Ending Fatigue / Video Games

• In most RTS game levels with 'destroy the enemy' victory conditions, you get your victory only by sending your world-crushing army scouting round the entire map, trying to find the last enemy unit that wandered off on its own. It's so common that RTS fans have a name for it: Last Enemy Syndrome. Later games tend to judge defeat by having no buildings left, which lowers the chances of this, unless they manage to smuggle a peasant out. Others, like StarCraft II, let the AI enemy request to surrender when it's obvious that a human player is going to win.
  • Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 resolved this problem with a creative and very fitting technique: once you destroy all their production facilities, the enemy will eventually sell the rest and then send all their remaining units against you in a final "blaze of glory" march. Which can be surprisingly effective and might end up destroying your base, but at the same time, it's far more entertaining than the hard way. Note though that it also has a "short game" option, which makes it so any player that has lost all their buildings is instantly out of the game (all of their remaining units dying all at once), but the AI doesn't change its behavior to account for this, so what would have been a "blaze of glory" march in a normal game becomes them just throwing in the towel for a short game.
  • Standard multiplayer RTS etiquette is for the losing player to surrender when the result is clear so that the winner doesn't get frustrated hunting down the last unit. Newer players occasionally don't understand this, figuring it to be polite to give the opponent the satisfaction of smashing everything, but anyone who has won more than a couple of matches will simply find it tedious.
  • This is especially bad in Achron, since not only do you have to wipe out every unit from which it is possible to recover (which includes many common military units), but you have to wait until said defeat reaches the immutable past, which usually takes several minutes of real time.
  • Though turn-based rather than real-time, "rout the enemy"-style maps in Fire Emblem tend to get this critique to a tee—HHM Cog of Destiny in Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade is particularly infamous for going on much longer than it needs to, due to the massive amount of enemies, all of whom use magic attacks and therefore can only be countered by other mages or Ranged Emergency Weapon-users. "Defend"-style maps can get this if the player is particularly quick to take the fight to the enemy, meaning that the first three or four turns are an explosive confrontation and the next turns are just mopping up the token reinforcements.
• .hack//G.U. Vol. 3: Redemption. After a battle with shiny lights, faux computer abilities, and screams (lots of them), Ovan's Avatar finally finishes its mission to reset The World and save his little sister, by sacrificing his own life, and all people who went comatose do wake up, one by one. That should be the end of the game, huh? Well, not really. All of a sudden Yata reveals that Cubia, a Big Bad from the previous series of games, suddenly resurrected (under pretty vague circumstances) and now he is threatening to destroy The World. Now you have some more 6 hours of gameplay on doing almost nothing interesting to stop it.
  • All of Volume 3 really has this problem. Before you fight Ovan you have to deal with Sakaki making a random return to... act evil, kick you out of your guild and host a tournament that does nothing really but waste time before you kick his ass again and he's finally removed from the story. The staff was banking on the Ovan reveal being a massively shocking plot twist that was the climax of the game. The director even mentioned they were expecting Evangelion level backlash, death threats and all. They didn't get it as most saw it coming and the others than didn't it wasn't that big a deal to. To make matters worse they had to reveal Ovan in Volume 2 so that people following Roots and people who played the game in Japan would get the reveal at roughly the same time (they tried to do the same in the US, but the US practices of changing timeslots and preempting episodes quickly ruined that plan) so Volume 3 is mostly wasting time before the fight with Ovan, and then Cubia as an epic final threat.
• In Baten Kaitos, once you've whupped Malpercio's ancient godly ass and saved the world everything's over, right? Nope! You're in for about a half-hour of exposition that attempts to wrap up all the loose ends left by the game's rather confusing plot. Then it's over, right? Nope! They introduce new plot points and drop even more exposition on you that takes an extra 20 minutes or so to wrap up. Then it's over, right? "Noooooo! Not so fast kiddies! What do you think you're doing?!" Yep, Geldoblame is somehow back to cause a ruckus with one brief final boss battle, followed by another half-hour or so of the ocean being restored, Xelha's fake-out Heroic Sacrifice, a bit more exposition to wrap things up, and the final "good-bye to the player" scene. Yes, you could actually watch Toy Story in its entirety in the time it takes for Baten Kaitos to finally wrap up.
• Bayonetta 3's final chapter is made up of a lengthy Marathon Boss with three major forms and several phases spaced through those forms. After both the Big Bad and Bayonetta's crew throw everything they can at each other, the game then goes to a Post-Final Boss against Dark Eve and Kraken before finally getting to the credit sequence, which itself has a few quick bonus missions as part of the series tradition. Overall, the final level can take well around half an hour to complete despite most of it being spent fighting the same guy.
• The Binding of Isaac and especially its Updated Re-release Rebirth has a Disc-One Final Boss that only amounts to about half of what would become a single run, and multiple runs must be done just to start unlocking the path towards the last floors of the game. By the Repentance DLC, reaching the True Final Boss needs hundreds and hundreds of runs all on its own, and that's not counting challenges done just to unlock things to help.
• Black Mesa falls deep into this as a result of trying to avoid the original game's infamous case of Xen syndrome. While Xen is much prettier to look at, it drags on significantly longer thanks to the Crowbar Collective trying to make it long enough to be its own full-length game. Unfortunately, this also means that many of the areas and puzzles are completely new, so players can't rely on knowledge from the original game to help them if they get lost or bored.
• Bravely Default has, counting both endings as one, nine chapters. The first four chapters deal with 90-some-percent of the game's content, from bosses to jobs to items. Then you hit chapter five, and the game dries up. There's nothing left to do but re-fight the same cadre of bosses with minor permutations such as increased HP or a new attack or a different enemy party. And if you want to get the True End, you have to do this four more times. You could skip the optional bosses, but that would leave you severely under-leveled and without the best abilities in the game. By the time you reach the end, The Reveal has become tedious and explicit, the game has become a cake walk, and it all goes in direct opposition of the game's moral.
• The second disc of Chrono Cross feels like one Big Bad fight after another, and it can get very wearing. It's not helped by the plot infamously collapsing in on itself due to a Gambit Pileup. First, you fight FATE, who has been built up as the Big Bad for the entire game. But then he goes down, and the six elemental dragons do a Fusion Dance to become the Dragon God, who promises to ravage the world now that FATE, the thing sealing it away, is dead. Then, you go through the Marathon Level to end all Marathon Levels, kill the new Big Bad, and that's it, right? Nope, now you have to kill the Time Devourer, which is a Giant Space Flea from Nowhere compared to the other enemies you had to fight. And if you don't jump through a couple of Guide Dang It! laden hoops, then you do not get an ending, just a little card saying 'Fin'.
• A universal problem in 4X games such as Civilization, Total War and many others. Players tend to reach the point where their empire is so powerful that they can't possibly be defeated, but mopping up the AI or completing the Victory Conditions may still take several more hours, at which point the game ceases to be challenging or interesting. Nothing to do but load up a new game and start again! Nowadays games try to mitigate this in various ways, usually by having a scripted "crisis" occur in the late game to actually challenge the player's empire. Even so, many players freely admit to never having actually finished a game, despite having dozens or even hundreds of hours of playtime. (In 4X-game Stellaris for example, only 5% of all players have the Steam achievement, "Win the game through any victory condition." And the game is one of the pioneers of throwing scripted crises at the player near the end with its Endgame Crisis system; even that has not been enough to make players actually finish the game after the crisis is over)
• Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time isn't a long game to beat level-to-level, but if you want to true ending, which requires 100% Completion, oh boy. You need to collect all 6 gems in every normal level, including the slightly-remixed "alternate timeline" levels, then get all 6 gems in every level's "N-Verted" version (which mostly amounts to playing the exact same levels again, just mirrored and with a graphical filter), get all the Flashback Tapes and complete all of them, do a No Death Run of every level (thankfully you don't need to replat this for the N-Verted versions), and replay every level in time trial mode for all the Platinum Relics. (The previous game only required Gold for the best ending, Platinum was just for bragging rights.) Adding insult to injury, all this unlocks is a seconds-long Stinger. To put this in perspective, HowLongToBeat estimates a main story time of 10 hours, and a completionist time of over 80.
• If you play Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble! to its regular conclusion, you won't encounter this trope, but if you go for the Golden Ending and try to find all the secrets, you're in for an anticlimactic time. The secret levels themselves are fine, if not especially novel and exciting, and your reward for clearing all of them is a new vehicle, the Gyrocopter. The Gyrocopter itself is cool, but the only new areas it unlocks are the last few Banana Bird Caves, which means the last thing you'll do in the game is solve a Simon puzzle, before a final cutscene that is, admittedly, pretty funny. Contrast with Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest, whose bonus levels ended in an appropriately-climactic True Final Boss battle.
• The original Doom has a case of this, due in part to its origins as Shareware. New enemy types, powerups, and weapons start to get thin on the ground after the end of the first episode (which was the part released for free), which means most of the later levels don't have many options for how to change things up other than "spawn twice as many enemies as the last one", which quickly wears out its viability considering there's little middle ground between enemies that die in one shotgun blast and ones that take ten or more. After the Cyberdemon boss fight at the end of the second episode, there's still nine levels left to go, and by that point, the only things there are left to see are the missable, Too Awesome to Use BFG-9000, and the game's final boss, which is a relative pushover compared to the Cyberdemon. Part of what made Doom II so significant was just that it added a ton of new enemies, which meant later levels still had tricks up their sleeve.
• Doom³ seemed to go on forever... you go to hell, kill the boss, a great stopping point, then come back to Mars for hours of more gameplay, but it's the best part of the game!
• Eternal Sonata's endgame devolves into this for some people, possibly because the Big Bad gets killed in a very stupid way two dungeons before the end of the game, forcing the party to climb a ridiculously large tower and fight his right-hand man instead. And then the game throws one last boss fight at you in the form of Chopin himself. Add to that a lengthy ending cutscene, plus the entire cast lecturing you over the end credits, and you've got a game that seems to go on forever.
  • It gets fixed a bit in the PS3 Updated Re-release, as the Big Bad doesn't die straight away and instead accompanies his right-hand-man to the final dungeon. The cast lecture is either altered or eliminated as well, depending what version of the ending, you get, as well as certain changes to some scenes.
• In the final dungeon of Final Fantasy VII Remake, after escaping the remake-specific detour of Hojo's tests, you finally make it to the final floor and face a horrific form of JENOVA, unlike anything you've seen in the game so far, that has all of the hallmarks of a final boss. After defeating this monster, you head to the escape helicopter only for it to be suddenly shot down and you're forced into a Duel Boss fight with unique mechanics against a character who has barely appeared in the game up to this point. Then the rest of the party fights their own boss fight. Once everyone reunites, you're treated to an extended chase sequence using the motorcycle gameplay seen one other time early in the game. Then the characters have an extended conversation about all of the increasingly strange events that have been occurring and you agree to follow Sephiroth through a rift in time and space. The scene has many hallmarks of a cliffhanger ending teasing the new and crazy threats you'll be facing in the next game, only for the game to immediately continue in another Boss Bonanza, each with multiple stages. During this entire time, there are only two opportunities to save and catch your breath. Then, after all of that, you're treated to several cutscenes giving resolution to multiple plot threads, while also teasing plot threads for future installments that are barely given context.
• In Fire Emblem: Three Houses, the Verdant Wind and Silver Snow routes suffer from this. After the apparent final confrontation with Emperor Edelgard, there's another mission in which the army invades Shambhala, home of Those Who Slither In The Dark. But the game isn't over yet, as there's one more mission against a resurrected Nemesis on Verdant Wind and a berserk Rhea on Silver Snow. To make matters worse, in the final month of the Silver Snow route, the characters act as though the war is over in monastery conversations, and the game actually does end with the aforementioned Disc-One Final Boss on Azure Moon.
• Many games of Football Manager suffer this as a season draws to a close. Players heading towards the end of the season, especially if they stay up late and into the early morning (which many do solely because they are on a good run and believe saving & coming back later will "reset" their momentum), can often start pushing towards the end of the season and not paying as much attention to their team, lineups, tactics, and various non-match related aspects like scouting new transfer targets for the off-season. This can lead to extremely frustrating losses and situations that can cause that entire season to go up in smoke. This is not the games fault as each season has as many games as it would in real life.
• Golden Sun: The Lost Age. Make no mistake! The ending is great, very climactic, and satisfying. But what is the one thing you want to do above all after defeating that nasty Boss? That's right! Save your progress! However, while you sit around with your Game Boy in your sweaty hands, shaking uncontrollably with the unquenchable desire to save, the ending drags on and on and on...
• Guitar Hero 5. Do You Feel Like We Do. It is by far the longest song in the game at 13 minutes and 40 seconds, more than double the next longest song. There is an achievement just for getting 95% of the way through, whether you then successfully complete the song or not.
  • And while you're at it, everything under the Music folder that has been on Guitar Hero or Rock Band also fits here. Which makes the Rock Band 2 edit version of Prequel to the Sequel the odd one out - the entire second half of the song is removed, and the fans HATED Harmonix for that.
• Kingdom Hearts known for this in its numeral titles:
  • Kingdom Hearts wraps up nearly all of its plot points in the Hollow Bastion chapter, where Sora defeats the Big Bad Maleficent, rescues the seven Princesses of Heart, squares off against Riku in a dramatic Cain and Abel confrontation, and pulls a Heroic Sacrifice to save Kairi by temporarily becoming a Heartless—all of which would make for a perfectly satisfying ending. But then the game just keeps going with the End of the World area, with Sora reliving all of his adventures in the previous worlds, culminating in a battle with Chernabog. Except that's not the ending either: afterwards, Sora still has to survive the most intense Heartless battle in the game... which only leads to the door to a boss battle with the (actual) Big Bad Ansem. And even then, he has to defeat Ansem four times in a row, then fight his way through a succession of Heartless-packed room before destroying his battleship form.
  • Kingdom Hearts II has a little Expectation Subversion where Hollow Bastion - now your Hub World - is attacked by big baddies of the game - Organization XIII and hundreds of Heartless (Thousand, to be exact). You fight side by side with Final Fantasy characters, and Goofy almost dies. All in all - by the end of the sequence you finally: see Organization's leader face, he makes some plot twist, finding out that your friend has been captured. And just when you think now it'll be your final confrontation...the game sends you to second trip around worlds, yeah. After all, Chip and Dale finally locate the Organization Headquarters - The World that Never Was. You go through ominous city, and then you approach a giant castle flying over it. Inside you encounter huge amount of cutscenes and taking down last remaining Organization XIII members. There you also find both of your friends, see Heroic Sacrifice, and finally confront Xemnas himself. At first, the battle will be just like with the others when you fight him face to face. Then, Xemnas will sit on a giant dragon atop of the castle, from where he'll be throwing buildings at you. After that, you need to beat him in his armor while he sitting on his throne. After that, there's another dragon battle - firstly you just shoot off his wings and take down another armored figure. And only after all of those you will face the man in final fight.
  • Kingdom Hearts III take this trope Up to Eleven or, in this case, up to thirteen. The final confrontation with 13 Seekers of Darkness takes around 1/4 of the game's length - firstly you'll need to fight a huge amount of Unversed, Nobodies and Heartless combined, the Demon Tide, a giant tornado full of Heartless, and only after that you can begin your long boss rush against first 12 members of the Organization. That's not all. Only after only one Xehanort remains, there's two-part boss battle before you can face the old man himself - firstly you'll need to take down 12 replicas (luckily with only one HP bar), defeat Xehanort in his armor, and after that you come face to face with the old master.
• The new Kirby games are notorious for their insanely long Marathon Boss finales.
  • Kirby's Return to Dream Land ends with a fight with Landia, a shoot-em-up section, a fight with the Lor Starcutter, and a fight with Magolor. In case that's not enough, the fight with Magolor is split into two distinct phases, the former of which ends with a section that uses Kirby's super abilities.
  • Kirby: Triple Deluxe has a two-phase fight with Masked Dedede, a fight with Queen Sectonia, a cannon-firing segment, another fight with Queen Sectonia, and a Hypernova Kirby finale. The True Arena version is even worse as Sectonia has an additional third phase.
  • Kirby: Planet Robobot has a fight with Mecha Knight, a fight with President Haltmann, and a three-phase final boss against Star Dream. The True Arena version is even worse as Star Dream has an additional fourth phase.
  • Kirby Star Allies has a fight with Zan Partizanne, a two-phase fight with Hyness, and a four-phase fight with Void Termina. And that's not even the end; after beating Void Termina, you have to go through a button-mashing segment to truly defeat him.
  • Kirby and the Forgotten Land has a two-phase fight against Forgo Dedede, a fight with Leongar, a fight with Fecto Forgo, and a fight with Fecto Elfilis. But then Fecto Elfilis isn't defeated, and you have to get through one last Mouthful Mode sequence and a control-stick-wiggling sequence to finish them off once and for all.
• The sequel to the otherwise famously excellent Game Mod Brotherhood of Shadow for Knights of the Old Republic, Solomon's Revenge has this. What appears to be a fairly straightforward final battle in a climactic location ends up in an extremely long scene littered with flashbacks, self-findings, and whatnot, and most importantly, neither the heroes nor the villains JUST. STAY. DEAD. EVER. Whenever it seems like one side has finally been dealt a lethal blow, they still somehow manage to get up again and everything begins once more. This actually culminates in a scene where the player character has to beat down the Brotherhood around a dozen consecutive times under exactly the same conditions in different environments until they finally give up.
• At around the three-fourths mark in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, the game sends Link on a fetchquest to recover part of the Triforce, which requires the player to find the 8 charts showing their locations, have enough cash to get all of them deciphered, and then sail to where they're at and haul them up with their boat's grapple arm. All this really amounts to is stretching out the running time when the story is clearly wrapping itself up. The HD rerelease addressed this by introducing the much more efficient Swift Sail and reducing the fetching needed by replacing most of the charts with the Triforce pieces themselves.
• The Longest Journey became a bit too long in the tooth at the end. The developers actually seem to be aware of this, as April (the protagonist) is around midway outright given a Plot Coupon, instead of having to do the usual fulfilling of ancient prophecy ballyhoo (April lampshades this).
• The Lord of the Rings Online: Volume I of the Epic story has a short Epilogue, tying up some loose ends left after the climax of the story. Volume II that followed it, however, has as many as twelve different Epilogues, enough to form another Book or even two.
• Super Meat Boy has five full chapters and a short finale chapter consisting of five levels and a boss. The end? Escape Sequence time! Your reward? A Smash to Black as a block is about to land on Meat Boy. The end? Brownie to the rescue! Now it's just Meat Boy and Bandage Girl watching the Floating Continent blow up. The end? Dr. Fetus attacks Bandage Girl! And it actually ends right there unless you beat the Dark World version of the boss level, in which case Bandage Girl turns out to be unfazed by Dr. Fetus's punches, and stomps on him.
• Mega Man:
  • Metal Man's stage in the Mega Man 2 ROM Hack Rockman 2 GX has multiple doors that make it look like you're about to fight him in the next room, only for the stage to continue.
  • Rockman 4 Minus ∞: Wily 3 is an insanely long maze level, the Wily Machine has far too many health meters, Wily 4 has three more bosses, then the Bullet Hell Wily Capsule, and then an annoying stretch of level, and then finally you fight the final boss. AND THEN THERE'S A SELF DESTRUCT SEQUENCE. The credits are long too!
  • Make a Good Mega Man Level Contest 2's final stage consists of, in order: a brief intro sequence; a lengthy cutscene; another insanely long maze in the vein of Rockman 4 Minus Infinity with five boss fights scattered throughout; a long battle against a Wily Machine that spends most of its second phase out of your attack range; the Final Boss fight, bookended by lengthy cutscenes; a Post-Final Boss; one last cutscene; and finally the credits roll. That's eight boss fights and four cutscenes in one stage! Then the postgame opens up: 12 new stages (including several infamous That One Levels) with 14 energy elements and 37 Noble Nickels between them, a huge really-final-we-mean-it-this-time stage with 24 good-sized areas to clear (though thankfully you're only required to do six unless you're going for 100% Completion) along with three more Noble Nickels and a four-phase Superboss. And then it ends for real—unless you want 100% on your save file. Whew!
  • Every Mega Man Battle Network and Mega Man Star Force game has lots of awesome postgame content — and every time, you can't get to the end of it without filling your BattleChip library. The final boss and the bonus boss are always separated by a wall of many hours of grinding for rare drops. BN4 comes close to being the worst by requiring extra playthroughs if you're careless enough to miss a Mystery Data on any of your first three runs. But BN3 is the champion: it pulls an egregious case of One Game for the Price of Two which requires Navi chips from the opposite version (which are treated as non-required Secret Chips in all the other games). If you don't have access to it, you're not fighting the Omega Navis unless the BugFrag Trader listens to your prayers.
  • While not quite as prolonged as Rockman 4 Minus Infinity's ending, the Wily Fortress in Rockman 7 EP starts to drag on towards the end. The final Wily stage (which is the new fifth stage rather than the fourth) takes over twenty minutes even for a fast player, owing to its four lengthy Multi-Mook Melee rooms, rematches with all eight mid-bosses, and one more level segment and a Marathon Boss afterwards.
  • The third Mega Man X: Mavericks game is notably longer than the others. Besides the opening stage, an intermission stage and ten Maverick stages, you've got an extra five stages on Planet Maverick and three fortresses of four to five stages each to go through.
• Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain has Skull Face being killed and Metal Gear Sahelanthropus destroyed in Mission 31. However, there's 50 missions total so the game drags on for another 19 missions to wrap up minor sideplots and introduce MORE sideplots that never get resolved. Also, half of those 19 missions are actually just rehashes of some of the first 31 mission with increased difficulty. And the icing on the cake was that there was supposed to be a massive 51st mission that was supposed to wrap up all of the still unresolved plot points, but it was ultimately cut from the game.
• Metal Slug 3, the final mission. First you go through a long, hard dogfight with Morden's forces, then you fight Morden himself... But it turns out to be a Martian. The Mars People then abduct the character you're using, forcing another character to go after them, you storm the mothership, you battle the Mars People from inside, rescuing Morden and your captured comrade in the process... Then comes a Free-Fall Fight with the leader of the Mars People, Rootmars. On a good run, the game takes 45-50 minutes to complete, with the final mission taking about half an hour out of that time. Yes, that's right, you spend over half of your play time on the final mission.
• The renowned hack Super Metroid Redesign has the same plot and bosses as the original game, but stretched out much, much longer. How much longer? The final escape countdown starts at 25 minutes.
• Mighty No. 9 achieves the bizarre feat of having this trope and a too-short ending. The actual ending is three pictures and The Stinger, but between those is a three-hour, fifty-eight-minute credits sequence, the single longest credits sequence in any form of media ever.
• In NEO: The World Ends with You, the final day is by far the longest one in the game, so much so that it's split into three separate chapters in the chapter select menu. After the Wicked Twisters defeat Shiba, Kubo reveals his true colors and destroys Shibuya, forcing Rindo to use his time rewind powers and redo the day. The second time through, the Wicked Twisters convince Shiba to help them against Kubo, only for them to be unable to defeat Soul Pulvis. After that, Rindo returns to the RG, shows a young man named "Haz" around Shibuya, and after learning he's an Angel who had Kubo exorcised for overstepping his bounds, gets one last chance to save his friends and Shibuya. The third time through involves repeatedly talking to characters in order to set up an elaborate plan to save the day, after which you finally get to fight the Final Boss. The denouement isn't too drawn-out, but it certainly takes a while to get there.
• NieR: Automata is a strange example, as the game says that you got ending A when you beat the game while playing as 2B. This unlocks route B, which consists of playing through mostly the same game as 9S (with some differences, as you see what happened with 9S when he was separated from 2B). This ends in the same way as the first ending, giving you ending B... and unlocking the second half of the game, route C+D, which is entirely new content. Each of the endings marks a Point of No Return, but you can go back after you get ending C or D (whichever you choose) and replay earlier content in the game, including sidequests which otherwise would have been unobtainable. Though if you complete ending E, and choose to sacrifice your save data to help other players, you really will lose all your save data and have to start the game over from scratch.
• Odin Sphere: The Book of Armageddon, if you're going for the best ending. You need to see every scene possible, even the ones where you pit the wrong character against certain bosses. This requires a minimum of four playthroughs, although thankfully you can cut the second and third short in the remake after beating the third boss without missing anything if you don't make any redundant character choices.
• Parasite Eve is divided into 6 day segments. Day 5 is easily the longest in the whole game where you slog through the American Museum of Natural History whose duration in time spent in there is almost as long as the trek through Central Park earlier in the game. The museum has four floors with a lot of backtracking required once you have the proper keys to open doors. A lengthy cut scene with the The Dragon ensues, followed by a mini-boss fight, an actual boss fight, a trek to the top floor to confront the Big Bad, a really lengthy cut scene showing the protagonist and the military teaming up to reach the villain, and then a two-stage boss battle with the main bad girl herself. But wait, now you have to progress through day 6 before completing the game! While the 6th day is thankfully short, it mostly consists of a cut scene, the Final Boss fight that has five stages with a cut scene in between, followed by a chase sequence with the dying final boss going after you while you flee, rig the cruiser to explode, then escaping as the ending (which is reasonably short) plays out. Woe to you if you die during any of these segments and have to watch the cut scenes all over again!
• Pathfinder: Kingmaker has quite some trouble with this, especially if you go for the golden ending. Upon reaching the final level, the House at the Edge of Time, and gathering your companions, you'd think it's a straightforward run towards the boss, Nyrissa, only to be hit with a plethora of enemies (and sub-bosses) living in two alternate dimensions, which you have to travel between to get to the boss room. Then you enter the boss room and face Nyrissa. End of story, right? Well... Not if you manage to befriend her (either by sparing her or not fighting her at all). Upon doing so, the true final boss, The Lantern King, will reveal itself and express its frustration at the way things were settled, swearing revenge at the player's character before leaving the first world to attack the player's kingdom. A new chapter will subsequently start, where the true final boss warps the player's kingdom and curses the player's character and companions, depowering them greatly. In order to break the curse, the player has to fight spirits of opponents they have already defeated, gradually lifting the curse with each opponent. Then, after the curse has been lifted, the player has to face the true final boss in their own throne room, which would be simple, if not for the fact that the player needs to destroy three fragments of The Apology, the artifact that grants the true final boss most of its power, before they can enter. Once they've done so, they finally face the true final boss in combat, who goes through four (!) different phases before admitting defeat. After that, the player has to make one final choice, before the epilogue rolls and they can enjoy their victory. All in all, this final stretch can take somewhere between 20 to 40 hours to complete (depending on party composition), with most of it being a slog to get through. Then again, you can always just kill Nyrissa and be done with it, cutting the required time in half.
• Pokémon:
  • Pokémon Sun and Moon. After cementing themselves as Alola's first Pokémon champion, the player has to wade through a half-hour of unskippable cutscenes, not including the also unskippable ten-minute credits sequence, before they can jump back in to experience the post-game story, start putting together a team for competitive Player Versus Player battles, and/or complete the Pokédex.
  • Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity , is chock full of them, particularly at the very end of the game, which, after beating the Bittercold, the final cutscene before the credits is over a half-hour long. Doesn't help that there are two rather lengthy ones in between the two parts of battling the Bittercold, either.
• Red Dead Redemption II has two epilogue chapters from John Marston's perspective after Arthur Morgan dies, containing perhaps 10 to 15 hours of more story content, longer than the entire story of many games. The epilogue covers John's attempts to lead a peaceful life and build the ranch at Beecher's Hope after an eight-year Time Skip, but — while it does have some touching moments between John, his family, and several surviving gang members — it doesn't have the kind of drama of the game's six main chapters. The early epilogue missions in particular can be extremely frustrating because of how slow and uneventful they are. Arthur's story ends with a great deal of action and emotion, and almost immediately afterward, the player is required to sit quietly and complete errands that feel far more like a tutorial than something you need to do 80% of the way through a game. Even when John has to fight, it's only against generic thugs, gangs, and bounty hunters until the final mission, when the player finally gets to kill Micah Bell.
• This is a major flaw with Resident Evil: Revelations, which is compounded by the game's Anachronic Order plot, its habit of jumping back and forth between places and protagonists, how it uses two identical cruise ships (the Queen Semiramis and the Queen Zenobia) to repeatedly fake the player out, and its habit of jumping back and forth between antagonists. The game has a natural ending when the Queen Zenobia is sank, a massive monster that would be the final boss has been killed, and Chris and Jill are flying off in a helicopter... except it then reveals there is a third ship, the Queen Dido, and the game plods on for another hour or so before finally deciding to end.
• Just a simple game of Rise of Nations can end up having this once the players have researched all of the endgame upgrades. These upgrades allow the player to instantly create units, quickly accumulate resources, instantly take over cities and be immune to nukes and missile attacks. This results in a tedious endgame, in which the surviving players throw endless hordes of units at each other, in which the winner is usually the player who can persevere against the tediousness of it all.
• Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Koei) games tend to fall into this in the end game, much like civilization, since most of the fun comes from negotiating and dealing with the other factions. Thankfully, some games allow you to let the AI finish the game.
• Ryo's journey to Kowloon in Shenmue II ends with a lengthy, spectacular climactic fight through the Yellow Head gang's headquarters that culminates in an awesome rooftop duel against leader Dou Niu, all while the Big Bad watches from a helicopter. We then get a denouement where Ryo learns that he must travel to Guilin, and he departs for the next chapter of his adventure. So far, so good, but then we find out that wasn't the real ending; it actually makes up the entirety of disc 4.
• Persona
  • Persona 3, which alternates between a Dating Sim and a Dungeon Crawler, takes place over the course of one year in-game, but come November you suddenly run out of things to do apart from your few remaining social links and have no real pressure to hurry up in Tartarus anymore. Two solid months go by without real plot development.
  • And then there is the final boss rush. You reach the Avatar of Nyx after fighting two other bosses... except this boss has one phase for every major Arcana, meaning it has fourteen different phases, all broken up with about a minute of the final boss waxing poetics about how "The Arcana is the means by which all is revealed...". And it's still not done - you have one more boss to go.
  • The Playable Epilogue "The Answer" is pretty bad too. The end is five boss fights in a row (thankfully you can save in between them) and long cutscenes.
  • Notably averted in Persona 4, which fixes this by skipping several months in story time. Although they justify the time skip well enough, the remake Persona 4: Golden actually gives you most of this time back, and a few extra nifty things to do. Also unique in how each Ending (three or four depending on the version) extends the game, meaning that the ending is only as long as how far the player wishes to ‘pursue the truth’.
  • This trope comes back again in Persona 5. After the Big Bad is defeated, the rest of your days are spent on final exams and finishing up any last bit of Confidants you have left. That's not too bad, but the fatigue really starts to kick in a few days after that as you go through the Disc-One Final Dungeon and The Very Definitely Final Dungeon in a single day. That's right, you spend a single day having to do what amounts to two dungeons, without any breaks, which is especially jarring when the series' core gameplay consists of progressing through dungeons in small increments and taking breaks to pursue Social Links and otherwise improving your character. The second dungeon is essentially four minibosses in a row, which doesn't help. It's not too bad if you've been consistently making trips to Mementos, which gives you immediate access to its deepest parts, but it can be very draining.
  • In Persona 5's Updated Re-release, Royal, you're given an extra month of gameplay much like Golden. The issue is that the base game was already very lenient with its time management and gave you plenty of time to finish all the Confidants before December, so a player who's kept up with them will only have 5 ranks of one Confidant left in January, and then there's nothing much to do besides playing Darts or going to the Jazz Club every day.
• Sin and Punishment: Star Successor, already longer than the first game, takes about 2 hours and 40 minutes to beat, which feels too long even by Shoot 'Em Up, Rail Shooter, and Run-and-Gun standards. You could be watching a movie with a runtime like that. The stages are mostly Marathon Levels also.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Super Mario RPG: After maintaining a brisk pace through the first two thirds, the game slows to a crawl once you beat Yaridovich and get the fifth Star Piece. The trek for the sixth star takes you through Land's End, Bean Valley, Nimbus Land, and then Barrel Volcano. All of these areas are rather long, have at least one boss in them (Nimbus Land has two, as well as skippable miniboss fights, and Barrel Volcano has three) and Nimbus Land also has a lot of cutscenes to sit through. But at last, you get the sixth star in the volcano. Then it's on to Bowser's Castle which is even longer than the previous areas and at one point forces you to fight your way through four of six random hallways, which variably pit you against difficult platformer segments, logic problems, or just a gauntlet of enemies. And when you finally get to the end of the castle, after beating the third of three bosses, guess what? There's still one more dungeon to go, even longer than Bowser's Castle, with six bosses before you get to Smithy at last, and the stage is full of clones of Smithy's minions that are themselves minibosses. When Bowser steps out at the entrance to said dungeon and basically says "I'm done, I'm not going any further," the player is probably agreeing with him.
  • Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time: You finally face off against Princess Shroob in the climax... but then the Cobalt Star is reconstructed, releasing Elder Princess Shroob. And just when you think you've won, she has a second form that takes even LONGER to beat. And then she possesses Bowser. Luckily, the Post-Final Boss is easy and takes a shorter time to beat. It doesn't help that all the bosses have an ungodly amount of hit points in the US version.
  • Paper Mario: Color Splash: Mario's journey to get the final Big Paint Star, the green one, isn't as good as the rest of the game. There's a lot of revisiting older levels and tying up loose ends that feel too late (such as Sacred Forest and Redpepper Volcano, which you last visited half the game ago). Most levels in this part are loaded with difficult enemies that have high health and deal lots of damage, and the game tones down its puzzles and mini-arcs in favor of just plain platforming. While the Emerald Circus is a fun finale, it's also not much of a level, consisting entirely of a Unique Enemy Boss Rush.
• Tactics Ogre: The Very Definitely Final Dungeon the Hanging Garden (also known as "Eden") is a "Siege map". However, unlike other "Siege maps" where you at most had maybe three maps to go through, this one has eighteen, with most of them simply consisting of only a handful of enemies total. There are shortcuts, and the shortest route still takes five battles to complete. Oh, and you're still not done just because you got to the top - you got three more battles to go before the final battle. Mercifully, you can save between them and quicksave in battle, but it brings the action to a screeching halt. The remakes gave you a shortcut if you want to revisit the game using the World Tarot, fortunately.
• Tales Series:
  • In Tales of Symphonia, the Big Bad seemingly dies, but many parts of the storyline have yet to be resolved, such as Lloyd settling the score with Kratos and Sheena making a pact with Origin in order to reunite the worlds. Suddenly, the Big Bad returns and the world is thrown into an even more dire situation than the one it was just saved from, and the heroes head to the Very Definitely Final Dungeon for one last throw down with the final boss. It's actually much grander than it sounds.
  • Tales of the Abyss features a similar situation to Symphonia, but the first fight against the Big Bad is at the end of the second act, rather than two dungeons before the end. It also adds in a lot of padding and dealing with minor side villains before the central conflict can be resolved. It's still an interesting example because this trope is felt and expressed by the party members, Luke in particular. Already gloomy from his unresolved issues as a Replica, he gets more and more depressed as everything the party worked so hard to accomplish falls apart.
  • Legendia is the worst offender of this trope in the Tales series. You enter the Big Bad's fortress, defeat all of his major subordinates, defeat the Big Bad himself, and finally main character gets closure on his childhood love interest, complete with a nice cutscene. But then Your Princess Is in Another Castle! and the game goes on. Later, you enter The Very Definitely Final Dungeon, fight the Final Boss, save the damsel in distress for the umpteenth time, the credits roll... and then the second half of the game starts.
    • And the second half has its own share of Ending Fatigue. While it does resolve the plot threads and character arcs for the whole party, you retread the same dungeons you cleared in the first half of the game to do this rather than go to any new locations, with recolors of the same enemies you've already defeated as random encounters. This all adds up to a 10-15 hour slog of nothing new or interesting to see besides maybe the conclusions of each character's story. It doesn't help that this arc has no spoken dialogue at all (compared with the first half of the story, where almost every cutscene was voice-acted), making it feel like even more of a drag. This lasts until The Absolutely-Definitely-No-Take-Backs-We-Really-Mean-It-This-Time Final Dungeon, which is little more than a Boss Rush with the True Final Boss waiting at the end.
  • Tales of Vesperia: The main plot seems resolved, the Big Bad is defeated, and Estelle is returned to normal... Then a rift appears in the sky and Sodia stabs Yuri, causing him to fall into the ocean below. You then spend the final third of the game left reuniting the party and wrapping up a global warming plot that is only loosely connected to the political intrigue and moral themes of the first two acts. Many people find this last arc to be the weakest part of the game, wishing it was dealt with sooner to avert the anticlimactic nature of it.
• Trails Series:
  • Trails of Cold Steel II can take quite a while to finish. Once you beat Vermilion Apocalypse, you'd expect the game to end. But then you have to play another (but short) chapter featuring two of the main protagonists of the Crossbell duology. Then you beat that and the epilogue begins, where Rean and the rest of Class VII, as well as the rest of the students, spends their last days together before graduating. Then, you have to do two mandatory sidequests and three optional ones. After reporting them, the final dungeon becomes accessible, where the True Final Boss, a reskinned version of Loa Erebonius from the first game, resides. Beating that will officially let you see the ending.
  • Reaching the end of The Legend of Heroes: Trails into Reverie can take quite a long time before the game is over. After watching a long cutscene, players are thrust on the fight against Ishmelga Rean with Lloyd and Rean required for the fight. Then it switches to the Soldat fight where players have to fight Zoa Gilstein for a total of four times, with Ishmelga Rean dealing a Curb-Stomp Battle on the first three phases after the player depletes his HP to a certain point. It's then followed by a long cutscene and then the player has to fight the Final Boss of the game that requires Lloyd to be in the party but takes out Rean, Rufus, and Crow. And just when the player thinks its over, the player has to traverse through the final dungeon again with Lloyd, Lapis, Swin, Nadia, and Zeit to save Rufus' life while he enacts his Zero-Approval Gambit and then the game is finally over. Thankfully, the last part has no enemies so players can still take their time (even though the plot dictates that they must hurry as the whole place is about to get vaporized by a laser beam).
• Ultima VII Part II. After visiting the entire map with numerous roundabouts and mandatory sidequests, you finally face down with Batlin, the Big Bad whom you were chasing and why you were on Serpent Isle in the first place. Turns out this is about the half-way point in the game.
• The Wild ARMs series has done this.
  • Wild ARMs was notorious for feeling like it was going to end at many points throughout the game. End credits after the attack on Adlehyde? All that was just the introduction. Defeated Mother? Only the halfway point. Defeated Zeikfried? One of your party members becomes injured so you have to fix him up.
  • Wild ARMs 2 fares better, but the end sequence itself feels longer than the entire game.
  • Wild ARMs: Million Memories has a really long ending. After beating Mother in her final form, you have to watch cutscene after cutscene of what the remaining villains are up to and what numerous side characters are doing as well, even if they had very little to do with the actual game.
• For all of it's high quality, not even The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is immune to this. After finally rescuing Ciri, and the epic showdown at Kaer Morhn, the game looks to be reaching its climax very soon after. Instead, there's still 10+ hours of story left to go, which brings the momentum from said fight to a screeching halt. Now you have to go back over previously cleared areas of the world with Ciri at your side. With no new parts of the world left to explore, it can make the final few missions feel like they drag on and on, though seeing several key side characters and plot points get resolved does help alleviate this somewhat. Notably, even CD Projekt Red seems to agree that the game went on a bit longer than it needed to, and have stated that Cyberpunk 2077 would be shorter than Witcher 3, perhaps to avoid this trope popping up again.
• In X-Men 2: Clone Wars, the final level is the Phalanx Mothership and it is almost as long as the entire rest of the game combined. Multiple stage segments, two big boss battles (Cameron Hodge and the Brood Queen), and then the final battle is a rather anticlimactic fight with clones of each of the playable X-Men (Magneto optional). One at a time. And this on a game that lacks a save function or level select cheat.
• Yggdra Union. The game should have ended after Gulcasa died and the dragon threat thing was over, but the game goes some chapters after just to explain what was Nessiah's purpose all along. While Nessiah is a cool character and a good enemy, that still doesn't change the whole "The game is over... NOT!" effect it makes.

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