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How to weaponize confusing endings.
"Oh this is… this is nice, this is the end, okay. Where exactly am I? Oh grea… here's the song, oh good. Um, there's some things that are still unresolved here, guys! How do I get home? What do I eat? Was Rei my-my mom? Or a clone? Or, hell, was this all in my mind? Wha-what's an EVA? Is that sort of a Freudian thing? Er… um Am I real? Oh, hell, does a bus run through here? I mean, I'd like to go home now but um… Oh God… Where's home? Okay, okay, okay. I mustn't run away, I mustn't run… Okay I got that, good, okay. Now, if I were to run away, let's analyze that: Where the fuck would I go? I'm on a big blue ball! Uhh, is this how you end the series? I mean, is this where we go from here? Okay, the movie better sure as Hell make up for this, I'm telling you right now, 'cause I'm stuck in Nowhereland! You ran outta ink too, didn't you, ya bastards?"
Studio Gainax has become famous for, among other things, deliberate subversion of the subjects its shows tackle. True to its company's roots, most of its best subtle satire is of its own fans and their expectations.
Many of its endings are not light-hearted, though calling them strict Downer Endings is a misnomer here. The more common themes associated are lots of dialogue with obscure metaphor and conversation and a serious treatment. The philosophy of the series is most openly seen here. Indirect or Distant Finales pop up too. Basically a Genre Shift in the last episodes, usually aiming to dark. Expect a Drama Bomb Finale.
Even if another production company has done a story, saying a show has a Gainax Ending is usually a spoiler-free but well understood "warning" to the watcher for a strange ending. While certainly not the first or the only company to do so, this exaggerated stereotype has pretty much been stuck on them since Neon Genesis Evangelion.
A more cynical use of the term Gainax Ending can also refer to running out of budget before the end of a series leading the last episodes to contain lots of Stock Footage, voice overs, unresolved plots, and other tricks — Gainax once prominently had a Grand Finale done in black and white. How well this works artistically is debatable. However, this is less common nowadays, as shows concentrate their budgets for the first and last sets of episodes most of the time, and the inevitable tidying up for the DVD releases.
Related to the above, but more applicable to solo creations, there are cases where an author runs out of time/brainpower/creativity/ sanity, and cannot come up with an ending to a story. In which case, the options are "shelve it until such time as it can be resolved" or "write something, anything, the first thing that comes into your head". The first isn't always an option, especially if they're being paid by the word.
A potentially even more cynical use of this trope is as a disguised Sequel Hook or ambiguous Cliff Hanger. Although such uses aren't always cynical. Sometimes the writers just don't want to flog that particular dead horse so hard. Sometimes they just don't know that the studio isn't going to spring for their intended sequel/season/spinoff. But sometimes they're just hedging their bets with an ending that will lead on to the sequel (if they get to make it), or just confuse the hell out of people (if they don't).
One way to tell whether or not you're watching a Gainax Ending is if you find yourself repeating Spike Spencer's words from the opening quote: is this how you end the series?!?!?!?!?!
(Note: If the above quote is delivered in anger, you're likely dealing with a Wall Banger.)
Compare Outer Limits Twist, Dada Ad.
Not to be confused with Gainaxing, which is not a downer so much as an UP and downer.
Examples
Anime and Manga
- As mentioned above, Neon Genesis Evangelion for both interpretations of the Gainax Ending. This, however, only applies to the original ending (episodes 25 and 26 of the TV series), as End of Evangelion is a much less sophisticated Downer Ending.
- They're now remaking the series in the form of four movies, which will apparently have yet another alternate ending.
- And we can assume that there will be yet more alternate ending action if the manga is ever finished.
- Even the movie ending is pretty bizarre by normal standards, and would probably be considered an example by the standards of most of the other things on this page if the TV ending hadn't out-Gainaxed Gainax.
- Mahoromatic (and yes, it's another Gainax production!) seems to end every episode in this manner. In fact, the entire premise of the show is that as a non-rechargeable combat android, Mahoro can literally number the days till she deactivates, and the viewers are constantly reminded of this fact.
- The original manga follows the same format in this regard.
- It should be noted as well that that The countdown is never finished, as Mahoro's ultimate attack drains the same energy that keeps her alive; she is forced to use it in the second season, leading to the Time Shift Enigmatic Ending
- The anime adaptation of Yami To Boushi To Hon No Tabibito had a rather disappointing ending to what some would consider a classic yuri series.
- The anime of Excel Saga actually subverts this trope; in the last few aired episodes it suddenly gets a real plot going and is much more serious. Then in the final (albeit unaired) episode, it becomes even more weird, as if to make up for the serious finale.
- Well really, the broadcast finale was a rather lighthearted mix of humor and light drama, while the second to last broadcast episode was the (almost) completely serious one.
- Chobits starts out as a typical Magical Girlfriend-cum-Moe show, then, about halfway through, gets...er, weird. And to top it off, after spending half the series contemplating the sentience of persocoms, the single most advanced persocom in existence states that she isn't really sentient, and neither are any of the other Chobits - they're highly advanced, naturally, but when you get down to the nitty-gritty, they're only following their programming. Most of the fans interpreted this turn of events as a gigantic middle finger from CLAMP.
- The manga is straightforward about this, but I seem to recall the anime made her actually sentient.
- Petite Princess Yucie is a light-hearted Magical Girl anime that just happens to be made by Gainax. Naturally, they run headlong into this trope with Arc's poisoning, Yucie's decision to use her wish to save him rather than break her own curse, and the revelation that not only does the wish made by the Platinum Princess require the sacrifice of the other contestants, but if the wish isn't made, the world of the Platinum Princess will be destroyed. All of this appears to culminate with the decision by the other four candidates to wipe Yucie's memories of them so she can make the wish without guilt. The very last episode then inverts the whole trope by taking a sharp whipswing back around as Yucie recovers her memories and, through The Power Of Friendship, restores the lives of all of her friends.
- Revolutionary Girl Utena. Of course, compared to the rest of the series...
- The makers of the Air anime were likely shooting for a Bittersweet Ending, but the ambiguity of what happens after Misuzu's death leaves many viewers in the dark.
- Same for Clannad: To understand the Gainax Ending requires a lot of analysis of the dialogue between Ushio and the Garbage Doll before the Illusionary World collapses. Also, one has to wonder why Nagisa has knowledge of Tomoya wishing that he'd never met her, as well as if the reality where Nagisa, Tomoya, and Ushio died really happened. It really did.
- Divergence Eve: Misaki Chronicles does this. It breaks the original theme of the series by showing everyone dead is alive again, and also is totally confusing.
- The Big O, partly because of the head writer's love of Mind Screw and partly because it was only intended to be a season finale. To summarize: The former Union agent Angel discovers that her memories of her childhood are false, and the enigmatic Gordon tells her that she's not a human being. He then leads her to an elevator going deep underground. She reappears either turned into or controlling a negative-colored mecha that erases everything it touches, finally leaving behind only a Star Trek-style holodeck grid, until Roger calls out to her to stop, giving an impassioned speech ending with "You must stop denying your own existence as a human being!". She seems to ignore him, but after both her mecha and Roger's erase each other, there's a flash of light, and the entire world reappears as it was
before episode 25 at the very beginning of the first episode. Full synopsis here . Message boards were flooded with "they pulled an Evangelion on us!".
- They weren't sure if they'd be able to have a third series, but only the epilogue would have changed - Chiaki J. Konaka originally had a different epilogue which went into more detail than the one we got and literally ended with a curtain falling, but was asked by the U.S. network to write a less conclusive ending in case they picked it up for a third season. They didn't.
- Creative differences caused a Gainax Ending in Kare Kano, causing the popularity of the series to shoot up considerably.
- BLAME! arguably combined a Gainax Ending with a Downer Ending and maybe even an acid trip. What's definitely for sure is that it's certainly a Gainax Ending. There's a prequel, and a series that might be connected to BLAME!, but other than that we're left with...a lot of head scratching after reading it. And just for completeness, the main character is even left on what could be interpreted as a giant blue ball.
- Erm. Very last panel would make things abit clearer in connection with the short summary given at the beginning of NSE. Basically The blue sphere was the egg (created by Cibo/Sanakan) designed to create a human with the Net-terminal genes Killy was looking for. The egg could only grow in a pure place, by awesome coincidence Killy falls into just that place after being shot. The last panel depicts a human wearing a life-suit with Killy leading the way. NSE follows this up confirming that Killy did indeed complete his mission and turned off the Netsphere.
- He Is My Master, another show animated by Gainax, is a light, funny, gag series about a guy with a maid fetish. How else to end the series than with a sudden Mood Whiplash into angst and philosophizing?
- Abenobashi Mahou Shoutengai, made by Gainax, has an ending that may make no sense whatsoever to you if you didn't follow the shows' philosophy and possibly See The Sailboat.
- Xamd Lost Memories. An Ancient Conspiracy of soul-eating albino children. A stillborn Death Seeker kaiju. Only a mass-sacrifice Spirit Bomb can stop the Big Bad, except not. The main character goes to a Journey To The Center Of The Mind and defeats the Big Bad by giving him his name... Or was it the laser? Instrumentality! The main character dies, and gets better nine years later for no reason! ...Oh, and he has inexplicably aged in the meantime.
- Bagi, the Monster of Mighty Nature does this. At the end, Bagi is left prowling the jungle with her human intelligence destroyed, and Ryo just decides it would be better to stop trying to catch her.
- Although not popularly characterized as such, this troper was never able to figure out the ending of Last Exile. Particularly what EXILE actually was.
- Exile was the colony ship that brought humans to the planet (if it qualifies as such) the series takes place on; in the end, it takes the protagonists back there.
- The manga version of Sound Horizon's Ark starts out straightforward enough, but a few pages into the second and final chapter, it takes a sudden detour through WTFville into Gainax Ending Land. This troper, who translated said manga and is quite familiar with the overall story line of the album it's based on, still doesn't get it.
- White Album
- Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle isn't over yet, but the buildup for the finale suggests something like this is going to happen.
Comic Books
- The ending to DC's Final Crisis is really beyond explanation or understanding, as if Grant Morrison had all these epic ideas but never figured out how to stick them together coherently.
- The ending to Whatever Happened To The Caped Crusader. Granted, the series was intended to close the character of Batman with a metaphysical look at the character, but the ending grabs metaphysics and goes straight into the surreal, passing by Elseworlds, multiple universes, and the Golden, Silver, and Dark Ages of comics along the way.
- The last chapter of Watchmen is intended to come across as a Gainax Ending, until you re-read the comic and associated documents to pick up all the foreshadowing.
Film
- On the subject of the Mind Screw subtype of Gainax Ending, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Essays have been written. Many, many, essays. (The book was slightly better explained.)
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail. However, this might have too simple an ending for this to count. Everyone gets arrested. Interesting note: The original scripted ending was to have a large battle that the English begin to lose, but they are saved by swallows dropping coconuts. This editor thinks that would have been far better, but considering how much of a horrible time everyone had working on the movie, it's not surprising they wanted to finish it quickly.
- This troper's brother has a book written by the Pythons that explains the reason for the changed ending—all the actors were being used as the English side of the fight, so there was no budget and no cast to be the French. One of the Pythons suggested, "Oh, let's just have everybody get arrested."
- From what I heard, they also just ran out of money. Their budget was famously small (That's why they had coconuts instead of horses), and they spent most of it on "locations and drink."
- The Pythons where fond of this kind of endings anyway. See below under Live Action TV
- The Wachowski Brothers refuse to explain exactly what's going on with Neo and Smith, the Source, flaming truth vision, etc. etc. in the sequels to The Matrix. The fan theories are a bit odd, but that's unescapable given what they've got to work with.
- Lawn Dogs is a fairly realistic and depressing movie about the friendship between a 10 year old girl, Devon, and a 21 year old lower-class outsider, Trent. You know it's going to end bad, when after Devon shoots the man who is beating up Trent and helps him to his car, she gives Trent a comb and a mirror and asks him to throw them out the window as he drives away, to cover his tracks. When he later does so, a river rises up underneath him, and a forest sprouts up behind him. This actually makes some sense metaphorically and was slightly set up, but still seems to come completely out of nowhere.
- The ending of the movie adaptation of Silent Hill was quite opaque.
- The film of Being There ends when the main character is taking a stroll by himself after losing interest in Ben's funeral, and winds up walking out into the middle of a lake, actually walking on water. And, just so there's no confusion, when he realizes where he is, he fully submerges his umbrella before accepting the situation and continuing his stroll. This ending was not the scripted one, but one the director conceived because he figured the movie was so believably acted - given its plot - that audiences would not find it unbelievable that the protagonist could do this.
- The ending of the first Dungeons and Dragons movie has the remaining main characters standing over the grave of the comic relief. They hold a stone over the grave and turn into little balls of floaty light and float away.
- Vanilla Sky, based on the Spanish Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes), has a pretty strange ending. It appears to be something along the lines of a sci-fi All a Dream ending, except that, when he wakes up, just before cutting to credits, we clearly hear the voice of someone who shouldn't exist outside the dream. Or maybe that wasn't it, but there was some sort of contradiction in that final line that couldn't be explained.
- On the original Spanish film they make it clear it was all a simulation, he was connected to a machine dreaming until his body could be repaired, and the film ends when he accepts this as a reality. The last thing heard after he decides to go back to the (now future) world, on the black screen before the credits, is "open your eyes".
- The ending of The Black Hole. The crew go into the black hole and then... they're in Hell? And then they're in space? Wha?
- This troper swears in some child book adaption he read that they ended up in another galaxy or an alternate universe with all the planets the black hole has consumed/that were on the other side were there to explore. And perhaps...the act of such defiance of physics made them cross hell and heaven? Or they thought they did? This is what happens when directors are inspired by 2001...
- This troper has a graphic novel version of The Black Hole that has the above ending. I've actually only seen the movie once, and was sorely disappointed. The graphic novel is far more entertaining.
- One novelisation has the crew passing into the black hole, and somehow being spread across the Universe while still being aware. Some kind of trippy/pseudo-cosmic Ascend To A Higher Plane Of Existence kind of thing, presumably. The final line says that they then "...contemplate the universe they had become". Duuuuuude.
- I think I read somewhere that, due to the distortion of time, you would remain conscious while disintegrating and having your atoms smeared around the event horizon. Luckily, your perception of the experience would be that you were a completely normal, whole person. As far as I can remember.
- The ending to the remake of Planet Of The Apes. Marky Mark hops in his spacepod, flies back through the timewarp, and... suddenly he's on Earth (or what we assume is Earth), and apes have replaced humans. Did he just bump his head getting into the pod, and is hallucinating? Yeah, that's gotta be it.
- According to Tim Burton that was supposed to be a cliffhanger if a sequel was made. It wasn't, now it's just weird.
- Also, the book had pretty much the same ending (although since it was originally in French, they used the Eiffel Tower instead of the Lincoln Memorial).
- You realise this makes Thade the Missing Lincoln, right?
- ...
- ...
- I regret nothing.
- This troper watched the movie and understood the entire thing. He even came up with a complex explanation full of diagrams and stuff, but nobody understood it, so he forgot it.
- Local Hero, for the most part a charming, low key dramedy about a Texas oil man being sent to buy up a small Scottish village, gets a little weird in its last half hour. It's hinted but never confirmed that the old man who's blocking the purchase is descended from the oil company's original owners, and that a major character's love interest is a mermaid. Then the oil man is sent back home, where he piles some shells he collected from the village beach on his counter, tacks up some pictures he took, and goes onto his balcony to watch the sunrise. Cut back to the village, and its one phone ringing with no one answering. It's also left a little vague who the title refers to, though most agree that it's Ben, the old man mentioned above.
- The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) ends on a deliberately ambiguous note. The Earth is hurtling towards the Sun, but a series of massive nuclear detonations in Siberia may avert the catastrophe. The last scene shows the journalists waiting in the print room with two editions ready for printing, one saying WORLD SAVED and the other WORLD DOOMED. (The American distribution however included the sound of church bells ringing, implying that the world had been saved).
- Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan ends with Jason being caught in a flood of toxic waste in the New York sewers (happens every night apparently) causing him to, for some reason, become a completely normal looking little boy in swimming trunks. The sequels never address this.
- Knowing. The world will end in a super flare from our sun unless something is done at the location of the very first Creepy Child's new home. What happens there? Some alien/angel/demon/somethings that have been following the main kids around for the whole movie take said kids into some spaceship. The main protagonist goes back to be with his family. The sun asplodes. Cut to a shot of the two main kids being dropped off in some sort of meadow centered around the tree, presumably the kids are to Adam/Eve the human race again on some other planet, maybe its earth after destruction, and why are there other similar spacehip things in the background? After an entire movie trying to stay somewhat scientific and avoiding the mystical, they end it like this? Most people in this troper's theater never saw when the credits started, as they had already walked out.
Literature
- In Nuklear Age by Brian Clevinger (who makes Eight Bit Theater), most of the book is a comedic parody of the superhero genre, somewhat akin to The Tick. The last section of the book, however, turns quite rapidly to dark, with a villain killing off main characters, extremely large segments of the world's population, and injecting a bunch of philosophy based somewhat off of Norse Mythology into the mix. It was an elaborate joke played on the readers.
- After a series of voyages to societies with satirical iniquities, the fourth book of Gulliver's Travels features a trip to a Mary Suetopia of sapient horses who define all evil through a race of bestial humanoids. It ends with the heretofore inquisitive and tranquil Gulliver falling into despair upon realizing that the English are more like these beasts than the horses. Boo-friggin'-hoo.
- A Series of Unfortunate Events. Basically every single plot point in the series was left unresolved at the end. The last book can best be summarized as "Ha, ha! In life, there are lots of mysteries you'll never know the answer to. So long and thanks for all the book sales."
- This Troper thinks the ending was left open for interpretation. The readers themselves could decide what happened. Whether everyone died at sea or lived happily ever after or somewhere in the middle is entirely up to you.
- Moreover, the reader not only finds out the fate of almost all the major characters (even if that fate is occasionally metaphorical), enough information is given for the readers to make a good guess about the immediate Lemony/Beatrice backstory, even if the characters can't. The author doesn't give explicit answers, but a lot is done by implication.
- The Bible. Revelation is a bizarre and trippy (if evocative) Mind Screw set in the far future, or quite possibly Twenty Minutes Into The Future from its writing (1500 or so years ago), it isn't exactly clear. Just deciphering its meaning has led to quite a bit of Wild Mass Guessing and not a little Fan Dumb.
- Science-fiction author Philip K. Dick pretty much made a career out of this and Mind Screw. Ubik is the mother of all Gainax Endings.
- However, if you count the many short stories and The Man in the High Castle, he's not as screwy as compared to Ray Bradbury. Hell, a LOT of the stories make a lot of sense, especially the collection The Golden Man.
- Pretty much everything Neal Stephenson ever wrote. Take for example, Cryptonomicon: although the novel's ending is implied to be suitably epic, by that point in the story, the POV character has lost interest, so all we get is a bare-bones version of events, with a month's worth of events crammed into just under six pages.
- Robert Sheckley's Mindswap has this. The hero ends up trapped in the "Twisted World" but believes himself to have regained his own body and returned home successfully.
- The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy books all seem to end up here, apart from the eponymous first book which ended on an intentional Sequel Hook.
- Only Mostly Harmless really fits this; the others all have very comprehensible, if not substantial endings. Mostly Harmless sees, as far as I understand it, every possible version of Earth and therefore every version of Arthur and Trillian destroyed forever by the Vogons, concluding their plot arc nicely. However, it completely fails to tie up any number of outstanding plotlines but does give us a possible Ultimate Question in "Where does it all end?"
- EVERY Goose Bumps book ever writen.
- The ending of the Dungeon fantasy series, which was written by multiple authors, leaves much unexplained and even makes the main character into some kind of god without explanation.
Live Action TV
- The Prisoner is one of the earliest examples. A synopsis exists at Wikipedia.
- Kamen Rider Ryuki managed to pull off an Everybody Lives ending without ruining its There Can Be Only One premise, and while justifying the alternative continuities of the movie ("Episode Final") and the TV special ("13 Riders"). It's just damn confusing the first time you watch it, mainly because it's something of a Jigsaw Puzzle Plot.
- Twin Peaks (or every other David Lynch film for that matter).
- Except for the aptly-named The Straight Story.
- At the end of the famous Dead Parrot Sketch in ''Monty Python's Flying Circus'', the customer is told to go see the store owner's brother in Bolton, Lancs to replace his dead parrot. When he gets there, he finds that the store he arrives at is exactly the same as the one he just left — even the birdcage he left behind is there. He asks the Bolton shop owner (who looks like the other one with a mustache) if he is indeed in Bolton, only to be told he is in Ipswich. The customer then goes to back to the train station to complain that the train to Bolton dropped him off at Ipswich, but when told that he is in Bolton, he turns to the pet shop and asks why he was told that he is in Ipswich. It turns out that the store owner made a failed palindrome. This still does not explain the similarities between the two shops, and at this point the customer gets fed up with the nonsense, prompting the Colonel's appearance.
- In the episode Michael Ellis, the main character is offered several different endings (such as a chase, a slow fade or a happy ending) by an assistant of the "End of Show Department". Eventually, the assistant asks: "How about a sudden ending?" Cut to the black screen.
- Easier, really, just to say Monty Python, full stop, as almost none of their sketches have a true ending. When the troupe felt a sketch had run its course, they'd drop a 16-ton weight; have the "Stop, this is silly!" officer enter; or segue into an animated sequence, news broadcast or documentary. This was a reaction against conventional sketch comedy where every sketch had to have a punchline. The Pythons set about deliberately subverting this, and were dismayed to find that their comic mentor Spike Milligan had done it first with his show Q5.
- In an interview they stated that since usually many sketches where funnier than the punchline, they dropped it entirely.
- In the BBC's 2008 remake of Survivors, there's six weeks of build up and setting up of plot threads, of which not one is resolved after the ending of the series. This troper for one had to double check that it was in fact the final episode, as it is entirely a cliffhanger for at least SIX reasons. One can only hope the second season gets commissioned.
- It did. It's coming to BBC next winter.
- In the American remake of Life On Mars, Sam Tyler is a New York detective from 2008 who somehow found himself in 1973. Was he mad? Lying in a coma in a 2006 hospital bed, dreaming of 1973? Back in time? None of the above. Sam and his fellow officers from 1973 were really all from 2035. They were astronauts on the first manned Mars mission, and were kept sedated, with artificially-induced dreams, for the voyage.
- To be fair, the show was cancelled it's first season so this ending was placed in. Had they had a season or two more they could have foreshadowed it more and not made it such a Gainax (there had been some hints about it, but they only made sense in retrospect). The final shot of the episode, Somebody in 1970s shoes stepping onto the Martian Surface also left enough ambiguity that had there been a super-last-second renewal they could have been able to explain it away.
- Sopranos? Black screen?
Musical
- Our House the Madness musical: was always going to have two endings due to the parallel universes plot. However, even after these are resolved via dual Twilight Zone Twists there's still time for a third 'ending' to turn it all into a Shaggy Dog Story (done by introducing a third option in the life-changing event at the beginning of the play which would mean none of the things we've just been watching happened at all.) Oh well. Song and dance number!
Video Games
- Probably the most famous example in gaming culture is Metal Gear Solid 2. It owes a great deal to The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster's mindscrew on the distinctions between author, character, reality, and fiction. Much it takes place in cheap talking heads CODEC sequences to boot, although it's not clear whether the game's production had any budgetary problems (it was certainly pressed for time and had the backlash of 9/11 to deal with). There is no way to summarise the key events in a reasonable amount of space, so you can look here if you want to know what happens. There was a point to all the meandering, but the end result was not popular.
- Depends on who you asked, and it's very much explained in Metal Gear Solid 4. And originally, it was supposed to be a simple story of Snake taking on another set of terrorists (basically the Tanker chapter stretched to the full length of the game). And, yes, the ending was supposed to be a lot more explained, but Kojima cut it out after 9/11.
- Xenogears, starting somewhere along the second disk, replaced virtually all overland map movement and scenes with the characters sitting in chairs narrating everything that happened. This actually is an openly admitted case of a low budget and forced rush to market causing a Gainax Ending.
- Monetary constraints aside, the ending was pretty straightforward: the party fights Deus in its sanctuary, Elly takes Deus away before it self-destructs on the planet, Fei enters Deus and he and Elly have a Battle In The Center Of The Mind with it, chat with Krelian, and leave before Deus explodes. Then they come back home to a very unambiguous, triumphant welcome from the rest of the heroes. It got metaphysical once or twice, but everything else was spelled out crystal-clear, leaving virtually no room for alternate interpretations.
- The ending of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge: Lechuck is actually Chuckie, Guybrush's creepy brother, haunting him through the game for breaking one of his toys. The whole thing was essentially an amusement park fantasy played out in the minds of two bored kids. Or Lechuck just put a spell on Guybrush to make him think so. Even for a game series that thrived on absurdist humour and Star Wars references, the mixing of the two with presumed Lotus Eater Machine involvement created a true masterpiece in confusing endings which was only explained by the next game that was released six years later.
- Well, more "retconned" than "explained." Series creator Ron Gilbert insists that he has his own idea of what MI2's ending means, and he's not telling.
- Since he's no longer involved with the series, maybe he should...
- Super Mario Galaxy, surprising for a series that's usually known for shallow plots. It usually takes at least two viewings of the ending for players to figure out just what happened, which is convenient because you need to see the ending four times for Hundred Percent Completion. Apparently, it somehow involves the universe being destroyed and reborn. And Rosalina is... some kind of goddess maybe?
- Chrono Cross: The main character is supposed to be dead. A computer that controls destiny. The computer kept humanity safe from a race of dragon people, Nice Job Breaking It Hero. Everybody from the last game is inexplicably dead and your actions may or may not have actually done anything about it. Schala Lives! Then finally, a credits sequence of a girl running around in Tokyo with a necklace that has nothing to do with anything. And good luck figuring out if you actually accomplished anything from playing the game.
- Any video game ending with a strange glitch can be perceived as one of these in the right light. For example, this is the way you knew you'd beaten the original arcade version of Donkey Kong. By the 22nd level, the time limit wraps around to become physically impossible for Jumpman/Mario to complete the first stage in time. This has become known as the Kill Screen.
- The first two Earthworm Jim games were near-legendary for their bizarre endings: In the first one, the Damsel In Distressed, a mere five feet away from the protagonist's rescue, is crushed by a falling cow launched by the player way back in the very first level. The second game's ending is even more insane: Turns out the Damsel In Distress was a cow in disguise. As was the Big Bad. And the player. Wait, WHAT?!
- Kingdom Hearts: Imagine: You're a kid or teen or young adult, who bought the game, just because he/she likes Disney. I mean, it got Disney on the box after all, doesn't it? So, what are you expecting? A nice, happy, "everything's perfect" ending. But you didn't count on one thing: The Final Fantasy elements of the game! Suddenly, you find yourself in an ending where your best friend is trapped in some scary place, along with Mickey Mouse, for some reason you can't comprehend (after all, he could have just gone over to Sora, to the other side of the door, couldn't he?). Your girlfriend is suddenly appearing out of nowhere (wasn't she in Traverese town when we last saw her?) just to disappear again after two sentences (one of which consists of a single word: Sora!). And then, finally, your party is chasing a dog with a piece of paper in a place you've never seen ANYWHERE in the game, and there's absolutely no explanation of how they even got there! As for me, this ending was the first true "WTF just happened?!"-moment in my whole life! Thank God there's a sequel. Two to be exact. The dog is, strangely, obliterated from the first sequel, the piece of paper, that seemed to be SOOOO important, from BOTH.
- Beyond Good And Evil springs a last-minute surprise on the player that's set up in such a way that it's incredibly easy to miss - the Dom Z are feeding on the citizens of Hillys because their own weird alien lifeforce, which they call "shauni", was stolen from them — by Jade's parents. Jade's somehow the Dom Z's shauni, and they would very much like her back. In hindsight, it's a decent explanation for a lot of odd behaviour that the player's already put down to "it's a game". It's not terribly well set up even if you notice the extremely incidental evidence the game presents in the final level, specifically a conversation the player overhears that's optional, and how the sacred chant the Dom Z keep repeating has the same lyrics as the battle music — including the word "shauni".
- The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. After finally getting back the Macguffin, Martin is about to be crowned as the Emperor...and then hordes of Daedra appear out of nowhere even though the Big Bad behind their summoning into the mortal realm is dead, and said Big Bad's god arrives, driving you and Martin into a temple. Then Martin breaks the Macguffin, which somehow makes him morph into a dragon and drive off the Daedra, then inexplicably turning to stone. After going through all your trials, it feels like a sick joke and unrewarding, and it practically runs on A Wizard Did It.
- But it was awesome. It was like seeing Charizard and Goro fight!
- To be fair, the whole Martin-turns-into-a-giant-dragon thing sort of makes sense if you think about everything involved. The Amulet of Kings contains the blood of the god Akatosh. Since Martin is the last descendant of the Imperial line, and thus Akatosh's appointed peacekeeper on Earth, breaking the amulet allows him to "meld" with Akatosh in his physical form as a giant dragon. He then turns to stone because there's no more need for an Emperor once the Amulet of Kings is broken.
- On the topic of The Elder Scrolls, Daggerfall has a few of its Multiple Endings, specifically using the Totem yourself (and being destroyed by the Numindium), and giving the Mantella to Mannimarco (where he transcends his earthly body, rockets into the sky, and becomes a god. And note that both of these were canon.
- The problem with that interpretation, however, is that Martin is not actually descended from Tiber Septim, since Tiber had only one child (Pelagius I), who himself died childless. Every later "Septim" is descended from Tiber's brother Agnorith, and thus they're all pretenders to the Septim dynasty. Also, the Amulet predates the Septims by millennia, so it's unclear how or why it's tied to them in any way but accident. Also, it's unclear why the dormancy of the Amulet during the Akaviri Interregnum didn't have any apparent consequences, or how Empress Katariah (a Dunmer) and her son Emperor Uriel Lariat (son of Gallivere Lariat), reigned for a combined 89 years, despite definitively not having any Septim blood of any sort whatsoever. Also, etc, etc. In short, Bethesda broke the canon with Oblivion's story.
- Fallout 3 proudly follows the tradition of Oblivion. After a Crowning Moment Of Awesome wherein you are accompanied by a giant robot with laser eyes who tosses mini-nukes like footballs, you are told that the water purifier is about to go nuclear and that Someone Has To Die, which flies right in the face of the survival theme that most of the rest of the game has. Even worse, a number of companions you can take with you that can survive (even thrive) in high-radiation environments refuse to do it for you for extremely contrived reasons. On top of that, there are none of the patented Fallout mini-endings that explain how your actions in certain sidequests affected the futures of those organizations or settlements. All in all, a Wall Banger for most people.
- The Expansion Pack, Broken Steel fixes this... somewhat: The game no longer ends if you choose to make the Heroic Sacrifice yourself and your character winds up waking up a few weeks later after being rescued by the Brotherhood of Steel. In addition, you can now send one of your radiation-immune companions in to save the day in your place. You do however still get berated by the ending for refusing to do the job yourself, even though such a sacrifice is compltely wasteful and unnecessary when it can be done by another character that can easily save the day AND live.
- Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic II had this for Light Side. You beat Kreia, she talks to you for a bit, explaining why she liked you, and explaining the fates of some of your comrades. Then, she dies, your ship picks you up, falls into a chasm to its apparent destruction, then flies away from the exploding planet unscathed. AND NOTHING ELSE HAPPENS. No denouement, no "what's next?", just hop on the ship GOOD NIGHT, EVERYBODY, leaving everyone wondering "Okay, is there ANY backstory for Sion or Nihilus? How did the remote beat G0-T0? And why was HK apparently completely extraneous?"
- Dark side wasn't any better, in fact it was worse. Your ship falls into a chasm before you even reach the academy for no apparent reason. Then, you beat Traya and become leader of the Sith Academy. That's it, no mention of what happened to the rest of your party, except for the remote, which G0-T0 presumably destroyed. Just you and the academy. A Winner Is You indeed.
- You can thank Lucas Arts for the rushed ending. Executive Meddling, indeed.
- No kidding. If I recall, the planned ending involved a variety of things, such as your friends actually trying to help (rather than mostly just disappearing once you hit Malachor), possible tragic deaths, and even maybe facing Atris instead of Kreia. Which would have been much better. But no. Thanks a lot, Lucas Arts.
- The World Ends With You is almost a Double Subversion: the plot is a Thirty Xanatos Pileup we don't get too many details about, and the ending it just utterly confusing. However, you're then given the ability to unlock reports explaining what happened. But then you eventually get all of them, and unlock a final scene that makes even less sense.
- Dragon Squadron Danzarb ends with the revelation that the soldiers in the squad are mind-wiped convicts who were sent to a remote island chain to fight staged battles (while being secretly filmed "reality TV" style). The money earned from their exploitation is being used to fund "real" military ventures in the rest of the world (which they've been sealed away from). After discovering the truth, the main character looks into a camera and chews out whoever is watching, scolding them for getting a kick out of watching other people die for the sake of their own amusement (implying that the player, who has been watching the whole thing, is one of those sickos).
- The Good ending for Star Soldier: Vanishing Earth consist of a nonsensical poem that doesn't have anything to do with the plot. The Bad ending, while making more sense, is still very strange.
- The first Silent Hill game invokes this trope no matter which of the Multiple Endings one achieves. Both Good endings have Alessa and Cheryl merging and forming a giant glowing woman thingy. Kaufman splashes some red liquid on it, and it suddenly becomes a giant red demon thingy, which Harry then has to kill. After its death, the glowing woman returns and gives Harry a baby, who then runs off into the fog. The end. The Bad ending has Harry kill the glowing woman thingy, which says "thank you" in Cheryl's voice before dying. Harry collapses in grief as the room crumbles, before Cybil snaps at him to leave. The Worst ending is also the worst Gainax Ending, as it only has Harry still in the car from the accident at the beginning of the game, unconscious/dead and bleeding from the head.
- By those standards, the alien ending, in which Harry is abducted by aliens after asking them if they've seen his daughter, almost makes sense.
- The following games mostly contain far less ambiguous endings (although they're still heavy on the Mind Screw), but they aren't immune from them. Without contest the most bizarre is one of the endings of the second game, in which James discovers that the controlling force behind the town and the cause of all his torment is a dog. No, not a talking dog, just an ordinary dog. A Welsh Corgie, to be specific. Her name is Mira.
- The "comedy ending" of The White Chamber seems to be this intentionally. The crew that Sarah had murdered turn up alive, and reveal that everything was just as planned for a surprise birthday party. It's rather entertaining, as the other crew members in this ending are a rather odd lot... Oh, and the meteor coming out of nowhere along with the karaoke bunny-ears guy riding it. "You were confused by the 'comedy' ending" indeed.
- Braid has one. We're not even sure how much of the entire game previous was metaphorical. Somewhere between 50 and a 100% probably.
- The final level has the Princess running away from a knight, while you follow underneath her and help each other overcome obstacles. At the end, you find yourself outside the princess's bedroom, and are only able to rewind time. Rewinding shows that in fact it was you who was chasing the princess, while she tried to stop you with a variety of traps that you managed to overcome, with the knight rescuing her at the end.
- Drakengard. Legions of creepy floating babies, a giant naked woman who uses sound as a weapon, a main character turning into a clone army of demonic angels that destroy the world, and that's just scratching the surface. It's like they were trying to out-Evangelion Evangelion.
- F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin's final battle is a figurative Mind Screw and a literal Mind Rape. And physical rape, too, while we're at it.
- Eternal Sonata.
- Practically anything and everything created by Suda51.
- World Of Goo - Every chapter has it's own Gainax Ending. The Ivy Goos float away with balloons! The world is powered by the beauty of a giant ugly woman! The World of Goo corporation's new product is the third dimension! MOM is a spam bot! The fish have wings and levitate the telescope! The title refers to the moon! Made even better by the insanely epic music that plays during each scene, despite the game's premise being, essentially, poking goo until it goes somewhere.
- Final Fantasy Tactics leaves us in the lurch about whether the main characters are really alive or dead. Due to bad visuals, there's also some confusion about whether Delita and/or Ovelia live or die after Ovelia stabs him.
- Battle For Wesnoth. Descent Into Darkness. "Forever and Ever, Amen."
- Leisure Suit Larry 3: Passionate Patti in Pursuit of the Pulsating Pectorals has an extremely bizarre ending: After the player spends the last third of the game scouring the jungles of Nontoonyt as Patti looking for Larry, both characters get captured by lesbian cannibals and bound in a cage. Patti then uses a magic marker to draw a magical portal into the air, which transports them out of the game and into Sierra Studios, where they run around the Police Quest, Space Quest and Kings Quest sets until Roberta Williams offers Larry a lucrative deal to design and write adventure games based on his own adventures. Al Lowe had to skip the fourth installment in the series altogether just to write himself out of that one.
- Mondo Agency and Psychosomnium. Cactus loves this kind of thing.
Radio
- Most The Goon Show episodes have no clear ending, unless everyone dies. The grand finale actually dissolves into random gibberish as the entire show comes to a crashing halt, and it doesn't seem atypical.
Western Animation
- The first season ending of Sheep In The Big City shifts to the Narrator escaping after all the characters are trying to capture him, then the Sheep rescues hin, going down the drain, and ends up having Sheep being Evil Overlord who can talk. Private Public start to speak French, and so is everyone else. Then the Narrator got put in the Narrator-powered raygun, with him begging that the whole thing's a dream then a flying pig appear and says This Is Reality or else he won't have wings. What?
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