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The Very Definitely Final Dungeon

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Surely, there can't be an Ultimate Decisive Battlefield! Right?
"This door just screams endgame."
Shiki Misaki, The World Ends with You

A video game with any sort of combat (and a few without) can be expected to end with a dramatic Final Boss battle. Console Role Playing Games in particular tend to be downright obsessed with epic final showdowns. This clash needs an appropriate venue. Some get away with an ordinary castle, Elaborate Underground Base or the like, but that real twang takes a place that might as well bear the words "FINAL CONFRONTATION HERE" in a spiky font, colored red and black with a remix of the main theme blasting in a thousand-mile radius.

It could be the tallest of spires or the highest of mountains. It could be somewhere in outer space, or deep beneath the world's surface. In a Scavenger World, it's a fully armed and operational battlestation from legend. Often it's the very Weapon of Mass Destruction the Big Bad wants. In any case, it embodies the words "serious business," and just entering it can merit an FMV or a Boss Battle (on the first try; from there on, it's easy as pie). Extra credit if it forms/arises/descends/erupts just when everything seemed all right, if it's more dangerous than would be allowed for any real place, and if it has a pretentious, overblown name.

And sometimes, just to screw with the player, the Very Definitely Final Dungeon seems peaceful and quiet... too quiet. Of course, It's A Trap. Expect it to be also the Point of No Return and/or Point of No Continues.

If they're going for a nostalgia feeling, there may be a bit of each terrain/level/mechanism from earlier in the game put in there, making a final conclusion of the game as a whole.

Interestingly enough, it's usually stressed that it will be incredibly difficult, maybe even impossible to leave the final dungeon once you've entered it. This only applies in gameplay. Most characters who enter the final dungeon simply leave after the boss has been defeated, sometimes barely finding a means to escape, but at other times with no explanation at all. Unless they die there. This sometimes does not come into play, as it is the boss's power causing some obstruction to leaving. The game will sometimes warn players that there's no turning back and ask them if they really want to move forward. If they're not lucky, they could be walking into that one level.

Where It All Began is a particular type where the final dungeon has some connection to — or in some cases even is — the spot where the game started. If the player can visit the final dungeon before the endgame, it's a Final Dungeon Preview. Can naturally be combined with Storming the Castle or Amazing Technicolor Battlefield. Compare and contrast Bonus Dungeon, an optional location that tends to be the only place that rivals the VDFD in terms of danger, and the Brutal Bonus Level, a Bonus Dungeon that most definitely will be more dangerous and challenging than the VDFD. For the exact opposite of the spelunking spectrum, see the Noob Cave. Beware of fake outs by the Disc-One Final Dungeon!

And if a game allows players to continue upon dying... that feature will often cease to be available once they enter the VDFD!


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Action Adventure 
  • ANNO: Mutationem: The Consortium's Elaborate Underground Base serves as the final area. It is a Marathon Level consisting of multiple research stations and assembly lines that is split into several sections filled with Elite Mooks and a Boss Bonanza with the pathway leading to the inner center of the facility where C is located.
  • Asura's Wrath has two. The main one has Asura and Yasha going into the center of Gaia to defeat the Vlitra Core. The DLC has you fighting the creator of the world, Chakravartin, inside of Naraka.
  • Cave Story:
  • EXTRAPOWER: Giant Fist has Zett's compound and the tunnels beneath, filled with his Body Horror experiments forming the last defense until the final bosses.
  • Shadow of the Colossus takes this trope seriously when you fight the Final Boss who lives on a dark mountain - under a huge rain storm. Said Final Boss virtually counts as a Very Definitely Final Dungeon unto itself, as well; it's big enough that more than one player has initially mistaken it for a last obstacle to climb before you reach the Final Colossus — until they notice the tower is moving.
  • Ōkami has the Ark of Yamato as the true final stage. Any previous dungeon that seemed to be the last one is only a Disc-One Final Dungeon, while this one shows that it's the real deal for having a Point of No Return.
  • Ōkamiden: The role is filled by the Dark Realm, which is where Akuro awaits. Chibiterasu arrives there after the completion of Moon Cave in the past, which in turn is followed by Kurow's betrayal.
  • The Castlevania games usually feature the top floor of the eponymous castle (or a different yet, similar one) as this, almost always featuring a very large staircase leading to the throne room, and occasionally after a Disc-One Final Dungeon. There are a few notable exceptions:
  • The Legend of Zelda series never fails to offer these:
    • The Legend of Zelda: Level 9, Death Mountain. You know you're there: "Spectacle Rock" is the overground architecture in the first quest (and the map, a skull, is by far the largest in the game). In the second quest it's in the very top-left corner, and the dungeon map is shaped like Ganon's head and is roughly as large. The music is much creepier than that used in the first eight dungeons, there are much stronger enemies that only appear in Level 9 in either quest (including a new Mini-Boss called Patra), and these levels are much more mazelike than their predecessors. In addition, if you don't have all eight Triforce pieces, a guardian awaits in the first room beyond the entrance to shoo you away.
    • Zelda II: The Adventure of Link: The role is filled by the Great Palace and is the longest level in the game, big enough for you to get lost. To get to it, you have to travel through a lava-strewn terrain, which only exists in that one part of the world. The Great Palace also has unique music, unlike the previous six dungeons which all had the same music. Also if you lose all your lives there (which is very likely to happen) you will begin your quest again from the entrance instead of all the way back at the start of the game. It is the only dungeon to feature this trait.
    • The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past: Ganon's Tower is where Link goes after having rescued all seven Maidens (including, among them, Princess Zelda) in the prior Dark World dungeons. It is located where the Tower of Hera would be in the Light World, and is protected by an energy layer that can only be removed with the power of the freed Maidens. It is also the biggest dungeon in the game, and on top of devious puzzles and obstacles it also includes a Boss Rush gauntlet against the original four bosses of the Light World. That said, you don't actually fight the final battle here, as Ganon fights you here under his Agahnim persona and then flees the scene to the Pyramid of Power for the actual final duel.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: Ganon's Tower is a giant black monolith floating over a sinkhole-shaped sea of lava, where Hyrule Castle used to be in the past era. After Link awakens all Sages and receives a sacred weapon from Princess Zelda (whose reveal and location also lead to her kidnapping by Ganondorf), he has to enter the Tower by crossing a rainbow bridge created by the freed Sages, and once inside he has to dispel the barrier to the top part by part.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask: The inside of the Moon, a terrifying grimacing moon, appears to be a beautiful field containing a single tree with children playing around it. Children wearing the masks of all the bosses. Most of it is optional (you can talk to the child wearing Majora's Mask to teleport directly to the final battle), and in order to fully complete the dungeon areas you'll need to have collected all masks in the game, as doing so will grant you a very powerful extra mask that is unavailable otherwise.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Oracle Games:
      • In Oracle of Seasons, the final dungeon is Onox's Castle, which is protected by a force field that holds on during much of the adventure's duration.
      • In Oracle of Ages, Veran spends the entire game building the final dungeon, right next to the village, and it ominously gets taller and taller as her plot progresses; logically, this invokes It's All Upstairs From Here by the time you manage to get inside.
      • If you're playing both games in linked form, completing the second one will settle the climax into the Room of Rites, where the final battles occur and the combined story is wrapped up for real.
    • The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker follows the footsteps of A Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time by giving this role to Ganon's Tower. This time, it's located next to Hyrule Castle in what used to be the land of Hyrule before its flood. Per tradition, a barrier prevents you from accessing it early and you'll need to empower the Master Sword with the help of two temple Sages to break it (as well as the Triforce of Courage in repaired form to return to Hyrule to begin with), but this time it's not in the Tower itself but in Hyrule Castle. The dungeon is divided into three sections: One in which you have to dispel a gate's seal by tackling rooms based on several previous dungeons, one which features an illusory puzzle and a sequence of rematches against a familiar Mini-Boss, and finally a long staircase leading to Ganon and the story's climax.
    • The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap opts for Hyrule Castle itself. While the location is technically visitable at several points before the endgame, Vaati's magic eventually warps it into a much more sinister structure than it was before. The dungeon itself is very tall, featuring numerous puzzles and enemies, including multiple Mini-Boss battles against Darknuts.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: Hyrule Castle is visited twice during the game's first half, but it can only be explored in full once the diamond-shaped barrier protecting it is destroyed by Midna with the help of the Fused Shadows. The Castle, barrier and all, is visible almost anywhere in the overworld. Bits of the final battle take place outside the castle as well.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass shakes up the usual formula by portraying its Mega Dungeon, the Temple of the Ocean King, as the very last dungeon in completion order. You even get to visit the very last floor before the game's climax (in fact, you have to do it in order to unlock the last quadrant of the World of the Ocean King, as it's there where the last regular dungeon lies). The catch is that the large door located there can only be opened when you manage to defeat all Phantoms in the area, for which you must have forged the Phantom Sword with the Pure Metals guarded in their temples. Beyond the door is the area where the Final Boss (Bellum) awaits, but you only fight it there in the first two phases, as the other two take place in the overworld.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks has the Dark Realm, a Final Boss, New Dimension accessible once you retrieve the Compass of Light at the very end of this game's Mega Dungeon (the Tower of Spirits). The Demon Train, as well as Chancellor Cole assisting the first form of Malladus, are confronted during the train portion and Phantom portion respectively, but the game kicks back to New Hyrule for the final parts of the battle.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword: Sky Keep serves as the ultimate destination, available once you learn the Song of the Hero and complete the final Silent Realm. The cinematic reveal of the location of this dungeon helps a lot, and its inner gameplay presents a novel set of puzzles that take advantage of its variable shape. However, the last two bosses aren't found here, as they'll only appear after you've completed it (namely in the past-era version of Sealed Grounds).
    • The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds: Lorule Castle, located at the center of Lorule and accessible after you've freed all Sages (though it's Hilda who breaks the seal with her magic, not the Sages with theirs). The second half of the game begins and ends in the domain of Hilda.
    • Hyrule Warriors: Ganon's Castle serves as this once more. This time, however, it was Hyrule Field until the events of the game allowed Ganondorf to corrupt it.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: The player is explicitly told from the start of the game that Hyrule Castle is housing Calamity Ganon. If you ignore all the dialog and cutscenes, the giant darkened castle in the middle of the world map, with black smoke swirling around and hordes of giant death-robots on patrol, is still pretty conspicuous; and even if you don't pick up on any of that, each main dungeon's completion adds a miles-long laser-sight pointing directly at Ganon's lair. Interestingly played with in that not only can it be visited at any time to fight the final boss, stopping by sometime before actually confronting Ganon is encouraged — a few sidequests and one of Link's memories require the player to visit the castle early.
    • Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity: Hyrule Castle again. It gets corrupted by the emerging Calamity Ganon halfway during the game, forcing Link and Zelda to flee so they can gather the allies and powers they need for the final confrontation. Then when all the pieces are in place, the allied forces of Hyrule have to Storm the Castle for the final confrontation.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: Hyrule Castle is NOT the final dungeon this time (in fact, if you're following the game's story in the suggested order, then Hyrule Castle will turn out to only be a Disc-One Final Dungeon, as there's still a Story Arc later on regarding an additional Sage). Rather, it's the Chasm beneath the castle where Ganondorf lies waiting beyond a series of tunnels teeming with Gloom-infested monsters, a Silver-Maned Lynel, and one last round versus Phantom Ganon, ending Where It All Began in the cavern Link and Zelda explored in the opening. Like before, this can be visited at any point, although this time there's little incentive to visit it early.
  • The final battle in Beyond Good & Evil takes place in a gargantuan cavern inside a large moon, on a slab of rock surrounded by green glowing water, with a giant statue-like Domz creature looking over the battle, and all your friends and other citizens of Hyllis locked in permanent paralysis in green Matrix-like pods lining the walls of the cavern. Doesn't get much more final than that.
  • La-Mulana has the Shrine of the Mother, where you don't quite fight the final boss yet. Only after defeating all the other bosses and chanting a series of mantras do you unlock the True Shrine of the Mother, a Palette-Swapped, badly-damaged version of the Shrine, the center of which you fight the final boss in.
  • Predator: Concrete Jungle had a pretty epic final battle which started beneath a gigantic hologram of Earth and ended in the right palm of a two-hundred-foot-tall statue of the Big Bad.
  • Krazoa Palace in Star Fox Adventures. Where better to end it than Where It All Began?
  • The Mysterious Murasame Castle ends at Murasame Castle, where the floor is black and the walls are Nothing but Skulls.
  • Mega Man Legends has the Main Gate, a mysterious ruin that you've spent the entire game trying to figure out how to get into, while the sequel has Elysium, the Utopia/Kill Sat that most of the series up to this point has revolved around. The Misadventures of Tron Bonne tops them both, however, by having its VDFD be a gigantic Reaverbot (as in, the gigantic Reaverbot isn't what you fight at the end of the dungeon, the gigantic Reaverbot is the dungeon). That's right, it beat out Shadow of the Colossus in the "VDFD actually being the thing you're trying to kill" department.
  • Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon has Treacherous Mansion. It's a huge castle-like structure suspended on a tiny piece of land above a gigantic ravine/waterfall, which also happens to be a museum based on the earlier levels in the game. And it has things like a pirate ship sticking out the side and part of a tree sticking out the roof for no real reason.
  • Folklore has the Netherrealm's Core, which holds the artifacts that make the afterlife work. The first half is made of floating islands, taken from Doolin's past history. The second, inner half is a dark crystal maze.
  • In Axiom Verge, the final area, Mar-Uru, is structured like a tower projecting upward from the rest of the game world, with the Final Boss stationed at the top.
  • In CrossCode, halfway through the game, Lea first reaches Gautham's tower in the Vermillion Wasteland. It's tall, dark, spiky, and contains a few goodly horrifying scenes. This turns out to be a false positive at first, since much of the game hasn't been explored yet. However, she inevitably returns (to beat it without punching through the walls) in the finale.
  • Little Tail Bronx:
    • Every other stage in Tail Concerto is either one of the many flying islands making up Prairie or a fortress of some kind. Then all of a sudden, you're inside an ancient world-breaking monster fighting an organic robot for the last stage.
    • Solatorobo goes further by having you fly into an alternate dimension within the planet-sized Tartaros, where the Final Boss resides.

    Action Game 
  • Gungrave:
    • The last stage of the first game is reached through an incredibly tall elevator which dwarfs the city it extends from. In stark contrast to the urban crime drama of the rest of the game, is an ancient floating temple with crystals hovering around, populated with blue-skinned monsters which look remotely human at best. And no, the game doesn't explain where it came from. There is an explanation, but it isn't in the game, it's in the artbooks.
    • The last stage of the sequel takes place in the "basement" of a previous stage (The Laboratory). Said "basement" is really The Methuselah Starship, an alien craft that crash-landed on the planet hundreds of years ago, and the very place where the technology necessary in engineering the Seed and Necrolyzation Projects originated from. Again, it makes more sense if you read the art book.
  • Jet Force Gemini: While Mizar's Palace is hyped as this, it's revealed to be only a Disc-One Final Dungeon, since Mizar pulls a Rage Quit upon being defeated easily by Lupus (a dog). The true last level is the Asteroid Mizar is travelling with to reach Earth in a desperate attempt to cause a doomsday there, and it can only be intercepted by performing The Great Repair to a sacred apaceship, which makes up for the whole second half of the game.
  • Metal Warriors: The ninth and final mission takes Stone into the Axis Central Command, the last bastion of the Dark Axis forces and the place where a devastating superweapon is being built. Stone has to storm the area, dismantle the superweapon and kill the chief figure of the Dark Axis to save the world. The level has areas where Stone has switch between going on foot and piloting his Mini-Mecha, as well as large moving machinery that makes navigation more difficult.
  • Ninja Gaiden II:
    • During many of the game's cutscenes, you could see the final tower in the background, and after beating one stage, you see the tower in question in a final cutscene before actually entering it.
    • The Imperial Palace in the Xbox game. It's an enormous tower hanging upside down and covered in giant skulls, and features rooms that house fetuses like bees in honeycombs on the walls. It's so very definitely final, that even the item chests are evil and spiky.
  • The final stages of Dm C Devil May Cry have Dante and Vergil assaulting Mundus's headquarters. However the final battle itself happens in the ruins of Limbo's collision with reality after you succeed in your mission to unseat Mundus.
  • No More Heroes:
    • Played straight at first in the original game, with the 1st Rank battle taking Travis well outside Santa Destroy and through an ominous forest, with the battle itself happening right outside the 1st Rank assassin's personal castle. Ultimately subverted with the True Final Boss battle with Henry, however, which happens in the parking lot of the Motel No More Heroes where Travis lives.
    • No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle: The 1st Rank assassin (Jasper Batt Jr.), awaits you at the very top of a large and ominous skyscraper, filled to the brim with his guards. Hilariously, it's also right across the street from Travis' home.
    • No More Heroes III: The 1st Rank assassin is Jean Baptiste VI, a.k.a. FU, and is fought at the top of the very tall, ominous Damon Tower (itself located in the central island surrounded by the other cities and towns).
  • Dishonored has Kingsparrow Lighthouse, which is either sunny and relatively calm, or filled with dramatic rain, thunder, and way more guards, depending on your choices. The final confrontation is either relatively straightforward on a low-chaos playthrough, or dramatic on a high-chaos playthrough. The sequel gives us Dunwall Tower, which has been converted into a den for Delilah and her witches, and is filled with disturbing imagery no matter what your choices were.
  • Versus Umbra: Nivaga in First Strike. Red sky, black ground, full of caves, and level names like "Satan's Backyard" all point to it being the final planet.
  • Streets of Rage:
    • The first game has its final level taking place in a long hallway within a penthouse. Said hallway is filled to the brim with mooks and you have a Boss Rush with every single boss you've faced. Beyond the doors at the end of the corridor is Mr. X himself.
    • The second game does something similar with its final level by taking place in a penthouse again (along with a rush of mooks and bosses), except the hallway leads to an elevator that takes you up to Mr. X and his elite henchman, Shiva.
    • The third game does it again a third time, but subverts it by revealing the Mr. X sitting in the chair is a robot in disguise and it isn't the final level. Round 7 has two different paths that signify the definitive final area; the bad ending path has you fighting your way to City Hall and the good ending path has you fighting through the robot factory.
    • In the fourth game, after fighting Mr. Y on his private jet, it crash-lands on Y Island where you fight him and his sister, Ms. Y. After beating them up for a bit, one of them jumps into a Humongous Mecha...
  • ActRaiser 2 has Death Helm, which is Hell reached through the mouth of a volcano. Entry requires taking the Sky Palace, the throne of the Almighty God, and crashing it through the walls. The final level is littered with dead cherubs and surviving angels are being exterminated, because shit just got real.
  • The Wonderful 101: GEATH-Wahksay, a massive space fortress that appears at the end of the third-to-last level. It serves as GEATHJERK's trump card, and is so heavily fortified that even reaching it with an army of a hundred Humongous Mecha takes an entire level on to itself. The Final Boss of the game is fought in its core. It is revealed after the first two phases of the boss fight that he controls all of GEATH-Wahksay, to the point where it acts as his mechanical body. Because of this, GEATH-Wahksay doubles as both the endgoal area of the game and the final boss itself.

    Adventure Game 
  • Professor Layton:
  • Torin's Passage has the player spending most of the game trying to get to the next progressively deeper layer of the planet. The final battle takes place inside the Big Bad's house... located in the very center of the planet (which you've been banished to as a punishment, rather than seeking out and entering for yourself), where gravity pulls from every direction, causing one to float in midair except inside said house. The house itself isn't all that special, except that the entryway is lined with all of the people the Big Bad has imprisoned in giant crystals with her powers, including Torin's parents, some of the game's creators, Sailor Saturn, and Darth Vader.

    Driving Game 
  • F-Zero:
    • The SNES game F-Zero (1990) has Fire Field as the final track in the King League. Not only it's longest track in the game, it also has every kind of obstacle thrown at you all at once; sharp turns, mines, dirt patches, ice, and magnets that pull you in from the sides. The race also takes place over what seems to be a field of lava.
    • F-Zero GX on the Gamecube has two of these. The second-to-last race in the storyline takes place inside a volcano, while the final race takes place on an ethereal virtual track that cycles through the colors of the rainbow.
  • Mario Kart has Rainbow Road. A large, hazardous racetrack in space (usually. Once it was floating over a city) with dramatic, upbeat music and looks like it's made out of a...well, rainbow. There's one of them in every game and it is always the last track in the game (if you do the cups in order, as Rainbow Road is part of the Special Cup). The games with Retro Cups have the Lightning Cup end with a retro Rainbow Road (except in the DS and Wii games, where the last retro tracks are GCN Yoshi Circuit and N64 Bowser's Castle respectively).

    Fighting Game 
  • Super Smash Bros.:
    • Super Smash Bros. Brawl: You might think the final levels of The Subspace Emissary take place in Subspace. And you'd be right... mostly. Actually the final dungeon of Brawl is The Great Maze, which is a literal maze made out of previous levels, where you have to fight off every character you've unlocked, and every boss you've faced so far in order to open the final door to Tabuu. Needless to say, it does feel very definitely final, and even looks final. A big grapeshaped cluster of worlds floating in darkness, with an ominous staircase leading to it and everything. And the ominous shadowed gate with the trophies of all those you defeat inside the Great Maze. The Very Definitely Final Part of the Very Definitely Final Dungeon within the Very Definitely Final Dungeon.
    • Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: World of Light has the Final Battle, a war between darkness and light that the player must keep balanced. If not...
  • Depending on the game, the final battle can take place in the inner sanctum of the final boss (such as Rugal's airship BlackNoah in The King of Fighters '94, Krauser's great hall in Fatal Fury 2, Seth's secret laboratory in Street Fighter IV, or Murakumo's operation room that also houses the biggest of the Blitz Motors in Akatsuki Blitzkampf).
  • The final boss fight of BlazBlue takes place at the Azure Boundary, an otherworldly dark realm dominated by a blue singularity located beyond the Forbidden Gate deep within the Boundary. For context and reference, this is the place the villains have been trying to reach over the course of the entire series and whoever wins this battle wins the right to rewrite reality as they see fit.
  • Mortal Kombat 11: The final fight in the Story Mode involves fighting Big Bad Kronika after she's already begun reversing time to the point all of mankind, including the characters in the game save for Raiden and Liu Kang, have been irrevocably erased from existence. This final bout even decides how far back history rewinds by the time of your victory; sweep both rounds, Kronika is stopped by the prehistoric era and therefore Kitana is saved, but take all three rounds, and history is rewound to the dawn of time itself. Kronika's stage even reflects these changes through the fight.

    First-Person Shooter 
  • Medal of Honor:
    • Medal of Honor: Vanguard's final mission 'The Crucible' takes place in a large factory that is visible in the distance during the parachute drop in the previous mission 'Endgame' and is the largest most heavily fortified structure in the game. The mission also takes place on the 25th of March 1945, during Operation Varsity, just 45 days before the war ended in Europe.
    • Medal of Honor: Airborne has Der Flakturm (the Flak Tower), a huge structure brimming with anti-aircraft artillery, and the last German stronghold in Essen, Germany.
  • You catch a glance of Xen at the beginning of the original Half-Life during the resonance cascade - having spent the first nine-tenths of the game in a mostly-underground military facility, you spend the final tenth suspended in the sky of an alternate dimension, fighting gigantic aliens atop semi-organic purple floating islands. Opinions are divided.
  • The Citadel in Half-Life 2: towering ominously over the entire rest of the game, blaring alarms and occasionally releasing hordes of airborne enemies, this miles-high spire (lit by deadly balls of energy, and consisting almost entirely of poorly-safeguarded catwalks) clearly fits the definition.
  • Dark Watch has Deadfall, an Mordor-esque town that is overflowing with fire, lava and brimstone, its populated by demonic ghosts and serves as an entrance for a hellish pocket dimension where the Final Boss takes place.
  • Descent has the final level of Descent 2, Tycho Brahe. Previously, the player would be given an introductory cutscene for each star system they visited (each consisting of 4 levels), but this is the only level that has its own cutscene separate from the ones before it, and it's an ominous one indeed, playing creepy music as you approach the clearly artificial planetoid.
  • Destiny has the Black Garden, the Vex "homeworld" and site of the main story's final mission.
  • Deus Ex, which takes place at Area 51. Not only do you find out that you're a clone and there are more nano-augmented agents like you, but it's also the place which can bring down the entire world order, has the mastermind of the Gray Death virus stationed there, AND has a malignant AI that wants to merge with you. Either way, it doesn't go down well, especially since the following game retconned the fact that you killed the mastermind, merged with the AI and destroyed the government AT THE SAME TIME.
  • Deus Ex: Invisible War has its Where It All Began final level.
  • Deus Ex: Human Revolution has Panchaea. A massive building hollowing out a section of the ocean built by one of the richest men on the planet. Due to his plans, it's also infested with augmented people being driven mad by their chips.
  • Halo:
    • Halo: Combat Evolved has the crashed Pillar of Autumn. Also where the game began.
    • Halo 2 ends at the building that houses Delta Halo's control room. You fight a lot of Brutes, and then you get to the control room itself where the Final Boss fight with Brute Chieftain Tartarus takes place.
    • Halo 3: Bringing things full-circle, the final mission takes place on the Halo installation being built to replace Alpha Halo, the one the Master Chief destroyed in the first game.
    • Halo: Reach ends with a firefight taking place on a platform overlooking the yet-to-depart Pillar of Autumn in the far distance. After firing the MAC at a dozen or so Phantoms and destroying the glassing laser on the Covenant cruiser, Noble 6 is then left behind in a foggy wasteland as endless and increasingly difficult waves of soldiers advance to take you down.
    • Halo 4 has you single-handedly storming the Didact's giant spaceship in order to nuke it from the inside before he destroys Earth.
  • The final part of The Darkness has you on a island with a lighthouse where the lighthouse is the where the final fight takes place. The area begins in full daylight, which as it's light you lose your powers, but soon after a solar eclipse happens, making the being inside you extremely powerful... for some reason, who then subverts this trope by destroying everything and body in a mile radius.
  • S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl ends inside the Chernobyl nuclear power plant itself, the location you've spent/struggled the entire game trying to reach. And during a period where you spent your time doing blind local teleportation, you surprisingly do one long distance teleportation on the very first place you began to play.
  • Somewhat averted in the Turok games, as the rest of the game contains such interesting locales that the final dungeons aren't that much of a telltale shift. The biggest indicator they're the final areas are the fact they're named after the Big Bads of any of the games. (Primagen's lightship, etc.)
  • Borderlands:
    • The first game has the Eridian Promontory, a winding, snowy mountain pass leading towards the Vault. In the DLC The Zombie Island of Dr Ned, with you heading to the giant lumber mill that can be seen from nearly everywhere on the island.
    • Borderlands 2 has Hero's Pass, a volcanic cavern excavated by Hyperion that leads to the Vault of the Warrior.
    • Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! has Eleseer, the core of Elpis, and where the final battle is located. As if Tycho's Ribs — the passage you had to get through to make it this far — was bad enough, making it to the location of the boss fight itself requires lowering a number of ramps, and contending with some high-levelled enemies. It is pretty though, with a very futuristic blue, black, and pink color scheme.
    • Borderlands 3 has Destroyer's Rift, a massive forming chasm near a small set of Eridian ruins on the surface of Pandora, where The Destroyer emerged after the opening of The Great Vault.
  • Near the finale of F.E.A.R. you descend into a vast underground base with Star Wars-like bottomless pits, flashing lights and a massive sphere covered by a wave-like forcefield containing a murderous ghost girl who has been trapped in there for decades. Compared to the relatively mundane office buildings and warehouses that you spend the rest of the game running around in, the contrast is pretty jarring.
  • The final level of Crysis 2 takes place in Central Park. A Central Park suspended more than a mile in the air by a Ceph lithoship previously buried underground. A Central Park you have to navigate while massive chunks keep falling off and the Ceph hunt you across its surface, while you have twenty minutes to reach and destroy the lithoship before U.S. command launches a nuke at it.
  • Doom:
    • Doom: The second episode has the final level, "Tower of Babel" being actively constructed during the Marine's battle across Deimos.
    • Doom II:
      • Icon of Sin, named after the Final Boss. A giant lake of blood, a demon hundreds of feet tall, and a reverse shooting gallery with rows of monsters blasting away at you.
      • In the Master Levels, the level codenamed Teeth.wad ("The Express Elevator of Hell") serves this purpose (and it's also listed last in the map list in the expansion as included within the Unity ports of Doom II). The level is a complex, challenging facility with an elevator that branches into eight paths (one per floor) which are also identified by number; it is filled with powerful enemies, and requires cleverness for a successful navigation due to parts in some paths that can only open from others; it also features a secret exit leading to a Brutal Bonus Level. Its music is "Evil Incarnate", which was originally the theme for the final level of Spear of Destiny.
    • Doom 64: The Absolution is where the Mother Demon awaits, being a large battlefield with three large gates from which hordes of enemies will come to torment Doomguy one last time before their queen arrives. It's possible to shut down the gates if the secret levels' keys were collected prior.
    • Doom Eternal: Final Sin. The Icon of Sin is stomping across a ravaged Earth as Doomguy returns to finish what he started.
  • Judge Dredd: Dredd vs. Death: After Dredd spends most of the game dispensing justice in Mega City One and tracking down the Dark Judges, the final level sends him to Deadworld again, an Alternate Dimension ruled by Judge Death where all life is a crime.
  • Nosferatu: The Wrath of Malachi: The Count's Domain. More specifically, Malachi's Grave Tomb.
  • Wolfenstein: The New Order has Deathshead's base, a gigantic Nazi fortress and where the Mad Scientist does his most terrible experiment. It, and Deathshead himself, are considered so vital to the regime's hold over Europe that the Resistance is more than willing to nuke it.

    Idle Game 
  • FE000000: With a name like Finality, getting the achievement "Nearing the end" after performing it for the first time, reaching the star cap before it, and having golden buttons, you know that you're in the last stretch of the game from this layer onwards.

    Light Gun Game 
  • The final battle in Time Crisis 2 takes place in a space center, where the Big Bad actually wields the Weapon of Mass Destruction against you. Of course, unless you're a real pro at that kind of games, that means you'll have to spend at least four usually expensive continues.
  • Goldman's office building in House of the Dead 2 and 4.

    Mecha Game 

    Miscellaneous Games 
  • Katamari Damacy:
    • The first game doesn't present a "final dungeon" per se... but while you've been rolling around discrete areas and secluded locations in previous levels, the last stage is actually the entire world (which contains all the previous locations, but by the time you get to them you're likely far too large to recognize them.)
    • And then, We Love Katamari goes one step further. The final level is essentially rolling every planet and star around to roll up the sun. Keep in mind the planets and stars are made from levels. The final level is rolling everything you ever rolled in the entire game. In both games if you've imported the save data from the first. You actually have to play this final stage early on in the game, long before you're able to finish it successfully.
    • In Beautiful Katamari, you roll up all the stars and planets, asteroids, strata, constellations, nebulae, King of All Cosmos himself, and if you are exceptional at it, you can roll up the Black Hole in Space that the King caused at the very beginning of the game itself. Very Definitely Final indeed.
    • Katamari Forever. You start about 2m high and work your way up to rolling up everything as in Beautiful Katamari, but the four modes for each level mean you roll up every other level up to four times. Then there's sort of an encore level or two.

    MMORPGs 
  • Final Fantasy XI gets special mention because of having several of these dungeons, all serving this role for their storylines. Such examples are the Shadowlord's Castle for the original storyline, the floating Zilart city of Tu'Lia in Rise of The Zilart, and the Zilart Capital of Al'Taieu... in another dimension in Chains of Promathia, which also has the very last boss fight take place above Vana'Diel! Special mention to the final fight in the Treasures of Aht Urghan expansion where you fight a newly summoned Alexander inside the giant shell of his previous summon. Although you don't have to fight your way there and you could enter the area before that, it is still kind of freaky.
    • The Wings of the Goddess expansion has the Threshold, a fragmented town suspended in ethereal space, with a massive maw in the "sky" over it.
    • The Seekers of Adoulin expansion has the ancient ruins of Ra'Kaznar, where Hades lies in its innermost sanctum.
    • The Rhapsodies of Vana'diel expansion has players go to the bamboo forest of Reisenjima to get to the temple where they fight the Cloud of Darkness.
  • In Final Fantasy XIV, each expansion's main storyline has a climactic final dungeon to end on, with the Final Boss usually being unlocked after the completion of the dungeon itself.
    • In A Realm Reborn there's the Praetorium, a massive fortress of The Empire which houses the Ultima Weapon, which the Eorzean Alliance invade with the help of the Scions and the Warrior of Light.
    • Heavensward has the Aetherochemical Research Facility, the interior of the massive Allagan complex called Azys Lla, containing the bioweapons of the Allagan, along with the security systems left in place by them.
    • Stormblood has the Empire-controlled city of Ala Mhigo, invaded by the Alliance to free it from the yoke of the tyrannical Prince Zenos.
    • Shadowbringers has a recreation of the Final Days of the city of Amaurot, filled with eldritch monsters created by the fears of the Ancients. The final part of the dungeon even sends the party into space, allowing them to see the planet below being destroyed by falling meteors, all while Emet-Selch narrates the destruction of his people.
    • Endwalker:
  • In Phantasy Star Online, the bizarre and dark Ruins end incongruously in a flowery field with a pleasant stone monument in the center. Then Dark Falz appears and the ground turns into skulls. Animate, shrieking skulls.
  • Although it's not the final final dungeon, the final dungeon on zOMG Chapter one is suitably epic. Divided into four parts, the final instance takes place below the Shallow Sea as your fight your way to Labtech X's Underwater Base. It is by far one of the most challenging areas in the game, so far.
  • Mabinogi, set after Humans defeated the evil Fomors in a great war, ends 2 of its 3 mainstream storylines in a parallel universe in which the Fomors won instead. Interestingly, the ending area of Generation 1 is home to Zombies that are very useful for training the Windmill skill to rank 1. And most people who mastered it on a human can attest to how hard that is.
  • An MMORPG like World of Warcraft doesn't have a true "final" dungeon as content is continually added, but major plot lines still conclude in epic dungeons.
    • While the era before the first expansion did not have an overarching plot, the final raid it added certainly fit the bill. Naxxramas was a vast necropolis that floated ominously above the blighted plaguelands, looming over you whether or not you ever confronted its challenge. Master of Naxxramas was Kel'thuzad, right-hand man to the Lich King (who himself was the main villain left over from his victory in Warcraft III), making it the most significant confrontation to the plot-light game to that point. The raid itself featured never-before-seen monsters and bosses that tested raids like never before.
    • Competing with Naxxramas in the original game was Ahn'Qiraj. While its story was developed for World of Warcraft and was mostly self-contained, it was introduced with a new epic backstory that established its relevance. Ahn'Qiraj is part blasphemous temple, part insect hive, and home to an Eldritch Abomination who whispered disturbing messages to the raid group. Sealed up by ancient protectors millennia ago, players have to undergo a massive quest chain that takes them all over the world to re-open it and bring death to the horrors inside. Populated by enough insectoid aberrations to wipe out several armies and reinforced by gargantuan colossi that were made in the image of one of the most terrifying Eldritch Abominations in the Warcraft universe, just opening the gates required a quest chain that took you to some of the longest and most challenging raids of the time and resulted in a world event that simulated a several day long war between the entire server and the denizens of the dungeon. The actual area was split into two regions each with about a dozen extremely hard bosses while the final boss of the forty man raid was completely unkillable until Blizzard scaled down the difficulty from impossible and fixed a few bugs. The actual mechanics of C'thun's fight could scale the damage to points that reached the tens of millions and massacre half a raid in a second.
    • The Black Temple. While it did not conclude the story of The Burning Crusade expansion as a whole, it did conclude the launch plot about Illidan teased with the introduction cinematic. A corrupted temple turned into a fortress, the entire zone that it lies in is designed so all the plot elements do nothing but lead you to the gates, and you need to complete a massive questline requiring completion of other raids just to enter it. A massive siege is occurring outside of the fortress, and the actual raid involves you entering through a hole you blew into the sewers, before you fight your way up and up until the final boss of the expansion waits on the roof.
    • Icecrown Citadel at the end of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion might be the most straight example. You know from the beginning that it's the lair of the Big Bad and thus your ultimate goal, and as you push his forces back the lands get more and more desolate until you reach the barren glacier upon which the citadel was built. The zone is so overrun with undead that the only safe bases of operations are floating airships, and the citadel itself rises high into the sky at the far end of the zone, designed with an extremely sinister architecture and covered in the black blood of an Eldritch Abomination.
    • While Cataclysm's final raid, Dragon Soul, doesn't stay in one place, instead splitting between breaking the siege at Wyrmrest Temple, and then taking the fight to Deathwing, finally ending in a desperate struggle to finish him off before he does the same to the entire world at the Maelstrom, a massive vortex at the epicenter of both the ancient Sundering that first tore the continents of Azeroth from eachother and the Cataclysm that nearly broke them altogether.
    • Mists of Pandaria ends with the Siege of Orgrimmar, which serves as Where It All Began for the Horde, but as this for the Alliance. Ever since Wrath of the Lich King, tensions between the Alliance and the Horde have been escalating, culminating in all-out war that's been raging throughout the expansion. The Siege itself takes place in the very capital of the Horde, first pushing through the bloodied streets of the city before plunging into a massive underground fortress built to house all of the terrible weapons he's plundered from Pandaria.
    • The Legion expansion has a subversion in the Tomb of Sargeras.
      • From the earliest previews, the Tomb of Sargeras was a massive corrupted temple that loomed over the environment and the great fel green beam it shot into the sky sustained the portal that the Burning Legion was using to stage their largest invasion ever. The expansion starts with the heroes besieging the island to reach the Tomb and seal the portal, and when the initial siege is broken, the goal of the expansion becomes to return with special artifacts in order to seal the portal for good. Approaching the Tomb before the counterattack was ready would instantly kill you due to the evil magic emanating from it. However, once the Tomb is attacked once more and the portal is sealed, the heroes decide that they can't simply wait for the Burning Legion to regroup and try again, they need to turn the tables and invade the demon's world to stop them once and for all, making it not the final raid after all (by the time the raid opened, players knew this, but early in the expansion it was often assumed to be the final location).
      • The actual final raid of the expansion, Antorus, the Burning Throne, manages to one-up the Tomb of Sargeras and secure its place as a straight example. The demon's world, Argus, is an utter hellscape that stretches all the way to a bleak and heavily detailed skybox. Antorus absolutely dwarfs the Tomb of Sargeras and getting even remotely close to it leads to nearly instant death that cannot be shielded against. Built into the core of a shattered planet, Antorus, like the Black Temple, must be entered through a makeshift entrance that leads the players through increasingly massive and ominous halls that include an absolutely colossal factory with lines of fel reavers stretching off into the distance.
    • Battle for Azeroth has Ny'alotha, the Waking City, a vision that depicts a possible future in which the Old Gods' ancient Black Empire has been restored and completely conquered Azeroth, and thus reflects the manifestation of all of the Old God N'Zoth's goals and his vision for the future of Azeroth made real.
    • Shadowlands has the Sepulcher of the First Ones, an ancient place of power in Zereth Mortis, containing secrets of the eponymous First Ones that The Jailer seeks to use to unmake the balence of the cosmos.
    • Dragonflight has Amirdrassil, the Dream's Hope, growing in the Emerald Dream and meant to serve as the Night Elves' new home on the Dragon Isles. Azeroth's champions band together to defend it from Fyrakk and his molten allies, and keep Fyrakk from devouring it's heart in order to bathe the world in flame.
  • EverQuest has had several new ones of these, as several expansions had one to cap off its plotline.
    • The Ruins of Kunark had Veeshan's Peak, the tallest mountain on the planet, which was an active volcano at the heart of a very tall mountain range, where the council of dragons that had been referenced in passing since the game was released apparently resides, and required a ridiculously long and convoluted route to get the key to access... which had to be done by every person in the raid (this was dropped later).
    • Planes of Power had The Plane of Time, a Place Beyond Time where you've learned that the entire pantheon of Norrath (including gods that normally won't cooperate for any reason) have worked together to imprison an outcast deity so that he can't share These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know that he wants to tell everyone. So of COURSE everyone wants to find out.
  • While there still is some way to go until the players reach Mordor, which most likely will be the very final dungeon, in The Lord of the Rings Online, you will notice when you're at the conclusion for the storyline you're currently following. While Angmar itself felt like this from the start, that storyline didn't end until the final chapter, seven updates after the game launched. The Moria/Mirkwood storyline doesn't end until the players get to Dol Guldur, one of Sauron's fortresses. For raiders, the final challenge is climbing the fortress all the way to the highest tower, where they face one of the Nazgûl and its flying steed. Speculation is that the latest storyline will end at Isengard.
    • At the end of one of Isengard's storylines (fighting against Saruman), you fight through the different wings of Orthanc, overcoming bosses, empowered with rings created by Saruman himself. At the end, you fight Saruman at the pinnacle of Orthanc, using his rings to destroy his own master ring. In fact, most of Nan Curunír, especially inside Isengard, feel like this as well.
  • Guild Wars tends to have these for each campaign. The first campaign ended on a volcanic island, for example.

    Platform Game 
  • Klonoa:
    • Klonoa: Door to Phantomile has the Moon Kingdom, Cress, the home of Klonoa's friend Huepow. Klonoa and Huepow must navigate the halls of Cress to defeat Ghadius and foil his plan to create Nahatomb to destroy Phatomile.
    • Klonoa: Lunatea's Veil has the Kingdom of Sorrow, Hyuponia, where Klonoa and his friends must defeat the King of Sorrow to prevent sorrow from consuming the world.
  • The Mega Man franchise:
    • The, ahem, architecture, of Dr. Wily's fortress makes it obvious in the Mega Man (Classic) series. A skull? Really?
    • Mega Man X2 subverts it thoroughly. After completing 4 levels in the North Pole, you see the X-Hunters' base utterly destroyed. So where does X teleport into? Bizarrely enough, Magna Centipede's stage, or just the opening half, replacing the annoying sword with possibly Zero and Sigma. In fact, going to Magna Centipede's stage at that point in time (rather than selecting Sigma) will still make it the closing level.
    • X4 has the Final Weapon, a Kill Sat that X (or Zero) is trying to stop.
    • X5, originally the final chapter of the X saga, has Area Zero as one of these. Notice how different the area feels from the final dungeons in the other games, including those after X5; the background solely consists of untouchable electric light animation, giving the creepiest and the worst feeling of loneliness out of all the final stages in the X saga.
    • The very final boss fight of Mega Man Zero 3 takes place in an even more ruined version of the same room where Zero was initially found by Ciel.
    • Mega Man Zero 4: The Ragnarok orbital cannon, falling from space and burning its way into the atmosphere, with only two minutes left to defeat the final boss of the entire series. Nintendo Hard indeed.
    • In Mega Man ZX, the landscape of the city is clearly dominated by the huge HQ of Slither Inc., a large tower decorated with things that look like a lotus flower. You visit many places inside the city and near the tower as the game's dungeons, it's possible to see the HQ in the background of some of them, and you can even walk by the front doors past the highway stage. Take a guess what the Final Dungeon is.
    • Mega Man ZX Advent: The final battle takes place on the Ouroboros, the ultimate Biometal and fusion of countless Model Ws, the center of the Big Bad's plan to Restart the World, the goal of the enemy Mega Men throughout the series, and heavily resembling the Ragnarok orbital cannon from which the Model Ws were originally spawned from.
  • From the Rayman series:
    • After collecting all four masks in Rayman 2: The Great Escape, Rayman must confront the Robo-Pirates in their base of operations and the penultimate level of the game, The Prison Ship, in which Rayman enters the vessel titled The Buccaneer and frees all the slaves the Robo-Pirates have imprisoned. After doing so, Rayman then confronts Admiral Razorbeard in the final level, The Crow's Nest, which takes place at the tipity-top of the prison ship... in the first phase of the battle. The second phase takes place in a lava-filled room in the ship's bottom.
    • Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc has The Tower of Leptys, where the Big Bad and The Dragon have gone to absorb power from the god Leptys. It's filled with all of the game's toughest enemies in large swarms, the most difficult platforming sections in the game, driving sections, and turret sections all leading to the Final Boss at the top.
    • Rayman Origins has two. The first is Moody Clouds, a steampunk city in the sky. The second one, The Land of the Livid Dead, is your typical Brutal Bonus Level.
    • The final non-Bonus world in Rayman Legends is called Olympus Maximus, inspired by Ancient Greece. While the first level takes place on Mount Olympus, most others take place in the Greek Underworld, including tidied, trap-filled mazes maintained by Minotaurs, and fiery, lava-filled caverns housed by swarms of dark creatures. The final boss, the Hades' Hand, starts in the fiery depths of Hades, and slowly ascends to the heavenly skies above Mount Olympus.
  • Ratchet & Clank:
    • Veldin in the first game, which is also Where It All Began, as it was also tutorial level, except now it's set during twilight instead of day, is much longer, and instead of local anklebiters you'll be fighting Drek's Elite Mooks, dropships and tanks (though anklebiters are still there).
    • Megacorp HQ in the second game, with dark atmosphere, two distinct segments which even have different music and loads of enemies going after you as you inflitrate the facility.
    • Mylon in the third game.
  • The Sonic series has various examples over time, including:
    • Sonic the Hedgehog's Scrap Brain (and, in the GameGear version, the Sky Base) Zones, both of which being the base of operations in which Eggman's machinations are born.
    • Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and Sonic 3 & Knuckles's Death Egg, a moon-sized space station made in the likeness of Dr. Eggman.
    • Sonic the Hedgehog CD has Metallic Madness Zone, the factory in which Eggman slowly mechanizes Little Planet. In the past, it is still under construction. In the present, it is simply an ordinary factory. In the Bad Future, it is a horrific wasteland devoid of plants and life slowly crumbling and perpetually malfunctioning, with the entirety of Little Planet implied to be in the same state. In the Good Future, it is a Solar Punk utopia where Eggman's machinations have all but been eradicated and plants and animals grow freely assisted by the same machines that once subjugated them, with only a few lingering deathtraps here and there.
    • Sonic the Hedgehog 4 has the Death Egg Mk.II, a recreated Death Egg built around Sonic the Hedgehog CD's Little Planet.
    • Sonic the Fighters' Death Egg II, a new Death Egg where Metal Sonic and Eggman wait to challenge you.
    • Sonic Drift 2 has the Death Egg serving as the final track of the Blue Grand Prix.
    • Sonic Adventure's Final Egg, Eggman's final stronghold after the destruction of the Egg Carrier...at least for Sonic. Inverted for Gamma, for whom Final Egg is the first action stage.
    • Sonic Adventure 2's Space Colony ARK, a derelict space station made by Gerald Robotnik, the posthumous Big Bad, in the midst of preparing a laser to be fired directly at Earth, causing The End of the World as We Know It.
    • The Cosmic Angel, Egg Utopia and Chaos Angel from the Sonic Advance series, a pair of space stations and the slowly collapsing, space-distorted remnants of Angel Island, respectively.
    • Sonic Heroes's Final Fortress, the mothership of an entire fleet of Eggman airships set in the middle of a thunderstorm.
    • Shadow the Hedgehog's Black Comet, named in the Very Definitely Final PATH as The Last Way, the biological home base of the Black Arms where the invasion begins in earnest.
    • Sonic the Hedgehog (2006)'s "End of the World," the remnants of Sonic's world slowly falling apart and distorting after Solaris's rebirth.
    • Sonic Unleashed's Eggmanland, a hellish carnival city situated on a floating continent hovering over the Earth's Core.
    • Sonic Colors's Terminal Velocity, the space elevator connecting Earth to Eggman's Interstellar Amusement Park, the latter of which is being consumed by a black hole.
    • Sonic Lost World scales things back by taking place in a simple burning volcano, albeit with the added stipulation of Sonic's world slowly dying thanks to the Deadly Six.
    • Sonic Mania has the Titanic Monarch Zone, a Humongous Mecha the size of the Death Egg at LEAST situated atop Little Planet once more, and a distorted dimension in THERE caused by a malfunctioning Phantom Ruby. The Mania Plus update drives this home by including a new stage transition from Metallic Madness that accentuates that "this is the endgame". Check it out here.
    • Sonic Forces has the Eggman Empire Fortress, a titanic stronghold in the middle of a desolate and dead area of the world, standing as a symbol of Eggman's conquest of the whole world.
  • The Legend of Spyro:
    • The Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning: You fight Cynder in a world between worlds — a creepy place filled with unbelievably huge planets, weird floating objects that look like ribbons and whisper Spyro's name, and glowing jellyfish. The battle takes place next to a purple, sucking wormhole that functions as a portal to and from hell.
    • The Legend of Spyro: The Eternal Night: You fight Gaul in the Well of Souls, a looming Monster-Shaped Mountain with green sludge flowing everywhere and a skylight through which the corrupting lights of the moons' eclipses can shine on you.
    • The Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon: You start out fighting in a fiery void above the destroyed Dragon Temple, then end up falling down an erupting volcano, and end the fight in the center of the planet as it breaks apart. Damn.
  • Prince of Persia:
    • Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones: The final battle occurs at the top of the Tower of Babel, which provides a panoramic view of ancient Babylon on your way up. Additionally, the battle is followed by an epilogue of sorts where you chase the game's other Big Bad through a weird landscape of swirling mists, neon platforms, strange perspective tricks, and an occasional flash of a scene from the previous Prince of Persia games. Finally, you confront him in a room where the decor is dominated by... a pair of elegant thrones.
    • Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time has the Tower of Dawn, full of sword-wielding sand monsters and requiring precise jumps to be climbed up, without any sand powers. The Big Bad is battled a couple of cutscenes later.
  • Metroid:
    • Metroid has Tourian, home of the Mother Brain and the only place you'll find the titular Metroids. Super Metroid also has a Tourian with the same defining traits, with the added bonus of also being the place you finally see the Metroid infant.
    • Metroid: Zero Mission has Chozodia, which happens to contain the Space Pirate Mothership, but considering it more or less just becomes another area later on and the entire anti-climaxiness of the end boss, it's pretty borderline.
    • Metroid Prime Trilogy:
      • Metroid Prime: The final boss fight(s) take place inside the Impact Crater, the source of the space-borne mutagen infecting Tallon IV, which you have to collect a bunch of Artifacts (twelve in total) and defeat Meta Ridley to get into.
      • Metroid Prime: Hunters has Oubliette, a surreal... place that Gorea was banished to. It can only be unlocked by gathering all Octoliths across the Alimbic system and placing them in a special chamber in Alinos.
      • Metroid Prime 2: Echoes: To access the Sky Temple in Dark Aether, you have to get back all of the weapons and abilities you lost, steal the planetary energy from the rest of Dark Aether, obtain the Annihilator Beam, and collect the nine Sky Temple Keys. It doesn't hurt that you're told ahead of time that the lord of all Ing is in there, either. He's not the final boss, but shortly after its defeat you fight Dark Samus, who is. But given that the Emperor Ing makes up one-half of the Big Bad Duumvirate and you fight Dark Samus (the other half) in the temple entrance, it still counts.
      • Metroid Prime 3: Corruption brings you to the planet Phaaze, the source of all suffering and evil from the last two games. To access it, you have to take control of a Leviathan Seed that is within the domain of the Space Pirates, for which you must have destroyed the injected Seeds from all affected planets (including that from the Pirates' own planet), and input a Pirate Code that is only available in a wrecked vessel whose state requires a new set of Energy Cells (up to nine, if you want to collect all items and get the Golden Ending) scattered across the galaxy.
    • Metroid II: Return of Samus and by extension Metroid: Samus Returns have the final nesting ground that holds the source of all suffering and evil from the entire series. It's unlocked after all previous areas are devoid of Metroids, and thus only one such creature remains (though the final area itself has a few more hatch before Samus arrives to the Queen's room, so those have to be slain as well). The remake does hold an additional surprise after the final area's completion, however.
    • Metroid Fusion has two final dungeons, actually. The first one is the secret part of the space station, where the Metroids are being bred. AFTER that, you head to SR-X's secret underground labs, which resemble Tourian. Both this and the final bosses represent the trope Where It All Began.
  • Super Mario Bros.: At first, only some games marked their respective final levels as truly being the last (for example, there is no indication that World 8 in the original game is the last, or that the seemingly-normal aerial shmup level in the last level of World 4 in the first Land houses both its regular boss and Tatanga), but over time it has become a tradition in the series:
    • Super Mario Bros. 2: World 7-2 starts with the drawbridge to Wart's castle completely open. Though this means World 7 only has two levels instead of three, this one more than makes up for it by being packed by enemies and hazards (including up to four boss fights, and the series' first appearance of conveyor belts), plus being very huge (almost twice as large as a standard level in this game and the majority of games in the series).
    • Super Mario Bros. 3: Bowser's Castle is reached at the end of an eerily desolate straight path in the final section of World 8's map (the only other level present there is the last Remilitarized Zone level). The level itself also has a unique castle design (plus a new hazard in the form of laser-shooting statues) not seen anywhere else in the game.
    • Super Mario World has Bowser's Castle making it clear it's the final destination by displaying the fifty-foot neon letters on the front saying 'BOWSER'; it also brings back several features from previous castles and fortresses, while also adding some new ones. Amusingly enough, the castle has both a front door that can be reached absurdly fast and a back door that leads directly to the room before the boss.
    • Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins has Wario's Castle, tantalizingly located at the center of Mario Land, and only accessible after Mario gathers the eponymous 6 Golden Coins that open the castle's entrance gate.
    • Super Mario 64 has Bowser in the Sky, complete with a Negative Space Wedgie if you don't have at least 70 stars. It is located in the highest floor of Peach's Castle, in the same room housing the last bonus level and the last two regular levels.
    • Super Mario Sunshine has Corona Mountain, a volcanic location whose entrance opens when Shadow Mario is defeated in all regular worlds and Delfino Plaza is flooded. It's a perilous path to the summit, where Bowser, Bowser Jr. and Princess Peach are.
    • Super Mario Galaxy: The Galaxy Reactor is the center of the universe with multiple planets, and it's there where Mario faces Bowser for the last time in the game. It can be accessed when five Grand Stars are retrieved and a minimum total of 60 stars overall are collected.
    • Super Mario Galaxy 2 has Bowser's Galaxy Generator, represented in the final world's map with the largest galaxy icon/diorama in the game and the duology (with the shape of Bowser's head).
    • New Super Mario Bros.: In all games, Bowser's Castle is hidden off the edge of the world map, when you get to it, the map extends to reveal a castle that fills the entire screen. New Super Mario Bros. U changes it up; the final dungeon is Peach's Castle this time, but you can't see what it has become until you enter World 8. And it's two stages long.
    • Super Mario 3D Land: The game appears to end in the World 8 Castle following up 8-5. However, when Mario defeats Bowser and approaches Peach, he notices that this "Peach" is a cardboard modeled after her, and Mario was fooled by it due to Depth Perplexion. Then one more level (8-6) is unlocked, and completing it leads to the real last Castle (where the real Peach is held captive as well), represented by a gigantic castle diorama at the very end of the world's path.
    • Super Mario 3D World: The world containing Bowser's Castle, World Castle, is actually the seventh world. World Bowser (a.k.a. World 8) is a neon amusement park Bowser creates using the sprixies, complete with a tower stretching into the sky that serves as the real final level.
    • Super Mario Odyssey has the Moon Kingdom, where Bowser is planning to have his wedding with Peach. The game introduces it by, instead of playing any music or fanfare, simply showing the sound of the wedding church's bells, audible in the whole place.
    • Super Mario Bros. Wonder: Castle Bowser, while being technically part of Petal Isles (the game's Hub Level, and at the center of which the castle is located), serves the role of the setting for the game's Grand Finale once Mario and his friends help Prince Florian gather all Royal Seeds from the main numbered worlds and dispel the hovering Piranha Plants that guard the castle's entrance. Once inside, the characters have to climb their way to Bowser's whereabouts by conquering dangerous levels where warlike and electrical hazards await; it all culminates in a climactic final stage where Bowser triggers the Wonder Effect to the fullest extent, which the character will have to endure until they finally meet their enemy.
    • Yoshi's Island has King Bowser's Castle, always located in the last world (which in turn is signaled as the last for taking place in a shadowy and/or volcanic wasteland).
    • Wario Land:
      • The aptly-named "Really Final Chapter" in II. Wario has to beat all the other endings to fill out a map that contains the location of the Black Sugar Pirates' secret hideout. Additionally, this level is the only one in the game with a Time Attack.
      • The Golden Pyramid in Wario Land 4.
      • Wario: Master of Disguise has the deceptively serene Allergia Gardens, played in Chapter 10. It is here where the last fragment of the Wishstone is found and, once Wario finds it and the treasured relic is assembled, Tiaramisu reveals her evil side and serves as the Final Boss.
    • Super Princess Peach has Bowser's Villa, the eighth and final world of the game. A big storming castle on top of Vibe Island. The game stops pulling its punches and starts throwing a variety of challenges and enemies at you, on top of having the most difficult boss of the game, Bowser himself.
  • Iji has a Very Definitely Final Rooftop, complete with an apocalyptic musical score, an enemy the size of a building himself, a skyline that is literally on fire from planet-destroying orbital bombardment, and the fact that if you win the fight you've put down almost everyone in the game who the writer gave names to.
  • Sly Cooper:
    • Krakarov Volcano in Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus, a sinister volcano containing Clockwerk's base.
    • Arpeggio's Blimp in Sly 2: Band of Thieves is a massive flying fortress and the final part of the Klaww Gang's operations.
    • The final level of Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves is the Cooper family vault, where not only are you going through the entire history of the Cooper family, but you're also having to use all your moves to get through it.
    • The final level of Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time is Le Paradox's airship, which requires the use of all of the Cooper ancestors to navigate so the gang can advance through the airship. The final battle takes place inside a time vortex and on top of the airship.
  • Conker's Bad Fur Day: Subverted with the windmill. It's visible right in the middle of Windy for the entire game, but teasingly, there's no way inside. Then, after the War chapter, it gets destroyed by accident when Rodent is bounced away from the then-exploding Tediz island (he survives thanks to his armor). Conker says: "Oh no! Where did the windmill go? I was sure that was the final level!" Instead, the actual final level is the Feral Reserve Bank [sic] (which is part of the Panther King's castle), which has been just out of reach for the entire game until the very end, similarly teasing the player.
  • Psychonauts The final level is Very Definitely Final not only in appearance, but also in its theme. Visually, it's a Circus of Fear made entirely out of raw, bloody meat—quite possibly the creepiest thing in the game thus far. Thematically, it's inside the head of the Big Bad himself, and, due to Applied Phlebotinum, the hero's head as well. In the previous level, you've fought the Freudian Excuses of assorted people; now you're fighting your own demons, and those that made the Big Bad who he is.
  • Vexx teases the player with this. There's a giant, ominous floating tower visible in the sky from every stage (except for the ones taking place indoors.) You'd think that it might be the final stage, but ultimately it never comes to play, and instead the Final Boss is fought in his home dimension, which still is dark and ominous enough to fit this trope.
  • The first Jak and Daxter game ends with a fight atop a mighty citadel tower and the second in an ominous lair. The second last level of the third game takes place on board an enormous spacecraft, however the final boss fight merely occurs in the wasteland outside Spargus.
  • Shovel Knight has the Tower of Fate, an ominous structure that can be seen looming in the background throughout most of the game. It is the home of the vile Enchantress whose forces have invaded the land, as well as the setting of the final three stages.
  • In Shinobi III: The Ninja Master, Round 7 is titled "The Final Confrontation," and it begins with Joe Musashi clinging to the underside of an airship.
  • Super Monkey Ball has many of them.
    • The first game has a stormy palace at the end of the expert levels, but should you make it to the master stages, you reach Banana Sanctuary, a temple filled with all the bananas you can eat, should you make it past its trials.
    • The second game has Dr. Bad-Boon's space base, where you stop the mad doctor from firing a laser that makes all bananas on the earth taste like curry.
    • You face the final boss of Banana Blitz in the obligatory Space Zone, but the secret final world takes place in the sky.
    • Step and Roll has Siliconia, a futuristic city, which shows up after beating the other 6 worlds. Also the preceding world, Magma Valley, also counts.
    • Banana Splitz has a time paradox make up the final world.
  • The Kirby series has its share of Final Dungeons:
  • Front Mission: Gun Hazard scores a double; first defeating The Society by crashing the The Sentinel, then it's time to head up the ATLAS Space Elevator which has been on the map since the beginning of the game but serves seemingly no purpose.
  • Donkey Kong:
    • Donkey Kong '94: The Tower. In the earlier worlds, every fourth stage is a Boss-Only Level. In the Tower, every level is a Boss-Only Level, and the stage music during the latter half of the world turns extremely serious, emphasizing that this is really the end of the game and you've finally cornered Donkey Kong.
    • Donkey Kong Country: The trope is subverted, as DK and Diddy climb to the top of DK Island for Gorilla Glacier, climb slightly down from the top to reach Kremrock Industries Inc., an area named after the main villains of the game... and then just keep going further down the mountain to Chimp Caverns, a generic cavernous area (when there already was a cavernous area earlier in the game) that looks more like a mid-game stage (it even has a Palette Swap of the first boss as the area boss) but is the actual final stage of the game before boarding K. Rool's ship for the Final Boss fight.
    • Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest: K. Rool's Keep is posed to be the climactic finale of the game, not counting the bonus Lost World. It's located at the top of Crocodile Isle, and is where Donkey Kong is held captive. Diddy and Dixie traverse dangerous castle areas as they climb up to their destination. When they finally reach the final area (which is even called Stronghold Showdown), they see DK forcefully tied with a rope and approach him to free him... and then he's pulled upward to be taken outside, and the level ends. The two rescuers then venture into the true final area (The Flying Krock), which consists of a race level against Screech and then finally the battle against K. Rool. In the GBA version of the game, Stronghold Showdown does have a boss on its own: Kerozene.
    • Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble!: Unlike its two predecessors, which toyed with the trope in different ways, this game plays it straight with KAOS Kore, a large Bavarian-inspired castle located in a deep jungle at the north of Northern Kremisphere (this once again doesn't count the secret Krematoa, which serves as this game's Lost World). Once Dixie and Kiddy arrive to the jungle, they can see the castle from afar and something... sinister happening withing, judging from the purple light leaking from the topmost window.
    • Donkey Kong 64: Hideout Helm is the last major world, and is accessed by entering the mouth of K. Rool's Island (which only opens when almost all Boss Keys are used in K. Lumsy's jailnote ). It consists of disabling the large energy machine to prevent K. Rool from destroying DK Isles, but there's a time limit whose duration will depend on how many blueprints you retrieved. Interestingly, even after you succeed in your mission, K. Rool isn't fought here because he plans to escape before he's found; you even manage to grab the last Boss Key (provided that you have the required items) without any boss fight. K. Rool is only fought after you free K. Lumsy, in DK Isles.
    • Donkey Kong Country Returns: The Volcano area of Donkey Kong's Island houses the lair of Tiki Tong, the leader of all the Tikis that have stolen all the bananas and hypnotized all animals except the Kongs and three of the Animal Buddies (Squawks, Rambi and Professor Chops). The levels within the Volcano are very challenging, and the one housing Tiki Tong himself averts the Boss-Only Level trait shared by all other boss levels in the game and the other 2D games in the series: Before meeting the Big Bad, Donkey and Diddy have to reach it by traveling upward through a perilous vertical section with a rocket barrel.
    • Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze: The game makes use of DK Island as a whole for this purpose, since the Kongs' objective beforehand was to return to it after being exiled into other islands. The homeland they grew in is now a frigid tundra where all familiar locations from the game's predecessor are now shrouded in snow and ice.
  • Played literally in Master of Darkness; Round 5 starts you off in the dungeon of Dracula's castle before navigating a maze that leads you to Dracula himself.
  • The final location to restore in Ori and the Blind Forest is the inside of imposing Mount Horu on the verge of its eruption. The approach up to it is filled with strong enemies and lethal lava flows, the interior is full of dangerously hot surfaces and tricky platforming that requires you to jump off enemies, and your progress through the dungeon is interspersed with cutscenes of what is happening outside.
  • In Ori and the Will of the Wisps, the endgame sees you bringing Seir, the soul of the Spirit Willow to Willow’s End, the hollow corpse of the Spirit Willow filled to the brim with glowing purple Decay that instakills Ori on contact. You also obtain the single most powerful movement ability in the game in the area leading up to this one—Launch. You will need it, both to navigate the area’s Mount Horu-esque platforming and to beat the final boss.
  • Blaster Master Zero takes place in an abandoned underground human habitat, so most of the areas you traverse through are mostly what you expect. The last area, Area 8, where the Mutant corruption is heaviest, is a Womb Level. However, the real final area, Area 9, is a straight-up Eldritch Location with logic-defying environment.
  • The Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures:
    • The first game has Laughin' Jokin' Numbnuts, the final level of Game Land unlocked after beating all the others. It is a rainbow-themed area that consists of every obstacle and enemy type in the game, all put together to create a tense finale.
    • The Angry Video Game Nerd II: ASSimilation:
      • The main game has the Final Tower, the last world of the game. It consists of only two levels; Virtual Insanity, which is similar to the final level from the first game in that it contains every obstacle and enemy type, but goes upwards instead of right, ending with a final fight against The Rival; and the final boss fight at the top.
      • The Tower of Torment expansion's only world, Crappy Castle, essentially serves as the true final world, a four-level trek through the titular tower.
  • SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom: The Chum Bucket Lab, the origin of all the robots that have been harassing Bikini Bottom throughout the game. It is a massive arena where the Final Boss is fought, with the latter part of it devoted to platforming inside the boss after it grows gigantic.
  • Tiny Toon Adventures: Montana Max's Mansion, which serves as the sixth and final world in the game. It features guards that run onto the player's character, butlers who periodically turn the lights off and make everything harder to see, spiky corridors, cannons that shoot money bags, muscular enemies that run very fast, and moving metallic platforms. It all culminates with the Final Boss battle against Max.

    Puzzle Games 
  • Catherine has the Cathedral at the top of the seemingly endless tower; from the beginning of the nightmares everyone's major goal is to reach the Cathedral and obtain "true freedom." Subverted; everyone, including the villains, thought Vincent's journey would end once he reached the Cathedral, but the game actually ends in the Empireo, the heavenly realm above the tower where the gods Dumuzid and Astaroth can be challenged.
  • Antichamber: Behind some red bars at the beginning of the game, once you've acquired the Red gun, you can find the exit you've seen for a while behind the wall of glass - and this time, you can actually cross it. Behind it, you'll find a long series of corridors where you'll chase the black block you've seen for the whole game.
  • Bugs Bunny & Taz: Time Busters has one per every era, a level ruled by the local villain. The best and most traditional example of this trope is the Transylvanian Era, a dark and creepy locale ruled by the ravenous vampire Count Bloodcount. And then you get to his quiet, scary castle...
  • The Talos Principle:
    • In the main game, there's the Tower. That's five floors with puzzles requiring all the mechanics you've used during the game, then some timed puzzles on top of the tower, with two robots (one helping you, one hindering you). After that, you finally get the best ending.
    • In the Road to Gehenna DLC, there's the Secret World where the gray sigils are located. Only accessible after you've acquired at least 10 stars, it requires to do a series of jumps across several fans over the void, just to reach the entrance. Once there, you'll find a collection of the seven hardest puzzles in the game (both the DLC and the main campaign), which provide you with the sigils required to free Admin, leader of the robots you've been freeing during the DLC. Just to reinforce it, the song played there isn't the usual music which plays in forest exteriors like that place, but instead the song that plays outside of the tower in the main campaign.
  • The final districts in each season of Criminal Case are always expected to have much higher stakes and whammy moments in its plot. It also helps that the previous districts always have some form of reveal that serve to hype what's coming in the last stretch of the game.

    Real Time Strategy 
  • Age of Mythology concludes its epic-scale campaign "Fall of the Trident" with Arkantos and his companions successfully sealing the "last" gate to Tartarus, in the Norse lands, and bringing back the head of Gargarensis to Arkantos' homeland of Atlantis in the penultimate level. Just before they arrive, though, they find out that they've been tricked and Gargarensis is still alive and currently leading an invasion of Atlantis, Where It All Began as Arkantos originally left Atlantis to try and stop sea monster attacks against it. In the very last level, the effort to stop Gargarensis from opening the real last remaining gate into the Underworld results in Atlantis sinking.
  • Command & Conquer:
    • The original game featured GDI forces assaulting the Temple of Nod, an evil looking building with tall spires that glows red. The temple serves as the main Nod headquarters and has its own built-in nuclear missile silo. Curiously, the final mission briefing implies that GDI had difficulty in locating Kane's headquarters, even though a temple with tall spires and red glow should have been quite distinguishable on satellite surveillance or aerial reconnaissance.
    • The final missions of Tiberium Wars certainly feels like a final dungeon. You start off the campaign in the Blue zones either containing Nod insurgents or causing havoc as Nod, where the tiberium levels are low and contained. Then the action moves into the yellow zones as the fight is taken to Nod's front door, where tiberium proliferates and structures are all dilapidated. The final levels take place deep in red zones, where tiberium contamination is so high there are whole glaciers of the stuff and the blasted landscape looks more alien than anything, and that's besides the gigantic, glowing towers.
    • Kane's Wrath features one where the Oh, Crap! meter boinks the roof. The enemy will spare no expense towards your destruction and you are awarded by Kane all three Nod Factions for use in the mission, allowing you to build three super weapons (normally restricted to one) and all of their units. There's also a count down timer to doom hanging over your head, with the Tacitus going ever more critical the longer you drag your feet.
  • Pikmin:
    • Pikmin (2001) has the Final Trial, a short puzzle course that requires the abilities of all three Pikmin types leading up to the Final Boss, the biggest creature in the game.
    • Pikmin 2 has the Dream Den. The Hocotate Ship will warn that it's exceptionally dangerous, and it's right. The cave has fourteen sublevels with only one rest area and several difficult enemies combined on single floors. It is also found in an area modelled off of the first location of the first game.
    • Pikmin 3: The final area is the Formidable Oak. The entire stage is an ominous, towering termite mound in the middle of a desert.
    • Pikmin 4 continues the trend with the Cavern for a King. This cave has a total of twenty sublevels, of which only three are rest areas. The other seventeen are populated by a wide assortment of enemies and bosses.
  • Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time has Modern Day. Features include the setting of the tutorial and the first game's first map, gimmicks, zombies and music from all the past worlds, having the first game's credits theme, Zombies on Your Lawn, as the final wave tone, and being longer than the past worlds and having a boss rush at the last levels.
  • In StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, when you go to Char, you cannot go back. The battles get a lot fiercer, at least in lore terms.
  • In StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, when you invaded Korhal, you again cannot go back. This feature is actually used for each set of missions.
  • StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void has the Void, Amon's home realm, a realm of shadow and darkness with floating desolate rocks. Fittingly, Word of God confirmed that this is the final level of the original storyline that started back in the first game.
  • The final mission of either (main series) Homeworld game takes place in orbit around the eponymous Homeworld: Hiigara. Scenery Porn even despite the original's (relatively) limited graphics. It also happens to turn into Scenery Gorn in Homeworld 2.

    Roguelike 
  • In all of the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games, the final dungeons involve some sort of floating structure. In order, they are:
  • The final level of NetHack is the Astral Plane (AKA Heaven) where you battle swarms of hostile angels and the other three Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
  • Similarly, ADOM has the final battle (with an Elder God no less) take place in the realm of primal Chaos.
  • Exaggerated in The Binding of Isaac thanks to years and years of new content.
    • The first such dungeon was The Womb, until the Halloween update. After that came Sheol, where you fight Satan.
    • With the Wrath of the Lamb expansion pack, Sheol is sometimes replaced with The Cathedral, whose final boss is Isaac himself. If you manage to get through all that and have a certain trinket with you, you have one more place left... The Chest, whose final boss is ???/Blue Baby.
    • In Rebirth, you can choose between Sheol and the Cathedral, and while The Chest remains, Sheol has its own equivalent: The Dark Room, where you fight The Lamb. Both of those areas also house the Golden Door, which leads to the real True Final Boss (until Afterbirth+ that is...)
    • Afterbirth+ added yet another, the final dungeon to end all final dungeons, in The Void: An Eldritch Location where every room's decor is taken from a different chapter in the game, creating an incoherent, delirious mish-mash of locations. This one features the game's true ending, wrapping up a lot of speculation and marking it as the real final dungeon.
    • Repentance adds not one, but two final dungeons. The first is a fake out, the Corpse, the final dungeon from the Antibirth Game Mod that this DLC canonized. After beating that, you unlock the real final dungeon: Home. The path to this area is a backwards trek through every floor, containing extremely powerful Elite Mook variants of various enemies. Once you make your way back through the Basement, you end up in Isaac's house. His actual house, with no enemies... at least until you come across the actually-seriously-we-damn-mean-it-this-time final bosses - a sequential rush where you have to take on Dogma, the four Ultra Horsemen, and The Beast all in a row.
  • Darkest Dungeon has the titular Darkest Dungeon, specifically its deepest floor, past ancient ruins covered in increasingly huge and increasingly disgusting amounts of Meat Moss, you find yourself walking in what seems like a background of stars, with no torch able to pierce the darkness. Once the real final battle begins, however, you find yourself in the literal belly of the beast, with the background being the internal flesh of some indecipherable abomination while you fight its imitation of your ancestor, and finally its heart.
  • Darkest Dungeon II: The Mountain; it's ominous enough from a distance, but when you're on its slopes, it loses all pretense of being a normal Earthly place, as a lightning storm starts over it and the ground becomes awash in shadowy mist as you approach the cult Ziggurat at its center, where the chapter boss awaits.
  • FTL: Faster Than Light: the final sector strongly implies this even in its name: "Last Stand". Instead of fleeing through space from the ever-encroaching Rebel fleet's advance, the entire sector is occupied right from the start, and the soundtrack eschews the standard Variable Mix and leaves you with always-on tense combat music. The Rebel Flagship is also Very Definitely The Final Boss - it's easily twice the size and has thrice the armament of any ship you have thus far faced.
  • Hades has the Temple Of Styx, the area closest to the Gates of the Underworld, and aside from the Final Boss it's the final challenge the player has to do before ending a run.
  • World of Horror has the lighthouse, where the Old God's summoning ritual is being conducted. It can only be accessed by solving all of the mysteries in a given playthrough, and is a gauntlet of traps, hazards, and a Final Boss who will try to accelerate the summoning.
  • Returnal: after a fakeout end dungeon in the Derelict Citadel, the game truly ends in the Abyssal Scar, a deep-sea chasm in planet Atropos. The area is murky and oppressive, with only the bioluminescence of hostile creatures to light the way, and the Cosmic Horror Story vibes of the narrative are ramping to high gear, giving the entire area a dreamlike sense of nightmare logic. No mater which way you go, the branching paths always lead deeper, forcing Selene to descend downward and downward, a deliberate echo of the descent to the underworld in tales of Classical Mythology.

    Role Playing Game 
  • Baldur's Gate had an ominous abandoned temple of Bhaal in an underground city, but Baldur's Gate 2 ramped it up to Hell itself, and the Throne of Bhaal expansion had the final fight at, you guessed it, the Throne of Bhaal (which looked rather futuristic, for the home plane of a god in a fantasy setting).
  • Baten Kaitos:
    • Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean: Cor Hydrae, the ancient castle of Malpercio currently floating in the middle of a dimensional rift.
    • Baten Kaitos Origins: Tarazed, a colossal machina construct powered by captured afterlings and serving as both the new capital of The Empire and said empire's continent-shattering superweapon.
  • Bloodborne
    • The base game has the Nightmare of Mensis, a Dream Land only available to enter after the blood moon rises. Essentially, it's a large castle-laboratory filled with nightmarish creatures, madmen cultists, and three Great Ones, one of them an infant that powers the entire dream dimension. However, it's only the final area that is explored, the actual end of the game and true final boss is in the Hunter's Dream, the hub zone.
    • The Old Hunters DLC has the Fishing Hamlet - the place the Healing Church and the Byrgenwerth institute desperately attempted to keep secret, recreated within the Hunter's Nightmare and the center of the dreadful curse casted upon all Hunters and their descendants for the unforgivable sin they committed there: slaughtering the Kos-worshipping villagers, and then murdering Mother Kos herself. It's as dreadful and moist as a village filled with half-human half-fish hybrids can be, and at the very depths lays the Final Boss of the DLC: The Orphan of Kos, a Humanoid Abomination stillborn child birthed from Kos's beached corpse, understandably VERY angry and lashing out at anything that approaches it like a wild and scared animal - killing it and putting its soul to rest is the only way to break the curse of the Old Hunters.
  • Blue Dragon
    • The first game has Primitive Cube, a huge lava-filled... cube, floating in the void between the two halves of the planet, revealed after Nene saws the world in half.
    • The Abyss serves as one for Blue Dragon Plus and is the deepest part of the Atomic Cube where the party descends in order to finish off Balaur once and for all.
    • Blue Dragon: Awakened Shadow has the Dimension Sanctuary which has two guardians Ghost Demon Malboro and Devil Cupid who need to be taken down to access the final area. The player and their party travel there in order to stop the Egg of Light from devouring their planet.
  • BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm: The normal path ends with “Her World,” Arianna’s twisted tech domain beyond the Firewall, where she’s been assembling her “perfect” new reality. If you’re on track for the True Ending, then the real last dungeon is the Sky Abyss, a harrowing climb through five strata of Bubbly Clouds guarded by some of the toughest enemies and bosses in the game.
  • Bug Fables: The Giant's Lair, an abandoned human house that borders Bugaria on the east. Because it is a "Dead Land," bizarre powerful monsters unlike anything else in the game roam here, and the whole place has an oppressive and dark atmosphere.
  • Child of Light's final dungeon is the Palace of the Sun beneath the Cynbel Sea, where the last of the Plot Coupons, the Sun of Lemuria, is held by Nox. Immediately following her Boss Battle is Aurora's death and resurrection cutscene, then the Final Boss battle with Queen Umbra. Umbra's castle was planned to be the Very Definitely Final Dungeon, but the developers ran out of time to program it.
  • The Black Omen in Chrono Trigger. An ominous evil edifice constructed by pure evil out of the remains of the Ocean Palace that floats above the earth for eternity, and it's black and covered with spikes, domes, and weird eyes. The first half of the final battle takes place inside Lavos's shell; the second half, meanwhile, is fought at a point where all time converges, shifting from one place in history to the next.
  • Terra Tower in Chrono Cross. Another floating edifice, constructed by the now extinct Dragonians, risen by the power of the Dragon God, and inhabited by the embodiment of the forces of nature as well of the already mentioned Dragon God. The final battle, meanwhile, goes down at the junction of all possible dimensions. Both of these are really an aversion, since you don't need to go to a dungeon to get to the final boss, and in fact, the Multiple Endings require you to fight the final boss at arbitrary points in the middle of the game.
  • Most of the settings in Contact are lush, peaceful islands with the occasional high-tech military base or island version of Akihabara in between, but the game makes no bones about it when the last island has a great big sinister castle.
  • In Cthulhu Saves the World it's, surprise surprise, R'lyeh. In the Cthulhu's Angels bonus campaign, the final dungeon is instead the Grand Library, where the all-female team of heroes face off against the game's narrator.
  • Dark Souls boasts a good example of this. The final confrontation takes place inside the Kiln of the First Flame, what is essentially a giant fire pit filled with ash, twisted metal, and Black Knights, and the place where Gwyn burned himself alive to link the fires and ultimately caused the curse of the undead. Oh, and the door granting you access to this area requires the souls of your enemies to open.
    • The Artorias of the Abyss DLC has the Chasm of the Abyss, a dark rocky cavern situated deep underneath the Township of Oolacile in which Manus, Father of the Abyss resides.
    • Dark Souls II has Drangleic Castle, the former seat of power of King Vendrick and Queen Nashandra covered in constant rain. Interestingly, you get access it right after you get the 4 Great Souls, and it's fully explorable, however the door to the final boss won't open until you go beyond Drangleic Castle. However since you do return to it to finish your run, and it's the place where the final boss resides, it still counts as the final dungeon.
    • Dark Souls III sets its final level inside Lothric Castle, with gauntlets of extremely tough enemies and apocalyptic scenery. Another contender would be the Ringed City from the eponymous DLC, which technically serves as the final level of the entire series. There are loads of traps, enemies, and brutal boss fights.
  • The final battle with the title archdemon of the original Diablo takes place on the lowest level of Tristram Cathedral, which thanks to Diablo's fell influence has turned into a scene out of Hell itself!
    • Diablo II's final showdown takes place in the Chaos Sanctuary, a gigantic hellish pentangle in an infernal cathedral at the end of a river of lava. The expansion, Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, ends in the Worldstone Chamber, in the deepest level of a holy cavern, at the top of a very tall mountain.
    • The final battle with Diablo in Diablo III takes place atop the Crystal Arch, the very heart of Heaven itself. The final battle against Malthael from the expansion, Reaper of Souls, takes place in the very heart of the Pandemonium Fortress.
  • Disco Elysium ends with you going to a ruined Sea Fortress off the coast of Revachol to confront The Deserter and learn the truth about the case.
  • The Disgaea series has several:
    • Disgaea: Hour of Darkness has Hell Invades Heaven. Enough said.
    • Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories has you inside Zenon's castle, which is the lair of the main villain that has been present the entire game. It looks awesome in itself.
    • Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice pulls a Where It All Began for this one. It's the Overlord's Castle, albeit immensely cleaned up. Originally, everything was black-colored, and now it's a stark white. Quite the contrast, which is noted by the cast.
    • Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten, which has you inside a planet-destroying weapon known as Fear the Great, controlled by God himself and fueled by pure malice. The place is bleak, mostly black, grey, and white, and has a bunch of beings of pure malice running around, converging towards the center. The malice creatures were all made by one guy's malice, by the way.
    • Disgaea D2: A Brighter Darknessnote  has deepest innermost part of the Netherworld, where the game's Big Bad is keeping the kidnapped angels of Celestia.
    • Disgaea 5: Alliance of Vengeance brings us a two-parter. The Netherworld Dark Demise is the home base for Void Dark's machinations. You land at the outer areas and have to fight your way in.
  • Dragon Age: Origins doesn't get more final than the assault on Darkspawn-occupied Denerim, which is a Point of No Return, marked by the fact it gives you an entire sequence in which you speak to each member of your party, whether reassurances, final farewells or Badass Boasting. As a sort of final-dungeon-within-the-final-dungeon, at the far end of Denerim is Fort Drakon. The Archdemon's at the very top—and it's rude to keep him waiting.
  • Dragon's Dogma has The Everfall, which only appears after you kill the Dragon and has 12 levels full of stronger versions of earlier enemies. Notable because you're introduced and even go into it fairly early into the game.
  • Dragon Quest
    • The first game sets your final battle in Charlock, the home of the Dragonlord.
    • Dragon Quest II has its final battle in Hargon's Castle, which has you facing off against Hargon and Malroth.
    • Dragon Quest III, after beating the Disc-One Final Boss, Baramos, has you journeying to the Dark World (actually the world of the original game) and has you returning to Charlock for the showdown against Zoma.
    • Dragon Quest IV sends you to what is essentially Hell and has you battling demon lords before storming the palace of Psaro the Manslayer and then climbing his mountain to do battle with him.
    • Dragon Quest V returns to the Demon World and eventually has you climbing another mountain to face Grandmaster Nimzo.
    • Dragon Quest VI has you facing Mortamor in his castle in the Dread Realm.
    • Dragon Quest VII has you battling Orgodemir in what was once the Cathedral of Light.
    • Subverted in Dragon Quest VIII, in which the very definitely final dungeon becomes the final boss. Since the Disc-One Final Boss's dungeon had done such a good job of imitating a Very Definitely Final Dungeon, the real deal had to be something outside the box to top it.
    • Dragon Quest IX has the Realm of the Almighty, twisted into a hellish place by Corvus.
    • Dragon Quest X has a whopping total of 6 final dungeons throughout the game's history.
      • The first Version has the Heart of Hell, a gloomy version of the Reidametes Temple where the Hero can finally fight the Netherlord Nelgel.
      • Version 2 has the Abyss Gate, where Maldragora and Toma are after the Spiritual Core of Creation needed for the former to enact his plan of replacing Rendacia with his Rendacia.
      • Version 3 has Nadolagram Temple, where Patriarch Orstov is offering Estelle as a sacrifice to revive Nadraga.
      • Version 4 has the players going back deep into the Kingdom of Tenton's Alchemy lab to fight Kyronos.
      • Version 5 has Doomsday's Garden, Jagonuba's base of operations located at the very bottom of the Netherworld.
      • Version 6 has players finally infiltrate the Evil Eye Moon to put a stop the Jia Kut Clan, a group of crystal alien invaders that Jagonuba, or as he was once known, Jia Gonuba, was once part of.
    • Dragon Quest XI: The Fortress of Fear, where the Lord of Shadow awaits, is the final dungeon of Act 2. Act 3 (or the postgame, as it's sometimes called) has the Dark Star, which houses the True Final Boss, though it's less of a dungeon and more of an arena since the battle starts as soon as you enter it.
    • Most of the dungeons in Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker take place in your typical temple locations. However, the final dungeon, in order to stand out, takes this trope way over the top. Basically, Infern Isle, which was once merely desolate, has been transformed into a barren hellscape covered in dark purple clouds, soaring demonic monkeys, and a couple lava flows here and there. Then you get to the top of the island, enter a creepy-ass stone face, and end up in Tartarus, which is somewhat of a mix between a Womb Level and Hell; all the scenery is purplish, veiny, and occasionally even pulsating, the enemies are all some manner of undead, one room features a sea of ghastly purple faces, and another features a pair of giant pulsating organic tubes that continuously spit out and swallow what appear to be enormous balls of tormented human souls.
  • The final dungeon in Drakengard is the skies above Tokyo.
  • Dungeon Siege (the game, not the terrible movie) concludes with a final fight against the resurrected master of a long dead evil race, in a cavern below a castle, with walls made of human faces and screams echoing in the air.
  • Elden Ring has Crumbling Farum Azula, a gigantic, floating mausoleum in the sky, surrounded by tornadoes and whose skybox has dozens upon dozens of flying ancient dragons, said to be a place placed out of time itself. You get hints at its existance ever since the first area of the game, get to briefly visit it in an optional zone in Liurnia, and is the place where the Rune of Death is sealed, which the Tarnished needs to complete their quest. However, While technically Farum Azula is the last proper dungeon in the game, the actual final area is Leyndell Capital of Ash, which is more of a sequence of bosses up to the final boss.
  • The Elder Scrolls:
  • Epic Battle Fantasy series:
    • The Rift in Epic Battle Fantasy 3, an outer space-like Pocket Dimension with a straight path leading up to Akron at a black hole.
    • Epic Battle Fantasy 4 has the Temple of Godcat, a giant set of ruins that extends to the sky. The final stretch of the game is on a bridge through the clouds, leading to a shrine where the final boss is fought.
    • Epic Battle Fantasy 5 has the Rapture, the area where the massive meteor landed. It's a huge black wasteland with a lake of lava and a mechanical zone with toxic water. At the center is a portal to the Beyond, a smaller sub-area in space that houses the final boss.
  • In Eternal Sonata, the Final Dungeon is just some tower out in the desert. However, that desert is located on the Moon, which acts as the dreamworld's Purgatory. The final battlefield (accessed by a portal at the top of the tower) is implied by That Other Wiki to be the core of the dream, but by others to be the ruins of the Tenuto flowerfield.
  • The fifth stratum in every Etrian Odyssey game is where the story ends (there's a sixth stratum, but it's a Bonus Dungeon).
    • The original game has Lost Shinjuku, whose existence provides the horrifying reveal that the characters are living in a post-apocalyptic world. The Millenium Girl has Claret Hollows. A stratum with suspiciously organic features located within the deepest insides of the Yggdrasil Labyrinth, even below the ruins of Lost Shinjuku. The corruped core of Yggdrasil awaits at the center, serving as the Final Boss.
    • Etrian Odyssey II: Heroes of Lagaard has the Heavenly Keep, a regal castle located at the top of the Yggdrasil, and inhabited by the Overlord. The Fafnir Knight has Ginnungagap, an ancient temple located within a ravine of stone and where the core of High Lagaard's Yggdrasil Labyrinth is sealed.
    • Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City has the Porcelain Forest, a disorienting maze that serves as the grounds for the final outcome of the conflict between the Deep City and Armoroad.
    • Etrian Odyssey IV: Legends of the Titan has the Forgotten Capital, revealed once the Yggdrasil Tree withers and dies. It can only be properly explored after opening the Kings' Gate, for which the player's party has to look for the credentials of the Four Kings while venturing into the secret parts of the previous main dungeons.
    • Etrian Odyssey V: Beyond the Myth has the Untamed Garden, which is a half-natural, half-artificial forest located well beyond the planet's atmosphere. It is the homeland of the Eternal Tyrant, the most powerful monster in Yggdrasil and the world.
    • Etrian Odyssey Nexus has the Yggdrasil Labyrinth itself as this, being the 13th dungeon. It serves as the prison for Jormungandr, falsely believed to be the source of unlimited treasure when it's actually an apocalyptic monster that is sealed by the four Shrines built across the corners of Lemuria.
  • E.V.O.: Search for Eden has Africa after clearing the Final Ocean in the final era as the climax of the game. After fighting revived bosses, a giant caveman, and mutated dinosaurs, you face off with the only other creature trying to enter Eden: Bolbox, a mutated algae cell who can summon strong creatures from all of history.
  • Fallout:
    • Fallout had either the subtle cult's main base: a cathedral built over a Vault infected by its resident, the Master OR a former military base in the Sierras filled with Super Mutants and vats of the F.E.V. Both were pretty ultimate and like everything else in the game, you got to choose!
    • Fallout 2 had the Enclave oil rig. After juryrigging a (extremely large) supertanker to sail out to it, you're treated to an FMV of the city-ship being dwarfed by a figurehead on the side of the base. As a bonus, the Enclave are so well equipped, they even have a spare G.E.C.K. sitting in a storeroom closet, after you've scoured the wasteland for one the entire game. After everything you'd done to get there, the FMV of the ship leaving the harbor felt like a happy ending all its own. Quite a grandiose example of enforcing the Chosen One's will on the post-war world.
    • Fallout Tactics, set in the Midwest, takes it to a bit of an extreme. Pretty much everything from your first run-in with Super Mutants is basically leading up to the end of the game, which sends you further west than you've ever been, up into the mountains, where you do battle at the entrance of freaking Cheyenne Mountain. Just getting into the vault beyond involves carting a nuclear warhead up to the door then setting it off. And once you're inside? All bets are off. Once you leave for Cheyenne Mountain, you can't go back to your home base. And you're surrounded by angry robots who want to murder you, and once you've blown the door off the whole place is a radioactive hellhole.
    • Fallout: New Vegas has this inside the game's MacGuffin Location, Hoover Dam. The game asks you if want to commit to this final quest before you start, and automatically creates a savegame either way (not an autosave, an actual permanent save) so that you can go back and explore more of the Vegas sandbox if you so choose. The end result will be a fight with either Legate Lanius or General Oliver, depending on who you sided with (though only Caesar's Legion sympathizers will fight Oliver).
  • Fate/Grand Order
  • The Final Fantasy series is big into this. In order:
    • Final Fantasy: The Chaos Shrine, only this time it's 2000 years in the past!
    • Final Fantasy II: Pandaemonium, the capital of hell which The Emperor emerges in Palamecia after his death. The Soul of Rebirth questline has Arubboth, the castle of heaven, which the Emperor's light half has taken over.
    • Final Fantasy III: The World of Darkness, where the Cloud of Darkness resides.
    • Final Fantasy IV: The Lunar Subterrane, a pathway leading down to the crystalline core of the moon.
    • Final Fantasy V: The Interdimensional Rift, composed of the pieces of the world destroyed by the Void.
    • Final Fantasy VI: Kefka's Tower, a monument to death and destruction formed from rubble collected from around the destroyed world.
    • Final Fantasy VII: The Northern Cave, a complex cave system leading to The Lifestream.
      • Crisis Core: Banora Underground, a dungeon hidden beneath the namesake town, where Genesis awaits Zack for their final showdown.
      • Dirge of Cerberus: The insides of Omega, the planet's last resort when all life on it is threatened.
      • Final Fantasy VII Remake: Singularity, a portal guarded by the Whispers of Fate and an incarnation of Sephiroth.
    • Final Fantasy VIII: Ultimecia Castle, a giant floating fortress in compressed time.
    • Final Fantasy IX: Memoria, a land comprised of Gaia's memories that the heroes chase Kuja through into the Crystal World, where the Crystal resides.
    • Final Fantasy X: The Insides of Sin, with the final battle taking place within a recreation of Zanarkand.
    • Final Fantasy XII: The Sky Fortress Bahamut, a flying fortress designed by Doctor Cid to be Archadia's ultimate airship.
    • Final Fantasy XIII: Orphan's Cradle, a strange, shifting, "digitized" dimension that is the "cradle" for Cocoon's power source.
      • Final Fantasy XIII-2: Academia in the year 500 AF, totally deserted and in the midst of being torn apart by chaotic energies. Might not be the most impressive, but certainly the most unnerving.
      • Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII: Luxerion Cathedral, the seat of power for the order of Salvation surrounded by chaos as the world gets destroyed. After that, the Final Boss battle takes place in Cosmogenesis, the seat of the God of Light who watches over the creation of the new world.
    • Final Fantasy XV: The ruins of Insomnia, where mutated humans and literal hellspawn freely roam the streets after the world fell to darkness.
  • Final Fantasy Mystic Quest: Doom Castle, the Dark King's lair situated at the top of Focus Tower.
  • Final Fantasy Tactics: A dead city called the Necrohol of Mullonde, where Saint Ajora was burned and where Ultima can be resurrected.
  • Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Mount Vellenge, isolated far away from known civilization and right at the edge of the visible world, bearing the meteor which first brought miasma to the world. Then right when you are about to destroy the Meteor Parasite, Raem intervenes and teleports you to an Amazing Technicolor Battlefield called the Nest of Memories. Interestingly, after Raem's defeat, you are returned to right where you left off — dealing the finishing blow to the Parasite.
  • Dissidia Final Fantasy has the Edge of Madness, the throne of the god of destruction and disorder. Interestingly, the representative stages for each game are the final dungeons listed above, with the exception of I (the present day, wrecked shrine) and IV (the moon's surface). Same goes with Duodecim, but is named the Edge of Discord instead.
    • Dissidia Final Fantasy NT, in a unique case, reuses the Interdimensional Rift from V, simply named here the Dimensional Rift. It's where Shinryu, the ancient dragon that is the cause of the cycles of war, resides.
  • World of Final Fantasy has Exnine Castle, where the three Heralds, Brandelis, Segwarides and Pellinore, await.
  • Fire Emblem
    • Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light has Dolhr Keep in the depths of Dolhr.
    • Fire Emblem Gaiden: Duma's Tower, located at the northernmost extreme of Rigel. It is tackled in two parts: the main part of the building is initially tackled by Celica with the intention of confronting Jedah, but she and her party are captured and trapped in its basement. The second half of the tower is its sprawling, cavernous, Terror-ridden basement, which Alm and his party have to traverse in order to obtain the Valentian Falchion and rescue Celica's party. Duma is situated in the deepest cavern below.
    • Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem has the Dragon's Table, a plateau on the border between Dolhr and Macedon, and the massive altar attached to it.
    • Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War averts this, as the final map is like all the other map in the game, which are much larger in scale then in any other game, spanning large regions with many different locations in them. The last boss fight takes place OUTSIDE Belhalla Castle (which is a location visited previously in the game).
    • Fire Emblem: Thracia 776 has the Altar of Loptous, a castle under the Loptous Cult's control that stands near Munster.
    • Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade has the Dragon Temple.
    • Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade at first uses the Dread Isle as the Disc-One Final Dungeon, but eventually you return there as the Dragon's Gate, which is located on there, is the real Very Definitely Final Dungeon.
    • Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones has the shrine in the Darkling Woods.
    • Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance averts this with the final battle once again taking place outside the "final dungeon", in this case the Crimean Royal Palace.
    • Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn has the Tower of Guidance, a sacred tower dedicated to the Goddess Ashera who is said to sleep there for 1000 years - only she wakes up prematurely thanks to war. She will be your final opponent, though not before you finally get to take out every other villain you've wanted to throttle, plus a couple of unexpected foes. And the tower itself is glowing like a beam of light. As a bonus, the dimensions are distorted inside, though you only get to find out when it is already firmly established as The Very Definitely Final Dungeon. It's also the only place in the entire game where simply standing on a tile can boost one's magic power or defense. Before then, only mundane terrain like bushes could help with defense.
    • Awakening ups the ante: the evil dragon Grima, whose revival you've been fighting to prevent for the whole game, has been brought back to life. The last stage takes place on his back as you fight to either put him back down for another thousand years or so, or kill him outright.
    • Fates has one for each of the three routes, with the final battle being in the throne room of the castle of a different faction depending on which one you picked:
      • Birthright has Castle Krakenburg of Nohr, where the Avatar faces King Garon.
      • Conquest has Castle Shisaragi of Hoshido, where the Avatar faces both the monstrous Garon and a possessed Takumi.
      • Revelation has Castle Gyges of the Kingdom of Valla, where the Avatar and the united royal families of Hoshido and Nohr face the true Big Bad, Anankos.
    • Fire Emblem: Three Houses plays with this depending on which route you pick:
      • The Azure Moon route appears to have a straight example with the Imperial Palace in the Adrestian Empire's capital city of Enbarr. However, the exact same map is used in the Silver Snow and Verdant Wind routes as the Disc-One Final Dungeon.
      • The Crimson Flower route, likewise, has the final map be the streets of the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus's capital city of Fhirdiad, but you also fight there in a climactic battle most of the way through the Azure Moon route. Though, the difference is that in the Crimson Flower version, the city is on fire.
      • The Silver Snow and Verdant Wind routes seem to have a straight example with Shambhala, the underground Advanced Ancient Acropolis of "those who slither in the dark", the remnants of the ancient Agarthan civilization. However, in both routes, that is only the penultimate map, with the actual final battles being set in much more mundane locations. For Silver Snow, the Outer Wall of Garreg Mach Monastery (where you've already fought multiple times). For Verdant Wind, the Caledonian Plateau, which has been turned into a toxic swamp by dark magic.
  • Fullmetal Alchemist and the Broken Angel uses the highest tower on a castle, which was built for some inexplicable reason by the leader of the town, who isn't even a villain. Fullmetal Alchemist 2: Curse Of The Crimson Elixir goes even further by having the final area be an enormous super-pyramid (the Spire of Lebis) in the middle of a reconstructed ancient city (complete with Golems imitating era-accurate people), and then when you reach the top of that, you're transported to the basement of the Spire, which is a humongous cavern (the ceiling fades to black), characterized by stone ledges built seemingly in the middle of an abyss with torches of blue fire set along them. And the far-off walls have rocks with glowing red eyes carved into them.
  • The Geneforge series plays with this a good deal, with most sequels playing the trope more straight than the last:
    • 1 averts this to a certain extent; the game's climax will always take place in the Research Core, the series of warrens sprawling the northeast corner of the island the game takes place on, all building up to the Geneforge, the final experiment that got Sucia Island barred. Depending on your faction, the game's final major challenge can also potentially take place in the Great Temple, a massive, ancient structure overlooking the wastes to the northwest. However, the actual final location the player will always be forced to visit is the Guarded Docks... a small, moderately guarded fort situated on a grassy plain over the ocean. The player can even sneak around the south end of the fort if they have the right Spore Baton, bypassing the fortress entirely and beating the game on even more of an Anti-Climax.
    • 2 and 3 play the trope a bit more straight, with Benerii-Uss in 2 and Benerii-Eo in 3 taking the place and the role of the Research Core, and Dhonal's Keep, the center of all Shaper affairs on the Ashen Isles taking the Great Temple's place in 3. The games themselves will only end when the player returns to the entrance of the Drypeak Valley in 2 or goes to the final docks to Terrestia in 3; however, with the exception of the Rebel-aligned docks in 3, all of these final areas are simply walks to the end and can't really be considered any sort of "final dungeon" in the same way the Guarded Docks can.
    • 4: Rebellion is the first game to play this mostly straight; the game will end regardless of faction in Northforge Citadel, a massive Rebellion stronghold and the seat of both a Geneforge and the final undertaking of the Unbound project. If the player aligns with the Shapers, the place's final dungeon status is taken a bit more literally, while if the player sides with the Rebels, they will have to investigate the warrens before going to the Inner Shaping Hall to defend from the Shapers' final seige.
    • 5: Overthrow plays this totally straight, with 4 of the 5 major factions ending the game at Gazaki-Uss, a massive underground city that serves as the heart of the Rebellion and the home of its leader, Ghaldring, while the fifth faction ends at the Shaper Citadel, the largest seat of Shaper government in which the leaders of the Council and the Shapers as a whole convene.
  • Golden Sun:
    • Golden Sun: The Lost Age: has Mars Lighthouse, the final Cosmic Keystone that you've hiked across six continents (and two games) to reach, located at the very edge of the world. It isn't even marked on your map.
    • Golden Sun: Dark Dawn has the Apollo Sanctum, which sits on top of the world's tallest mountain, and has you spend a good chunk of time scaling the mountainside just to reach it! If that doesn't scream final dungeon, the last portion of it also has you walking through a shower of light that is so strong it will completely destroy you unless you use the Umbra Gear, which creates a shadow barrier to protect you temporarily from the intense light.
  • Grim Dawn:
    • In the base game, the final dungeon is the Necropolis, an ancient and absolutely massive graveyard of old where thousands upon thousands of the Empire's citizens lay buried, and where the Cult of Ch'thon has holed up to finalize their summoning ritual, causing the very last floor of the Necropolis' central tower to overlap with the very Void itself; it is here that the Loghorrean awaits to be unleashed upon the world, and where you must put it down.
    • Ashes of Malmouth has the Fleshworks, right at the heart of the titular Malmouth (one of the greatest cities of the empire, and that which fell fastest and hardest to the Aetherials due to infiltration). A titanic construct of amalgamated, living human flesh created by Theodin Marcell, the Flesh-shaper and effective commander of the Aetherials. It is here that he runs his operations to provide bodies to his troops, where he constructs some manner of weapon that will end all resistance in Cairn forever if he gets his chance to use it, and where he must be dug out and finally killed if the Aetherial menace is to ever end.
    • Forgotten Gods keeps escalating as the endgame approaches. First you have the ruins of Korvan, the city that Korvaak, the Eldritch Sun (the titular forgotten god) once ruled and was worshipped by, followed by the Tomb of the Eldritch Sun, the gigantic temple at its very heart where the clergy and the god himself once resided, with a portal right at the bottom leading to the Eldritch Realm, an Eldritch Location of pure magic that the Witch Gods usurped from Korvaak... and finally, the Throne of the Three, the drifting, skyborn prison where the Witch Gods chained the Eldritch Sun up, and from where they had to flee in a hurry before he could finally break free and take his awful vengeance on realms both material and immaterial.
  • Heroes Must Die has Skullcrusher Mountain, the Big Bad's base where you worked prior to your Heel–Face Turn.
  • Jade Empire - the Imperial Palace is a gigantic, floating palace inhabited by the Big Bad and the source of their power. The entire purpose of the fourth chapter, the Lotus Assassin Fortress, is to gain access to the palace. Then you storm the palace and defeat the Big Bad, only to be killed in turn by your teacher, who set the whole thing up. You get better and promptly come back to the Imperial Palace to kick even more ass.
  • Kingdom Hearts:
    • Kingdom Hearts has the End of the World, a twisted world formed from the shattered remains of worlds lost to the Heartless.
    • Played with in 1, as Hollow Bastion fits this trope more despite being a Disc-One Final Dungeon. The End of the World isn't the fortress of the Heartless, it is their leftovers (and largest concentration). The area is impressive, but closer to a protracted Final Boss, New Dimension. However, fitting that trope more is the final battle in an expanse of swirling darkness, and that is only after you finish the part where you fight in a battlefield formed from the broken remains of Sora's world.
    • Sora spends all of Chain of Memories in Castle Oblivion, but the last floor still fits. Every previous floor had retold the story of a world from his memories. The thirteenth floor, however, is simply the stark white halls of Castle Oblivion itself.
    • Kingdom Hearts II has The World That Never Was, home to a sprawling yet empty Dark City, above which floats the central headquarters of Organization XIII, the Castle That Never Was.
    • Subverted in Birth by Sleep in that while the Keyblade Graveyard — an eerie barren world filled entirely with abandoned Keyblades created from the titanic Keyblade War — serves as the final dungeon for all three scenarios and certainly has the tone and style to match, there is still one more scenario with Aqua, culminating in a boss battle against the newly minted Xehanort at Radiant Garden. Also, said graveyard pops up as a dungeon early on in Ven's scenario as well as in various cutscenes in Terra and Aqua's scenarios. Final Mix adds another new scenario where Aqua wanders the Realm of Darkness.
    • Kingdom Hearts coded (as well as Re:coded) has a data recreation of Castle Oblivion, where the cast finally gets to figure out the meaning of the mysterious message in the journal.
    • Dream Drop Distance features The World That Never Was again, only this time it's even more ruined, warped, and twisted after the destruction of II's final battle.
    • Kingdom Hearts III has the Keyblade Graveyard once more, the fated setting for Xehanort's final bid to recreate the Keyblade War. While the actual last world visited is Scala ad Caelum, a grand, long-abandoned city floating atop an endless ocean, it serves more as a Final Boss, New Dimension as very little of it is explored before launching right into the final battle. The Re: Mind DLC on the other hand does have Scala ad Caelum as the final dungeon, since Sora has to find five pieces of Kairi's heart scattered around the town before the game begins the final battle (starting with Sora fighting a Darkside Heartless holding the fifth piece and ending with Sora and Kairi facing off against a copy of Armored Xehanort).
  • The Knights of the Old Republic games were based on the Star Wars franchise, so the final battles (and most boss battles, for that matter) were guaranteed to take place at impressive locations. In particular, the first game ended at the Star Forge, an Artifact of Doom factory that could pump out entire fleets. And it siphoned a sun for a power source. The sequel set the finale on Malachor V, a less visually impressive but still very definitely final dungeon - a planet literally torn apart by a gravity weapon. Again, don't Take Our Word for It. You can see it here. And because there's also a secret academy under the surface, with the final boss fight taking place in the center of a hole in the force, above a pit of fiery death.
  • The Legend of Dragoon has the Moon That Never Sets.
  • The Dominion of Hate in Live A Live is what remains of the Kingdom of Lucrece, once a vibrant and magical medieval kingdom, after it was scourged by the wrath of the demon king Odio. The castle is barren, the village depopulated, and all that remains besides wandering monsters is Odio and his boundless hate.
  • As predicted by the title, the last battle of Lufia & The Fortress of Doom... is in the Fortress of Doom, which sits on a floating island. Not too surprisingly, this is also where the game usually sends the players in all the other games...
  • Mass Effect:
    • The final battlefield of Mass Effect turns out not to be the planet Ilos, as initially suspected, but the Citadel itself. And you climb a kilometer-high tower in zero-gravity fighting many Geth along the way while being buzzed by their Big Damn Gunships. And then the Foreshadowing really hits - near the beginning of the game, Ashley mentioned that the stair arrangement in the Council chamber makes for a great defensive position. Now you have to fight through it just to get to Saren!
    • Mass Effect 2 has the Collector base. An enormous (Citadel or bigger) biomechanical space station, suspended in the middle of a huge ancient debris field. In the accretion disc of the supermassive black hole at the very center of the galaxy.
    • In Mass Effect 3 the final dungeon consists of two separate areas. The first area is London, which is on Earth, which is where the third game began. The second area is the Citadel, a major area throughout the trilogy, now in the hands of the Reapers. The final battle takes place in London, while the trilogy's conflict is resolved on the Citadel.
  • The Mega Man Star Force games have their own VDFDs as well, each on their own more VDF than many of the Battle Network games.
    • Leo/Dragon/Pegasus take place inside a space station that went missing for three years, and everyone onboard with it. The FMians who came to invade Earth under a Gemini-influenced Cepheus use it as their staging point and a place to store EM wave-eating Andromeda as well.
    • Zerker x Saurian/Ninja has the floating continent of Mu, which Lady Vega raised as part of her misguided agenda to take over the world. While she does earn woobie points for how she suffered due to idiots being in charge of her home nation, it doesn't completely justify raising a continent as well as restoring all its weapons with it.
    • Black Ace/Red Joker takes place inside Meteor G, a meteor-sized cluster of Noise! King tried using it to take over the world, Jack and (Queen) Tia want to use it to destroy the world's technology, and in case you thought a plot thread was left hanging for two games, Kelvin Stelar has been in there for over three years as an EM body slowing the damn thing down to the best of his ability. Saving your dad, and the world with him, put this head and shoulders above the others easy.
  • In the Might and Magic franchise, you can usually tell that you are close to the end of the game once Sci-Fi-elements start showing up. The VDFD is usually some kind of starship or control room for the planets, though in MM IX it changed the theme significantly, making the VDFD a hellish crypt called the Tomb of a Thousand Terrors. VIII had the complication that whether it had a very definitely epic final dungeon or didn't really have a final dungeon depends on how strictly you define "dungeon" — the Plane between Planes is a strange, alien place with skeletal remains of a truly giant creature found towards the centre, actually done as a full landscape (meaning flight and such works) and where even creating the key to enter the crystal dungeon that has its entrance was the work of a third of the main quest… but it also has smaller, more proper dungeons inside it, and while Escaton's Palace could itself be called epic (it's built out of the skull of the aforementioned giant, and harbours the closest-thing-to-a-Big Bad, Escaton the Destroyer), the quest structure also means it will always be the first dungeon in the Plane between Planes you complete, with one of the four small and rather less impressive elemental prisons in each corner of the plane being the actual final dungeon (any one — they can be done in any order).
  • In Miitopia, we have the creepy, otherworldly and aptly named Otherworld, which sets the game's Astral Finale.
  • Minecraft Dungeons: The Obsidian Pinnacle, a.k.a. the ramparts of Highblock Castle and the place where you finally fight the Arch-Illager.
  • Mother series examples:
    • EarthBound Beginnings has either a very small final dungeon, or a very large final dungeon if you count all of Mount Itoi.
    • In EarthBound (1994), the final stage, the Cave of the Past, is achieved after crossing the Point of No Return. While its present-day version is a series of green platforms floating in the middle of somewhere very mysterious, its past version, where the final battle occurs, is a ghostly mass of gray cliffs and otherworldly shapes floating amid a foggy void. Such an eerie place is fitting for the Big Bad, Giygas, to take up residence.
    • The final chapter of Mother 3 takes your party to New Pork City. It's clear that there's no going back, since the overworld has been completely abandoned, and just about every NPC you've ever met is there with you. The final battle itself takes place deep underground, like in EarthBound (1994).
  • Neverwinter Nights: The Source Stone in the original campaign. The Netherese city of Undrentide in Shadows of Undrentide.
  • Neverwinter Nights 2 ends with one of these as you attack the Big Bad's stronghold. Of course, you just drove his army away from yours minutes earlier...
    • And even though it's really short, Mask of the Betrayer has you fighting through the depths of your own soul.
    • The second expansion, Storm of Zehir, has the Temple of the World Serpent. Subverted in that you can continue adventuring afterward a la The Elder Scrolls.
  • Played with in NieR. There's a giant door of no return that leads to what the characters are calling the Shadowlord's Castle, all the Plot Coupons have been found, and everyone's gearing up for the final battle. They go through the door...and find that it looks like a cross between a high-end apartment building and an office. This is the first sign that something is deeply wrong.
    • Played with even more in the remaster, where the final dungeon that composes Ending E is completely different from the rest of the game: a virtual-looking space made out of blocks and recycling architecture from the Shadowlord's palace, with Grimoire Weiss' powers gaining a blocky appearance as well and the HUD itself changing to the one featured in NieR: Automata.
  • NieR: Automata pulls this thrice. The first is the Copied City, a blank white replica of a Renaissance city, with Adam waiting inside, littered with corpses of YoRHa corpses, possibly from the battle with Grun you just struggled through, as 2B. Later, you have to escape from a suicide cult in the depths of the Abandoned Factory's basement, with assistance from 9S in hacking space, making it one for both Sides A and B. The final battle of Sides A and B just takes place in the City Ruin's crater. The true final dungeon, The Tower, doesn't reveal itself until after 2B is corrupted and commits suicide by A2, which causes 9S to snap and swear revengeance. Both 9S and A2 trek through it, with 9S getting a Mirror Boss Zerg Rush of 2B clones to fuck with his head, while A2 sneaks in after him and reaches a replica of Devola and Popola's library from NieR. Then both battle against Ko-Shi and Ro-Shi, two revamps of So-Shi and Boku-Shi, fought at the end of Sides A and B, A2 on the ground, 9S in the air. After beating them individually (and briefly teaming up to kill Ko-Shi and Ro-Shi's combined form, 9S and A2 then face off, who you choose to control decides whether you get Endings C or D.
  • Octopath Traveler has the Gate of Finis, which as the player learns during the endgame is where the fallen god Galdera is sealed.
  • OMORI: The place where Basil is being help captive; Black Space, a Yume Nikki-esque area with a nexus with multiple doors leading to several nightmarish areas- you must go through a little more than half of them to be able to reach the Church of Something and the game's endings. Unusually, you reach this area after fighting the standard Final Boss, Humphrey. The True Final Boss is fought at White Space, where the game began.
  • Parasite Eve has the Museum of Natural History as its final area for you to explore. It has multiple floors, lots of backtracking, powerful enemies, creepy atmosphere, and the Big Bad is waiting for you to show up at her room. The actual final battles take place in a different location, but the museum pretty much screams that it's the beginning of the end.
  • Subverted in Phantasy Star; King Lassic's tower of Baya Malay is at first glance the Very Definitely Final Dungeon, until you reach its peak and discover it's merely the gateway to King Lassic's invisible flying city, the Air Castle. The game then subverts the trope the second time when, after finishing the dungeon and killing Lassic, the real final dungeon turns out to be an unimpressive catacomb beneath Paseo, where Dark Force has taken up residence. The other games in the Phantasy Star series, however, usually play it straight: The control center for the entire solar system, an ancient city, the other side of a dimensional prison, etc....
  • The Fortress of Regrets in Planescape: Torment is a fortress that stretches for hundreds of miles, located in a Plane of total entropy, built from the regrets of all the vastly terrible deeds in the main character's countless past lives and populated by the shadows of all the people who have died because of him. And the portal leading to it turns out to be in the room you started the game from.
  • Most main Pokémon games have two of these, one for the evil team plot and another for the Pokémon League challenge. Before you can face the Elite Four and the Champion at the Pokémon League, you must go through each region's Victory Road, a long cave or series of caves filled with powerful wild Pokémon and trainers that you pass through while scaling a mountain. You also generally have to fight your rival either before you enter or at the exit. In addition, while early installments had the League Building itself be a normal skyscraper, from Gen IV onward, they're ornate buildings designed to look like either Eastern- or Western-styled castles. There are also different "final dungeons" for the villainous team plotlines, which typically end at a different point to the League plotline. Each of these takes its time to hammer home what you're getting into here, with dramatic music, face-offs against the villainous bosses and Legendary Pokemon, large and complicated puzzles, and sometimes certain features being disabled (such as music overrides not occurring or bottom screen features not functioning).
    • Pokémon Red and Blue: Silph Co., a ten-story skyscraper filled with teleporters and Team Rocket members, where you fight Giovanni at the top.
    • Pokémon Gold and Silver (and by extension HeartGold and SoulSilver):
      • The Team Rocket plot Goldenrod Radio Tower, which has you fight three Executives in one building to stop them from broadcasting a message to Giovanni.
      • Victory Road and the Champion are the last challenge of the main game, but the post-game final dungeon is Mt. Silver, a gargantuan mountain in-between Kanto and Johto. And at the top you fight Red, the protagonist from the first games.
    • Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire:
      • Seafloor Cavern, where Groudon and Kyogre are awakened by Teams Magna and Aqua respetively, which is shortly followed by the smaller but no less majestic Cave of Origin.
      • The Delta Episode of the remake has the Sky Pillar, a tower where Rayquaza must be awakened to get its help in saving the world.
    • Pokémon Diamond and Pearl:
      • The original games have Mount Coronet, which must be scaled to reach the Spear Pillar and stop Cyrus from destroying the universe.
      • Platinum turns Mount Coronet into a Disc-One Final Dungeon as afterwards the player must go into the Distortion World, which is essentially Pokémon's version of Hell.
    • Pokémon Black and White, has N's Castle, which N, the leader of Team Plasma, summons after you battle the Elite Four. After you go through the castle and reach him, the version legendary appears (who you must catch) and you must fight N, who has the opposing legendary. And after you defeat him, Ghetsis appears and reveals the true intentions of Team Plasma and you have to take him down. That's where the game ends. Going back to properly challenge the League and actually battle the Champion is treated as something to close out the epilogue.
    • Pokémon Black 2 and White 2: The Great Chasm is the final area of the Team Plasma story, though most of it is spent in the second visit to the Plasma Frigate within the Chasm.
    • Pokémon X and Y: Team Flare Secret HQ, a huge, clinically-styled Elaborate Underground Base hidden below a civilization-ending weapon.
    • Pokémon Sun and Moon: Vast Poni Canyon, a Victory Road-esque cave which is the only place you can summon your version legendary and access Ultra Space.
    • Pokémon Sword and Shield: Instead of a Victory Road and an Elite Four, you go to Wyndon Stadium, where a single-elimination knockout tournament takes place. Instead, your final dungeon is Rose Tower, which you must climb in order to stop Chairman Rose after learning of his plans, which happens just before your Champion match.
    • Pokémon Scarlet and Violet: Due to the open-world formula change in this instalment, there is no Victory Road (although the questline for the traditional eight gyms and the Pokémon League is named after it). In fact, the Pokémon League is just a short walk away from the central city of Mesagoza and all of the Pokemon up the path are low-level. However, upon completing all three main storylines, one final storyline takes place which takes the player and their friends to Area Zero, a crystaline biome deep within the Great Crater of Paldea where powerful Pokémon roam, including very dangerous Paradox Pokémon brought from the distant past/future whom threaten to break free of their containment within the Crater and overun Paldea's ecosystem if not stopped.
    • Pokémon Colosseum ends in the Realgam Tower. It spends the entire game being constructed, and in the final act it opens as a glittering Vegas-style resort complex run by the Cipher syndicate. You dismantle Cipher at the top of the spire by battling in Realgam's private Colosseum, while thousands upon thousands of screaming spectators view your final struggles.
    • Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness, the sequel to Colosseum, sees Cipher confronted in their newest base, Citadark Isle. This hideout is still under construction, and the tunnels in the complex weave in and out of an active volcano.
  • Radiata Stories ends in the City of White Nights, a decaying structure located at the literal end of the world that is shrouded in perpetual night. At the top is the castle of the Gold Dragon, where all reality is due to be reset any time now...
  • Resonance of Fate: The Basilica. If the entire gameworld is an enormous tower, where else can the ultimate confrontation be but at the very top? And then the Bonus Dungeon takes place at the bottom of the tower.
  • "Mother's Lair", the core of the Ghost Planet you've spent 90% of the game trying to reach, serves this role in Rogue Galaxy.
  • SaGa (RPG):
    • The Final Fantasy Legend has the heroes ascending the tower for the second time, after falling victim to a booby trap after the battle with Ashura. Once they finally make it to the top, they meet the Creator.
    • Final Fantasy Legend II has the Central Temple, which is in the verge of collapse and will take down the entire world with its destruction as a result of Big Bad Apollo's abuse of the MAGI.
    • Final Fantasy Legend III has Xagor's Castle, the Big Bad's base of operations atop Mt. Goht.
    • Romancing SaGa has Quietus, the prison of the evil god Saruin, sealed beneath Isthmus Keep.
    • Romancing SaGa 2 has the Sealed Dungeon, where the Seven Heroes retreat to after their defeat by the generations of emperors that ruled Avalon.
    • Romancing SaGa 3 has the Abyss itself, where the personification of the destructive power that the Rise of Morastrum represents resides.
    • Sa Ga Frontier has several final dungeons depending on the chosen scenario. A traditional example is the HQ of the evil organization Black X in Red's scenario.
    • SaGa Frontier 2 has the Last Megalith, where the Egg, the Artifact of Doom, Sealed Evil in a Can, and Eldritch Abomination rolled into one, resides.
    • Unlimited Saga, like SaGa Frontier, has several final dungeons depending on the chosen scenario. Here, however, the Final Boss is always Chaos.
    • SaGa Scarlet Grace has Ei-Hanum, the mystical city where the Big Bad, the Firebringer, resides.
  • Salt and Sanctuary has the Still Palace, where the actual Nameless God resides. A gigantic, luxurious palace that is floating upside-down in the middle of a black void, where only the roofs and the undersides of stairways can be properly traversed. There is nothing inside except for you, him, and thousands upon thousands of lit candles that give the entire place an eerie look of pure, white light against endless dark. It's also the only place in the entire game to get unique music, setting the tone for the final battle of the game.
  • Shadow Hearts series:
    • The first Shadow Hearts game had its final dungeon be a gigantic castle that acted as a beacon for an alien of godlike power. This castle was also a biomechanical space station. In a game set in Asia and Europe in 1913. Telltale shift in scenery doesn't even begin to describe it.
    • Shadow Hearts: Covenant has the Asuka Stone Platform, which when activated teleports one to the Vessel, a massive series of tiers powered by crystals, with bizarre shapes floating by in the distance.
    • Shadow Hearts: From The New World has The Gate to the World of Malice, basically the very dimension where all Malice originates, complete with a black sun that's the game's Final Boss (well, him and Lady/Grace Garland).
  • The Shin Megami Tensei series has no shortage of epicness, and the final dungeons are no exception. In particular:
    • Shin Megami Tensei I ends at the great Cathedral of the Messians, a towering monument built for the glory of God after He has flooded the world and left only you, tiny island pockets scattered across Tokyo, and people already at the Cathedral as the only survivors to the End of the World. Who you fight there depends on your alignment.
    • Shin Megami Tensei II sends you to the Ark, a space station also dedicated to God, from which He intends to cleanse the entire planet forever, and filled with His various avatars and incarnations.
    • Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne climaxes in a climb up a tower which leads to the center of the inside-out Vortex World.
    • Digital Devil Saga: Avatar Tuner 2. The final dungeon of that game is the afterlife, after all the main characters have died and Serph and Sera have fused into a superbeing on the way. And the afterlife is inside the sun, and the reason they're going there is to speak to God and convince him to stop destroying the world. Also, the inside of the sun is apparently purple and kind of sparkly. Looks pretty, though.
    • Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey: While the entire game takes place in the Schwarzelt, the final sector, Horologium, just plain screams FINAL AREA. The influence of Mem Aleph's presence is so great that the area takes the form of primordial Earth — ie, Fire and Brimstone Hell. The fact this sector is absurdly large and filled with powerful demons, as well as featuring a very confusing move-tile maze, contributes to making this sector one hell of a trek.
    • Shin Megami Tensei IV: The Law path goes through Lucifer Palace, a gilded palace with an infinite hall puzzle. The Chaos path has Purgatorium, a flying golden clockwork city with reversing gravity. The Neutral path gets both.
    • Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse: The final dungeon of both Peace and Anarchy is an entire alternate dimension ruled by God called YHVH Space, where Nanashi and Flynn fight through both the dead armies of Law and Chaos before confronting Metatron, Satan, and YHVH.
    • Shin Megami Tensei V: The final destination is the Empyrean, the pathway to the throne of the world's Creator, which is a pure white space with a tower made of cathedrals stuck together in Alien Geometries that ascends into the heavens.
    • Interesting aversion from the original Persona: The alternate path has you battle the Snow Queen, whose final dungeon is the school the kids go to, as she's really one of the teachers. The normal path ("SEBEC Route") however, sends you into the Avidya World — a cavern deep beneath Mikage-cho which Pandora (the creature born from Maki's innermost sense of denial and delusion) has hidden herself in. That is, the entire final dungeon is Maki's willing ignorance and self-denial made manifest.
    • Persona 2 Innocent Sin takes you aboard the Xibalba, an ancient spaceship that rumors across Sumaru City have just recently brought into existence... in time to see the entire rest of the world be destroyed. Its sequel, Eternal Punishment, sends you to the Monado Mandala, Nyarlatothep's domain in the deepest reaches of the Human Collective Unconscious.
    • Persona 3 has also a downplayed example since the final dungeon is the only dungeon. Doesn't stop it from being difficult to reach the top, especially if it is the first play. (It also has the fact that most of the time, there's timed barriers.)
    • Persona 4 is tricky, given that there are many wrong choices the characters and even the player can make.
      • While Mitsuo's dungeon is an obvious Disc-One Final Dungeon, both Heaven and Magatsu Inaba could very well count, depending on what ending the player gets. The real deal is Yomotsu Hirasaka, where the game's real Big Bad lurks. Yomotsu Hirasaka is also a Genius Bonus for those aware of Shinto mythology: it is the path that leads down to Yomi, the Shinto underworld.
      • The Updated Re Release, The Golden, adds in another such place with the Hollow Forest, unlocked only when the player maxes new character Marie's Social Link before the new winter events. Made even more convincing by the boss having the combined power of both Namatame and Adachi's powers given by the true final boss forced onto herself.
    • Persona 5 will have the following examples if you're able to avoid making the wrong choices.
      • The original game is strange in that the dungeon is really a place you've already been exploring for leveling up: Mementos, the collective unconscious. Turns out this "side area" is mandatory in order to complete the game unlocking the last area where the Greater-Scope Villain is hiding. But it's only part of the endgame (assuming you avoid an obvious choice that leads to a bad end). Part two is the real world, which is starting to fuse with Mementos.
      • The Updated Re Release, Royal, will have a new dungeon take place after the above example if the player manages to reach the highest possible rank for the Councillor Confidant before the start of the third term. When the protagonist and Akechi notice some oddities in the world despite the destruction of the Metaverse, it is revealed the cause is Takuto Maruki, Shujin Academy's guidance counselor and the Councillor confidant, who is revealed to be a Persona user in control of his own Palacenote . Yaldabaoth's influence, the stress brought about by his failures, and his anger at his research being stolen by Shido have caused Maruki's Persona to go berserk, carrying the risk of bringing back the Metaverse and forcing the Phantom Thieves to go on one last heist through his Palace before their school term ends.
  • Soltis in Skies of Arcadia is a whole continent, but fits this trope perfectly. It appears ominously from the happiest and lowest-level area in the game, raising up dark clouds and the game's strongest monsters with it to change everything around. Everybody in the world automatically fears it, even when they can't see it. It was the original home of the Crystal Spires and Togas civilization that bore the Mysterious Waif, and inside is the power to destroy the world. Not only does Soltis appear in the lowest-level area of the game, but the entrance to the dungeon is Shrine Island, the first dungeon in the game, which turns out to have been a piece of Soltis that broke off when the continent originally sank.
  • South Park: The Stick of Truth has Clyde's Fortress, an enormous treehouse in the backyard of Clyde's house, who has just revealed to be the one who stole the Stick of Truth.
  • Lampshaded in The Speris Legacy, when Cho enters Gallus's imposing fortress of Spiral Castle:
    Cho: I've finally got here! What a journey!
  • Stella Glow has the Moon where Mother Qualia rests, which the Tuning Knights must put a stop to save both the world and Marie.
  • The Suikoden series subverts this trope by relying on the series' emphasis on war: the last dungeon in most of the games is usually the other army's biggest fort or capital city. In the latter case, it almost feels anti-climactic, as the player had to fight to said city, ensuring most of the enemy army would be in tatters. The examples are as follows:
    • Suikoden: Gregminster Palace, the home of The Emperor, and the building where the game begins.
    • Suikoden II: L'Renouille, the capital city of Highland, the nation which has been the main opposing force for the entire game. However, the last dungeon is not the last (optional) confrontation, which occurs at Tenzan Pass, where the game began.
    • Suikoden III: The Ceremonial Site, a suitably ancient series of ruins, which also happens to be the Lost Superweapon central to the Well-Intentioned Extremist antagonist's plan.
    • Suikoden IV: Fort El-Eal, the southernmost stronghold of the Kooluk Empire.
    • Suikoden V: The Sindar ruins of the Ashtwal Mountains, where Lord Godwin has threatened to use the power of the Sun Rune on the country, and which requires three parties to get through.
    • Suikoden Tierkreis has a more traditional example: the tower of the Order of the One True Way functions as this well enough the first time through, but after that, The One King arrives and turns the whole thing into a giant, but hollow, statue of himself, which you have to go through again.
  • Super Mario Bros.:
    • Super Mario RPG had a double subversion. Bowser's Castle. The sword sticking out of appears to be the final boss... except that the sword is the gateway to the true final dungeon, Smithy's weapons Factory (complete with Smithy, the Final Boss and Big Bad, at the very end).
    • Paper Mario
      • The final dungeon of the original Paper Mario is a flying castle (Bowser's). The final battle is on a special Bowser-boosting arena mimicking the appearance of his Clown Car, and is accessed via a temporary bridge leading from Peach's Castle, which is on top of Bowser's Castle. And all this happens IN OUTER SPACE.
      • The final dungeon of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is behind the titular door, a gigantic downward-going complex that houses powerful monsters and the entombed soul of a demon.
      • The final dungeon of Super Paper Mario was an entirely black-and-white castle in the middle of a void that threatens to devour all of existence. In both cases, with the way they are designed, as well as the dark and bleak moods of the places, there is no doubt of their validity as TVDFD.
      • Although far more mundane, World 6 of Paper Mario: Sticker Star takes place in the skies of the Mushroom Kingdom and sees Mario attacking Bowser Jr's airship to reach Bowser's Sky Castle, having a final confrontation with Kamek and finally confronting Bowser in a battle that ends on the edge of the castle, right in front of Peach.
      • Paper Mario: Color Splash has Black Bowser's Castle, which looks almost the same as Bowser's Sky Castle from the previous game... except this one is floating in the middle of a island, and you can only reach it by traversing a rainbow.
      • Paper Mario: The Origami King has Origami Castle, which King Olly used his power to turn Peach's castle into. Aside from being positioned on top of a volcano, the castle is filled with powerful enemies, monuments to Olly and Olivia, and pits full of living cootie-catchers that can kill Mario in a couple of hits.
    • Mario & Luigi
      • In Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, the final dungeon happens to be Bowser's Castle... a giant castle floating in mid air that even LOOKS like a giant statue of the Koopa King. Done differently though in that Bowser isn't actually the Big Bad; the villain who hijacked his body took his castle, army, and technology for the invasion.
      • Shroob Castle plays this role in Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time, being the Shroobified version of the past Peach's Castle complete with UFOs, Mordor style conditions, and a giant statue of Princess Shroob on top.
      • Peach's Castle in Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story. It's huge, it looks extremely ominous on the upper levels, is filled to the brim with Fawful-style decor, and turns into a giant black hole shooting mecha to fight Bowser directly.
      • On the Bros' side, there's the Airway, Bowser's insides final location, which is full of enemies corrupted by the Dark Star.
      • Neo Bowser Castle in Mario & Luigi: Dream Team. It's huge, it looks like something from a nightmare itself, floats high in the sky, has a dark forcefield around it, a death ray that it demonstrates on a few nearby islands, and is even shown being wished for by the Big Bads.
      • A completely different Neo Bowser Castle in Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam. It's huge, floats in the sky (and you actually storm it while it is flying, unlike Dream Team where you had to send it crashing to the ground) and sports a giant cannon used to destroy Peach's Castle.
  • Sweet Home (1989): The game is spent wandering around Mamiya's mansion, in gardens, courtyards, inner quarters, ballrooms, basements, and even underground caves. The final stretch, however, takes place in a strange, glowing, red-and-purple twisted nightmare scape with chasing specters, as well as Doppelgangers of the party to act as bosses.
  • The Hanging Gardens/Eden in Tactics Ogre. A surprisingly tranquil looking place full of palm trees and waterfalls...until you get to the final stages, which are crawling with undead and a gate to hell.
  • Tales Series:
    • The final dungeon of Tales of Phantasia is Dhaos's Castle. Not the same Dhaos Castle that was the Disc-One Final Dungeon; this one has a totally new layout and it's hidden in a different time period. The heroes have to bend space-time to their will to even make it to the front door.
    • Tales of Symphonia:
      • The game has Derris-Kharlan, which is a purple, gaseous planet that is just a bit too close to the planet where most of the game takes place. Inside you've got really powerful undead monsters, evil angels, and it ends with a busted up castle with what appears to be a black hole behind it. Yeah, Amazing Technicolor Battlefield. Oh, when Derris-Kharlan appears, it is started with the Big Bad hijacking the body of The Hero's closest friend (who may be his lover) then causing the Tower Of Salvation to EXPLODE, sending chunks of it raining down as meteors. If that's not enough, when the dungeon does appear, it is seen with it so close that bolts of space lightning are raining down from it and its gravity is causing huge storms on the planet. And it turns the sky purple.
      • The sequel sets the final battle at the Ginnungagap, the gateway in between the heroes' world and Niflheim, the realm of the demons. Failure means the heroes' world will become one with Niflheim. But seriously, no pressure.
    • Due to it having 2 mostly independent stories, Tales of Legendia has 2 of these. First is the Wings of Light, which is ridiculously obscenely long and has 3 distinctive sections, each of which could qualify as a full dungeon on its own. The second, the Cradle of Time, isn't so impressive length-wise, but it's a place that exists outside of time, and is made of small floors that on each one is a boss fight.
    • Tales of the Abyss ends at the Absorption Gate, a castle located at the North Pole where all the world's energy returns to the Core. Then the game pulls a Your Princess Is in Another Castle! on you and it turns out that the real Final Dungeon is Eldrant, a replica of an entire island, which is now capable of flight (until it crashes by way of your party), and resting place of the Crystal Dragon Jesus.
    • Tales of Vesperia has the Tower of Tarqaron, a floating city which has been converted to a Magitek weapon of enough power to annihilate an Eldritch Abomination... by sacrificing the life force of every human on the planet for its power source.
    • Tales of Graces has the Lastalia, the core of the planet Ephinea and the source of all eleth that gives life to the planet. It was about to be corrupted by Lambda until Asbel and co. put a stop to his plans. The final dungeon for the Lineage and Legacies storyline is another Lastalia, but this time, of the dead planet Fodra.
    • Tales of Xillia has as its final dungeon the Temporal Crossroads. It is located somewhere between the worlds of Rieze Maxia and Elympios, but is not normally accessed except via dimensional scars. You visit it twice — first, when Jude and Milla unite to confront the real Maxwell; and second, when the united party faces the final bosses of the game, Gaius and Muzét.
    • Tales of Xillia 2 ends at the Land of Canaan, where some say that it leads its travelers to the "Promised Land".
    • Tales of Zestiria has Artorius' Throne, an enormous ruined temple, where Lord of Calamity lurks. The skies here has blood-red color, and the sun is turned black. Curiously, it's actually the Disc-One Final Dungeon of the prequel. What appears to be a random final dungeon in the first game suddenly makes a lot more sense, given what happened in the epilogue of the second one.
    • Tales of Berseria has Innominat's Domain, a huge palace in the sky where the party confronts Artorius and Innominat.
    • Tales of Arise has Del Fharis Castle in Ganath Haros, where it's built up to be the Final Dungeon as it is the residence of Big Bad Vholran, the last Renan lord to be fought against. As per Tales series tradition though, it is actually a Disc-One Final Dungeon, with the real one taking place in the decimated planet of Rena..
  • Tokyo Xanadu:
    • The base story has Pandora which opens up on the Final Chapter, caused by Shiori remembering that she's an outright paradox: she died during the Tokyo Twilight Disaster and it was the Twilight Apostle who brought her to life. Killing her saves the city, but it makes her Ret Gon to everyone that isn't able to manifest soul devices. It isn't until dealing with the Final Boss of the base game, the Nine-Tailed Fox, that Shiori is brought back to life and undoes her Ret-Gone.
    • The After Story, set three months after the end of the base game, has the Boundary of Death. Because of the Nine-Tailed Fox undoing Shiori's death, the Twilight Apostle is free to pick up where it left off, throwing Morimiya into a shadowy purgatory and plans to do it to the rest of the world.
  • The Legend of Heroes - Trails:
    • The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky:
      • First Chapter sets up the finale to be in Grancel Castle, which you've been to earlier in the Final Chapter but has now been taken over by the Intelligence Division. The party is sent on a mission to break into it and rescue Queen Alicia, but then you find that the real final dungeon is the Sealed Area, a secret multi-level ancient ruin hidden beneath the Castle.
      • Trails in the Sky Second Chapter has the Liber Ark, a floating Advanced Ancient Acropolis built by the ancient Zemurian civilization that's been perfectly preserved by being sealed in a pocket dimension for 1,200 years, with a large part of the villains' plan throughout the game being spent just getting it to reappear. The very last part of the game is spent climbing to the top of the Axis Pillar, a tower in the center of the city, then taking an elevator down the middle of it into the very core of the Ark, where the Aureole, is kept.
      • Trails in the Sky The 3rd has Phantasmagoria Castle, which is the home of Anima, the living core of the artificial dimension of Phantasma.
    • The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure:
      • Trails from Zero has the Sun Fort, a centuries-old military fortress now being used as the lair of the D∴G Cult.
      • Trails to Azure one-ups that with the Azure Tree, a massive, tree-shaped tower made of blue crystal formed by the Reality Warping powers of the Azure Demiourgos.
    • In The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel has a rather different approach to this in the first few games.
      • For the first game, the final main dungeon, the Realm of the Great Shadow, is in the seventh floor the Old Schoolhouse outside of Thors' Military Academy where Class VII has been going all year long investigating its depths. The final dungeon is not only longer and larger than any of the floors they've been to at that point, but they then have to deal with an Eldritch Abomination in Loa Erebonius, which is very much a Climax Boss. The True Final Boss is set well after the events of this dungeon.
      • In Cold Steel II, the Finale ends with the Imperial Palace in Heimdallr transformed into a hellish fortress called the Infernal Palace. While it's quite the big dungeon for the story, it only marks a turning point at the end of the civil war. It's only during the end of the school year in March, in the Epilogue, that Class VII and their allies have one last adventure in the Old Schoolhouse, which has been transformed into the Reverie Corridor, the true final dungeon of the story.
      • Trails of Cold Steel III ends in a bizarre pocket dimension called the Gral of Erebos, located underneath the Karel Imperial Villa.
      • Trails of Cold Steel IV -the end of saga- has the Tuatha Dé Danann, the "Phantasmal Mobile Fortress", the ultimate weapon created by the Gnomes for their war against the Witches, that disappeared in the space-time disruption caused by the clash between the two clans' Sept-Terrion. Now recovered and rebuilt by the Gnomes' descendants, the Black Workshop, it emerges above Osgiliath Basin, then moves to floating above the capital city of Hemidallr. Its appearance is accompanied by five duplicates of the mysterious "Salt Pale" that destroyed the country of North Ambria that emerge across the Erebonian Empire and sustain a barrier around it, necessitating the party to split up and destroy all of them just to get inside.
    • The Legend of Heroes: Trails into Reverie has Reverse Babel, the massive tower that houses the Elysion system and acts as the base for the Eighth Awakener, Ishmelga-Rean.
    • The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak has Genesis Tower, a tower with the ability to stop time created by the Seventh Octo-Genesis, where the heroes go to stop the Armata mafia syndicate, with Gerard Dantès at the very top.
    • Trails through Daybreak II: Crimson Sin has Octradium, a phase space where multiple parallel dimensions overlap and a place for the Oct-Genesis to observe humanity's sins.
  • Ultima:
    • The last level set its final confrontation in a cavern beneath a volcano, 1000 years in the past. It may have been monochrome and not that visually impressive, but it was about as very definitely final as one could hope for on an Apple II computer in 1980.
    • The Great, Stygian Abyss from the fourth and Dungeon Doom from the fifth installment of the series should also qualify, if only for its name and the damnable somersaults you have to perform to get in there. In Ultima IV, the player characters need to have completed a number of highly virtuous tasks in a highly virtuous manner, learned the Word of Power, and collected several Plot Coupons; in Ultima V, you have to drag your tired arses halfway across the Underworld, the Word of Power is needed again, as are several other items (actually usable items with other functions) and it's combined with the fact that once you go in, you can't leave until you reach the very bottom and hopefully have everything you need to complete the final puzzle.
  • Vagrant Story takes place in the city of Lea Monde, which was governed by a theocracy. The entire city is a giant Grimoire, its walls inscribed with magical runes and ancient languages. At the very locus of the city, where all the power of the Dark gathers, stands the Cathedral.
  • Valkyria Chronicles
    • The first game has The Marmota, an enormous vehicle commanded by Maximilian that's much less a tank and more of a land dreadnought. In addition, it also serves as a platform to utilize the largest Valkyrur weapon ever created, the Valkof.
    • The second game has the Dandarius, a heavily armed battleship given to the Gallia Revolutionary Army by the Atlantic Federation that's crawling with soldiers and tanks, equipped with a powerful rail cannon that will one-shot anything caught in its blast, and where Baldren Gassenarl turns himself into the strongest Artificial Valkyria.
  • Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines: Venture Tower, a massive high-rise visible from almost every location in the game. A long climb up impeded by elite vampires, SWAT agents, and some villains who really had it coming.
  • The Wild ARMs games have a tendency to employ this. Given that they have a Wild West theme (with some steampunk elements thrown in), their final dungeons are really out there. In order, we have had:
  • Wizardry 8 has Ascension Peak. The top of a mountain, where the player's party must find three temples where the Plot Coupons must be placed. It also has a teleporter to the Cosmic Circle, residence of the universe's gods, the Cosmic Lords, where the player party will ascend in order to become Cosmic Lords themselves.
  • The World Ends with You decided that an awesome spot for the final several fights would include God (or a god)'s drinks parlor/pad and that the ultimate final cutscene would occur in a massive room where soul-stuff gets refined and remade. And promptly does, post scene. The door to the former is lampshaded by one of the characters - "This door just screams of endgame!"
  • The final dungeons of the World of Mana games tend to take place in or near the Mana Tree. One exception is Secret of Mana, with a floating superweapon that's big enough to be mistaken for a Floating Continent.
  • Xenogears: The final area takes place inside an large artificial constructed body formed by the Final Boss, who is within the core at the epicenter.
  • Xenosaga:
    • Episodes 1 and 2 have the Proto Merkabah and Omega System, respectively. Both are weapons of mass destruction awakened by that game's Big Bad, with the latter being especially notable for erupting from the core of the original planet Miltia everyone's been trying to locate throughout both episodes. 2 also has a sort of "epilogue" final dungeon: a Space-Time Anomaly created by Albedo, Episode 1's Big Bad, where Jr's confronted with a lot of disturbing memories and has a final showdown with his twin brother.
    • Episode 3's final dungeon is so massive that it'll easily make up at least 1/5th of your total play time. Planet Michtam, once home to the antagonist organization Ormus and one of your party members Ziggy, also houses the device Zarathustra Big Bad Wilhelm's planning to use to enact Eternal Recurrance. All of the mysterious artifacts and important players of the story have gathered here; what follows is a line-up of climactic cutscenes and boss battles against all the remaining antagonists as the party starts on the planet's surface, descends into an ancient factory, before navigating the maze-like crystalline control structure of Zarathustra before finally reaching the planet's core for the final showdown.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles:
    • Xenoblade Chronicles 1 has you entering the massive titan controlled by the Big Bad, and fighting a boss in its heart. Then, you are returned to one of the Disc One Final Dungeons, a demonic prison now sunken into the titan's head, and completing that takes you to outer space.
    • The final story mission in Xenoblade Chronicles X takes place inside the Lifehold Core, located very far from any of the five continents explored up to that point.
    • The World Tree, and Elysium up top, has long been hinted to be the final destination in Xenoblade Chronicles 2, but few anticipated that it and the landscape around it are what remained of the old world with massive roots entwined around a high-tech orbital elevator, and fewer still suspected that the very satellite where Klaus conducted his fateful experiment was at the very top.
    • Xenoblade Chronicles 3 has Origin, the super-computer floating in the center of Aionios created by the Queens of Agnus and Keves which has become Moebius and Z's base of operations for sustaining the eternal war.
  • Ys series by Falcom is a big fan of these. Let's elaborate:
  • Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana has Octus, an alien dimension inside of the Great Tree of Origin filled with otherwordly beings. However, if you reached the True Ending, the ACTUAL final dungeon is the Abyss of Origin, a strange primordial location in which lies the Origin of Life.
  • Ys IX: Monstrum Nox has the Balduq Fortress of Yore, a timelocked version of the Balduq Prison from 500 years ago from the Hundred Years War where the Big Bad of the game has been conducting his experiments to end the Grimoire Nox. The party fights through all of his hellish creations to learn what he had been up to, especially involving Adol: To make a godlike being from Adol's memories named Atra Nox Philius who wipes out the Lemures outside of the castle, but now decides that humanity is to blame for the Grimwald Nox and is the final boss. Luckily there's a NO TURNING BACK door that lets you know this is where the game ends.

    Shoot Em Up 
  • EXTRAPOWER: Star Resistance The Stage 5 ascent up the Shakun Star Central Computer tower is penultimate stage where the player is pursued by swarms of enemies from above and below before the final boss fights.
  • If you can complete all the objectives in Xeno Fighters R, you get to make a decisive raid on the refitted space colony the BRES army calls home. And of course, that means a very, very large fleet of fighters is there to make life short and exciting for you. It doesn't help that this isn't just BRES's administrative base; it's also an industrial colony—in part, their main shipyard. So yes, a few of their capital ships and a lot of their recently-constructed higher-grade fighters are ready and willing to fight. Have fun!

    Simulation Game 
  • Ace Combat series:
    • The Electrosphere in the American version of Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere (and one of the multiple endings in the Japanese version), a stunning void space crisscrossed by infinite planes covered with shiny luminous grids, with a big green vortex on the background, where you must fight a really tough UI4054 Aurora fighter. Fortunately, by that point you're already flying the mighty XFA-36A.
    • Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War had you raid the entrance of and then fly into a giant underground tunnel with an enemy ace on your tail. Except that it is not the true final dungeon. The very definitely final final dungeon is not really a dungeon, it's the open sky of a capital city.
    • Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War had you fly through a canyon with heavy anti-air fire, then into the interior of a dam.
    • Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown had you enter a series of underground tunnels leading to the International Space Elevator against a small agile drone that can start a Skynet-esque revolution.
  • The Tower of Maximus from Sky Odyssey. As it's the goal of the game for the player to rediscover this lost city, it's no secret that this is the final level. When flying here the music suddenly changes to a more mysterious/ominous tone, the massive tower appears out of the mist, and the players has to avoid massive waterwheels along an underground river to reach the center of the city.

    Stealth Based Game 
  • Thief:
    • In Thief: The Dark Project, after visiting such Victorian/medieval/steampunk locations as a mansion, a cathedral, city streets, an opera house, a prison, a thieves' guild etc., the last level is the Maw of Chaos, a hellish dimension of weird layout, magic and the Elements, spewing forth an unlimited horde of monsters. With an Elder God inside that most people in the enlightened world no longer believe in.
    • Thief II: The Metal Age has Soulforge Cathedral, the home of the insane religious leader who has spent the majority of the game trying to kill you, and has now sent a battalion of guards and robots to find you. Your strongest ally and the only other person who knows about his plan has just gotten herself killed in a last-ditch attempt to give you a chance to succeed in stopping him, and you're not going anywhere until you do.
    • Thief: Deadly Shadows actually averts this, as the final sequence of the game takes place all over the City's streets.
  • In Sheep, Dog 'n' Wolf, you have Marvin the Martian's Planet X.
  • The Metal Gear series has a few.

    Survival Horror 
  • Bendy and the Ink Machine has Ink Bendy's lair, where Henry must reach the throne room to play "The End" in order put an end to Ink Bendy once and for all.
  • In the Resident Evil games, it's usually a lab. 0, 1, 2, Code Veronica, Survivor, Outbreak and Umbrella Chronicles follow the normal formula, While the rest is a bit of a mix up...
    • 3's is a abandoned factory. The 2020 remake turns the final level back into a lab, however.
    • 4's is a military base on a island (Dead Aim also does this, but with a different island).
    • 5's is Wesker's personal battleship, which is bursting into flames by the final segment. And the final final showdown takes place inside an active volcano.
    • In 6, Leon and Ada's stories end in a zombified and exploding city, finishing with a trek up a skyscraper. Chris and Jake's stories end in an undersea research facility, and both have opposing elements surrounding the final bosses, water and fire.
    • Revelations ends in The Queen Dido, a sunken luxury cruise ship
  • Fatal Frame generally has its final location be the site of the failed ritual, though later games have begun to play with this idea.
    • Fatal Frame: The Hellgate. A barren location underneath the Himuro Mansion, where Kirie was supposed to keep the gate closed and prevent the Malice from escaping.
    • Fatal Frame II: Two locations, actually. The underground path leading to the area just before the ritual's location, where the player has to defeat the Kusabi. Depending on certain conditions, the player may be allowed to proceed to The Abyss, the place where the ritual of the twins takes place, and pits them in one last battle against Sae.
    • Fatal Frame III: The Abyss of the Horizon. Located right next to the Shrine of Thorns, where the priestesses are laid and have to keep the Rift from leaking out.
    • Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse: Shaken up by making the final location the Lighthouse, which is not where the ritual took place. The final battle takes place at the top of the lighthouse.
    • Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water: The Shadowspring. Played with, as the shrine leading to the Shadowspring is one that Yuri has been heading to previously, but was not able to pass through the last door, until it came time for the showdown.
  • You always know when you're at the end of a Silent Hill game - if the bizarrchitecture and increasing grossness of the environs don't tip you off, the increase of monsters surely does.
    • 1: About 90% of the way into Otherworld. Order? Logic? Sanity? Causality? You wish.
    • 2: The hotel itself is very final, but the true hotel is very definitely final.
    • 3: The Church of the Order. Welcome home.
    • 4: Walter Sullivan's Re-Birthing Dimension.
    • Silent Hill: Origins: Where it ALL began.
    • Silent Hill: Homecoming: The Chamber of Child Sacrifices
    • Subverted in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories; the Lighthouse looks this way, and is built up this way by the characters, but the end of the game comes right before you enter it.
    • Silent Hill: Downpour: The local island-based prison. Subverted in that Murphy had no plans to go there, and indeed, was in the clear until Anne shoots him, causing him to wake up there, reflecting the game's "Full Circle" theme.
  • Haunting Ground: The House Of Truth has shifting rooms, much more linear gameplay, a fake-out final boss, a teleporting Implacable Man for a stalker, and one of the most foreboding tracks in the game on a loop in the background.
  • The ObsCure games:
    • In the first game, after spending most of the experience fighting through a high school crawling with monsters, you enter the villain's lab beneath the school, which had been briefly seen in the prologue. The giant metal doors in one room are a pretty good indicator that whatever's behind them is probably the endgame.
    • The second game, however, tops the first by a long shot. What initially seems like the Final Boss fight takes place in the desolate ruins of the high school where the first game was set, in a Where It All Began sort of manner. Once that's over, however, the game waits until after the end credits to reveal that it's not over just yet, dropping the player in a No-Gear Level before you meet the True Final Boss. As if the giant football stadium where you fight him wasn't enough, you've also got the sun coming up over the horizon (the monsters are Weakened by the Light) and a mountain of weapons and ammo right at the gate. Yeah, it's goin' down.
  • Until Dawn has the central hall of the Washington Estate, where up to five of the eight surviving charactersnote  must escape from the Wendigo. Doubles as a case of Where It All Began, as the central hall is the first main area of the estate that you explore.

    Third Person Shooter 
  • The final showdown of Max Payne takes place atop the Aesir Tower, headquarters of Aesir Corporation and Big Bad Nicole Horne. Max Payne 2's final battle happens inside the Woden Manor, and is initially a two-person castle storm until Mona is gunned down by Vlad at the end of the second to last level, at which point Max chases the Big Bad straight to the top for the final level and faces off with him for the last time.
  • The final showdown of the John Woo game Stranglehold has Tequila storming the gates of Wong's Manor in order to save his daughter, with the showdown with Wong and Dapang proper taking place in the big chamber with the huge jade dragon statue.
  • Dead Space at least has quite a big change of scenery, while Dead Space 2 has you see the Artifact of Doom and the Convergence they have been talking about for all of the two games all through the final section. And all culminates in your own mind, fighting off The Plague.
  • Uncharted 2: Among Thieves' final boss fight takes place within the mythical neon-blue, glowing Life Tree that was mentioned very early on and then repeatedly discussed the entire game.
  • The final dungeon of The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is the Outsider space station where Origin is trying to rebuild Mozaic. Interestingly, you never actually square off against Origin. Instead, you are besieged by a never-ending swarm of enemies. Also, you control a different Player Character for this mission, unless, of course, you think of Asaru as your Player Character.
  • Spec Ops: The Line subverts this with Konrad's hideout, which the player spends the majority of the game trying to get to. After finally getting there, the last of the Damned 33rd immediately surrenders, leaving the player with just Konrad to face, and after climbing the Burj Khalifa and finally meeting him face to face... you discover that he was Dead All Along, and the Konrad that was talking to you for most of the game (as well as the Damned 33rd who surrendered) were just hallucinations. While there is a "fight" with the hallucinatory Konrad, it just consists of "Shoot Konrad and win." There's an optional final battle after that, but it just takes place in some nondescript ruins against the rescue team who comes for you, and fighting and killing them just triggers one of the bad(der) endings.
  • The last three missions in Robokill definitely give off this vibe. The scenery, previously featuring color-coded levels, is now all jet black with a post-apocalyptic look: partly molten holes in the hull, smouldering explosion craters and makeshift barricades, to name a few. There is a noticeable spike in difficulty as well, with much more dangerous enemies as well as generous usage of Bottomless Pits.

    Turn Based Tactics 
  • EXTRAPOWER: Attack of Darkforce has the Dark Force army's mothership.
  • The XCOM games all feature some variation on this.
    • X-COM: UFO Defense (aka UFO: Enemy Unknown) had the 'Cydonia or Bust' mission on the surface of Mars, and the following base mission with the alien overmind.
    • X-COM: Terror from the Deep had the two-part assault on the alien underwater city T'Leth.
    • X-COM: Apocalypse had a series of raids to the alien world ending with a battle over dimension gate generators. With a stream of alien reinforcements teleporting in.
    • Even the final hidden star system in X-COM: Interceptor can be considered an example of this trope.
    • The Spiritual Successor UFO Aftermath stays true to the spirit and ends with a do-or-die assault on the Reticulan mothership docked on the far side of the Moon.
    • Another Spiritual Successor, Xenonauts, has your scientist switch on his FTL jammer, preventing further alien reinforcements from arriving. The alins already in orbit then move to plan B, sending down their flagship filled with Reapers to a large city to start a Zombie Apocalypse to wipe out humanity. Your team has to board it in mid air, then assassinate the alien commander on board and sabotage the ship to escape.
    • The final dungeon of XCOM: Enemy Unknown is the Temple Ship, an enormous UFO that encompasses a decent chunk of the Atlantic Ocean. It is also crewed by almost every alien species in the game.
    • The final confrontation in XCOM 2 takes place in an alien facility, built at the bottom of the ocean. To hammer home the point that this is the endgame, you are allowed to take injured soldiers on this mission.
  • Silent Storm ends with your squad storming the Thor's Hammer headquarters and facing off against the leader of the conspiracy who is wearing a flying version of a Panzerklein. The goal is to stop them from launching a Kill Sat that would allow them to dominate the ravaged post-World War II nations.
  • In Jagged Alliance 2 The Capital of Arulco, Meduna is the final area of the game. It is by far THE hardest portion of the game. The garrison is almost all Blackshirt Elites, armed with the best weaponry available and have access to TANKS. So if you weren't stockpiling those M79 LAW's, you're in for a bad time.
  • Battle for Wesnoth outright tells you when you're at the final scenario of a campaign with a bit of text at the bottom of the scenario objectives.

    Visual Novel 
  • You read that right. Even a visual novel like the Ace Attorney series can have a Very Definitely Final Dungeon.
    • The final case of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies is tried not in a normal, run-of-the-mill courtroom, but in the exploded remains of one that had been bombed earlier in the game.
    • The final case in the duology of The Great Ace Attorney is in a secret courtroom, has a special judge, the Lord Chief Justice himself, and is full of plot points from all over the duology. Its name? The Resolve of Ruynosuke Naruhodo.
  • Each Danganronpa game has the final chapter (usually Chapter 6), where the final investigation begins.
    • Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc has Chapter 6's investigation, where the remaining students must now investigate the truth about their time at Hope's Peak Academy in order solve the unfinished case of Mukuro Ikusaba's death and deduce the mastermind's identity
    • Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair has the Graduation. A simplified version of the class trial room, however, it's in a tower in the middle of nowhere, with the background constantly changing between a neon-orange with Monokuma faces and black with Matrix's green numbers behind as the Neo World Program glitches and threatens the survivors' very existence. When Junko finally reveals herself, some walls go down and a giant Junko shows up stares down at the survivors while another Junko on her cellphone interacts with them. The investigation leading up to this also had an example of this, taking the remaining survivors through a glitched-out, exposition-heavy version of Hope's Peak Academy, the setting of the first game and a key location to the entire franchise.
    • Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls has Towa Hills, the former headquarters of the Towa Group which are now used as the hideout of the Warriors of Hope, the antagonists. It is an Evil Tower of Ominousness that is scaled in Chapter 5, and consists of one long climb with several areas and tough enemies and puzzles.
    • Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony has the investigation of chapter 6 as this: you investigate the entire school, now being destroyed by a battle between Keebo and the Exisals; this battle is happening while you investigate and you must fight the robots while investigating.
  • Both Spirit Hunter games have a final location that is where the investigation of the last chapter takes place.
    • Spirit Hunter: Death Mark: The Underground Shelter serves as this for the main game, as it is the setting of Chapter 5, the last chapter, and where the endgame reveals start to happen. Like most levels, it is maze-like and has some puzzles and Live or Die choices in your way.
    • Spirit Hunter: NG: The Momoi Department Store is the final area of the game where the final chapter takes place. Unlike the Underground Shelter from the previous game, which was a big maze, this area only consists of four rooms and has a single Crisis Choice and only one puzzle (gathering the items to carry out the Demon Tsukuyomi ritual), albeit one that takes a little while and requires a lot of searching.

    Wide Open Sandbox 
  • Scarface: The World Is Yours ends in Sosa's rather large mansion, fighting through his large personal retinue of mooks to finally give him his comeuppance. It's small hat compared to pretty much everything else on the list, but the game is fairly realistic as it stands, so it should be forgivable.
  • Saints Row 2's main storyline (initially) ends with the player character singlehandedly assaulting the Philips Building, a massive Combine Citadel-esque black tower that's been standing in the middle of the Saint's Row district for the entire game. First with an attack helicopter, and then breaking in and fighting the rest of the way up the building on foot.
  • Minecraft "ends" rather aptly, in The End, an Eldritch Location filled with nothing but endless expanses of air, a background that looks like TV static, making it very hard to see, tons of Endermen, massive Obsidian towers, and the Enderdragon. Although beating the Enderdragon serves as the final major scripted event in the game, the whole thing is a bit of a parody/subversion since it doesn't, well, end the game in any meaningful way. Once the dragon is dead, the game continues as before, and you can travel between the main world and The End at will, making it just another part of the open-ended sandbox.
  • The final dungeon of Dead Island takes place on a prison island, in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by floating mines, in a building run by the big bad and filled to the brim with hoards of hungry undead. And you can't leave once you've travelled there.
  • Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has Big Smoke's Crack Palace, an abandoned set of apartments that the Ballas have taken over to install their drug factory.
  • The Golden Ending of Grand Theft Auto V (Ending C, or 'Deathwish') has two - the foundry, where Michael, Franklin, Trevor and Lamar must fight off waves of FIB and Merryweather agents, and Devin Weston's mansion, where Trevor must sneak past Weston's guards to kidnap the Corrupt Corporate Executive himself.
  • Assassin's Creed II, with the majority of the game taking place in Florence, Tuscany, Venice, etc. has the last level as Rome, your objective being to head through dozens of Templars trying to stop Ezio getting to the Vatican. You'll have to use all your horseback, blending, and sword-fighting skills to make it to the end, and the final boss battle does not disappoint (Unless in terms of difficulty, but it's satisfying.)
  • The final mission of inFAMOUS: Second Son takes place at Augustine's tower, a news building commandeered into DUP's base of operations and surrounded by concrete structures. The first half of the mission is a climb up the outside of the tower with the help of Delsin's smoke powers and support from Fetch and Eugene, culminating with Delsin breaking in through the roof. The second half is a battle against Augustine with Delsin absorbing Agustine's powers and memories, learning the truth of the DUP, and Augustine going One-Winged Angel with Delsin having to stall until Eugene can get him Core Relays so that he can actually use his new concrete powers.
  • Level 7 in The Simpsons Hit & Run. It's the suburbs from Levels 1 and 4, but overran by zombies and given a Treehouse of Horror makeover. This is where Kang and Kodos' plan is at their peak, and the final missions of the game all involve driving across the entire map to blow up their alien ship.

Non-video game examples

    Fan Works 

    Literature 
  • In Sword Art Online, the Arc Villain intended for the dungeon of the hundredth floor of Aincrad, the "Ruby Palace", to serve this role. When Kirito uncovers the villain's plot, however, they allow him to fight the final boss right away, Subverting this trope. The video games Infinity Moment/Hollow Fragment play this straight, as the player is tasked with fighting their way through the last twenty-five floors of Aincrad and beating the game the way the villain intended.
  • The Great Orcus Labyrinth from Arifureta: From Commonplace to World's Strongest was intended by The Liberators to be this by its creator and leader: Oscar Orcus. His Labyrinth consisted of around 200 floors to it: the first 100 floors being the Upper Levels, and the lower 100 floors being known as the True Labyrinth which had far tougher enemies than the previous 100 floors, and required the usage of Magic learned from the previous six Labyrinths to successfully clear it. With those whom cleared the Orcus Labyrinth being gifted with access to Creation Magic as well as knowledge about the Liberators attempted fight against Ehit. Unfortunately for the Liberators, many of the inhabitants of their world 2,000 years later all thought that The Orcus Labyrinth was actually the Noob Cave due to how relatively easy it was to find, and aside from Yue and Hajime; nobody ever managed to get past floor 70 of the Upper Levels.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Dungeons & Dragons: The 5th edition storyline Tyranny of Dragons has the Well of Dragons, the Volcano Lair of the Cult of the Dragon. The place is defended by armies of evil mercenaries, giants, devils, and chromatic dragons, and the Temple of Tiamat, an eldritch castle that exists simultaneously within the Material Plane and the Nine Hells, stands in the volcano's caldera. It is here that the Cult's leaders are performing a grand Summoning Ritual to bring the dragon goddess Tiamat into the Material Plane.

    Real Life 
  • The Super Bowl, especially in modern times. Whereas the other major American sports leagues (the NBA, MLB, and the NHL) have the teams play at each other's stadiums and arenas in a best-of-seven series, the NFL schedules the Super Bowl years in advance, ostensibly in order to prevent a team from playing the one-off championship game on their home turf.note  Furthermore, they typically award it to the biggest, most modern, and most high-tech football stadiums in the country, often in a place like Miami, New Orleans, or Los Angeles that is virtually guaranteed to have warm weather even in the dead of February.note  This means that the two teams are facing off in one of America's biggest and fanciest sporting venues, one that was most likely built for exactly that purpose.
  • For the other football across the Atlantic, the UEFA Champions League ends in a single game at a high-end stadium that is chosen years in advance. The South American version is the final of the Copa Libertadores (originally played in both stadiums of the respective finalists, but eventually changed to a grand single match in a neutral field).
  • What the Super Bowl is to American Football, and The World Cup for everyone else's football, the Olympic Games is to most other sports, and sports as a whole. Host countries spend years building entire sports complexes and, often, entire towns from scratch to accommodate the ridiculously high-profile event. Afterward, since the locals can't possibly make sufficient use of all the enormous facilities, the area usually becomes a Ghost City.
  • As far as college goes, the Capstone Project is this when it comes to classes. It takes your knowledge gained via your Bachelor's program, and puts it to the test in an actual real world scenario to prove that you earned that degree.

Alternative Title(s): Very Definitely Final Dungeon, Definitely Final Dungeon, Final Dungeon, Very Definite Final Dungeon

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Origami Castle

The creation of Ollys great base, the Origami Castle.

How well does it match the trope?

5 (8 votes)

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