Disappointing Last Level

"I realise it's the endgame, but it still feels like too much. Just because it's 'endgame' doesn't mean it should turn into Russian roulette."

— raocow, in a description on a Let's Play video of An SMWC Production

A game is building up to the climax, and you can only imagine how amazing it's going to be with how great everything was beforehand. What you're thinking of seems too good to be true... And good God, it is.

The game's quality suddenly dips to hell and beyond, so much so that it feels as though the game was outsourced to another, less-competent group of developers for the endgame. The difficulty becomes largely inconsistent and unable to make up its mind about whether to spike or drop. The pacing is slow-paced and boring, filled with blatant padding in a generally fast-paced game world. The gameplay is suddenly full of awkward stealth, Trial-and-Error Gameplay, and terribly-placed (if at all) checkpoints. There's no new enemies, and what new mechanics get introduced should probably have been left on the cutting room floor. The end boss? Dies with about as much effort as it took to beat the first level's Warm-Up Boss. This climax should be as good as what lay beforehand and then some, yet it leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth after an otherwise enjoyable game. Essentially A Winner Is You from a game design standpoint.

Many developers have admitted to paying far less attention to their climaxes than they probably should, as most players don't get that far. Even some professional reviewers admit they don't play enough of the game and many reviews are based off of the early-mid parts of the game. This initiates an obvious vicious cycle of players who would otherwise finish being put off by terrible ending levels, with the expectation that no really great gameplay surprises (with positive impact) will happen after the first half or so of a game is completed. Even if individual developers don't want to be a part of this problem, Executive Meddling will often enforce this trope, especially if the game is Christmas Rushed and the ending is the first thing that's sacrificed. Another possibility is if one of the designers andor writers Died During Production without sorting out the ending out ahead of time. This was even more prevalent in the days of Shareware: when the first third of your game was going to advertise the rest, suddenly you were incentivized to put all the good levels in that part.

A lot of the time, this also stems from a desire to make the ending very dramatic and different from the rest of the game, in order to make the emotional impact stronger. When it works, it's not an example of this trope, but it fails hard when it doesn't. In the worst situations, you'll get a combination of the above where the game designers put far less effort than they should into the later parts while the writers and artists put in a great deal of work into the same areas, and the designers are obliged to have the player go through long, uneventful levels so such work doesn't go to waste, resulting in Ending Fatigue as the player is forced to make their way through levels that were completed in some aspects but not others.

As with Cosmic Deadline, the reason for this disappointing last levels is partially because developers know full well that reviewers often won't be able to play the full game, and even normal players often won't finish it. As a result, they often focus most of their development, playtesting, content, and other efforts on the early parts of the game (which more people will see and which the game is more likely to be critically judged by); while the final level or two, which fewer people will reach, gets correspondingly less attention.

If you really want people throwing their discs into a fire, then it can be combined with an A Winner Is You or No Ending as a "reward" for the player's perseverance. In a lot of cases (namely story-focused games), this can lead to a Cosmic Deadline situation. The opposite of Slow-Paced Beginning, but there's nothing stopping a game suffering from both.

As this is an Ending Trope, unmarked spoilers abound. Beware.

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Examples:

• Action Game
• First-Person Shooter
• Role-Playing Game

Adventure

• Shenmue II: After being worn down to the limits of boredom and tedium by an interminable mountain climb coupled with an inane conversation, people put down the game, only to discover later that was right at the game's ending. Even if you take the option to skip every unnecessary conversation, the denouement still runs on for about an hour of playtime, with only 25% of that spent on actual gameplay— mostly just a few QTEs and the riveting task of gathering up firewood.
• Monkey Island:
  • Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge is this immediately after you find Big Whoop on Dinky Island. Elaine turns up, somewhat undercutting the whole quest by the reveal that she already knew where to look without the rest of the map. And then you fall into an underground tunnel for the last section of the game involves a time based puzzle in a grim corridor with LeChuck randomly popping up on you and sending you to another area. Once you've done this bit, then there is the notorious ending. This area is livened up a little by Guybrush's helium voiced interpretations of disco songs (something he can also do in Curse, though not with music), LeChuck's girly underpants and Guybrush finding his parent's bodies. However it definitely didn't need to be in the game especially as it breaks the Suspension of Disbelief a little too much (it even has a door open onto an unused door from Melee Island in the first game).
  • Whilst the majority of The Curse of Monkey Island is of the highest quality, the final two acts see a noticeable drop in plot and characterisation, and a sudden sparsity of cut-scene animations. Most of your interaction with the villain LeChuck is limited to a very long, drawn-out conversation in which he explains away plotholes from the last two games, and the ending is very abrupt. And those last two chapters have absolutely nothing to do with the plot of the rest of the game. Earlier chapters focus on a quest to travel to Blood Island to find a diamond ring to lift the curse Guybrush has accidentally placed on Elaine. This ring, along with Blood Island itself, turns out to have a rich history behind it, involving a jilted lover, a line of soup chefs and a band of smugglers. But then as soon as you find the ring you're whisked away to Monkey Island, and suddenly the game turns into a half-arsed parody of Disneyland (which had been foreshadowed by precisely two very short cutscenes earlier in the game), and the writers decide they're more interested in tying up Monkey Island 2's plot than bothering to finish off the plot of the game itself!
  • Escape from Monkey Island is even worse about this — the final segment of the game features "Monkey Kombat", essentially Rock-Paper-Scissors with the appearance of a fighting game. The kicker? You have to learn how each of the five "monkey stances" interact with each other through trial and error, on top of having to fight enough "battles" in order to gain more bananas (Hit Points). After this segment you fight the final battle of this game which is really a Trick Boss since you can't hurt each other — you have to emulate your opponent's "stance" three times. The rest of the game has nothing to do with this, being an a item-collecting point-and-click style adventure (well, minus the click).
• The secret treasure from Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure. After the main game is finished, finding treasure shifts from solving elaborate, thought-provoking puzzles to doing arbitrary things such as walking around the same area 5 times to make a chest magically appear. In addition, you have to repeatedly send a crewmate off to find more for 100% Completion, which can take hundreds of trips.
• In Fable 1996, the last couple parts of the game are relatively dull, and they add such a nice backstory right beforehand...however the ending is the true slap in the face.
• The second disc in Toonstruck is a bit of a drop in quality from the first disc. The first disc is a lot more open-ended and not as straightforward, whereas the second disc is a lot more linear (But Darker and Edgier) than the first half. The ending also just...well, seems to be there to give a Sequel Hook.
• Space Quest VI: Roger Wilco in the Spinal Frontier takes a very sharp turn after Roger Wilco returns from cyberspace. The last stretch of the game takes place within the digestive system and brain of Stellar Santiago. Not only would that physically disgust several fans, the final takedown of Sharpei is done using the last item you'd expect, and the result is quite a Gainax ending.
• Pokepark 2 has you going to The Very Definitely Final Dungeon... and then suddenly your pals lose their memories, forcing you to leave and wander around the park (the fast travel system gets disabled during this) for no reason than to extend the playtime for about 15 extra minutes with loading screens.
• Life Is Strange:
  • "Polarized", the appropriately-titled fifth and final episode of the first game. A huge chunk of the episode is composed of a long Nightmare Sequence that was divisive for the fandom, with some viewing it as pure Nightmare Fuel with a good dose of Player Punch and others viewing it as a tedious series of long walks with an annoying Stealth-Based Mission thrown in that doesn't really mesh with the plot. And then you get into the actual conclusion to the story, with regards to whether or not the endings available negate all the decisions you made over the course of the game — and if so, whether or not that was the entire point. Word of God is that they had bigger ideas for the ending, but didn't have enough money to realize all of them.
  • The final chapter of Life Is Strange: True Colors has similar issues, though to a lesser degree, as the first game — a very jarring tonal shift into a nightmare sequence that takes up over half the chapter and feels disconnected from the rest of the game, very little in the way of actual gameplay, and the choices made throughout the storyline have no real bearing on the resolution of the core conflict, which is instead done via the main character giving a Patrick Stewart Speech (albeit they do at least affect the ending in other ways this time). In another odd parallel with the first game, this was largely due to real-life issues facing the production team, namely the COVID-19 Pandemic and having to add PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S versions halfway through development.
• King's Quest(2015) starts very strong with a long first episode full of puzzles, introducing us to a rich world with a delightful voice cast. Episode 2 is a little shorter and more linear but still gives us a lot of fun and character building. Episode 3 gets more character focused, but pretty light on the puzzles. Come episode 4 and nearly any traditional "adventure" puzzles are replaced with pure geometry puzzles. Episode 5 gives us a glimmer of hope with some interesting puzzles built around the narrator/protagonist's failing memory affecting the environment as he attempts to recollect the real story, but this is soon abandoned and the player is thrust into a white room populated with what is pretty explicitly a bunch of reused assets from cut features and plots from early episodes.
• Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It: The final level, Meet the Mayor, is confusing and doesn't really work as a Final-Exam Boss. The ending is also very anticlimactic.

Beat 'Em Up

• Trio the Punch, after an entire game ofstrange enemies, bizarre imagery, and general unrepentant insanity, starts to cool off toward the end as you enter a seemingly endless series of factory stages populated by nothing except palette swapped blobs of goo for enemies—while they occasionally take on reptilian shapes or wear suits of futuristic armor, they're quite uninteresting compared to the parade of Karnov clones and man-sized daruma dolls you've been fighting for the rest of the game. Without any surreal goings-on to distract you, the basic, repetitive nature of the core gameplay loop becomes quite readily apparent. Fortunately, the craziness comes back in full force just in time for the finale.

Card Battle Game

• Metal Gear Ac!d! The Powerhouse and the meaningless sidequests in FAR! FAR is irritating but at least changes the pace. The Powerhouse, however, is just terrible level design and very, very long. The final battle is strong, but mostly down to the excellent music — it's also very slow, awkward, and hardly challenging.

Edutainment Game

• The raft ride on the Columbia River in The Oregon Trail II. Fortunately, you can avoid it if you have cash on hand and aren't a greenhorn. If you're going to California or the Rogue River Valley, you must cross a large, unskippable desert.
• Zig-zagged in The Cluefinders games - usually the last "world" of the games are a constant race to the end, but they are usually are quite climactic and don't drag on for too long. A few examples stand out though:
  • Reading: The last "level" of the game is simply repeating the same Mastermind/Password style challenge several times. Given that this is intentional Trial-and-Error Gameplay, this can come off as a little more frustrating.
  • Search and Solve: If you get lost, then the final world will turn into this.

Fighting

• Super Smash Bros. Brawl's "Subspace Emissary": The Great Maze. It's pieced together out of rooms already seen during the adventure, and most players will have to re-tread parts of the maze to find and destroy all 40+ bad guys, and can take upwards of two hours to get through even on the easiest difficulty.
• The final level of King of the Monsters 2. You face all of the bosses you defeated previously which, considering the boss fight vs actual levels ratio, essentially makes you replay through the whole game all over again, and that with barely any health recovery items or the throwable objects found in the earlier levels. And after you're done with the Boss Rush, you have to face a ridiculously long and overpowered SNK Boss.
• In Dissidia 012 Final Fantasy, the bonus gameplay mode Labyrinth is set up as a series of interconnected rooms grouped into "cloisters", and each group has a gimmick on what types of treasures and enemies you encounter and what you need to do to unlock the door to the next room. However, once you hit Floor 50 the cloisters become longer, the enemies more difficult, and the final stretch to the boss from Floor 71 to Floor 96 is just one long string of powerful enemies. And, by the rules of the Labyrinth, if you die you lose all the equipment and items you won up to that point and have to start over from scratch. You're allowed to enter at checkpoints on deeper floors, and hypothetically can go right back to Floor 71, but will be deprived of all the equipment you will need to combat the high level enemies.

Hack and Slash

• Diablo II has Act 4. Whilst having the final chapter in the pits of Hell is pretty cool, there are far fewer areas in Hell than in any other chapter, only a handful of NPCs in the 'town' of the Pandemonium Fortress (Tyrael, Cain, and the equipment and potion merchants, the latter of whom doubles as the healer), and only three quests, two of which are needed to win the game anyway. Your blacksmith and healer in that town have noticeably been given fewer lines to say and have no discernible personality. "Hail to you, champion" will be stuck in your head after a while.
• Diablo III didn't exactly do any better with its finale. Act 4's Heaven level suffers from most of the same problems regarding II's Hell finale. Heaven however has no town so you're forced to return to Bastion's Keep from the act beforehand... and the dialogue you hear throughout the Heaven act isn't exactly award winning.
• Divine Divinity's final area, the desert of Yuthul Gor and its Black Lake dungeon fit this trope. The developers didn't have time to finish the area and were intending on cutting it from the game, but their publisher wanted an orange area for the back of the box, so it went in unfinished. You have to wade through hundreds upon hundreds of mobs of imps, spiders, and gargoyles to get to the final dungeon. Attempting to clear the map is an exercise in futility even for high level characters. Even when you do get to the dungeon, you then have to travel through dozens of copy-pasted winding corridors to fight the five evil wizards you fought earlier in the game again. Following that, you get a disappointingly easy final battle and a short and confusing cutscene to end the game. A shameful way to end an otherwise excellent hack-and-slash RPG.
• God of War:
  • The first game's ending loses steam with the spike pillars of Hades, that require you to climb two pillars of spinning spikes with one hit sending you right back down to the bottom (and each of these takes about a minute to climb if you're going fast). The entire Hades section has several jumping puzzles, dull scenery and very little of the action or puzzles from the best sections of the game. The developers themselves have said this section was thrown together in a hurry with little time to properly test it. For many, the pseudo-escort mission in the middle of the final boss falls under this too.
  • Most of God of War III is a fast-paced, heart-pounding thrill ride from brutal boss fight to awesome boss fight. Then, after the death of Hera, you're put into a big cavern to solve a bunch of puzzles and fight a bunch of standard enemies (and a jackal Elite Mook) that manage to be more difficult than the gods due to cramped spaces and a fussy grab mechanic.

MMO

As a general rule, this is typically the most common problem that a newly-launched MMO faces, with the early game more often than not being more fleshed-out than the endgame. This is because, in the early months of the game especially, it must attract and hook a wide audience, which means giving them a lot to do early on. If the dev team knows what they're doing, the ensuing months will see the delivery of more content, much of it focused on the endgame so as to keep those already playing coming back for more.

• City of Heroes:
  • The Sewer Trial and The Eden Trial, as well as the first few versions of the Hamidon raid, were slapped together from half-completed ideas to fill the high-level content checkmark. The Sewer Trial in particular remained an afterthought for the entire life of the game — it was hidden from all but the most cautious explorer, it was timed, it was filled with multiple copies of That One Boss, and until an update, it could be completely outleveled. The rewards of both are really worthless. The Shadow Shard looked beautiful, but it was filled with Scrappy Level after Demonic Spiders after Scrappy Level, had significant bugs fester for years, and lacked a lot of content that other zones had.
  • On the City of Villains side, Grandville was known for being a pain for superspeedsters and causing computer slowdown. Thankfully, these issues were at least toned down over time, if not fixed.
  • The "Task Forces" (a chain of missions that, once started, you can't do any other missions without abandoning) quite often turn into tests of endurance. Positron's task force was one of the first ones made, and is notoriously long and tedious. The later ones are notably shorter and more varied. The "old" task forces were designed with the mindset that a group of people would be willing to spend multiple play sessions together to accomplish the task. This wasn't a bad idea per se, but just one that proved to be flat-out wrong in predicting player behavior and expectations. The Positron TF was originally designed as two separate task forces that got merged into one, hence its length. In the Issue 17 update, it was split into two separate task forces, although you have to do both in order to get the badge that completing the old single TF would grant.
• Almost all of the original 'Vanilla' content for World of Warcraft was revamped with the release of the Cataclysm expansion, providing fun and engaging quests from levels 1-58.
  • Players are then subjected to old, tired Burning Crusade content from 58-68, which features muddled quest design, inconsistent enemy difficulty, and lots of backtracking. Things improve a bit from 68-80 in the Wrath of the Lich King content, and then the game is back to form from 80-90 with the Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria content.
  • Warlords of Draenor expansion is widely berated for having almost no interesting endgame content outside of raids. So whenever your guild isn't forming one, you have to mostly resign to sitting in your private majestic base goofing around in trade chat.
• The Secret World suffered from this early on. Kingsmouth is full of NPCs, quests, and particularly investigation quests, which are the hardest to design (and the best in the game). The first dungeon, Polaris, is the most polished and gives the best advice as you progress through the dungeon, though the second does a good job as well, averting Trial and Error gameplay. Later areas, however, grew increasingly unpolished, with lazier design, fewer and fewer NPCs, and more standard MMO missions as opposed to the clever ones that avert typical MMO design in the starting area, and by the time the player reached Transylvania, they'd find that there was one investigation mission in the entirety of the final three areas. The end of the main story left players hanging, with no apparent consequence to their final choice, and Lilith, the Big Bad that gets mentioned throughout the third and final area, is never seen, let alone faced. Over time, however, new issues (booster packs of several missions) came out, starting with adding more investigation missions to the higher-level zones, continuing with the addition of a new area (Tokyo), and ending with actually meeting Lilith in person.
• Star Trek Online gets hit with this, as well. The game's early stages for the three factions (Federations, Klingon Empire and Romulan Republic) are inviting, exciting and capturing. However, everyone has the same last levels, which send you to Nimbus III, fight the Devidians, stomp the Tal Shiar, deal with the remains of the Dominion, fight the Breen, and deal with the Borg and the Undine before you're caught up and dealing with the current stuff with the Voth. What makes this this trope, though, is that Nimbus III requires lots of walking to get from point A to point B, and the Borg and Undine missions are just boring. Thankfully, Cryptic is addressing the Borg and Breen issues.
• Book XV in Pirate101 due to the ironic situation of having been severely rushed due to being in Development Hell for three years. Since the time of the last story expansion, Kingsisle had shifted towards mobile game development at the expense of its MMOs, more so Pirate 101 than the more popular Wizard101. At some point in early 2016, they decided to shift their focus back to the MMOs. The result was a very rushed ending to the first arc, with not enough main quests to level you if you had finished the game beforehand, an array of plot holes, and a rather anticlimactic confrontation with the main villain.
• On launch, the widely-acknowledged worst part of Guild Wars 2 was the three zones of the endgame area, the undead land of Orr. There were no more renown hearts, the landscape was mostly bleak and covered with Demonic Spiders that made even traversing it a pain, and while there were some a couple of not-bad large-scale meta events, there were no actual interesting world bosses. It didn't help that the personal story taking place there was pretty dull too, with the final clash against the elder dragon Zhaitan being a somewhat anticlimactic encounter where you man the gun of an airship and shoot at him him until he dies. The game was severely lacking in endgame content for quite some time after launch, putting off a lot of players whose attention would not be held long-term by the PvP or WvW. Fortunately the devs adjusted Orr to make it less-frustrating to traverse and eventually added a whole new raft of high-level content with the Living World, Fractals of the Mists, expansions and Raids.

Platformer

• The Meat Circus from Psychonauts, while it does do its job in terms of wrapping up its story, suffers an absolutely tremendous Difficulty Spike involving a time-based Escort Mission and numerous leaps of faith in an otherwise easy game. The development team was in a time crunch near the end of production, so it's understandable, if still disappointing. One of the developers claimed to have dreamed of being trapped in the Meat Circus near the end of the development cycle.
• Ratchet & Clank:
  • Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando zig-zags this to hell and back. After you've finally freed the "love interest" of the game for Ratchet, you are forced to deal with another larger, tougher, frozen wasteland that is mainly white and blue, Planet Grelbin. Some players just go "eeeh" and force themselves through. And there is still 20% more plot to get through in the form of going to other planets in the middle of beating Grelbin and then getting to the final planet, Yeedil. The first half of Planet Yeedil consists mostly of a long, tedious Hypnotizer puzzle that effectively makes you waste 10 minutes in a long maze of electric fences and Protopets in order to move about 100 feet forward. Then you raid MegaCorp HQ, in what is largely considered to be one of the most fun and climactic levels in the series while Awesome Music blares in the background. And then, after The Reveal, you're treated to the final boss, who is one of the most laughably pathetic bosses in franchise history, going down in about 10 seconds to the Heavy Bouncer and not much longer than that with your other weapons. It's as easy as the first two bosses of the game, made worse since the planet where the love interest was rescued, Snivelak, is home to That One Boss.
  • Same deal with Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal. The second-to-last planet is Koros, which is a great experience given the original setting, new enemy type and hard but balanced battles. Then you get to Mylon, which is on the other hand visually bland, with easy puzzles and while battles are hard, they are against enemies you encounter since Metropolis. Once you get to Final Boss, you get into an awesome fight with few elements mixing it up, but the fight afterwards against Bio-Obliterator MkII is uninspiring at best.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • End of the World in Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) takes this to new extremes. The level is a horribly broken mess where you have to play as every single character in the game...except for Sonic himself (the main character! Who happens to be dead at this point of the game) and Blaze, who are considered the only two bearable characters in the game to play as. As if that weren't enough, the level is a full-blown Marathon Level separated into seven different sections...which the game has to spend time loading each and every one. As if that weren't enough, the level's main gimmick are time holes that suck you in and instantly kill you even if you have rings, which pop up out of nowhere and can often lead to a cheap death.^note There are actually two types of time hole — purple and orange (the main colors of Mephiles and Iblis, respectively). The purple ones are the ones that suck you in and instantly kill you; the orange ones throw boxes at you, which is annoying but manageable. However, time holes continuously spawn as you progress, and if too many appear at once (and you haven't been sucked into a purple hole or a Bottomless Pit next to a purple hole by then), you immediately die even if you're far, far away from every single "Instant Death" Radius. And you only get five lives to do this incredibly long level, even if you collected a bunch throughout the game. pokecapn's LP of the game has five videos of about 30 minutes each (and copious amounts of Sanity Slippage) for what should have been 12 minutes of gameplay, largely due to just how broken and unplayable this sequence is.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog 2. The end levels were as follows: Metropolis (a three-Act Zone packed with the roughest enemies in the game), Sky Chase (an auto-scrolling gimmick level), Wing Fortress (a short level full of bottomless pits), and Death Egg (where you fight both a mini-boss and the final boss with no rings).
  • Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode I ends with a throwback to Metropolis Zone, a Boss Rush, and a rehash of Sonic 2's final boss.
  • Sonic Generations received flak for this. The final boss is definitely a bit of a mess compared to the other bosses in the game and awkward to play. The final level, Planet Wisp, also has some awkward level design. This is particularly so in Act 1, where you must use the Spike Wisp from Sonic Colors, only it doesn't control as well as it did in that game. It is also a Marathon Level. Some reviewers go even further back than that, citing the difficulty spike that happens at the start of the Modern era (last 1/3 of the game).
  • Sonic Chronicles: Most critics and fans found the mid- and late-game boring. Apparently, this is due to BioWare rushing production halfway through when they were forced to divert more attention to the Dragon Age: Origins production crew. Up until the Disc-One Final Boss, you're still likely to learn how the game works due to the excessive uses of Action Commands, yet the game chucks tons of high defense or high-evasion enemies at you. While you certainly do have a Crutch Character with you, he doesn't help much. This changes once you reach the Twilight Cage — where it's obvious that BioWare really put a bit of heart and soul into the game. The difficulty is reduced significantly if you recruit Cream into the party. Unfortunately, it is very easy to permanently miss her during the early game.
  • Sonic Mania's final level is Titanic Monarch, which is also the last "original" Zone. While not a bad stage, it's generally seen as the weakest of the new Zones because it doesn't have as much Scenery Porn, relies heavily on gravity orbs, and is very long. The game's final bosses (the Act II boss of Titanic Monarch and the True Final Boss in Egg Reverie Zone) also get some criticism for being fairly simple.
• In Pulseman, the final level is nothing but awkwardly realistic platforming over several bottomless pits and the occasional room throwing Goddamned Bats into the mix.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Corona Mountain in Super Mario Sunshine is essentially a trek through a volcano filled with deathtraps that are not as effectively designed as the Bowser levels in the other 3D Mario games, and with intense platforming that's rather out of place for this game, apart from the FLUDD-less levels. This is then followed by a last-minute gimmick: obnoxiously realistic sailing, where you immediately sink and die if the boat touches anything. After that, the final boss is just a cakewalk.
  • "The Final Battle" in New Super Mario Bros. U is essentially a straight hallway with easy platforming, pathetically avoidable enemies, and power-up blocks placed generously enough that the main obstacle (Bowser Jr. in his protected Junior Clown Car) comes across as a small inconvenience at worst, even when going for the Star Coins. And unlike Wii or 2, the final fight with a giant-sized Bowser isn't a chase sequence that expands the level's length, but rather a surprisingly simplistic and traditional three-hit fight. Bowser is not even that hard, either.
• In The Adventures of Rad Gravity, the final planet is a long Death Course riddled with Spikes of Doom, Conveyor Belts of Doom, and a maze, then the True Final Boss fight takes place in zero gravity where you have to propel yourself with your gun and trick his homing missiles into hitting him, easier said than done.
• While many the later levels in Jet Set Radio Future may be cool-looking, they sure can be frustrating due to a combination of bottomless pits and confusing design (and the map layout doesn't help things, either).
• Croc 2 has two quite detailed worlds being the Home world and the Ice world. It then has Caveman world, which has a drop in quality, followed by the abysmal Inca world, which has only two levels, one of which revolves entirely around collecting 30 gobbos from a huge, dull pyramid. Possible reasons for this might be that the company was running out of budget at the time, but it ended up delivering far less than it promised.
• Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc: The last level is far from terrible, but it does feature a certain amount of recycled elements (partly made up for with the flying sections). Additionally, it's never explained how Globox escaped from the Hoodlum HQ and found the flying vehicle. The best example of this, however, is the final part of the Final Boss, which quickly starts feeling long and dull (not made any better by the mediocre music and awful background).
• Rayman Legends is a truly spectacular follow-up to Rayman Origins until Living Dead Party. The world has one new level — Grannies World Tour, which is really cool and awesome, but much easier and shorter than the other music levels. Afterwards, the rest of the world is just 8-bit rehashes of the previous music levels, except with horrific visual distortions that do nothing but add on Fake Difficulty, and no checkpoints. And at the end of the world is "Grannies World Tour, 8-Bit Edition", which is yet another 8-bit rehash... with all of the distortions combined!
• Epic Mickey. It starts with having to go back to all the worlds and get rid of some Bloticles, a very easy task that feels like padding, especially since it means more trips through the side-scrolling levels to get to the worlds. Then you get to Dark Beauty Castle, which is fine and exciting. The final area, though, inside the Shadow Blot completely falls apart. It's very hard-to-see, there's tentacles that require memorizing where they pop out if you don't want to die, swarms of enemies that either aren't fun to fight or are invincible...and you don't even end up fighting the Blot!. The whole thing feels rushed.
• Limbo: The earlier parts feature a The Lost Woods environment, Giant Spiders, and other children that try to kill you, all which contributes to the dark foreboding emotions of the game; then it switches to an urban and industrial settings devoid of life, the puzzle mechanics almost (but not quite) make up for it. According to the developer they originally had planned to feature the spiders in the last parts of the game, to serve as much more affecting boss encounters.
• Mega Man:
  • Mega Man 2, as legendary a game as it is, suffers from this near the end. After clearing the Wily Castle's exciting and challenging first few stages, the 4th stage is where things start to falter. A puzzle stage outfitted with fall-through floors and line-guided platforms that, once you figure out how to master it, becomes very tedious. To top it all off, you must fight the Boobeam Trap, which requires ALL the Crash Bomber's weapon energy to defeat with (a fact made worse as the only nearby enemies to item-farm from are Tellies and Sniper Armors). After that comes the series' very first Boss Rush teleport room in the next stage, which doesn't even have a segment giving you the chance to restock your weapon energy beforehand. Meaning that you'll have to fight a battle of attrition with Dr. Wily once the Robot Masters are dealt with. Luckily, the last stage and its boss are far less brutal.
  • Contrarily, Mega Man 3 had probably the easiest castle in the series. It especially shows considering it follows the Doc Robot stages. The castle stages are very void of enemies for the most part, there is very little dangerous platforming to be found, and the bosses leave a lot to be desired. This is saying a lot, considering one of them is the Yellow Devil, who was notorious for being That One Boss in the first game. The place is also littered with tons of E-tanks to give you easy health refills, which you probably won't need because they also throw health and weapon refills while you're at it, plus loads and loads of extra lives. Top it off with the final Anti-Climax Boss whose second form is killed in one hit with the Top Spin, the most useless weapon in the game and you have one of the weakest castles in all the series.
  • Mega Man 11 has the Gear Fortress. It's not the first Wily Castle to have only four stages, or to have the Boss Rush and Final Stages be "stages" in name only, with little to no content aside from the Boss Rush/Final Boss, or to lack a Wily fight in the Boss Rush, or to use only one song for all four of its stages. But it IS the first to cut all of those corners. The second worst offender is Mega Man 5, but it at least gets the excuse of being one of the three two-castle games (i.e. eight post-Robot Master stages). 11 does not get such a pass for obvious reasons. It has two real stages past the Robot Masters, with a Boss Rush and Final Boss barely thrown in.
  • Players of Mega Man ZX Advent may find themselves just giving up when they get to the last level. Instead of the challenge arising from puzzles requiring to make clever use of all your upgrades throughout the game, Inticreates decided to fill the level with loads of awkwardly placed bottomless pits, instant death spikes, and blocks that disappear when you hit them, only to reappear a few seconds later and kill you if you happen to be standing in their way. And you have to deal with the boss rush and one of the hardest final bosses in the series. The best part? If you lose all your lives, you have to do it all again from the beginning.
• Donkey Kong Country
  • In the first Donkey Kong Country game, Chimp Caverns. It doesn't feature much that you haven't already seen before, and the levels all derive from the very dull-looking cave stages compared to the rest of the game. It's really not much new, as it doesn't do much that Monkey Mines didn't do already, the boss is even another rehash of that world.
  • Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble!:
    • The final level is a very rudimentary "underwater" stage^note it actually takes place inside a drain pipe, with the "water" being some kind of poison with one obvious difference... your play controls are inverted whenever you're swimming, while immediately uninverting as soon as you jump out of the water, doubling this as an example of That One Level.
    • While Krematoa starts off and ends in a high note, the middle levels of this game's Lost World don't have nearly as exciting gimmicks as other levels in the game's worlds, mostly sticking to not nearly as intimidating locales as Kaos Kore did.
  • Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze has a Disappointing Last World. The first five worlds of the game are pretty varied, having some nice diversity in the environment, atmosphere, and design of their levels. Then you get to World 6, and all the levels are ice levels of some form, including the temple and boss stages. Despite its clear justification in-game and a few of the levels at least attempting to vary it up a little (notably 6-6 and 6-8), it doesn't stop the world from having by far the least scenic variety ^note each level is based off a world in its predecessor, as a sort of combination of Nostalgia Level and a cross-game All the Worlds Are a Stage. The fact that the world is also the longest in the game, with 12 levels (most contain 10), doesn't help matters either.
• Kirby:
  • Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards:
    • While Ripple Star still continues on this game's very impressive artstyle, it's also the shortest level in this game, with its three stages composed of a Bookends of the first stage, a relatively harmless underground catacomb, and a stage where you fight off every enemy in the game. While the stage remains exciting for the premise of storming into a castle, it's generally much less dangerous than the worlds preceding it. It's telling when Star Allies chose to use Shiver Star's factory for its final Nostalgia Level in Guest Star Adeleine & Ribbon than this planet.
    • Dark Star is unlocked after obtaining all of the game's crystal shards, but it only hosts a single stage with a few small corridors leading to the True Final Boss.
  • Kirby Star Allies: Far-Flung Starlight Heroes, the final area of this game, takes place across several planets in tribute to Kirby Super Star's final subgame, but all of its stages piggyback aesthetically from previous worlds, right down to most of its bosses being palette swaps or refights of previous ones. When the player finally arrives at Jambandra Base, the space station aesthetic from outside quickly gets tossed aside in favor of retreading more ground the Jambastion fortress already ran through, leading to a very anti-climatic final area and stage compared to the previous three games.
• Super Meat Boy's bonus world, the Cotton Alley, is predictably insane, given the rest of the game. It uses all the gimmicks seen in previous worlds, it could be considered a level version of a Final-Exam Boss, and unlike the rest of the game, the Dark World versions don't seem like they tinkered with the normal levels to make them harder. They're actually very different from their counterparts. But the final level (appropriately entitled "4 Letter Word") is just plain boring. The "gimmick" is corridors filled with the games favorite trap, spinning sawblades. Each corridor is harder than the last. That's it. Nothing exciting. The Dark World version (just as appropriately entitled "Brag Rights") is just plain lazy: it's the exact same thing, but backwards. Oh, and there's an Advancing Ceiling of Doom, but it's kinda slow.
• In Wardner, the final level in the basement of Wardner's castle consists mostly of two small rooms repeating over and over again, many with identical enemies. The Sega Genesis version pads this out even more with a Boss Rush and three vertical climbing shafts which are identical to each other.
• The Floor is Jelly:
  • The Disc-One Final Dungeon lacks the life and flora that gave life to the previous areas, and features three sections in which you jump from platform to platform in low gravity to find a key to the portal in the central area, and then backtrack through the section back to the central area, which is made harder on the way back with the addition of glitch blocks which have the same effect on your character as the game's regular Spikes of Doom. In addition, 6 of the game's 31 secret houses required for 100% Completion are gradually Permanently Missable in this area as you obtain these three keys since the hidden entrances to the rooms they're found in are permanently blocked off by said glitch blocks.
  • The Very Definitely Final Dungeon features various glitchy jelly physics not encountered in the game's other areas, with some rooms practically requiring luck with these glitchy physics to get through. If you find the game's very last secret area, you'll find what appears to be an apology from the developer written in platforms.
    I'm so sorry for this level it is a cruel and terrible shenanigan...
• In The Simpsons: Bart vs. the Space Mutants, you spend the first four levels platforming, detecting space mutants in disguise, solving minor puzzles, finding secrets, and playing the occasional minigame. Then comes the fifth and final level... and it's a friggin' maze. All you do is navigate the Springfield Power Plant looking for 16 plutonium rods and taking them to the basement. Oh, and to make matters worse, you know that 16th rod you can't find anywhere? It's Maggie's pacifier. The game doesn't give you a clue and it makes zero sense, but just touch her after you took the other 15 rods to the basement, and you win. Yeah, you read that right: there's no final boss either.
• The final area from The Mummy Demastered is very unimpressive and boring as it offers nothing new. It uses the same cave backdrops from one area and same breakable crystals from another (albeit colored differently), only has mid-game enemies with no new enemies unique to this area, is quite small, has a straightforward layout, and features no items to find save for a couple of ammo pouches. It's possible it was meant to be a breather in an otherwise difficult game before a difficult Final Boss, but they could have at the very least given it its own unique backdrops.
• Most of Monster World IV is defined by its platforming, puzzles, and exploration. The Underground Fort lacks all of these, instead simply being a series of corridors filled with enemies and minibosses from previous levels. No new enemies aside from the Final Boss appear. It's also fairly underwhelming from an aesthetic standpoint; the level itself is just a vaguely organic-looking cave (the remake, for its part, manages to make the area look more evil with the objects receiving a strong Sickly Green Glow) while the music is just standard Arabic-style music that isn't especially climactic-sounding. To top it off, multiple gold bars can be found throughout the level, but there's no way to go back to Rapadagna City and spend them without having to do the whole thing over again.

Puzzle

• While Antichamber was very well received overall, some critics noticed that the game started to tone down the Mind Screw it did so well in favor of more standard Block Puzzle mechanics as you upgraded the block gun. In addition, the standard puzzle mechanics and Perspective Magic rarely interact with each other.
• Catherine's stages are quite good, especially if you can put up with the Nintendo Hard difficulty. But then comes Stages 7 and 8, which make heavy use of Monster Blocks—blocks that can move in random directions—and Mystery Blocks—blocks that change into a random other block—a couple of Luck-Based Missions, especially if you're playing on Hard difficulty or otherwise going for a no-Undo run. And these blocks really are random—trigger one of these blocks, then hit Undo—the direction they move or block they turn into, respectively, will change!
• Chip's Challenge has the 149th, final level (called "Special"). The previous levels that are part of the final lineup of challenges were great (Cake Walk is a deliberately-misnamed difficult level that requires careful use of blocks and the items present; Force Field is a gigantic labyrinth made of conveyor belts; Mind Block is a compact, yet tricky chamber filled with Cartoon Bombs), but "Special" is anything but. The only two things you have to do to complete it (and the game) are: open the four colored doors with the corresponding keys (which is too easy), then find the exit in a hide-and-seek game involving blocks necessary to cross the water moats, but some of which are booby-trapped with fire that kills Chip instantly (which is too hard). And as with many other levels in the game, here you can see the worst side of the gameplay differences between the Microsoft and Atari Lynx versions: In the latter, you can slap the blocks to move them without touching the fire; but in the former you can't and thus you have to rely on trial and error. Have you just got burnt with one fire tile? Time to restart and open those doors yet again. Fortunately, the Level Pack Fan Sequels as well as the official sequel (Chip's Challenge 2) all have much better final levels.
• The majority of the last ten Lemmings levels are disappointing:
  • Mayhem 21 ("With a twist of lemming please") and 24 ("All or nothing") are luck-based; the former requires turning 50 lemmings into Floaters as they fall out of the entrance, and both levels require turning single lemmings in huge crowds (and narrow spaces in the latter case) into Bashers and hoping they're facing the right direction.
  • Mayhem 23 ("Going up.......") gives you a huge wall and no actions to take for over a minute as the lemming sent ahead to build a path to the exit must bash through the whole thing.
  • Mayhem 26 ("The Steel Mines of Kessel") and 27 ("Just a Minute, Part II") can be straightforward or unfairly hard depending on which version of the game you're playing (in the Mac version, the former requires extra Bombers due to the higher resolution graphics).
  • Mayhem 28 ("Mind the Step") is a nerve-wracking trudge across the screen with only a single lemming with little margin for error in the various bashing and building manoeuvres required. Mayhem 29 ("Save Me") is likewise devilishly hard, requiring (among other things) pixel-perfect timing and a race against the clock that necessitates doing multiple things at once (three lemmings must be sent ahead to build the path to the exit, and the other lemmings must be sent on their way to the exit before the path is complete - just as the steps involved in building the path require extra attention and precision).
  • After enduring these two, the final level, "Rendezvous at the Mountain", is almost a let-down. The developers' rationale for saving this level for the end is somewhat justified, however; apparently it was felt that the level's setup, with two groups of lemmings meeting at the center of the playing field and exiting together, made for a satisfying note for the game to end on.
• In Quantum Conundrum, the Final-Exam Boss gets progressively easier as you move through the level. Then you get a pretty unique section involving an elevator shaft. Then you complete a very easy puzzle which is designed to keep you busy and let Professor Quadwrangle narrate for a bit.
• Stephen's Sausage Roll: "God Pillar" is the final actual puzzle. It starts out competently. However, unlike majority of other puzzles that can be solved while playing it, this puzzle can be figured out far sooner. To go into more detail, once the player has figured out what to do, the same series of steps needs to be repeated seven more times. A small error in judgement becomes apparent only when you try to stack the contraption together, forcing you to restart the level from the beginning.
• The final level of Trine exchanges physics-based puzzles which may involve lots of character-swapping for a thief-only, Trial-and-Error Gameplay gauntlet that forces you to sit through a loadscreen every time you fail it. The creators later admitted that they had ran out of time and the final level was tested only by a single outsider. Fortunately a patch made it less frustrating.

Racing

• In the earlier parts of Motorstorm: Pacific Rift there is rubberbanding, but it's small enough to still be perfectly beatable with a good route and smooth racing lines, but then in the last few racing ranks it drops any fairness and becomes more about exploiting the AI than racing skill. The first game could be considered guilty of this too, but it's rather hard to tell if it is because the starting levels might be cakewalks or the AI honestly goes into overdrive cheat mode for the later courses.
• LEGO Racers 2 has a rather egregious example of this. After very tough bosses like Riegel and the Berg, which had you racing against an alien in a Humongous Mecha and an ice monster respectively who both can't get hurt by power-ups, you'd expect Rocket Racer to be very hard. You'd have even higher expectations after you see the tracks that surround this race; they are very complex compared to the others with jumps, loops, and other stunts. So what does Rocket Racer end up being? You race him on a completely circular arena with occasional jumps and walls, and he plays almost exactly like the other racers except he's faster. This way, he can actually be hurt by weapons. It does not help either that he goes up ramps, which clearly slow you down. Because of this, he becomes the easiest boss in the game, and it becomes even more of a total cakewalk if you continued to upgrade your car speed throughout the game.
• Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity zig-zags this trope: After beating Master Core ABIS at the Mobius Strip, you unlock 80s Boulevard and 90s Boulevard, which can definitely be fun in their own right. But you also get the Astral Babylon, the Heroes side of the Mobius Strip, which can be seen as a very underwhelming course in the sense that it's nothing but a straight rectangle with only a few areas to abuse gravity in.
• Mario Kart:
  • Mario Kart 64's Rainbow Road is by far the longest track in the game, but it has only minimal hazards, as guardrails line the track throughout. Coming immediately after the precarious unguarded ledges of Yoshi Valley and Banshee Boardwalk, it lacks presence as a final track. This track has been revamped and upgraded in 8. The most important change for this for the Lightning Cup? Reducing this course from a three-lap to a three-part course.
  • The final track of the final Retro Cup in Mario Kart DS is merely Yoshi Circuit from Double Dash!!, which is not only anticlimactic on its own but also in comparison to the other Mario Kart games with Retro Cups that do end with more memorable tracks (SNES Rainbow Road in both Super Circuit and 7, N64 Bowser Castle in Wii, N64 Rainbow Road in 8).
  • Wii U Rainbow Road in 8 is one to one side of the base, especially since the developers said it was "spectacular" before it was announced. It doesn't show anything that wasn't already seen with the anti-gravity mechanic, and is on the short side. However, it does look and sound awesome, which is why some other fans still like it.
• Kirby Air Ride: Nebula Belt is the final race unlocked in this game, but its layout is relatively much less exciting than previous ones, as there's rarely any ramps or rails to ride through, as well as having zero enemies to fight/get abilities from, meaning it's a generally unexciting ride compared to Machine Passage or Checker Knights.
• F-Zero GX features the final chapter of Story Mode. After winning an extremely difficult championship race to defeat and humiliate a Big Bad who then undergoes You Have Failed Me from the champion of the underworld and then defeating said underworld champion on a course with awesome scenery exclusive to Story Mode, the race against the creators of the universe not only features the epitome of the game's cheesy cutscenes, but the race is just a glorified time attack against a staff ghost. The only thing keeping it from being an outright Anti-Climax Boss is that the course is rail-less and can lead to "OFF COURSE! RETIRE" if the player is not careful, but even then the track design, that gimmick notwithstanding, is quite dull and unexciting to race on especially given the previous two chapters' courses.
• The fifth and final showcase event in Forza Horizon 3, "Big Air", is hyped up by the Horizon Festival's organizer Keira to be the craziest showcase event yet. However, fans of the game disagree that racing a Polaris RZR against a blimp is all that thrilling, especially since the previous showcase had the Horizon Festival's boss race a Lamborghini Centenario against a VTOL fighter jet through the streets of Surfers Paradise.
• The final level of The Simpsons Hit & Run, despite looking the coolest of all the levels and having an awesome audio track for driving around, is quite simply nothing but the exact same mission over and over again. You go to the Nuclear Power Plant, get a barrel of nuclear waste, drive to the alien's ship, and repeat. Four times in all. Sure you drive different cars, and you get chased by a black sedan a couple of times, but there's otherwise no variety at all. Around a third of the map being blocked off and the absurd frustrating difficulty of these runs doesn't make it any better either.

Real Time Strategy

• The campaign mode in Rise of Legends noticeably degrades in quality as the chapters continue. In the Vinci chapter, almost every mission has a special feature to it. The Alin chapter has a decent number of special scenarios, but the occasional skirmish map. The final chapter, where you play as the Mayincatec Coutl, consists almost entirely of simple skirmish maps.
• StarCraft II:
  • The final mission in the final campaign has all the dressings of a climactic last level. Thematically it represents all protoss coming together for a last stand, but in reality it functions as a horrendous Escort Mission where you are desperately moving forces around to keep your incompetent allies alive. On the higher difficulties, you don't find this out until the end of the level, but these allies are needed in the final enemy rush as speed bumps for when the enemy throws ten or twenty times the legitimate supply cap worth of units at you. To make things worse, Blizzard has abused the Hold the Line setup beyond all reasonable limits by that point, this being its seventh occurrence across the three SC2 campaigns.
  • The 3-part epilogue takes place inside the Void, so you'd expect some crazy visuals, unique gameplay mechanics and enemies and radically buffed-up scale of action, since you are, after all, fighting gods. Nope, it's the same boring landscape as in the real world, exactly the same enemies as before, and they waste one of the three missions on yet another "Hold the Line while babysitting a couple of inept allies" turtle-fest!
• Rocky Horror, the final level of LEGO Rock Raiders, was expected to be a huge monster horde in an epic and challenging level (especially after Back to Basics. There are very few monsters, your base is pre-built, and a giant crystal cache gives you everything. Karl White (the level designer) says it would have had hundreds of monsters, but it lagged on computers back then.
• Both single-player campaigns in Total Annihilation required you to destroy the enemy Commander as your final goal. So you'd prepare for an epic battle against a Commander much like your own, expecting it to build up his base and D-Gun your forces should they get too close. Instead, the enemy Commander would just sit atop a hill and do nothing at all. A few scout planes and a bunch of bombers could win you the level without even bothering with the rest of the enemy base.
• Dawn of War II:
  • The final level of the vanilla campaign should in theory be a big dramatic climax, but the Hold the Line segments are far easier than they look, and while the Final Boss is objectively powerful it dies laughably quickly, as you have control of all your heroes at once and Gabriel Angelos. The suits of Terminator armour make the level even easier, and getting all the suits means defeating the two Superbosses, both of which completely outclass the final boss in every way, making them the real climax.
  • The developers listened to the complaints about the ending being easy, and so for Chaos Rising they upped the difficulty of the ending to absurd degrees. Again, it should be party central, with the entire Chapter coming to your aid in a big pitched battle, but your allies are criminally inept and every one that dies gives the final boss more health. Said boss is the nastiest thing in the whole series, with potential health in the millions that regenerates almost as fast as you can hurt it, multiple attacks that can wipe out a squad if they connect, and frequently calls in Elite Mooks. Adding insult to injury, you can't use all your heroes this time, which makes no sense at all, seeing how, again, the entire chapter pulls in for that battle.
• Pikmin series:
  • Pikmin 2: The caves of the last area, the Wistful Wild, are considered a major Difficulty Spike to the point of being excessive. All three of them have floor counts in the double digits and are littered with hazards, including falling boulders and explosives that can kill Pikmin of any type. While many of the previous caves have a distinctive theme to them^note Such as Glutton's Kitchen having a toybox theme or Subterranean Complex largely being metal passageways, Wistful Wild's caves largely re-use assets and themes from previous caves, making them feel less distinctive.
  • Pikmin 3: The final area, the Formidable Oak, is widely seen as being a massive let down. To start, it is extremely linear, unlike all the other areas in the game. It is also an Escort Mission where the captains need to get Olimar out. While it is suppose to feel suspenseful, it is very easy to use a bug that causes The Plasm Wraith to be unable to find the player if they stay in a puddle of water, which, if abused, can remove any danger whatsoever. Add on to the fact there are very few enemies to fight and the fact nothing resets should the player take longer then a day makes the level feel like a disappointment. The final boss fight with the Plasm Wraith is generally agreed to be really awesome though.
• Warcraft:
  • In the Reign of Chaos Orc Campaign, the final mission By Demons be Driven can fall into this. Much of the level is fighting Chaos Orcs and Infernals. This means the enemy variety is about 5 to 8 non-neutral units. The Chaos Orcs, despite being Demonic Spiders, do not have a full techtree. They have only one spellcaster and no flying units. The Infernals spawning all over the map basically take the place of enemy heroes. Despite the previous missions building up to a showdown with Grom Hellscream and Mannoroth, neither are actually fought. Grom does not attack your base, he is an Orcus on His Throne for the whole level and when you meet him he will be instantly captured in the Soul Gem ^note he will actually try to attack you after you get to him, but he barely takes any damage, and even if you kill him he instantly respawns, so the game directs you just to one-shot him with the Soul Gem. By the time you reach him there will no real obstacles left to stop you, which means the last minute or two of the map is just silently walking to the circle instead of doing something dramatic or engaging. Mannoroth does not show up on the map at all and dies in the next cutscene. Compared to the final missions of the previous campaigns ^note Frostmourne for Human and Under the Burning Sky for Undead, By Demons Be Driven gives a lot less satisfaction.
  • The Frozen Throne Alliance Campaign's final mission, Lord of Outland can qualify. It is mainly due to the Unexpected Gameplay Change, where the level is an unusual mix of the normal base mission and a Baseless Mission. Instead of harvesting resources, Gold is collected from gold coin items in the Black Citadel, lumber is not a resource in the level at all, there are no workers, upgrades, or towers. Instead there is a set number of buildings that are just there by default to train land units from. The level has no air units available to train, and Kael can't use his Phoenix spell. Heroes are allowed to die, but reviving them is so costly and time consuming you are better off restarting the mission (due to how little gold you will be able to get for most of the mission). The level effectively has 3 groups to move. Illidan and Kael with the Blood Elves on the left, Lady Vashj and the Naga on the right, and Akama with his invisible Draenei also on the left. The Draenei are out to complete the sidequest that is effectively required ^note they have a Stealth-Based Mission to destroy the power generators that power Magtheridon's defenses, and not doing this sidequest makes it next to impossible to break into these bases. These 3 groups each take turns exploring their parts of the maps, attacking enemy squads and bases, and group up to fight bosses and their minions near the end of the map. These encounters can turn into complete bloodbaths, since this mission is the only with 4 playable heroes and no workers, so there is at least 20% more units than usual to micromanage. The only sense of urgency is that the orcs send some squads to attack Illidan sometimes. Some players actually enjoy the change in gameplay, since it can be considered a reasonable representation of a raid on a fortress, but it is not what anyone expects for a final level, which tends to be a fast-paced and intense base mission with full techtree access.
  • In The Frozen Throne Orc Campaign's final act, Act III A Blaze of Glory is much shorter, easier, and a lot more linear than the rest of the campaign. Acts I and II have an open main map and free reign to explore and travel to various small maps in Durotar while also leaving room for the main story. It can take many hours to explore Acts I and II and there is a lot to find. The final section of Act II Tidefury Cove, has Rexxar and his companions leading the charge against Admiral Proudmoore's base, engaging in combat with him personally, and destroying his castle. Instead of this ending the story, Proudmoore gets away and Act III is two linear missions dedicated to chasing him down to Theramore and killing him. The first has your heroes taking over a base to take control of the shipyard, then hiring endless battleships to destroy other battleships and your heroes become secondary in the mission to these battleships. It is more of a showcase of naval combat than the Open World RPG type gameplay of the rest of the campaign. The second mission is a tug-of-war, Multiplayer Online Battle Arena style map where the Horde army automatically engages with the Theramore army to kill Admiral Proudmoore and you use your heroes to help push into the city and all the way to Proudmoore himself to make his last stand. There is a big difficulty drop because random enemy mobs (especially Humans) in Act II could easily kill you if you weren't careful, the enemies of Act III are weaker, closer to melee game level, and your heroes are even stronger than from Act II. In both of these maps there is nothing to explore beyond the main objective and no sidequests. At most you get an Easter Egg or two per level. The Act III missions could either been added to the end of Act II (so as not to mislead players who were expecting a full length Act III), or Proudmoore could have been killed at Act II at Tidefury Cove and ended the story there.

Rhythm

• DJMAX Technika's Specialist Set. To unlock it, you must clear Special 6, which consists of two doable-for-many-players charts and Son of Sun (SP). When you reach the final stage of Specialist, your boss song is either "Enemy Storm" (available on Special 5, which you don't need to unlock as long as you have Platinum Crew access) or "Son of Sun". The real boss song is "Fermion", which requires you to get less than 75% MAX judgments.
• In Rhythm Heaven, the last third of Medal rewards and final post post-game game are all based around a That One Level that involves a Scrappy Mechanic. After you unlock Rhythmove Dungeon, there's no real motivation to collect Medals other than 100% Completion.
• The final boss in Guitar Hero III is widely noted for this. In general, the game is fun enough when you're just playing songs and hoping not to fail, and the first two bosses aren't too difficult, but then you get to Lou. You now have two choices: spend 500 tries attempting to kill him through normal (read: unfair) means, or exploit a loophole to kill him in one attack at a certain point in the song using 50 tries. Here's a hint to Neversoft: making the last boss into a Luck-Based Mission isn't the best way to finish out an epic guitar game.
  • It doesn't help that the entire final set leading up to the end boss isn't so much a Difficulty Spike as a Difficulty brick wall. "One", "The Number of the Beast", "The Cliffs of Dover" and especially "Raining Blood" ensure that only the best players will even get a shot at Lou. Challenge is one thing, but compared to what had come before these songs were just sadistic.
• beatmania:
  • The standard One More Extra Stage song of IIDX 14 GOLD is... "Fascination MAXX", which is just one of the Extra Stages from DanceDanceRevolution SuperNOVA, complete with annoying BPM gimmicks designed to trip up your timing and reading abilities.
  • The final unlock of beatmania IIDX 20 tricoro's "Our War of the Worlds" event, which is the game's final unlock event, runs on a lifebar that is damaged every time the player plays through the game. Fortunately, the lifebar was shared by all players on the network. Unfortunately, not only was the unlock tedious, taking many days to unlock even just the Normal chart, but the unlock itself, "Kyatorare Koi wa Mo~moku", is a cartoony "denpa" song that many players consider to be highly annoying, or at the least, not fitting as the Final Boss song of tricoro.
• The 2013 Dance Dance Revolution game has the Final Boss of the Private BEMANI Academy event, "Elemental Creation". While it's par for the course for the final song in an event or unlock system to be exceptionally difficult, the developers just HAD to use BPM gimmicks (an uncommon tactic in other DDR boss songs) for this song, making the scroll speed alternate between 212, 106, and 424 BPM. All other games participating in the event just have the song scrolling at a constant 212 BPM, which just makes this version of "Elemental Creation" stand out even more. It's as though the dev team doesn't know how to make boss charts that are less than 300 BPM.

Roguelike

• Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity's final plot-related dungeon is rather underwhelming compared to the previous games, being short, not especially difficult, and lacking a boss fight. When considering the length of the post-story in the previous games, it's also easy to think that it isn't the final dungeon. Though on the plus side, you're at least rewarded with a heartwarming scene at its conclusion.
• The Binding of Isaac:
  • The Dark Room in Rebirth, a dark "counterpart" to The Chest, which replaces the fun of having every gold and brown chest containing an item that can then be used to absolutely curb-stomp the early bosses with... four ordinary red chests (which often contains things ranging from "Blue Spiders/Flies mildly useful for one room before they die upon hitting the enemy" to "spawns enemies or self-destroying bombs") at the beginning, and harder enemies. It is not considered bad exactly, but players prefer going to the Chest unless they're specifically filling out the achievements related to clearing the Dark Room's boss. Fortunately, Repentance made the Dark Room less disappointing by replacing the normal red chests with special ones that contain Devil Deals.
  • The Very Definitely Final Dungeon of Afterbirth+ is the Void. It fits with the game's lore, but fans were disappointed to discover that the Void simply uses designs of the past floors in the game, with a different setting picked randomly for each room. The boss of it is effectively a harder Boss Rush in a game that already has one and with a ton of HP; to add insult to injury, its default form was glitched in earlier versions of the DLC, rendering it a static sprite that anticlimactically popped into blood like a regular enemy upon death. Even in Repentance as of July 2022, said boss is also infamous for being able to land cheap hits through telefragging, something no other major boss has a problem with. Making matters worse is that the ending from beating this — the last back in the Afterbirth+ expansion — doesn't really establish or change anything that wasn't already covered in a previous ending.
• Streets of Rogue's Mayor Village can feel like this on most runs. The Mayor is surrounded by a gaggle of highly armed Supercops but that should only be a moderate obstacle for any decently equipped character and there are a wide number of easily available items in the game like cyanide, rage poison, time bombs, tranquilizer guns and such that can wipe them out with absolutely no effort or risk on the player's part. It's even worse if you go for a political victory since you just walk up to the clerk in city hall and have them call over the Mayor to hand you your new hat, but at least that's unlikely to happen on someone's first time beating the game since the rules for elections aren't actually explained until you get to the final floor. In either case it's very common for the entire final level to take less than a minute or two to clear with no real chance of failure, in stark contrast to the Uptown floors immediately preceding it.
• Nethack is 99% a tough sidequest- and sidedungeon-riddled grind To Hell and Back to recover the Amulet Of Yendor... and 1% the Elemental Planes, four particularly dull and ploddy levels that tend to just get in the way (Earth is a time consuming digging exercise, Air is a mess where it's difficult to even move half the time, Fire is recommended to be done blind so you don't get bogged down in messages about all the fire traps going off, and Water is an inconsistent puzzle). At least the final dash through the Riders on the Astral Plane kinda makes up for some of it.

Shoot 'em Up

• The final level of Darius Twin is a chaotic mess, a blank starfield that throws multiple copies of every midbosses at you with no recovery after the previous stage's boss. The problem is that the spawning of said midbosses is entirely random, leading to potentially near-unwinnable scenarios such as having multiple copies of the My Home Daddy/Yamato midboss spawning at once, who spams clusters of onion ring-shaped projectives with a massive case of Hitbox Dissonance at great speed, which are difficult to dodge. Following the gauntlet is two easy and simplistic boss battles, though with how grueling what precedes them is, most players don't complain.
• Solar Jetman: Hunt for The Golden Warpship, an obscure title available on the NES and a few other platforms, suffers from this. The 12 planets (plus one hidden planet) all have the same gameplay style. After the 12th planet, the one with the largest level area and most oppressive gravity, you are treated to a side-scroller spin in the Golden Warpship shooting asteroids, and facing off a lame asteroid with...eyes? The level is fiendishly hard as well.
• RPG Shooter: Starwish is a combination shmup/visual novel that isn't terribly good on either count. The first two-thirds at least has good pacing and likeable characters. But following The Reveal, a new Big Bad shows up completely out of nowhere and... sits around doing nothing while you run pointless Filler levels trying to clear a path to him. Between levels, you get Info Dumps from The Scrappy which boil down to a lot of pointless exposition and the repeated insistence that the Big Bad can't be defeated and there's no hope. You eventually beat the Big Bad despite The Scrappy's protests by... shooting the Big Bad in the face. Really hard. And then the ending gives you a tacked-on Fantastic Aesop that the power to grant wishes is bad, which it immediately turns into a Broken Aesop by asking you to make a wish to choose your ending.
• Two of Space Invaders Extreme 2's final stages just use the same music from its predecessor's first two stages, with a few rearrangements. Seems like the folks at Zuntata were running out of ideas.
• Tyrian 2000, compared to the two previous releases of Tyrian, includes Episode 5 which wraps up the story of the game. However, the episode is very short, its new graphics are in a much different style than the rest of the game, its difficulty is bizarrely unbalanced (the first few levels feel like you're back on Episode I, and all the bosses have extremely little health), and the final level involves a rather easy battle against... a fleet of fruit-based spaceships that shoot food at you, which is way too silly even for a game that doesn't take itself all that seriously.
• Touhou Project: The general consensus is that Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom would be a much better game if Junko, the final boss, was better designed. All but a few of her attacks are variations on expanding bullet rings, which, as several big-name Touhou players have pointed out, are the easiest and quickest danmaku patterns to program. The fight is also overly reliant on extremely tight micrododging^note at the expense of other, more well-regarded techniques like reading tricky patterns, reacting to fast patterns, macrododging (i.e. large movements to dodge large bullets/clusters) and manipulating patterns with aimed elements, which makes playing as anyone but Reimu^note who has the smallest hitbox painfully difficult and leads to a lot of clipping deaths.

Simulation

• In the last level of Black & White, the game ground to a halt, as your Creature gets cursed and becomes almost useless (or even more so if you picked one with a low intelligence score). The real nail in the coffin here is a notorious glitch that made this curse permanent, even after going through the steps to lift it. It made an already challenging game hair-pullingly hard, and at least one FAQ/walkthrough terminates at this point—not only because of the difficulty curve, but because your Creature becomes ruined for the entire file, with the weakness, intelligence loss, and alignment change infecting all modes of gameplay, including network games. Even if you complete the game, the file remains broken.
• Freelancer starts off great, gradually revealing a vast conspiracy from the perspective of a few nobodies caught up in the action. It has all the hallmarks of an epic man-on-the-run political thriller, then the alien parasites show up and it becomes "hunt the Precursors in fast linear levels" like every other space game ever.
• Overcooked!: Every ordinary level is 4 minutes and the final one is 16. None of the previous levels provide the pacing practice you need to beat it. The meteors that set fire to the stage are also random, and if one hits the center, it's sometimes impossible to put out (or takes up so much time that you can't recover).
• The Battle of Endor scene from X-Wing Alliance doesn't really fit in with the main plot—that of the player character's family—that drove the rest of the game. In fact, the main plot itself is never completely resolved. Instead you get four missions covering the Battle of Endor. You wouldn't think it could be possible to screw this up, but the attack on the Death Star is incredibly boring and tedious, and it gets incredibly annoying listening to Wedge's invincible X-wing constantly taking fire as he follows you through the tunnel. And then you have to escape from a flashing cube of death after blowing up the reactor, rather than a proper wall of flame, or even the chain of explosions you normally get when blowing up a large ship; what's more, said cube will only catch you if you sit around doing nothing for a full minute. Not only does this mission absolutely pale in comparison with the version seen in Rogue Leader, but Super Return of the Jedi and the Atari 2600 tie-in game had Battle of Endor missions that were much more fun.
• RollerCoaster Tycoon:
  • The second-to-last scenario of the vanilla version, Rainbow Valley, is the meanest scenario in the entire game, banning you from all landscape editing and scenery removal, which makes it really difficult to build a decent roller coaster if you've gotten too used to slashing and burning forests to do it in the preceding scenarios. The final scenario, Thunder Rock, is a giant rock in the middle of the desert, but is a perfectly normal scenario otherwise without any gimmicks. It's above average difficulty since you have to cope with the long walk guests may have to take to make it to the top, but when put up against Rainbow Valley, it really can't compare.
  • The expansion, Loopy Landscapes, does even worse. Most of Loopy Landscapes scenarios are unique and creative compared to the original scenarios and Corkscrew Follies (Added Attractions on UK), but Micro Park is nothing more than a 15x15 flat park. Its goal? Have the park value at $10,000, which is difficult as hell on a tiny park as this.
• The last mission of Star Wars: TIE Fighter have you find the ship where the Emperor is being imprisoned and disable it. And that's it, primary objective complete. You can mop up remaining enemies and tackle the enemies' star destroyer if you want, but there isn't anything special left to do. Luckily, the expansions add more missions.
• The endgame of Surviving the Aftermath is the worst part of the game as, having built a functioning city capable of surviving the post-apocalyptic wasteland, you have to finish the Doomsday Bunker project, which just requires you to build a number of engineering stations (which require you to sacrifice your specialists to create an engineer) in certain biomes of the map to slowly, slowly accumulate points in the four research categories you need. Unless you build as many outposts as you can (and you don't get that many specialists to sacrifice) this takes so long that you'll have completely cleared out your city's map area, completely researched the entire tech tree, and will be scrubbing the rest of the world map clean just for kicks while you wait for it to complete. Occasionally your progress is stymied by very simplistic missions that pause your research progress until you set up some more engineering stations in specific biomes, after which it resumes again until you get all four categories almost up to 100%. Before you can do that you get one more mission to complete, which involves bringing down a bandit outpost (which triggers a totally unfair untelegraphed mass bandit attack on your city while your best specialists are out in the field), and only then can you get your research to 100%. Once you've done that, you complete the Doomsday Bunker project and... you win, we guess. Congratulations. Have a cookie.

Stealth-Based Game

• Hitman 3 ends the game — and Hitman's World of Assassination Trilogy — on a final mission in the Carpathian Mountains; "Untouchable". In stark departure from the rest of the trilogy, it's an Unexpected Gameplay Change consisting of 47, a Trojan Prisoner, making his way from the back of a train to the front of it, he has no penalty for killing anyone onboard (as they are all Providence operatives), and essentially acts as a Cutscene Boss, a means to the give the story a conclusion, which can come off as a bit of an Anti-Climax to those who expected another sandbox level. Comments from the devs mention this is an Intended Audience Reaction; they too consider Carpathian Mountains a Playable Epilogue of sorts to finish the story, and that the penultimate level, "The Farewell" in Mendoza, was made to to wrap up most of the major themes and side-stories by way of a party in a larger, more detailed map, and it being named "The Farewell" was not a coincidence. The level also has a unique one-time mechanic; Diana as your partner in crime, and her "betrayal" leads into the actual last level wrapping everything up in the story, whereby Diana tricks Edwards to get 47 close to him due to his untraceable base of operations, which leads to you neutralising him. All in all, the Carpathian Mountains mission, when compared to other levels, isn't looked upon too favorably.
• Metal Gear:
  • The final act of Metal Gear Solid is spoiled somewhat by an annoying double-backtrack segment (essentially recycled from Metal Gear 2), while the plot-action moves away from Snake, Meryl, the Ninja and Otacon, and towards side characters most players probably didn't care much about on their first playthrough. The Gamecube remake thankfully dodges the double-backtrack by being kind to players with good reflexes.
  • Act 5 of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, at least when compared to Act 4. Act 4 gives us a nostalgia bomb where you revisit Shadow Moses Island, which has been untouched since the first game, completely overhauled in next-gen graphics and culminates in piloting Metal Gear REX to blast your way out complete with taking on Ocelot's Metal Gear RAY in the end. Act 5 is rife with cutscenes that go on for way too long, cases of Mood Whiplash (the microwave corridor scene juxtaposed with Johnny's marriage proposal) and tons of exposition clarifying events from MGS2. Stick with that, another half-hour to forty minutes of cutscenes and the fake-out "suicide" scene, and you'll be treated to a post-credits stinger of Big Boss attempting to explain every lingering plot hole in the series, via a massive Infodump that takes twenty-plus minutes. To call it Ending Fatigue would be putting it lightly.
  • In Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, the fifth chapter consists of 6 missions in which you search for Zadornov in previous areas you have already been in the game. Obviously it gets very repetitive, and aside from the True Final Boss, this is the only thing you do in the entire chapter.
  • Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain's narrative, despite setting up Venom's future actions with Diamond Dogs and fight against Cipher, all culminates in Mission 46 (Truth: The Man Who Sold The World). It's actually the tutorial mission played over again, complete with button/tutorial prompts. When you complete it, you're treated to a twist (Big Boss is the Medic from Ground Zeroes), a boatload of "Truth Record" audiotapes dumped on you for no reason (with conversations that Venom had no way of learning about otherwise) and a final cutscene that raises more questions than it answers. It doesn't help matters that a final mission clearing up the biggest unresolved plot point (what happened to Eli, the child soldiers and Sahelanthropus) was only resolved in an intended "Mission 51" that was cut early in development and reportedly planned as DLC, but never finished due to Kojima's firing. The mission now only exists as a video on the Collector's Edition Blu-Ray disc.
• A great deal of the hype behind and appeal of Manhunt was related to the execution system, which encouraged the player to sneak up on foes with short-range weapons and then rewarded his patience by allowing the player character to slay his foes in gruesome and creative manners. Until the last few levels, that is, when the player is left with no real choice other than to shoot enemies from a distance. Plotwise, this is justified to some extent — the player character is no longer killing for the sake of the snuff film into which he has been drafted, but is out for revenge against the man who forced him into it — but it still abandons one of the game's central themes and only appeals.
• Syphon Filter: The Omega Strain becomes very frustrating around the halfway-2/3 mark, with an excess of stealth missions and Trial-and-Error Gameplay, where blowing your cover just once means the mission is FUBAR, made worse by the lack of in-level save points, the single-player mode using the same respawning system as multiplayer.
• Thief: The Dark Project, near the end, takes a bit of a dip. The level "Escape!" is considered by some to be the weakest chapter, and the game's final level, while by no means a bad level, is more a linear rush to the final confrontation with none of the stealth or exploration elements that defined the game.
• The final level in Thief (2014), "Dawn's Light", is blatantly thrown together and unpolished, a symptom of the game's fractured development cycle. The level itself feels like it's made up of pieces from three different plots haphazardly sewn together - the standard city hub, an indoor avoidance game with infected civilians, and a final confrontation on a ship that feels incredibly rushed and anticlimactic. Shopkeepers randomly appear in places they have no need to be (inside the infected stronghold, on the rocks outside the ship), and the final boss (Primal Erin) consists mainly of avoiding her and activating a device three times. Incredibly, the segue to the final cutscene goes from a rainy standoff between Garrett and Erin to her inexplicably hanging off the ship at daybreak. Even the final cutscene leaves the narrative on a vague Sequel Hook, which (to date) hasn't been addressed.

Survival Horror

• The first half of Cold Fear is a unique gem of sixth generation consoles; an abandoned ship full of zombie gunfights, rocking like a salt shaker in an Arctic storm. But the second half is a cookie-cutter Abandoned Laboratory.
• Ghost Hunter, a PlayStation 2 game that was the closest you could get to a good Ghostbusters game before they actually made one. The story of the game feels increasingly rushed the further into the game you get. For example, in the game is your own containment unit where you can view the ghosts you've captured and read up information on them. Halfway through the game, you are prevented from taking a break in between levels to view the ghosts and just drops you off at the next level. The game also concludes without revealing who the Big Bad was working for.
• You spend the first half of Silent Hill 4 exploring four different areas, all infested with enemies you can only stun, not kill, and it's just the right level of challenging and compelling. The second act is a big Escort Mission where you have to protect the injured Eileen from the unkillable enemies and are told to explore the same four areas all over again, and you are suddenly trapped in Gamer Hell. The more she gets damaged, the less time you have to save her during the final battle. The final area and ending(s) are worth the slog, but barely. Whether it was deadline crunch or Team Silent's admitted fatigue with the series, this sequence is considered a dark, dark stain on what was otherwise an excellent game.
• For the most part, Outlast is a terrifying chase and evasion game up against unkillable enemies in the dark, so conserving resources such as batteries and making a note of spaces to hide or escape routes is very important. In the last level, however, the setting is just an Abandoned Laboratory, which is completely well-lit, and devoid of enemies, except for one who is invisible and cannot be hidden from. Since the building is so linear, there's nowhere to go if you hear the Scare Chord except "run forward and he'll probably give up", which he does. The last exposition is delivered by a very soft spoken old man from far away, so it's easy to miss key dialogue, and have the end sequence be meaningless.
• The final chapter of the episodic indie horror Bendy and the Ink Machine feels rushed, ends rather abruptly, fails to conclude or even acknowledge a handful of plot threads, and tacks on a Gainax Ending for seemingly no reason other than to get people talking about it.
• Alone in the Dark (1992) suffers from this in the flooded caverns towards the end, where the gameplay unexpectedly switches from standard Survival Horror to 3D Platform Hell, exacerbated by the Camera Screw and Tank Controls.

Third-Person Shooter

• Contra: Legacy of War ends with a disappointing platforming section, followed by a final battle on a sphere.
• Kane & Lynch:
  • The first game has this with the entire final third of the game. The first two thirds, set in America and Japan, are full of tense shootouts with cops, a couple bank heists, and gunfights with civilians caught in the crossfire. The final act is set, bizarrely, during a revolution in South America, and has the player commanding a small Redshirt Army against a huge Redshirt Army. The credibility of the plot is stretched thin, and the inability of the friendly AI to handle the vastly increased difficulty of the endlessly respawning beardless Fidel Castros does little to help.
  • Dog Days has this to a lesser extent. Story-wise, having Lynch and Kane attempt to steal Glazer's private jet, and then resort to hijacking an airplane as it takes off makes less sense than simply having the two lay low for a few days or escape by boat or whatever, and having the level take place after Shangsi is killed leads to some serious Ending Fatigue.
• The end of Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy is generally slammed for the introduction of Aura Beasts, more annoying was the feeling of a general drop in quality, with the gameplay feeling more unbalanced (and while the checkpoints are no worse than before, the sudden difficulty spike makes them far more annoying), some very vague puzzles and extremely annoying instant-death invisible mines that are likely to lead to at least a few "What the hell!?" deaths before you work out what is going on.
• Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time: ​Many fans have this opinion on the final world, Modern Day. While the idea of a final world involving every zombie you've encountered thus far in a five-jalepeno rated world sounds exciting on paper, it ultimately falls flat when it came to execution. All the world does is reintroduce three zombies from the first game along with five gimmicky (but powerful) plants. Even the main gimmick of the world is portals leading to other worlds, which is related to the other zombies! And that's not without mentioning that the final three levels are just rematches against three out of the ten previously fought Zombots with plants from a different world, disappointing all the fans who were expecting a grand Final Boss with in the form of the original Zombot from the first game.
• In Jet Force Gemini, after you got to the last level, you were given a jetpack and forced to go back through all the levels again (and some new ones) and obtain each MacGuffin. It's safe to say most people quit before they got to the real ending.
• BloodRayne: The first half dozen levels are tutorial missions in the Louisiana bayou. Not too bad. Then you raid the Nazi complex in South America and fight Nazi zombies. Can't go wrong with that premise, right? Until you have to play level after level after level of lame-ass Resident Evil-style puzzles, fighting wave after wave of Nazi footsoldiers (dirt simple now that you have Bullet Time) in the same, endlessly repeated gray concrete industrial bunker.
• Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard falls right into this in the last two levels; the parody dries up, and you are stuck fighting the same enemies from earlier (after gradual additions in each of the earlier levels) over and over again. The little parody there is feels more like a parody of generic action movies rather than of Video Games (which there are already many examples of, and it therefore loses any of the potential of its concept). There are also Lampshading opportunities that are missed, for example, the penultimate level (the Docks) has you take a half-hour detour through a ship and then come out the other side with it having no purpose whatsoever; this would have been a perfect time to parody convoluted level designs (and the trope) in shooters, yet its not even mentioned. One of the few bits of Video Game parody there is (of MMOs) has the enemies be Palette Swaps of enemies you've been fighting throughout the game (again with seemingly no ironic invocation of it).
• Freedom Fighters (2003) has a strange sort of dual example. The climactic assault on Governors Island is extremely fun to play but vaguely unsatisfying from a story perspective, as the primary antagonist character remains The Unfought and there's no real closure over the Player Character's dead brother. Beat the game on the hardest difficulty, however, and you unlock a secret level... A completely linear, not especially challenging and very obviously unfinished level that looks like it was Dummied Out due to time constraints and then added back in as an afterthought, with a hilariously literal case of A Winner Is You on top. The worst part is, the very existence of this level suggests that there might have been a more satisfying conclusion planned at one point.
• Dark Void. The last level is an out of nowhere boss fight with a three-headed dragon and the whole thing starts so abruptly that you feel like you've accidentally skipped over a couple of levels and when you win, the game ends almost as abruptly.
• The last level of MDK2 consists of running through spacious, blandly textured halls of a castle which stands in stark contrast of the surreally designed last few levels. Any opportunities to use your character's unique abilities are next to none (the only time Dr. Hawkins has to be inventive with his tools is using a makeshift ladder at the beginning) and enemies are also very few. To top it off, the Final Boss essentially tells the protagonist they've been wasting their time, leaving them understandably very pissed.

Turn-Based Strategy

• XCOM:
  • XCOM Terror From The Deep has this. The original X-COM capped off with an incredibly difficult two-part mission to Cydonia, full of some of the toughest aliens in the game. TFTD is overall much more difficult than the original, and has plenty of two-part missions within it... but while the final mission to T'leth is a three-part mission, it's also incredibly boring, since the level designs resemble long, twisty pipes more than any sort of maze and there clearly aren't enough aliens.
  • Some people found the Temple Ship level at the end of XCOM: Enemy Unknown to be more than a bit unsatisfying. You send your team, with one psychic soldier nominated as "the Volunteer" with their powers jacked up to super levels, up to the enemy mothership to put an end to the war once and for all. Once you get there, you just proceed down a long, more or less linear corridor, killing off small groups of (almost) all the enemies in the game again in a tour through the game's bestiary while the alien leader dumps exposition on you, until you reach the end and fight the final boss... an "Uber-Etheral", who is just a normal Ethereal with more HP and the Rift power and a bunch of flunkies. Even worse, no changes were made to this scenario at all with the release of the Enemy Within expansion- not even including the new enemies which had been added, such as Mechtoids.
  • In XCOM 2 the final assault on the alien base takes about two hours to complete. Depending on how the player is feeling, this is either epic, or a long slog through all the usual enemies, but more of them. There are some new boss enemies right at the end, but at lower difficulties they are easier to deal with than Sectopods.
• Romance of the Three Kingdoms games, simply due to the nature of how it works. Winning the game involves taking over every single last city in the country, and if that last faction consistently refuses your offers of surrender...well, there's no fun in a curb stomp that takes hours to finish up. Later games allowed the option to have the AI take over, letting the game finish itself when it's obvious you're gonna win by that point.
• Valkyria Chronicles 4 has this to the point of absurdity. The final level is a boss fight, with the assisting troops not posing much of a threat at this point. The boss is a submersible drill tank, larger than any other land vehicle by far. This enemy effectively teleports around the map at random and has almost as many guns as you have squadmates. In theory you are supposed to climb on top of it by building ladders on it (huh?) and shooting the radiators with anti-tank lances. The problem is that the hitboxes remain bugged months after release, and sometimes it will just completely ignore a direct critical hit from a lance. At other times, the radiators will all retract (something which is explicitly impossible in-story), preventing you from hitting them. Further still, it will sometimes get bugged into that state forever, making the battle unwinnable. The only redeeming feature is that the whole sequence is So Bad, It's Good, with a derpy invincible teleporting drill submarine tank which is defeated by ladders.
• This tends to happen with Crusader Kings II, Europa Universalis, and many of Paradox Interactive's other historical strategy games. Even if you start off small, once you "blob out" and develop an empire that can't be threatened by any neighboring powers (if there are any left), the game will likely just boil down to micromanaging your economy and development and handling technological advancements. Some players of Crusader Kings II will even by the late game point divide up their empire among a bunch of heirs and/or vassals just to bring back some challenge or at least add a new diplomatic element to the world.
• In Hearts of Iron playing as one of the major European Axis powers, the last obstacle is almost always the United States. They are an awful opponent because they have probably spent 5 years building up a gigantic army that will swam almost any landing, as well as a large Navy if the Imperial Japanese Navy hasn't helped you by taking it out.
  • Occasionally you will find that after taking out the United States, one of the smaller countries in the Allies has become a "Major Power". The two common nations for this are Australia and the British Raj (India). While neither are likely to provide any real challenge, it is still annoying to have to invade them on the other side of the planet to get the peace conference.
• Fire Emblem:
  • The final level of Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade is probably the easiest one in the whole game. You're in a medium-sized room with Idunn, the True Final Boss, on the other side, and there are only two other enemies to start with, neither of whom actually block your path. Idunn's stats are also fairly underwhelming, and don't increase on Hard Mode (bar one extra point of HP). On top of that, at this point you should have most of the Legendary Weapons, plus the Binding Blade, all of which are Purposely Overpowered, and the Binding Blade deals massive damage to Idunn, such that Roy can one-round her without too much issue when trained. Though it's far from the only final level in the series that can be beaten in a single turn, most others require abuse of Warp or similar mechanics to pull that off; it's downright easy to manage here, with multiple possible ways of doing so.
  • In Fire Emblem: Three Houses, the Silver Snow route's final chapter is a long gauntlet of overpowered enemies, including respawning monsters, and most of them have the Miracle skill, giving them a random chance of surviving a lethal blow with 1 HP. The Final Boss can use an area attack every turn, which also regenerates their armour, making them very annoying to take down. To top it all off, it takes place on a map you've played already in the last pre-Time Skip level, and the plot reasons for the battle come out of nowhere after the route's main bad guys have already been dealt with.
  • In Fire Emblem Engage the final chapter takes place on a large flat square arena. Sombron's first form is rather easy, since he only comes with a handful of Mooks. His second form is a bit more complicated, since he takes up much of the center of the arena, is impervious to damage until you destroy the four Dark Emblems protecting him, has a few AOE attacks and the ability to forcibly cancel your Engaging with Emblems and has four health bars, but it's entirely possible to take him down in one go once the barrier falls. The Dark Emblems, based on other Fire Emblem games' final bosses, are quite easy to take down, since you get a massive damage bonus if you attack with the Emblem of the hero opposing them (for example, attack Medeus with Marth), and if you defeat Sombron before his shield returns, you likely won't see the second or third waves of Dark Emblems.
  • In Fire Emblem Heroes, the final battle in Book VII, Chapter 1 is considered to be one of the most disappointing Book finales for a variety of reasons. One reason is that her fight is almost exactly the same as the first fight against her was in Book VII, Chapter 13, just with different New Heroes. Secondly, due to Gullveig's status as a Glass Cannon, she is easily able to be disposed of with any capable unit in the player's barracks, making units like Attuned Nino and Isadora more threatening than the time goddess herself. And to top it all off, several fans expressed disappointment due to how anticlimatic the story ended with Gullveig dying from the power of the MacGuffin (despite initially showing to have immunity to such a power and growing stronger with each cycle), citing that Njörðr (the actual mastermind behind Gullveig's creation who was killed off without a fight against him) would have been a much more fitting and climatic Final Boss of Book VII instead.
• The final mission of Advance Wars: Dual Strike has this in spades, especially when compared to other entries in the franchise. It's a two-front map where one map is a desolate, featureless void with very few enemies and three targets to destroy, while the other map is a CPU vs CPU meat grinder where the enemy army can't deploy new units but the ally army can. Basically you set your ally CPU to "defense" and let it do its thing while you just build up an attack force on the first front, then swoop in and wipe out your targets once your CPU ally inevitably wins. No massive three-on-one climactic battle that pits enemies turned allies against an enigmatic new army that throws meteors like the first game, no race against the clock to destroy a missile that will destroy the world while weathering attacks from a massive laser cannon like the second — you just march up and kick a big gray blob after watching the computer play against itself.

Visual Novel

• Ace Attorney:
  • After the original three Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney games were all lauded for having fantastic final cases that made playing through the game well worth it, Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney stands out as having a final case that's very weak by comparison. It starts out well enough, with a compelling mystery over the death of an artist, but then rapidly falls apart after the first trial day, with an awkwardly out-of-place "flashback case" that puts you back in control of Phoenix, and then possily the most confusing and convoluted investigation in the entire series, courtesy of the illogical MASON System. You go back and forth between seven years ago and the present day, often getting evidence from the past that you need for the present and vice versa. By the time you return to Apollo, all that's left is some dialogue and presenting the last piece of evidence before losing control of him again to decide the final verdict as someone else.
  • The final case of Ace Attorney Investigations. The pacing becomes very slow, and it starts to drag out after Shih-na being revealed as Callisto Yew, the traitor in the Yatagarasu and the murderer of the previous case; unfortunately, you'll still have several more confrontations to go. The main problem is that the game's length isn't balanced by the emotional tension, as unlike the previous antagonists Edgeworth had no personal connection to the Big Bad, only an ideological one, and can make it hard to care at times. On top of that, despite the case's extreme length, it fails to do more than make the game's overall storyline feel like a series of massively improbable Contrived Coincidences. As a result of all this, it's widely considered to be not only the worst final case in an Ace Attorney game, but a strong contender for the single worst case in the entire series^note ("Turnabout Big Top" and "Turnabout Serenade" from Justice For All and Apollo Justice respectively are the only ones generally considered to be worse, and even then there are those who'd point out that they're just filler cases with little bearing on the overall plot of those games, meaning their poor quality isn't as damaging to the game as a whole).
  • While not nearly as poorly-regarded as those of the aforementioned games, the final case of the first The Great Ace Attorney game has been criticised for its investigation phase being slow-paced and incredibly heavy on exposition, to the point at which less than half of the phase is spent actually investigating anything. Things pick up for the actual trial, although even then it's not considered to be anything stand-out compared to other final cases in the series.
• Danganronpa: The last trials are generally not as well liked as many of the previous cases, especially considering that the fifth trials in the second and third games are considered among the best in the series. Part of the problem is that much of the cases involve listening to the game's Big Bad make (admittedly shocking) revelations about the plot, rather than doing anything to solve the mystery yourself. Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony gets this especially hard because of the controversial ending, in which it's revealed that the killing game was part of an Immoral Reality Show, and that everything, from the characters' backstories to the previous games, are works of fiction in-universe. The final trial goes on for a very long time after the Big Bad is exposed, and one of the few well-liked parts is the final Armament Argument.
• The final act of Snatcher may have the benefit of actually giving the game an ending (earlier versions ended at Act 2 on a cliffhanger) but is otherwise the game's low point. After quizzing the player on the events of the first two acts, the game then takes the player to a ruined church and sticks them on a very linear path. The adventure gameplay and investigation vanish almost entirely, with the player being shoved into the two hardest gun battles in the game back-to-back with no option to save in between. The rest of the game is almost entirely comprised of a cutscene, which lasts around a half-hour as the main villain gives an obscenely long Info Dump. Though said half-hour is full of important plot reveals and has one hell of a climax, it also gives you no input whatsoever beyond watching things play out.

Wide Open Sandbox

• Grand Theft Auto:
  • Grand Theft Auto III has this bad. Staunton Island and Shoreside Vale are increasingly less detailed when compared to Portland's bustling activity, varied scenery, and things to do. This is probably why Liberty City was revamped from the ground up in Grand Theft Auto IV, even if that effectively meant putting it in its own continuity.
  • The first half of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City had a fairly conventional story progression, since accessing real estate, decent weapons, and numerous outside areas was limited at first (and sometimes made saving games and conducting missions a huge pain). As a result, the plot progressed well with the player's increasing access to Vice City. Unfortunately, in the second half of the game, story progression becomes entirely dependent upon purchasing real estate to expand your criminal empire. As a result, the storyline sections are much harder to follow, thanks to scattershot mission locations and some missions lacking availability until players buy many different buildings (which gets expensive fast, and often forces players to do tedious taxi/police/ambulance side missions repeatedly, or even street racing, to get the required cash). Even when players do find the missions, they're mostly boring, save the excellent bank robbery and mall bombing missions. The last two missions anchor the story back into focus and conclude the game wonderfully, but getting there demands far too much trial-and-error and unnecessary exploration and busywork out of the player.
  • Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is the worst of the lot. When the game finally wraps up to a finale, CJ returns to Los Santos and has to completely disregard all his previous success in San Fierro and Las Venturas to represent Grove Street in the local gang wars, forcing the player to finish a significant chunk of the turf wars sidequest before they can move to the very last mission in the game. It's made particularly annoying by two factors: first, if you procrastinated on the turf wars until the very end, you'll have to complete the sidequest while all Hell is breaking loose around you as the citizens of Los Santos are rioting, and second, even if you completed the turf wars before leaving Los Santos at the beginning of the game, your turf war progress is reset as soon as you leave, so your efforts there are meaningless. And the final mission is no cakewalk, either...
  • Grand Theft Auto V has three different ending missions. Ending C, which is the only one that lets you keep all of the playable characters and kill all of the remaining antagonists starts with a gunfight at a foundry which, while intense, isn't really on a bigger scale then some of the other fights in the game. Next, you have to kill four different targets, all of whom only have a small group of mooks to kill, and only one of whom can be killed in a particularly interesting way. It feels like a step down given the scope of the game and how spectacular Rockstar Games' final missions tend to be. And the final missions for the other two endings are even worse, as they just involve a simple little car chase against a single enemy who barely fights back, one of which ends with a single bullet being fired, the other with a red herring moral choice.
• While the bosses of the three major gangs of Saints Row 2 were challenging and interesting, the final boss Dane Vogel is simply a shootout in a small area with few mooks to threaten you and Vogel himself with a pistol he isn't very accurate with. You do get an attack helicopter mid-way through the mission, but use it almost exclusively on static targets on a single building. The last few Ultor missions are also simple and easy compared to some of the final missions of the other gangs.
• Assassin's Creed:
  • The majority of Assassin's Creed is full of stealth, Le Parkour, and the occasional frenzy of short and violent fights frequently followed by a lot of running and hiding. Even boss fights generally fit into this standard. Then at the conclusion of the game, nearly all of it is thrown away for a long series of non-stop straight up sword fights with no chance of stealth or sneaking.
  • Assassin's Creed: Revelations: The last level with any actual action is a wagon chase scene. No freerunning, no swordplay. And eventually, you don't even get to kill the Big Bad.
• Level 7 of The Simpsons Hit & Run. While the Halloween theme looks cool, the level suffers from repetitive missions (barring the first) that involve repeatedly going back and forth between the school and power plant to deliver nuclear waste with little variation. Part of the map is also blocked off, resulting in a smaller game world than what was in Levels 1 and 4. The game acknowledges this when Homer realizes that the black sedan he's following is heading to the power plant. He says "The power plant?" in disbelief, then complains that he's bored of that level.

Non-Video Game Examples

• The Amazing Race was notorious for this during its first eleven seasons, as equalizing flights midway through the final leg would even up the teams after they had already done most of the tasks in the episode, and once in the final destination city, the winner would then generally be determined by whoever found the best cab. This took a lot of skill out of who won the race, and left a lot fan enjoyment on whether or a not a likable team could luck their way into a victory. This can really be seen in how the best team (by the stats) in the finale rarely won during these seasons, but after they started setting the entire final leg in one city in Season 12, the best team has won a majority of the races. Some examples include Season 1 (New York, a cab ride, followed by a train ride, then a long run to the Finish Line), Season 2 (San Francisco, a couple of cab rides and a long run through the city), and Season 10 (New York, two long cab rides with a long run through the city in between).
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • The 2nd Edition Planescape adventure Dead Gods has about attempts to resurrect the slain demon lord Orcus. The adventure is full of mystery and exploration, crossing all over the Outer, Inner, and Prime Material Planes to uncover the secrets of strange new creatures that can manipulate everyone's perceptions and are poisoning parts of the World Tree Yggdrasil. Players ferry arms to a drow civil war, rescue a vampire, and outrace an undead god and his lone surviving priest to capture the MacGuffin in a very satisfying climax. Only for the adventure to continue as the MacGuffin is stolen from them anyway and they go to a final final confrontation on Orcus's corpse in the Astral Plane, which sounds cool but is mostly just short, confusing, and with an ambiguous ending that more serves the setting's Metaplot than anything else. (Officially, the heroes failed no matter what and Orcus was confirmed alive again as of 3rd Edition.)
  • The 3.5 adventure Red Hand of Doom features a colossal pitched battle as its climax, with the PCs fighting off a hobgoblin horde and dozens of monsters, where all the PC's prior successes help contribute to the battle's conclusion, culminating in a final Boss Rush with any surviving Quirky Miniboss Squad members and the army's general. A few bad builds or odd setpieces aside, it's pretty excellent... but's not the final part. The final part, involving confronting the high priest who rules the horde, is a depressingly bland, padded-out, and somewhat overlarge dungeon crawl, with the encounters being largely static and easy-to-bypass and the Final Boss being trapped in what amounts to a killing jar.
• In-story in Ran Van. The Nintendo Hard game makes him expect a truly monstrous Final Boss, but when he actually makes it to the end of the twelfth level, the boss sprite is barely bigger than his own.
• The Super Bowl was this during the 80s and 90s, a NFC team won 16 of the 20 games played during those two decades and 13 straight from 1985 (XIX) to 1997 (XXXI), and most of those games were blowouts. This led fans (and even some commentators) to refer to the NFC Championship game as the "real" title game and treat the Super Bowl itself as a mere formality that had to be played to fulfill TV contracts. The Denver Broncos beat the Green Bay Packers 31-24 in Super Bowl XXXII to finally put the AFC back in the win column^note Through Super Bowl LVI (played in 2022 following the 2021 season) the NFC has a 29-27 lead.

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