favor is it has a really cool and fitting soundtrack for the game's final dungeon.
  • Brütal Legend: after the battle of Lionwhyte's palace, the story picks up at a nearly uncontrollable pace. The game slams rather suddenly into the final battles with Emperor Doviculus right after defeating Drowned Ophelia's Black Tear army. You never get a proper fight with Drowned Ophelia herself, and Doviculus and the Tainted Coil don't have the due attention that was given to Lionwhyte and Drowned Ophelia. The game has been described as feeling like "two acts of a three-act story." The game's rocky development due to outside influence (namely, Activision suing EA and Double Fine to halt production of the game on extremely flimsy bases) may explain this.
  • Castlevania:
    • Castlevania: Symphony of the Night: The inverted castle, beyond the initial novelty factor, is a copy-paste of the main castle, only flipped upside-down, and with very few cutscenes, coming after the sparse but still present storyline of the main castle. The rich musical variety of the first half of the game is absent in the second, with many of the areas using the same songs. With no more mobility upgrades to find, this half is based around wandering the castle to find the five Dracula parts needed to fight the final boss. The difficulty balance is wonky, being either very hard (due to ending up in areas out of sequence) or very easy (most required bosses are very simple, and powerful weapons are easy to find and remove challenge), and there aren't as many secrets to find.
    • Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin: Before the last battles, you have to go through four final portraits one after another. The portraits' layouts are recycled from all of the earlier ones in the game, and get really repetitive for that reason.
    • Castlevania II: Simon's Quest: Dracula's castle has no enemies, and the obstacles don't put up much of a challenge. Dracula leaves himself open for too long at the beginning of the fight, leaving you to throw nothing but flames at him and giving him no chance to fight back.
    • The final areas of Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow and Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, the Chaotic Realm and the Abyss respectively, just string together random rooms with a miscellaneous assortment of enemies. Dawn at least gives you bosses, but in Aria the Chaotic Realm is a long slog to pad out the game until you get to the Final Boss.
    • Dracula's Castle in Curse of Darkness is a mindlessly repetitive enemy gauntlet. The first area has you go in a big circle to get to the interior area, while the second is seven (counting the basement floor and ignoring the seventh floor, which is two rooms that just branch into the third area) floors of going through the same hallway and room full of some enemies over and over again with a rare change of textures. Thankfully the third area is just two hallways, a save room, and two boss rooms.
  • Dante's Inferno: The bottom levels of Hell take place in a desert environment, which comes across as bland. The final rush to the last boss consists of going through the same dull arena room ten times to complete challenges that lengthen the runtime. This is also the point in the game where the gameplay ceases to be innovative and boils down to combat rooms. All your skills are filled out by this point, so the game screeches to a dull grind.
  • Darksiders: Right as you're ready to go kick the Destroyer's ass, the game makes you backtrack to a bunch of places and get a bunch of pieces for a sword. It does have a cool boss fight in the middle of it, but that's the only new thing it adds. Said scavenger hunt takes place soon after the Black Throne, which is similarly disliked for the sheer repetition and excruciatingly Guide Dang It! puzzles it puts War through.
  • Devil May Cry 4: Due to the game's rushed development, Dante's half of the game consists mostly of Nero's levels in reverse, having to do the same content all over again. This is followed by a Boss Rush in the second-to-last mission, complicated by a dice puzzle which gets harder at each "step" of the level. When asked what he thought about Devil May Cry 4, Hideki Kamiya quite eloquently summed up what a lot of fans think of the dice levels: "Dice thing is SHIT"
  • Ecco the Dolphin:
    • Most of the first game is an atmospheric, beautiful, and slightly challenging but (usually) fair trek through the ocean. When the action shifts to a spaceship, these qualities all fall off. The last few levels have Trial-and-Error Gameplay, hideous environments, enemies that are entirely ripped from the movie Alien, and frequent instant death.
    • Ecco the Dolphin: Defender Of The Future: The "Domain of the Foe" levels are riddled with Fake Difficulty, respawning and unkillable enemies (which rarely pop up in earlier levels), and environments that seem incredibly barren. The latter is likely on purpose, to show what a desolate place Earth has become, but compared to the beautiful, lush environments of earlier levels, the whole final chapter looks disappointing.
  • In The Force Unleashed, the early levels are chock-full of interesting objects to smash, fling, and otherwise ruin with your Force powers. As you progress, the levels become less interactive and more likely to just toss you in an arena with some enemies and call it a night. In particular, there's the scene where you pull down a Star Destroyer, which in theory sounds cool but in practice is an annoying mini-game that's constantly interrupted by waves of hard-to-hit TIE fighters.
  • Gungrave:
    • The first game's last level. Stage 6 starts with a very cheap boss who loves to recover all of his health when he's bored. Then it moves to a bizarre climbing-the-tower area, where you fight a bunch of floating pus sacs that spew Demonic Spiders who have a nasty habit of shooting you with a rocket launcher so you fall off the stage. After you make it to the top, you fight a boss who gets swallowed by a Giant Space Flea from Nowhere. You end up offing the Big Bad in an interactive cutscene and don't even get to have a proper fight.
    • The end-game of the sequel doesn't fare that well either. You're running through some kind of weird spaceship bay, which is actually the second part of a previous level and doesn't have much of any inanimate objects to blow up like the previous eight stages. It consists of difficult enemies from previous stages, then an out-of-place and annoying jumping/platform "puzzle", a fight with Fangoram, and then a confrontation with the Big Bad. The boss fight with him is highly enjoyable, though.
  • La-Mulana is mostly very nonlinear, allowing you to solve puzzles in whatever order you please, meaning you'll very rarely get stuck on a single area for long. However, as you proceed into the endgame, you start running out of puzzles to solve, new areas to explore, and bosses to fight, and you're just stuck backtracking looking for whatever mandatory item you've missed. Before you can take on the final boss, you have to solve the Mantra puzzle, an extraordinarily drawn-out and confusing (even for this game) puzzle that takes well over an hour to do right, if you don't just look up the solutions.
  • Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen 2: The game starts promising, and most stages are true to the "gothic", pseudo-medieval flavour of the games in the series, with some steampunk technology introduced to show that centuries have passed in the plot; an enjoyable and credible fantasy setting. The last few stages are set in a pseudo-sci-fi facility that would look more at home in a futuristic FPS than in a Legacy of Kain game. A game where its fun-factor is playing as a vampire, exploring atmospheric gothic/baroque architecture, and attacking human guards and knights, is turned into a messing of genres where you have to find the switch to progress in bland similar corridors with little lights on the walls.
  • The Legend of Zelda:
    • The Wind Fish's Egg in The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening is an endless maze consisting of empty rooms with four exits whose solution is given in the village's library, just being a small distraction before the Final Boss.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Oracle Games:
      • Onox's castle in Oracle of Seasons consists of three wide-open rooms. You walk up, beat the enemies, walk up, beat the enemies, walk up, fight an optional battle against a midboss from early in the game, and walk up to find Onox's room.
      • The Black Tower in Oracle of Ages is better than its counterpart, but still feels underwhelming in comparison to earlier dungeons. Most of it is just a bland staircase maze full of Demonic Spiders; the rest is a few wide-open areas with no enemies or puzzles whatsoever, a cutscene or two, and then the battle against Veran.
      • The Very Definitely Final Dungeon of a linked game is an endless maze similar to the Wind Fish's Egg, with some eye statues directing you where not to go, followed by the final bosses.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask doesn't have a proper final dungeon, as the Moon consists of four optional mini-dungeons using the mask transformations, which can be ignored to immediately fight the final boss. Completing the mini-dungeons by trading in every mask after finishing them (which requires collecting all the masks in the first place) gets you the Fierce Deity's Mask, which will turn the final boss into an Anti-Climax Boss.
    • The final dungeon of The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass is a final trip through the Temple of the Ocean King, the resident Marathon Level that you've had to go through after most major dungeons. Since you reached the last floor of the temple during the previous visit, the only new features of this trip are more dangerous enemies. You have the Phantom Sword this time and can get a lot of satisfaction out of finally killing the normally invincible Phantoms with it, but outside of that it's just another backtracking sequence through the same puzzles until you reach the final floor and can enter the final boss's room, collecting the final optional items along the way.
  • For the final level of The Mark of Kri, Rau gets an Axe, which is much stronger than any other weapon. However, the final level throws away the good stealth mechanic in favor of hacking away hundreds of enemies with it, which gets boring fast. Most rooms past the first quarter are almost identical and always require you to open a door or to pull a switch, all while dozens of enemies are getting on your nerves. After traveling through the castle, you finally face the boss, which only consists of fighting three waves of enemies. You don't even touch the boss once, he gets killed in a cutscene. It's very evident that the developers ran out of time.
  • Metroid:
    • Metroid: Zero Mission: Shortly after the Unexpected Gameplay Change ends and the game approaches its climax, you get Power Bombs, the final upgrade in the game, a few rooms away from the final boss. The only purpose of Power Bombs is to use them to go back through the game world and get 100%, including more Power Bombs that you won't actually need, delaying the ending and interrupting the mood just to get a few excess items. While this can be ignored, the final boss is extremely easy unless the player has 100% item collection, in which case he gets a difficulty boost. It also results in a lot of padding that potentially screws up your chance of seeing the best ending, which requires 100% completion in under two hours.
    • Metroid Prime and Metroid Prime 2: Echoes both require massive amounts of Backtracking for artifacts before the final area (although it is possible to preemptively acquire some if you know what to do), putting many people off of getting to the final area. In Metroid Prime, the final location itself is also quite frustrating and feels a little thrown together. In Prime 2, many of the keys are not available unless you get the last upgrade in the game, the Light Suit, forcing the backtracking even if you know where most of the keys are already (in Prime, you could get almost every artifact before the point you were required to have them), not helped by the lack of shortcuts and mandatory combat rooms throughout the game.
    • Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, despite alleviating its own final fetch quest, has disappointing aspects to its final area, which locks you in after the rest of the game was exploration-friendly. Samus' suit freaks out from overexposure to the Phazon in the area and forces itself into Hyper Mode, which makes the last area a Timed Mission whose "time limit" is dependent on how many Energy Tanks you collected so far. The corruption meter is always building up over time and rises faster if you get damaged, so you have to speed through the level without being able to go at your own pace or explore. Since there are no Save Point areas in the final level, if you don't make it to the Final Boss in one run, the entire planet has to be restarted completely.
    • Metroid: Other M starts going on a decline right after the first battle with the Nightmare. You're introduced to a new, plot-heavy area with an enticing hook, only for much of it to be bypassed by the plot speeding up. Then you fight Nightmare again, then fight That One Boss (who is only killed by a method that the game never tells you) which has the only actual Metroids you fight in the game. After more cutscenes, you then finally get to deal with MB, a Cutscene Boss killed by aiming at her. This is followed on the lower difficulties by an epilogue which requires you to go all the way back through the Bottle Ship to get all the powerups you missed through the first run (which you won't need at this point) and fight Phantoon, then go through an escape mission, where you have different abilities which are used nowhere else in the game except the last few minutes.
  • In Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor the last level consists of dealing with the remaining two Black Captains, The Tower and The Black Hand. Unlike The Hammer, who is fought in a proper battle, The Tower is defeated by using only one button. The Black Hand then slits his own throat and is revealed to be Sauron in disguise. The fight with Sauron himself is a short QTE. There is also a fight with your nemesis, which is the Uruk that hates you the most. However, the player gets five warchiefs and their captains fighting by his side, making the fight as easy as the whole end game.
  • Chapters 7 and 9 (of 9) in Mirror's Edge are easily weaker than the rest, and also the only levels where some degree of enemy interaction is mandatory. It's not completely straight though, as 7 is still notably worse than 9 (which at least doesn't completely necessitate fighting, unlike 7), and Chapter 8 is one of the best chapters in the game.
  • No More Heroes has some annoying levels later on, especially #3, when you have to fight waves of enemies on a somewhat cramped bus, #2, where you have to run over a lot of enemies on your bike (it gets very tedious since they just keep coming, and if you fall off, you have to fight a lot of enemies with guns), and #1, where most of the beginning is a bike chase and then there's a forest maze filled with Goddamned Bats. They try to buck the trend of levels full of enemies to kill, and don't quite succeed.
  • The final levels of No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle often get a venomous reaction from players. Right after Henry's dream, the build-ups to the next three assassination missions consist, respectively, of an unbearably long, monotonous fight in a parking lot that isn't even remotely difficult, a drive to the spot with the number three assassin - a drive which doesn't have any enemies or obstacles whatsoever and culminates in a weak boss - and an extremely long maze without any real sense of direction to it. And then there's the final level, which consists of a fairly monotonous 30+ minute run through a mall, and nearly endless swarms of Mooks that pose almost no threat to Travis and are just there to serve as a distraction. It culminates with a Nintendo Hard showdown against Jasper Batt Jr..
  • No More Heroes III: Despite being teased as a whole explorable area at the center of the game's map, it turns out Damon's Tower only covers a straight passageway inside the tower itself where you kill enemies in order to reach the Final Boss battle. No area that surrounds the tower is explorable whatsoever. The game's developers confirmed that the overworld area (as well as the other inaccessible parts of the playable cities) couldn't be added into the game due to time constraints.
  • Ōkami: As opposed to previous dungeons, which have numerous puzzles to solve, treasures to find, and (usually) a brush god to obtain, the Ark of Yamato is nothing more than a Boss Rush and the place where the player fights the final boss. The fact that it's a Point of No Return doesn't help. You can't even challenge the bosses again if you save after beating them, so your only options after beating the last one before the final boss is to shop or fight the final boss.
  • Primal lets you explore multiple dimensions, each with their own story that ties in to a much bigger story arc. It is a big, atmospheric world that won the production team multiple awards. The final battle, with Jen as the force of Order versus her boyfriend Lewis who she was trying to save throughout the entire game as the force of Chaos, is terribly clunky and underwhelming. Your opponent, for one thing, never transitions beyond his Ferai ("Earth") form, even when in water. The final cutscene suddenly has terrible graphics, and the story simply falls dead with an immensely unsatisfying conclusion.
  • In the last level of The Saboteur, Sean climbs to the top of the Eiffel Tower to finally fight and kill Kurt Dierker, the Nazi colonel who killed his best friend (which has been Sean's driving motivation for the entire game). Sounds epic, right? Not quite. By the time you get there, all the Nazi Mooks have been killed and the final boss fight amounts to walking up to an already suicidal Dierker and shooting him.
  • Tomb Raider:
    • The last two Atlantis levels in Tomb Raider: Anniversary: The original game's Atlantis is considered on par with the rest of the game, and a high point for many people, but not so with Anniversary: at least 75% of the content of the original levels has been cut, and some very buggy jumping puzzles have been added. The general theme is also less interesting (with the feel of being in a living creature replaced by a more standard sci-fi theme). Even people that have no knowledge of the changes from the original game have slammed this section, although the boss fights and the very few puzzles that do return are improved upon.
    • While Tomb Raider: Legend doesn't really drop in gameplay quality, Nepal, the final "real" location (the last being a boss fight) feels extremely short and is over before it even really gets going.
    • Tomb Raider: Underworld shifts towards this someway around three-quarters in, with the last locations being much shorter than earlier ones, with a shameless example of Copy-and-Paste Environments and the varied colour schemes of the earlier locations being replaced by a mulch of grey and blue. It does carry through on the gameplay though, with the end areas still having a few great set-pieces.
    • Cairo onwards in Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation. While the whole game is set in one country, the earlier parts generally do a good job keeping things varied; Cairo, however, is one of the longest segments of the game and almost universally bathed in the same colour scheme throughout. The ability to swap between levels also gets way out of control, and makes things far more confusing than anything earlier when combined with the samey-looking environment and higher difficulty level. The Valley of the Kings is an improvement, but still weaker than the earlier sections of the game.
    • The final two levels in Tomb Raider III. The game is already Nintendo Hard for the most part, but the last two levels are so notoriously difficult that some may simply either give up or use a cheat code to skip the levels. The 2nd to last level has a ton of deep pits with tricky jumping as you get chased by glowing wasps that can easily push you into them, and there's 4 areas that are mostly a Death Course where you'll be redoing sections of them again and again (and this is made worse on the PlayStation version where saving is limited by how many Save Crystals you have left). The Final Boss in the last level can one hit kill you with its attack, and the whole arena is filled with lava and the mystery goo from the meteorite that will also kill you instantly if you fall in either of them. When you do beat the boss, you have to climb your way up and out of the impact crater to escape and shoot down some flamethrower guys before they can light you up (being on fire is death unless there's water, which there isn't in this example). Once you reach the helicopter, you're treated to an FMV of Lara hijacking it and narrowly escaping. That's it.
  • Uncharted:
    • Drake's Fortune goes into this right at the very end, where there's an enemy who can kill you in one hit (although easy enough to avoid if you learn the pattern) while you fight off waves of other enemies on what amounts to a timer due to destructible cover, and then it ends in a trial and error QTE fest.
    • Uncharted 2's final levels are not nearly up to the standards of quality of the ones before. While some of it is pretty awesome (the opening scenes of Shambala and the fight in the storm drain while it's, y'know, storming), the game starts sending frustrating firefight after frustrating firefight at you as soon as you cross the collapsing bridge in the Monastery and never really stops, feeling like the first game again. The awesome vehicle battles and chases don't return, with the exception of the collapsing rocks in Shambala (but that's for all of 5 seconds). The devs mentioned somewhere that they had a time frame and had to do the last areas more quickly then the first, the final boss especially. This becomes obvious when you consider the train level took the entire dev cycle to make, while Shambala was made in the last two or three months.

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