Amazing Technicolor Battlefield

It's the end of the world, and it's fabulous. ^note (from top to bottom: Final Fantasy remake, Riviera: The Promised Land, Kirby Super Star, Mother 3, Super Smash Bros. Brawl)

"GWAHAHA! Great dark hurricane! Seriously, perfect backdrop for an awesome final battle! You really sweat the details!"

— Bowser, Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story

You've finally made it. You've beaten down countless Faceless Goons, cashed in your Plot Coupons, trashed the Quirky Miniboss Squad and done away with the Goldfish Poop Gang (and, if you have enough time on your hands, found the Infinity +1 Sword). All that's left is the final showdown with the Big Bad.

You're ready to take him on, but just before you can draw your sword, he snaps his fingers, and all of a sudden your party and the villain are transported to Another Dimension. The villain's castle is gone, likely leaving you only with a floating platform on the edge of the void, or often standing on nothing at all, with various gyrating, pulsating patterns of colours and multi-colored nebulae providing the only background.

There may also be floating asteroids or ruins surrounding you, so that the villain can show how badass he is by making it look like he destroyed the Earth itself. If the villain has actually succeeded in destroying most of the world, this would seem like the most logical place to fight, especially if the heroes have just completed The Very Definitely Final Dungeon.

Seen mostly in many recent fighting games and fantasy-themed RPGs.

Compare Fight Woosh and Eldritch Location. May be the result of Trippy Finale Syndrome; subtrope of Final Boss, New Dimension.

Naturally, Spoilers ahead.

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Examples:

Action Adventure Games

• ANNO: Mutationem: The battle against Amok occurs on a red plane of Hinterland with floating black stones in the background.
• Brave Fencer Musashi: The final boss's battlefield takes place on a circular platform with a color-changing, cloudy background.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask: The last battle. At first Link is transported to a rather serene meadow, but then after talking to the lone boy by the tree wearing Majora's Mask, he suddenly ends up in an altered dimension with a vortex of colors.
  • The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap gives Vaati two Amazing Technicolor Battlefields, the former resembling an acid trip and the latter a platform against a starscape. He had it before that in Four Swords.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Oracle Games: In the combined game, one of revived Ganon's attacks turns the boss room into this for a few seconds and reverses your controls.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword has one for Demise, complete with the occasional lightning strike and Floating Water.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has the fight against Calamity Ganon take place in the huge, Tron Lines filled laboratory where he had originally been sealed.
• Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon: The final battle with King Boo at the end takes place in a purple-shaded vortex area.
• Solatorobo: Red the Hunter: The final boss fight is inside Tartarus, which is full of floating squares in various shades of pink and purple.

Action Games

• Bomberman:
  • Subverted in Bomberman 64. Sirius activates the Omni Cube, and you basically fight on a floating grate inside a giant version of the cube, complete with a space-y background. Then after some fighting, Regulus shows up and attacks the cube (floating just out of reach the whole battle), bringing you back to Sirius' throne room.
  • In Bomberman 64: The Second Attack!, the last battle with The Angel of Light and Shadow, occurs in a space void filled with stars.
  • Bomberman Hero: All battles with Nitros have a swirling background with different colors each fight.
• All the levels in Copy Kitty are set on psychedelic backgrounds, especially if you set the graphics and effects on high. Justified, as the whole game takes place in Cyberspace.
• Dante's Inferno has a couple of boss battles that feature this, though with more subdued color palettes:
  • First is the battle against Death, which takes place on a rocky platform in a bluish, cloudy void with random bits of architecture floating around and the light at the end of the tunnel looming ever closer as you wear Death's health down. The trope is actually justified, since Death is attempting to drag Dante to Hell, only for Dante to fight him off in the middle of the spiritual journey.
  • Second is the battle against Marc Antony and Cleopatra at the top of a tower in the second circle of Hell. Thanks to the Perpetual Storm around the tower, the battlefield is surrounded by a swirling pattern of blues and purples with occasional lightning flashes.
• Devil May Cry:
  • Many Bloody Palace stages tend to be this, with strange light shows going on under the floor or nebulae flying by.
  • In the finale of Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening, you fight a blob-shaped Arkham in some kind of shallow pool of various shades of purple and pink with a lot of black spots thrown in (Said black spots are the eyes and mouths in the faces of the souls of the damned that make up the pool). The blob-like Legion demons he summons as backups are also writhing in purple technicolor energy.
  • In DmC: Devil May Cry, A lot of areas in Limbo are full of blown-out, super bright colors and equally trippy designs. Lilith's nightclub deserves a mention, though - it's literally a demonic night club crammed with flashing neon lights and jittering sound waves with colors even more super-saturated than regular Limbo.
• In Katana ZERO, fighting the Secret Boss places Zero in a hellish void against The Psychiatrist's Eldritch Abomination form in a bloody swirling landscape.
• In Otogi: Myth of Demons, you fight the Big Bad Michizane in a pocket universe where he has been burning/bathing his body in the light and flames of eight million stars, growing ever more powerful and becoming a Physical God. And in the Sequel you fight the Nine-tailed Fox in the upper atmosphere of the planet, with snow and ice covered chunks of ground floating around.

Adventure Games

• In Danganronpa, each Bullet Time Battle occurs a unique background for each game; consisting of colored-grids, the trial room, or a setting that's related to who's being battled.
• World's End Club: The final stage occurs on moving vortex of data as Pochi moves in to shut down MAIK.

Beat Em Ups

• Asura's Wrath has The Event Horizon stage against the True Final Boss, Chakravartin.
• BattleToads: The last level against The Dark Queen takes place on the top of her tower with a moving blue grid background.
• The final battle of Castle Crashers starts on a flying platform with a glowing red crystal encased in a wall of rock in the background, as the fight goes on, the wall of rock slowly gets destroyed until the platform you are on starts FALLING mid-battle. The boss himself gets pretty wacky as well.
• In the second D&D game Shadows of Mystara, you fight in one of these against an evil ghost-thing named Ezerholden. Depending on the path you take you might also fight a revived Deimos in a similar trippy temple setting.
• The final battle in Violent Storm with the boss of the Monster Clown turns out to be against a small child who is a cross between Garlic of Dragon Ball Z and Tetsuo from AKIRA. The castle lifts up into the air and into an alternate dimension as he becomes gigantic and malformed and bulky like Zarbon.

Driving Games

• Played in the Mario Kart games. In Mario Kart this track is always called Rainbow Road.
• In F-Zero GX, the last raceway is a rainbow-colored hologram track high in the night sky. In F-Zero GX, it's Phantom Road, though F-Zero X also featured a direct rip of the Rainbow Road from Mario Kart 64.
• Sonic R, despite not having a boss, has something like this. The final level you unlock is a glowing racetrack apparently made of a rainbow or something.
  • It's more likely it's a racetrack inside/made out of a/the Chaos Emerald/s, considering Super Sonic's presence on the racetrack changes the music and lets you beat the game for real. It doesn't happen on any other racetrack.
• The final race in Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity takes place inside a black hole on a mobius strip track with a dark stormy psychedelic backdrop.
• Zone events in WipEout HD and Zone Battles in the expansion Fury take place on a hologram of the track that starts out with all white surfaces and muted music. As the player gets to faster Zone categories, the music get louder and heavier, the track gets a progressively more intense color palette, and the track surface starts showing media-player-esque music visualizations. By the time you hit Zen, between the speed you're flying and the intensity of the presentation, you'll know exactly why the game comes with one of those unskippable seizure warning screens.

Fighting Games

• Various BlazBlue stages can fall under this, such as "Sealed Space", "Sight of Gods", and "BLUE".
• In Dead or Alive 3, you face off against Omega/Genra in a field surrounded by flames. Throughout the whole battle, the camera is shown at an over-the-shoulder angle, and the screen displays a perpetual motion blur.
• Guilty Gear XX, the battle with I-No is fought in a black void with swirling red clouds and lightning strikes in the background. The screen will also Fade to Black when she unleashes her Megalomania super special attack, one that you can't use when controlling her... unless you're playing Slash and beyond as EX I-No. The chances of a non-CPU opponent falling for it are slim, making it kind of a moot point.
• Gundam Extreme Vs. has Extreme Universe (which becomes Extreme Evolution and Extreme Fatality in the sequels Full Boost and Maxi Boost), where the background is a nebula-like swirl of glowing colors. On top of this, the floor is made up of a number of large hexagonal pillars, and the Final Boss has the ability to raise and lower them (usually doing tricks like splitting the battlefield in half or creating pits) and his attacks have the power to temporarily destroy them.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: All Star Battle: If Enrico Pucci can evolve his Stand to Made In Heaven, it will change the stage to an interstellar platform leading to the new universe. As an added bonus, his opponent's movements will be slowed to a crawl while his own speed gains a boost.
• The King of Fighters:
  • The final battles in The King of Fighters '97 are pretty bizarre. The fights with Orochi Iori/Orochi Leona has the entire background turning red as a kind of symbolism for their current predicament (The Riot of the Blood), and the battle with the Orochi Team takes place at an altar where the elements change constantly: first, it's covered in purple flames, then a lightning storm rages, and then it's surrounded by magma. When Orochi himself shows up, weirdly coloured shapes and patterns flash by in the background. None of this is explained in-game.
  • In The King of Fighters '98: Ultimate Match, the stage select lists the latter two stages (which are apparently the same stage) as a "Different Dimension." The former examples are listed as "Bousou" ("Delusion") stages, which lends more credibility to symbolism. Magaki's stage in XI, "The Different Space," is similar in some regards: The floor in the background is alight with blue flames and an odd sphere of light hovers in the middle of the stage. Luckily, that's about it. Bear in mind that Magaki travels via pocket dimension and it makes a little more sense.
  • The final battle with Jivatma in Maximum Impact 2 takes place on a marble floor, surrounded by a starry field. As it only appears after Jivatma snaps his fingers, this is probably an illusion.
  • Orochi, Mukai, and Magaki can all create Amazing Technicolor Battlefields with their Desperation Moves (Orochi and Magaki use rays of light and Magaki's attack in particular resembles an acid trip; Mukai attacks with pertrification waves of white and grey energy to achieve a similar effect). Igniz's HSDM/MAX 2 in 2002: Unlimited Match encases you in a galaxy, which he then detonates.
• Mortal Kombat II: The stage "The Portal" has the combatants (sorry, kombatants) fighting on a stony ledge in front of a swirling red void.
• In Psychic Force 2012, Emilio's last fight from within Story Mode is against his evil side and that the battle takes place from within his own mind, in which the battlefield itself has a lot of creepy red, blue, and purple pulsating shapes and patterns flashing from within the dark background, which is to possibly indicate Emilio's own internal struggle against his psychotic side. It's heavily implied from within his own ending that Emilio loses this fight and is now trapped from within his own mind while his psychotic side is allowed to be free and continue his Ax-Crazy rampage.
• The final fight with Hyo in the first Rival Schools takes place in a multicolor light-show stage called "Illusional Space", created by his hypnotism powers according to the story.
• Happens in the first Samurai Shodown game, when, after winning one round against Amakusa, he does soemthing that makes the whole stage look destroyed and covered in multicolor flames, and the huge stone in the background opens to reveal a glowing, winged demon. The music also changes greatly and his AI gets somewhat improved. Curiously, after you win, the stage goes back to normal. Another example would be the final battle of Samurai Shodown 2, which takes place in hell and, accordingly, the stage is filled with bizarre visuals.
• Emerl's multiplayer arena from Sonic Battle pretty much fits; it's a plain black background, and the entire foreground (i.e. the stage itself) is made up of a holographic-neon framework.
• The final boss battles in all of the games in the Soul series.
  • Prominent in Soul Edge. The second to last battle: at a quiet port in Spain. The final battle: the same port (or chunks of it) drifting through trippy vortex-y space. The name of the BGM of this arena: "World Atlas Collapsed."
  • The only exception to date is in Soulcalibur II, where Inferno (the soul of the evil sword Soul Edge) is fought in a stage called Tartaros. However, the trade-off is that you're fighting in the traditional depiction of Hell.
• Star Gladiator's True Final Boss fight against Ghost Bilstein takes place from within a strange multicolored spinning tunnel-like vortex dimension that has shape-changing pulsating lights and images flowing from within the background while the fighters battle from upon a circle-esque ring that has a pulsating blue-purple aura image. Unlike the previous fights, the loser of the match gets sent hurling into a purple Plasma void.
• Super Smash Bros.:
  • The fight against Master Hand in Super Smash Bros. 64 takes place on a single, flat platform before a swirling void. The fight with him in Melee starts in the same spot ("Final Destination") but then warps out of there, eventually flying over a sun-lit field. The in-game explanation is that as the fight goes on, it transfers to the "real" world.
  • The prototype Final Destination (mentioned above) in the first SSB counts as well. You begin the fight in space/a starry-lit sky with tons of shooting stars in the background, which then shifts into what appears to be the inside of a purple nebula, and finally a blue vortex that becomes more and more unstable as you whittle down Master Hand's HP.
  • Brawl has two Amazing Technicolor Battlefields: the Tabuu fight stage and the new Final Destination.
    • The stage the Tabuu fight takes place on could be considered a Continuity Nod (or perhaps Internal Homage) to the above-mentioned original Master Hand stage — the background is very similar, and the platform looks almost identical, only this time it's made of... glowy... energy... wing-shaped... stuff.
    • Final Destination in Brawl definitely deserves further elaboration. The player starts in near-total darkness (the only prominent colors against the black are blue and green), treated to what appears to be the birth of a galaxy. As the galaxy begins to pass the stage by, Final Destination travels through a wormhole and is ejected at a scenic view (presumably on Earth) featuring clouds, stars, and the sun. The visual fades and is replaced by a different swirling void with a bright light emerging in the middle. At the end of the tunnel, there is a breathtaking sunset landscape, set over a sea. Finally, the sea and sky start flipping around the main platform and the light eventually dims, bringing you right back to the beginning. The Ominous Latin Chanting and orchestral rock that score the stage's default BGM only makes the experience that much more surreal.
  • Battlefield in Melee also counts.
    • Also to be considered is the battlefield in Brawl's Great Maze in Adventure Mode, whenever you fight a cloned version of one of the fighters.
  • True to form, the fourth game's imagining of Final Destination does not disappoint in this regard. The 3DS version more or less plays out like Brawl's, dropping the player in front of a galaxy. Then the player goes through a wormhole like in the previous games and ends in space, right before the earth itself. Then the glowing blue planet erupts, and when the light from the explosion clears, you're suddenly fighting over a sea — only this time, it's morning. Morning turns to evening, the stage moves into the sky/atmosphere, and finally travels through a second wormhole, placing you back at square one. The Wii U version is no less insane, with the sun and the earth in the background actually colliding into one another, followed by a change in scenery to a morning sky.
    • In Classic Mode, triggering the battle with Master Core causes the entire background to briefly blacken before the area becomes a violently fluctuating swirl of various colors (predominantly yellow, orange, red, and black in the 3DS version), only periodically turning dark blue/indigo (complete with the galaxy seen at Final Destination's usual first section in the background) for a few seconds at a time. In for Wii U, the colors alternate between what are mostly yellow and green hues and purple and blue ones, which actually makes it harder for the Swarm that makes up Master Core's forms to stand out. Upon reaching Master Core's true form, the area becomes a blinding vortex of blue, unlike in for 3DS.
• Ougon Musoukyoku. The stages themselves are pretty amazing, but then someone invokes the Meta-World... Just have a look.

First Person Shooter

• Halo 5: Guardians has its Rift Ball map, which is low-G Grifball in a neon-lit spaceship interior with floating crates for cover and plasma grenades to throw.
• Team Fortress 2:
  • Activating Pyrovision changes the textures to a psychedelic effect (though the skybox color remains the same).
  • Several fanmade maps, such as KOTH_Always (a map fashioned after Robot Unicorn Attack) are also like this.

Game Mods

• The 7th level of Donner Party (the Badderhacks.net ROM hack of Monster Party). Justified, since it takes place inside Ke$ha's rectal cavity, and we all know how much she likes glitter...

Light Gun Games

• Any fight against any of Anubis' incarnations in Battle Clash or Metal Combat.
• Interestingly, it's the BOSS of one of the Time Crisis games that invokes this himself and not the stage. He's in a suit made of mini-TV things that render him invisible. When not in use it looks like he's wearing a suit made from no-signal-received analog TV screens

MMORPGs

• The third form of Dark Falz in Phantasy Star Online levitates you on a ring full of colourful glyph symbols high up in the air with the ground viewable below. Not only the stage, but the boss counts as well, with garish technicolour wings and a blazing bright sword-arm.
• World of Warcraft has a couple of these. The battle against Malygos, the Dragon Aspect of Magic, takes place in the Eye of Eternity, on a big floating rock platform surrounded by stars. During the fight, Malygos uses his breath to destroy the platform, which coincides with the entire background going into brilliant swirly colors. There is a bug where the colors occasionally don't go away once the final combat phase starts, causing severe problems for sensitive players. And Malygos isn't even the Final Boss of the game.
  • The superboss, Algalon the Observer Raid Destroyer, in Ulduar, is initially encountered in an observatory which turns into a starry outer space background once the fight is engaged. It makes sense, since Algalon is sent by the Titans themselves and looks like a humanoid constellation.
  • Outland in its entirety could arguably be considered this, as the shattered planet floats through the psychedelic colors of the Twisted Nether.
  • The "For The Horde!" achievement has the fight against Prophet Velen inside the Exodar- which is already one of these (well, for The Horde, anyway — it's a city to the Alliance), but Velen's suped-up priest abilities set off so many particle effects that it takes things to the extreme.
  • The Lich King battle in Icecrown Citadel probably also counts. When your soul gets sucked into Frostmourne, it looks like this◊, with huge spectral chains swirling through the air.
  • Ner'zhul in the Shadowmoon Burial Grounds is a traditional example — upon entering his room, he transports the party into a swirling void on a floating platform, where the fight takes place.

Party Games

• Mario Party 3: The final battle in Story Mode, namely between the player and the (fake) Millenium Star, takes place in a battlefield that is transporting the two combatants across the stars in outer space. As the fight progresses, the battlefield's floor changes from having a checkerboard-based motif, to having the appearance of a metallic liquid, and later still becoming a transparent glass.
• Mario Party 8: The Final Boss battle against Bowser takes place in a starry, colorful region of outer space where the Koopa King is piloting a well-armed Koopa Clown Car while the player's character is maneuvering a star-shaped platform and has the Star Rod as their weapon.

Platform Games

• The final battle against Dracula (and in a lot of cases Death as well), in a number of Castlevania games, most notably Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and Castlevania: Curse of Darkness takes place in a dimension that resembles a swirling vortex of colors.
• In Celeste, once Madeline gives chase to her inner-self, the scenery changes to a rapidly moving wall with colored lines.
• In Dynamite Headdy, when Headdy finally reaches Dark Demon, he whisks the throne room away, transporting himself and Headdy to an area with nothing in it but zooming psychedelically-colored clouds, stars (or something), and invisible ground. This reverts to the throne room when he is defeated.
• The final boss battle of A Hat in Time takes place in the very fabric of time, after a Drunk with Power Mustache Girl gets fed up with Hat Kid's former enemies cheering her on.
• Jet Set Radio: The final level of Jet Set Radio Future is an odd jumble of a structure in a totally trippy world, away from the Tokyo setting of the rest of the game.
• Most Kirby final bosses have this.
  • In Kirby's Adventure, you fight Nightmare in the moon, having a starry sky as the background and a teal-colored terrain with star-shaped marks on it.
  • In Kirby Super Star, you fight Marx (who went One-Winged Angel right after his plan is revealed) in an area that consists of a purple ground with stars on it constantly moving (yet you're not affected by it), with small suns peeking out from the distance, all with a space background behind it. It even glows red and green when Marx's health is two-thirds depleted in the Video Game Remake. However, this was one-uped on by the battlefield of said remake's exclusive boss Marx Soul, which is more drug trip induced.
  • The final boss of Kirby's Dream Land 3 takes place in the Hyper Zone, an area consisting of a blue background with black clouds floating everywhere at a high speed (though in the Boss Rush, it is shown with high-contrast bright colors).
  • In Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards, the place where you fight 02 is a red void with barcodes.
  • Kirby & the Amazing Mirror: The final battle with Dark Mind in his first four phases take place in a strange room with a large swirling void in the background. Once he goes One-Winged Angel, this becomes an empty, fiery room.
  • The fight with Drawcia in Kirby: Canvas Curse takes place in a place full of swirling, distorting colors. It gets much more frantic when she enters her Soul form.
  • The final battle of Kirby's Return to Dream Land takes place in an extremely colorful alternate dimension, with a floor that looks be made of stars and Popstar being visible through a portal in the background. The Magolor Soul fight in Deluxe's True Arena makes it more menacing; while the portal in the background remains, the floor becomes a mix of black and dark purple, the sky becomes dark red, and the small planetoid sitting in the background is now light blue and resembles Void Termina's core.
  • While the initial phases of the final battle in Kirby: Planet Robobot are simply an Astral Finale, the final phase takes place in a kaleidoscopic interdimensional tunnel.
  • The final battle of Kirby and the Forgotten Land toys a bit with this trope. While initially subverted by having the fight take place on a helipad at sunrise, the final boss eventually warps the sky into a rainbow liquid mess of colors once it Turns Red.
• The Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning: The game finale takes place in an area known as Convexity, which fits this trope complete with floating rocks and strange jellyfish-like creatures roaming everywhere. See here.
• LittleBigPlanet 2: The Negativitron has a vortex background in his third phase. Said vortex came from the arcade machine on the background.
• Mega Man:
  • Mega Man 2's final boss is an alien thing against a black starry background... but it's all smoke and mirrors.
  • The final stages of Mega Man X5 are set in "Zero Space", a trippy-as-all-get-out area where the Zero Virus's overwhelming power has caused the real world and cyberspace to merge together.
  • Each final boss in Mega Man Battle Network does this. It goes from orange streaks in the first game to the background dissolving, being absorbed by a giant amoeba, swirly cosmic stars and planets, people's souls gathering, and finally trippy, psychedelic tie-dye designs in the final game. As a matter of fact, the vast majority of battles in this series have a bright, abstract background.
• The last boss fight of Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction against Emperor Tachyon takes place in an asteroid field on top of a relatively great asteroid. This is after the initial part of the fight is over though.
• In Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc, during the final battle with Reflux, the battleground slowly degenerates from being the top of a stone tower, to floating shards of building with a swirly purple void in the background, to an arena bordered by giant space-plants with eyes.
• RosenkreuzStilette: Michael Sepperin has a strange area taking place in a cloudy oblivion for his second phase. And later, you eventually fight his biological daughter and murderer amidst a yellow cloudy sky complete with clouds colored different shades of yellow and glowing white feathers floating upwards, and even the eventual appearance of a bright white sun, as if it resembled Heaven itself, and it's absolutely beautiful. During the final phase, the background fades to black when she's using her reflect laser attack.
  • Likewise, the background for the final battle of Rosenkreuzstilette Freudenstachel also takes place in a yellow sky with the same features as in the first game. The background transitions to a black oblivion with different shades of blue when Iris is using either her homing energy ball attack or her screen-filling Blitzstrahl attack, just before transitioning back to the yellow sky it was before.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Sonic Heroes: The haunted mansion level eventually turns into this after you hit a certain switch, with a few platforms floating in the midst of chaos. Once you hit another button... The level becomes the outside of a completely normal mansion, and the goal appears.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog (2006): At the end, the last level and last boss take place in a swirling, mystical void. Somewhat justified in that the boss actually has bitten a huge chunk out of the fabric of reality, and is simply letting that appetiser settle as he prepares to chow down on time itself. Appropriately enough, the area is called "The End Of The World".
  • Sonic Generations: The final boss is fought in a violet time void.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Super Mario 64: The final battle against Bowser is on a similar platform to the previous two fights, but has some funky lighting effects thrown in that qualify it as this.
  • Super Mario Galaxy 2: The final boss battle has a giant black hole in the background, creating black and white swirls and an ominous hum.

Puzzle Games

• The final level in Mighty Flip Champs! takes place in what appears to be outer space. The background scrolls quickly.
• Night Sky features a bonus world called Slightly Nonsense that is not mentioned until you beat the game. Once you complete the requirements to unlock it, you find yourself going through levels with bright checkerboard terrain and unnatural suns, Photoshop-filtered photos in the background, and even a level that's entirely composed of ASCII art! The puzzles here are quirkier (and more difficult) than the rest of the game.
• Zoop: The game's backgrounds become increasingly distracting the more the game progresses through levels. The game first begins with contrasting color schemes before moving on to increasingly intricate colors, more intricate backgrounds, and eventually, asymmetrical background shapes. The game refers to this as "Opti-Challenge".

Real-Time Strategy

• Last level of Nexus: The Jupiter Incident where you're fighting in subspace.

Rhythm Games

• beatmania IIDX has been doing this a lot in its recent installments, usually with Extra Stages. The background video usually has an overlay representing the personification of the boss song.
• Pander's stage in Bust a Groove 2 turns into one of these halfway into the song (which is trippy in its own right).
• If the player is doing well in the Dance Central games, the normal stage will drop into shadow with pulsing multicolor neon lights.
• If you manage to hit Cool mode on the fifth stage of Parappa The Rapper, the gas station back alley you were standing in turns into a psychedelic rainbow background with the faces of your teachers appearing as you continue freestyling. Oh, and you start chasing a toilet on a train track. It Makes Sense in Context.

Roguelike

• In Nuclear Throne Throne II is fought on a small chunk of land inside of a massive purple portal.
• The final battle of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity takes place in a swirling purple void with chunks of ice drifting about; an appropriate setting for a fight against a true Eldritch Abomination.
  • Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon's final battle is likewise staged upon a field of stars with the glowing silhouette of the Tree of Life in the distance, which also serves as the background of game's boxart.

Role-Playing Games

• ActRaiser: In the finale, The Master faces Tanzra and co. first in a cloudy wasteland, then in a starry galactic field.
• Ar tonelico II: Melody of Metafalica has an odd variation in that you cause this to happen. Then the enemy dies to your hypercharged song magic.
• The final battle of Baten Kaitos Origins against Verus-Wiseman takes place in a starscape.
• The battle against the goddess Myria in Breath of Fire III is a fine example of this, as you are suddenly on a small floating platform and facing a huge serpentine monster.
• Bravely Default:
  • Battles against asterisk holders take place in a swirling blue area. Background info explains that this is actually a force field preventing you from fleeing.
  • The final battle takes place in the Infernal Realm, with a variable background that eventually begins to show the player's face by using the 3DS's front camera.
• Bravely Second: The asterisk field returns, but for reasons unclear, it's brown for new asterisk holders, despite remaining blue for the returning ones.
• Downplayed in Bug Fables. The final battle arena itself is just a kitchen table, but it is decorated by swirling green energy from the Wasp King using the powers of the Everlasting Sapling, making it look like it is set in a glowing storm.
• Chrono Trigger has quite a few. Lavos's first form (which you get to see early in a Hopeless Boss Fight) takes place on a blueish background with ripples everywhere, as does a late-game boss intimately connected with Lavos. Lavos's "middle" form isn't one of these, but his final form takes place on a field of swirling colors, behind which scenes from the world's history can be seen. Altering the scenes is even one of the boss's abilities "Time warp", and it gains a specific attack spell with each different background. But before all of that, the magician Flea gets a starfield background, even though he's merely a mini-boss.
  • The Darkness Beyond Time from Chrono Cross. Slightly before that, the battle with the Dragon God might also count, as he tends to change the background on you from time to time.
• Dark Cloud's final boss Dark Genie teleports you to a kaleidoscopic purple space, in which you walk on air — transforming into a tentacle monster to make the experience that much more surreal.
• Dark Souls is generally too gritty to feature a trope like this, but it does play with the trope once. It's not even remotely close to the final boss, but the battle against the Four Kings takes place in the Abyss. What is the Abyss, you may ask? It's complete, uniform, total darkness in every direction. No terrain. No horizon. No nothing. Just blackness everywhere.
• Dark Souls 2 gets in on it with the Crown of the Ivory King DLC. 99% of the DLC takes place in a frozen castle-city... and then the final battle is on a platform suspended in mid-air over a sea of fire with tree roots that look suspiciously like the Bed of Chaos climbing into the sky, while enemies emerge from portals filled with dark flames.
• Deltatraveler uses this for not only the entire Earthbound section, but also the GG!Underfell Sans fight.
• The final battle in Digital Devil Saga and its sequel take part in a vortex of data and within the sun.
• The final boss in Dubloon takes place the darkness of greed, with aura of light emanating from the boss.
• Mother:
  • In EarthBound (1994) every battle takes place in a swirling background, from cultists to killer bees to the hippie down the street. Special mention goes to Giygas, who is the trippy background.
  • Mother 3 continues this trend just as well — The boss battle against the Masked Man is pictured above (the second from the bottom). As the battle progresses, however, the background gradually distorts and loses its color as a symbolic representation of Masked Man slowly coming to his senses and remembering his true identity.
  • The fan made Interquel Mother: Cognitive Dissonance Downplays this. It takes something of a middle ground between EarthBound Beginnings black battlefield and Earthbound's psychedelic backgrounds, offering more minimalistic background color patterns against a black backdrop.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • A rare Western-RPG example: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim's final battle against Alduin takes place in Sovngarde (which is basically, in keeping with Skyrim's Horny Vikings motif, an expy of Valhalla), and boy is it heavily saturated with color, especially as you look up and see Alduin approaching.
  • The fight against Umaril in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion expansion pack Knights of the Nine. You go through the Final Dungeon, defeat him once, then you fight him again whilst hovering thousands of meters over the Imperial capital.
• Epic Battle Fantasy series:
  • In Epic Battle Fantasy 3, the final battle against Akron is fought in a space-like void. Justified in that Akron's very unsealed presence warps space.
  • Epic Battle Fantasy 5: The final boss fight begins on a floating platform in deep space with space itself shattered behind it (only visible in the overworld), but the Devourer deletes Earth itself after half of its health is down. Replacing the arena is a rainbow platform out in the middle of space that gives the party something to stand on.
• Most Final Fantasy games after that have their climactic battles on Amazing Technicolor Battlefields.
  • Averted in I — III, but only because there was next to no background. Played completely straight in the remakes though.
  • The fight against Zeromus in Final Fantasy IV. The swirling background scrolls behind him and your party as you fight, and his most powerful attack, "Big Bang", will actually reverse the scrolling for a few seconds before dealing massive damage to your party.
  • You get the same deal in Final Fantasy V. One of Neo-Exdeath's attacks even declares "The laws of the universe mean nothing!"
  • Justified in Final Fantasy VI, as Kefka already succeeded in blowing up the world halfway through, and the battlefield you're facing him on is his tower/the ruined sky.
  • Final Fantasy VII also throws in the One-Winged Angel and Ominous Latin Chanting for good measure.
  • Final Fantasy VIII's final castle is bookended by a psychedelic trip forward through time, and then an even trippier journey backwards as Ultimecia attempts to "kompress" all of time in order to become a Sentient Cosmic Force.
    • Ultimately, it's a subversion, as the final boss takes place in a pitch black void.
  • Final Fantasy IX has the Amazing Technicolor Battle against Ozma.
  • Final Fantasy X's fight with Yunalesca, while NOT the final boss battle in the game, makes use of a totally cosmic Amazing Technicolor Battlefield. Complete with floaty ruins! The final battle against Yu Yevon and the aeons is also an example, only in this one you have to fight the floaty ruins.
    • To elaborate, when you fight Yu Yevon and the aeons, you are on a giant version of Jecht's sword in the middle of a swirling yellowish void. The boss immediately before Yunalesca also deserves a mention. Your battle team is standing on glowing symbols representing the temples that you have visited throughout the game. Each character can teleport to any of the unoccupied symbols. If you summon an aeon, you get moved to one of three floating rocks so the boss can kill the aeon in one hit. The background is a blue-tinted starfield with a pattern swirling both upward and downward from a ring of symbols corresponding to the aeons.
  • Final Fantasy XI expansion Chains of Promathia has a rather neat final battlefield with the characters fighting above Vana'diel. In space.
  • Final Fantasy XIV, being a love letter to the series as a whole, invokes this multiple times across all its expansions, usually for climactic battles during the main story or a raid series.
    • The final battle for the Binding Coils of Bahamut has you thrown into the heart of Bahamut himself, fighting a much, much more scaled-down but still extremely powerful version of the great wyrm himself. The battlefield is in a swirling blue void that shifts patterns throughout the phases of the fight, before changing to a firy red as Bahamut unleashes his Signature Move, Megaflare.
    • Heavensward features a particularly fine example of this trope in the final battle with King Thordan and his Knights Twelve, with the interior of the Triad Control room changed to a brightly lit starry fields and backgrounds during each successive wave of attacks against the player characters.
    • The final battle of the Alexander raid series takes place in a green void, which eventually parts to a vista of heavenly clouds, to match Alexander Prime's angel motif.
    • The final battle with Zenos in Stormblood - where he takes control of Shinryu - starts off on a platform of the Ala Mihgan palace's Royal Managerie, but eventually he gets tired of it and flings you heavensward into a rainbow vista with geometric mountains in the distance. He even goes so far as to proclaim 'the heavens are too small' for your fight.
    • The final battle of the Eden raid series takes place in a heavenly vista with a glorious sunset.
    • All three raid bosses of Endwalker invoke this to a degree; the first boss, Zodiark, is technically in an internal space, but has the appearance of a dark-washed void hued with subtle colours, which is fitting for the God of Darkness. The second boss, Hydaelyn, has you fight upon a crystaline platform in a blue void with shining lights in the distance, all which shift and change patterns as the battle goes on. The final boss, the Endsinger, is fought at the literal edge of the universe where material matter gives way to emotion. The background for most of the fight is a moving starry sky akin to Star Wars hyperspace, with colourful nebulas in the distance. During the final phase, a purple void behind the Endsinger - representing her last-ditch effort to smother you in despair - clashes with the blinding light summoned by your Scion companions.
  • Dissidia Final Fantasy's stages are the final dungeon or boss arenas from the main series, so naturally it would feature these sort of battlefields.
• The final battle of Freelancer takes place in a gigantic Dyson Sphere. We're talking way larger than any planet; Dyson spheres have a radius of about 150 million kilometers. The whole inside of this thing is covered in one big city.
• In the PS1 version of RPG Maker, the final battle of the demo Gobli's Adventure has Gobli fighting solo against Neko in a void with colorful rays of light radiating from a single point (with Neko placed so that it looks like he's in the center of it in the overworld). This same background can be used in one's own game.
• The Granstream Saga has two of these. One is against the final boss, naturally, who is a sapient-can-comprehend-mortals Jerkass Eldritch Abomination, and earlier, in a Mad Scientist's castle. The battle is against his experimental world-ending giant creature, and you have to destroy its heart from inside. While you're fighting the heart blood vessels can be 'seen' transparently from above as if you're really looking down into the battlefield, and the entire room pulsates and shifts with his heartbeats. Both trippy and disorienting.
• In .hack//G.U., in addition to all the Avatar battles and the areas outside the normal game, the very final battle against Cubia takes place in the middle of a yellow-ish tunnel while your party stands on a semi-translucent floor. Well, you have to fight the thing somewhere.
• In Kingdom Hearts, the final dungeons and bosses of each game are usually in an ethereal, unsettling realm on the edge of reality. Not all of them are used for bosses, either.
  • Both of the final bosses of PS2 games seem to be subversions: The first has the final fight in the heart of reality itself, a dark featureless void (barring the Eldritch Abomination Final Boss), and the second (presumably) takes place in the remains of the Very Definitely Final Dungeon....which is a white featureless void. There are other battles that play it straight, though.
    • In the first game, the battle against the Behemoth inside Hollow Bastion's Keyhole takes place in a more conventional Amazing Technicolor Battlefield. The End of the World gives this to the regular enemies too, due to it being a mix of abstract dimensions, phantasmagoric landscapes, and very colorful rooms.
    • The first Xemnas battle in Kingdom Hearts II takes place in Memory's Contortion, a rainy version of Memory's Skyscraper that just has the one building with wavering images of a city off in the distance. The second battle against Armored Xemnas happens in a crumbling version of the World that Never Was with colorful surfaces and streams of energy everywhere. Sora and Axel fight a swarm of lesser Nobodies in Betwixt and Between, which is the abstract interior of a portal between the virtual Twilight Town and the World the Never Was. Finally, the Paradox Cup battles in Olympus Coliseum are all set on platforms in a swirly green vortex that may or may not be in the Well of Souls.
  • The second battle against Marluxia in Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories takes place in a swirling field of blue stars. The PS2 remake splits it into two consecutive battles on different arenas. The first, which keeps the original boss, takes place on a platform in a gray void, which one of his attacks can alter to look like the Lanes Between from Birth By Sleep. The second takes place on the back of a giant version of the Nobody that Marluxia was riding in his previous form, now suspended in sparkly blue fog.
  • Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days averts it by having the boss fight move between rooms of different worlds for each round, and then back to the place seen just before the battle for the last one. The real final boss doesn't shift from Memory's Skyscraper.
  • Zig-Zagged in Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep. Terra and Aqua have fairly mundane Final Boss arenas, though Terra's becomes more colorful during the second stages of his fight due to him summoning chains of light around the plateau to trap his enemy. Ventus has his Awakening platform with a stained glass floor and black void. The Final Mix adds another technicolor field for Aqua, not too far from the first game's final world via a violet barrier around an area that's otherwise accessible normally. The Magic Mirror gets a proper one courtesy of the Evil Queen. It takes the form of an endless mirrored surface with pillars of purple smoke rising in the otherwise pitch-black background.
  • Sora's Heartless in Kingdom Hearts coded is fought in a blue area with the floor emblazoned with a pattern of grid squares, Tron Lines, and stylized text while more of the same pattern rises up on all sides with columns of lights at the corners. The HD remake of the cutscenes makes this area more colorful by adding more green and violet to its color scheme.
  • Played straight with the two fights against Ansem in Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance]. The first takes place in a colorful void with twisting tendrils of darkness in the background. The second takes place in a canyon within what appears to be the Realm of Darkness, with eerie glowing lights shining through cracks in the dark surroundings and the aforementioned void relocated to behind the now Stationary Boss. Young Xehanort also gets in on this, his initially plain clockwork dimension becoming progressively more colorful as you damage him, causing the hourglasses surrounding the platform to shatter one by one, scattering their colorful sands into the air, followed by him summoning a clock that covers the entire battlefield in swirly colors. And the very final fight, against a nightmare version of Ven's armour takes place on Sora's Awakening platform, but totally covered in darkness, and periodically switching between black and white. Also from 3D, when Sora fights the Spellican in Symphony of Sorcery, he first chases it down on a glowing track through a starry sky, which becomes a battlefield full of streaming lights and colorful, floating chunks of rock when he does catch it.
  • Kingdom Hearts 0.2: Birth by Sleep -A fragmentary passage- has what can only be described as an inversion — at the end of a game spent traversing the Realm of Darkness, the final boss battle takes place on the freshly-fallen, still picturesque and sunlit Destiny Islands. The battles against Phantom Aqua do take place in one, though. Like with the Magic Mirror's Pocket Dimension, it's a mirrored surface surrounded by pillars of smoke. The difference here is that the smoke forms a solid barrier around a much smaller area and is a sickly gray-green color.
  • In Kingdom Hearts III, Master Xehanort himself finally indulges in this trope during the final part of his Sequential Boss fight. About halfway through, he lifts Sora and friends high into the sky on a platform of glowing Instant Runes with Kingdom Hearts itself looming above. His attacks near the end of the battle distort the colors even further.
• The final battle in The Legend of Dragoon takes place in a surreal landscape that changes entirely from time to time as the fight progresses. You can invoke these more or less at will by using Dragoon Specials.
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails series have certain bosses and the Final Boss in each game fought in an entirely aesthetic moving background.
• Legend of Legaia had a particularly trippy one. The only (deeply unsatisfying) justification given was that the battle took place in the belly of a giant creature.
• In Legend of Mana, the battles against the Lord of Jewels and The Mana Goddess take place in such a battlefield.
• Persona:
  • Persona and Persona 2 has each battle occurring with an animated background.
  • Persona 3 and 4 do this whether it's just a regular field enemy or a boss. Persona 3 really takes the cake for the final boss in both The Journey and The Answer. The Journey deserves special mention because you are fighting inside Nyx itself.
• All of the final dungeon in Phantasy Star IV, and the final (hard and above) part of the Dark Falz battle in Phantasy Star Online. Somewhat expected in the former, as the final dungeon (which seen from the outside is a hole in the ground visible from space) is The Profound Darkness forcing its way through the final layers of the seal (which itself takes the form of a solar system) keeping it locked outside of reality.
  • Done in the previous Installments also except Phantasy Star I in which it was just a black background (in itself unusual, as almost every other fight featured a background), but remade into a space like background in the Remake.
• Pokémon:
  • Mostly averted in the handheld series, where the Champion is normally battled in a small, plain-ish throne room. Played straight however in Pokémon Black 2 and White 2 versus Iris, where the battlefield looks to be in outer space with colorful stars aplenty.
  • In Pokémon X and Y, the title legendaries Xerneas and Yveltal are fought in a massive chamber made of crystals and on the event horizon of a black hole respectively. Then you fight Team Flare's boss, Lysandre on the sun.
  • The battle against Mewtwo in Pokémon Stadium has you fighting him in a void filled with various shades of blue/green and purple with a white Poké Ball design in the center of the battlefield.
  • Multiple Mirage Spots in Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire lead the player to Hoopa's rings, which serve as portals to Pocket Dimensions full of pastel-colored mist where legendaries from other games can be fought. A palette swapped version of this is used for the Ultra Space encounters in Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon.
• In Riviera: The Promised Land, the final battle against Seth-Rah happens in the Maze of Shadows, with a purple background and some floating triangles. The place can be seen in the page image above.
• SaGa uses this quite a few times throughout the series:
  • Every Romancing Saga game has this for the final boss:
    • You fight Saruin in a sky-like area surrounded by pillars. Stays the same in the remake, except the pillars play an important role and the characters and Saruin are on a platform surrounded by them.
    • Death is fought inside some strange type of ruin that mixes a window behind him and the sun above him (Strange given where you are).
    • Schirach is fought on a bunch of pieces of what remains of the inner sanctum of the Shadow Palace.
    • You fight the Seven Heroes in a distorted realm.
    • You fight the Destroyer on a scrolling psuedo background, which also switched to an a drug trip like battlefield if it used its "Total Eclipse" technique.
  • Also applies to some bosses in SaGa Frontier:
    • Boss X is fought in a realm of a swirling mass of color, giving it a "3D glasses"-like effect. In fact, invoking this trope is pretty much his special power: when his mooks are in trouble, he'll send them and the heroes to one of these (apparently called the "4th Dimension Magisphere"), giving his mooks a substantial boost in HP and power.
    • Orlouge has a kaleidoscope-esque background.
    • Genocide Heart can shift the background to any virtual realm it had.
    • Master Ring is fought directly above the reborn Margmel.
    • Rouge, Climax Boss of Blue's route, is fought in a color-changing Magisphere that affects different magic types based on the color of the sphere.
  • The final boss in Unlimited Saga is fought in outer space on the moon, and you're drawn in towards the second moon on the 4th form.
• In Sands of Destruction, the Primal Cataract contains a chunk of rock for each of the seven colors of the rainbow. When you finally reach the end to fight Lacertus Rex — the real one — it has a flowing, twirling rainbow. But this isn't even the final dungeon, it's just the gateway to it.
• A variation appears in the original Shadow Hearts; the final battle takes place in space, atop a summoning circle for a godlike alien, projected by a castle/biomechanical space station. Said summoning circle also happens to look exactly like the Judgement Ring - the medium for Action Commands you've been using for the whole game.
• Par for the course in Suikoden games when the final boss is an incarnation of a True Rune. Averted in IV when facing the giant tree from another dimension whose presence is hinted at during the game. You just fight it in the same room where it's been sitting.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • The battle against Culex in Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, as an homage to Final Fantasy and its use of this trope. Given Culex is traveling The Multiverse and the visual similarity, it may be the same location as the Interdimensional Rift Final Fantasy V.
  • Dimentio from Super Paper Mario fits this trope. Whenever you fight him, he teleports you to his own 'Dimension D', in which his power becomes 256 times stronger. Regrettably, the player's power is also increased, therefore nullifying the effects.
  • Mario & Luigi:
    • Gleefully lampshaded by Bowser in Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story . He comments that the current final boss has to have good taste to pick such an awesome battlefield for the climactic showdown. The setting for Bowser's part of the final boss fight is actually dull in comparison to where Mario and Luigi's part takes place, however; it being in an unspecified, but extremely psychedelic colored part of Bowser's body with parts of the floor and background glowing on and off.
    • In Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time, the final battle with Elder Princess Shroob takes place on a floating platform in a stormy sky.
    • The final battle in Mario & Luigi: Dream Team already has a multicoloured battlefield floor on a creepy rooftop arena, but it then also inverts this trope by having an Amazing Technicolor Boss in the form of the rainbow coloured, glowing Dreamy Bowser.
    • Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam's final boss battle, Shiny Robo-Bowser, takes place in front of a glowing, red-colored void at the top of Neo Bowser's Castle.
• In Sword of Mana, the battle against Julius's final form takes place in an abstract blue realm with a shimmer effect in the foreground. The solid floor is just a wavy patch of violet material that looks like the bottom of a lake. The boss's Meteor-Summoning Attack has him fly into space, revealing a blue void with orange stars and nebulae.
• Tales of...
  • In Tales of Phantasia, the final fight with Dhaos, after he transforms into his true form, takes place in outer space, apparently high above the protagonists' home world.
  • Tales of Symphonia, when you fight Maxwell, the Sin Incarnates, and the Robot version of the Big Bad. Also any fights in the book, Forbidden Anamnesis. And the area before the The Very Definitely Final Dungeon, would count as well.
  • Tales of the Abyss, when you've beaten the Big Bad, Tear will begin singing a lullaby, while Luke uses his powers to stop an uber attack from said Big Bad, the battle background shifts into this blue thing with mysterious symbols every where, and while this is going on, everyone has infinite Hit Points, and you can't pause, or open the menu, or see the status of your characters. You just fight until Luke wins.
  • Tales of Vesperia's final battle starts off on regular stone platform, but gets more like this trope with each form of the boss you defeat.
  • In Tales of Hearts, you fight the final final boss in the Journey to the Center of the Mind of the Big Bad, and the superboss at the bottom of some sort of warped space.
  • Tales of Eternia has the final boss fight with a background of black kaleidoscopic swirling.
• Trials of Mana has two such battles: Zable-Fahr, the Dragon God of Darkness, and the final Big Bad in both Hawkeye/Riesz and Charlotte/Kevin's storylines.
• The True Final Boss of Undertale starts out with a plain black background just like every other fight in the game, but as soon the music (an epic orchestral remix of the main theme, no less) kicks into gear, it erupts into a psychedelic lightshow of rainbow colors.
• Several bosses from Wild ARMs are fought in a rainbow coloured void that resembles a nineties screensaver. These include the Mage Fox, Mother, Elizabeth, Zeikfried (the second time), Motherfried and Zeik Tuvai.
• The final boss in Xenoblade Chronicles 1 is fought as you fly through one of these. In the second phase, he shifts the scenery between this and a beautiful blue sky when he uses certain attacks.
• The final battle in Xenosaga Episode I takes place in a multicoloured haze, with no attempt at justification. The battle music also changes from the standard music used in each other battle in the game (including boss battles) to an arguably calmer, less tense piece of music.
• YS: The Final Boss battles of both Ys I and II. The former arena is in a starfield, the latter is surrounded by a sea of flames. Likewise for most final battles in the rest of the Ys series.

Shoot Em Ups

• The final battle of Chimera Beast takes place in such an environment, the screen from the intro in fact, located at the center of an atomic explosion.
• In the battle with the True Final Boss in Hellsinker practicly goes from somewhat confusing to downright Mind Screw. Must be seen to be belived.
• Star Fox:
  • Star Fox has this for its classic trippy final boss fight against Andross, with a swirl of colors. There are also two secret paths in the asteroid belt that sends you through a trippy alternate dimension asteroid belt that nobody in game notices. The second of these is an alternate ending with its own Final Boss.
  • Star Fox 64 continues the tradition with a similar eerie background, which actually gets weirder when it becomes less trippy as Andross shows his true form. 64 also has two hidden psychedelic warp gates.
• Touhou Project kind of has this for every boss half the time, as declaring a spellcard changes the background to something abstract. But probably the most in the spirit of the trope is the fight against Toyosatomimi no Miko: The entire final stage is a blue void with spirits of various colours in the background.

Simulation Games

• You get sucked into another reality (with creepy music to add) in the final mission of Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere. Though if you manage to get straight B's, or better, on all of the other missions, including that one, you get yet another mission.
• Manages to even show up in Pokémon Snap, the photo-safari game. After getting photos of all the other Pokémon, Professor Oak sends you after Mew by launching you on a rather trippy voyage through a strange cosmic realm out of a mid-80s Heart Video.

Stealth Game

• The Rectum in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. Having fought your way through the corridors of a high-tech but vaguely naval-looking submarine, you arrive in a gigantic void with a platform made of what appears to be data. There are no visible walls, the floor is covered in shadows and there's mist above you, and it's difficult to tell whether you're inside the thing or on top of it. This is lampshaded in Substance, where one of the non-canon Snake Tales uses the setting to represent the void between dimensions.

Turn-Based Strategy

• Last part of the last level of Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis.

Web Games

• In Henry Stickmin: Infiltrating The Airship, Henry duel with Right Hand Man using a yo-yo occurs on red waving background as a Shout-Out to EarthBound (1994).
• Robot Unicorn Attack has lots of bright purples and pinks, rainbows in the background, and multicolored butterflies everywhere.

Non-Video Game Examples

• In Adventurers! Khrima constructs an elaborate hollow sphere with displays on the inside surface so that the climactic Boss Fight can be fought seemingly suspended in swirling purple stuff.
  Khrima: Because... you can't have a final boss fight... without the psychadelic twirling coloured background!
  • The background gets progressively destroyed during the battle until the entire sphere has been demolished.
• When fighting the Glumdroodler in Awful Hospital.
• A McDonald's location in [1] had its interior modeled like this in the 1980s, including starry space-painted walls and ceilings with electric-blue black holes, asteroids, and flying rubble. Adding to the effect were actual props in the form of broken Greek columns, formations of crystals, and jagged glass, accentuated with rings of red neon lights. And also, penguins. Pure awesome, glorious 80s cheese. View some images here. In order to apply its new, hip coffeehouse aesthetic to all its restaurants, however, McDonald's renovated and stripped the decor.
• In the second game of Destroy the Godmodder God Craft becomes one by Trial 6, when it's bathing in the glow of a red onslaught of moon chunks, the light of a green plume of fire holding said moon chunks at bay, and two beams of orange and purple flame coming from a giant Godmodder mech's back.
• Dragon Ball:
  • The entire Other World in the Dragon Ball Z Non-Serial Movie Fusion Reborn; the ground is barren and cracked, but the sky is bright with colorful clouds and strange orbs floating everywhere. How little it makes sense just helps to show just how badly Big Bad Janemba messed things up.
  • In Dragon Ball Super, near the end of the Tournament of Power, the World of Void takes on this appearance once Toppo becomes a God of Destruction and fractures the entire arena.
  • In Dragon Ball Super: Broly, Broly and Gogeta's Beam-O-War is so intense it cracks reality, sending them into one of these. Then they power up even more and punch their way back into normal space.
• One Tournament Arc in the third season of Future Card Buddyfight has the contestants face off in "UFO Stages," floating metal spheres that are Bigger on the Inside and contain futuristic-looking platforms floating against a starry backdrop full of bright green nebulae.
• The fight between Yuki and Ryoko in Haruhi Suzumiya's anime adaptation takes place on a constantly shifting technicolour background.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • Golden Wind: Giorno's Gold Experience Requiem nullifies Diavolo's King Crimson powers as the background is flowing around them.
  • Stone Ocean: The heroes final battle with Pucci occurs with a constantly shifting sky as a result of Made In Heaven speeding the flow of time.
• In the webcomic Kid Radd, our heroes have entered an RPG game. The battles take place in these, where all you can see is the enemy against the swirls and stripes. The game is based off of EarthBound (1994), of course. Radd and his friends enjoy the trippy feel, for it's a nice change of pace for them; they're more used to platformers.
  Radd: Far out! This system rocks!
  Itty Bitty: Dig it.
  G.I. Guy: Is this a battle screen or a disco?
• Puss in Boots: The Last Wish: The film’s final battle is held on the crystalline surface of the glowing wishing star, its edges surrounded by a shimmering barrier that would send anyone unfortunate enough to cross it to their doom.
• Space Sheriff Shaider has the Strange Realm.
• The final battle of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse takes place inside a giant machine designed to reach Alternate Universes, which is a) running and b) threatening all of reality. As a result, it's laden with bits of New York that shouldn't be there, all picked out in lurid colours, including a train and the truck that saves our heroes the trouble of dealing with Doc Ock.
• Zero time from Star Driver fits this trope to a T.
• The final battle(s) against the Anti-Spirals in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann are set in outer space, in a very colorful alternate dimension.
• In Turning Red, the fight between Mei and Ming takes place in the Skydome which has been decked out with a preprogrammed lightshow intended for the 4*Town concert providing a constantly changing background for their battle.
• Underverse has a lot of colors in its fight scenes. 0.4's fight is especially colorful and breathtaking to watch.
• This is the second-most attention-grabbing feature in Jersey Jack Pinball's The Wizard of Oz (after the HD screen in the backbox) — the entire table uses color-changing LED lights to change the color of playfield targets and indicators throughout the game.
• The Yes! Pretty Cure 5 movie had the Precures face off against evil copies of themselves in separate Pocket Dimensions. Where Cures Dream, Lemonade, Mint, and Aqua fought their Evil Knockoffs in three different towns and a moonlit field respectively, Cure Rouge instead fights hers in an orange starfield with colorful floating spheres as the only solid surfaces.
• Another example comes from Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds. Activating the Speed World spell card does this, minus the ever-changing colors. The same is done with the Neo Space card in Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, though the entire battlefield is a rainbow-colored shimmering landscape, including the floor.

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