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In long works involving some form of magic, many creators seem to decide that the universe they've so far established is much too prosaic for the big finish their project surely deserves, and as a result, send their heroes into some uncharted realm resembling a whacked-out dream sequence.
Overlaps with Gainax Ending when it gets particularly symbolic. Videogames tend to make this an Amazing Technicolor Battlefield.
If the gameplay goes sour, it's Xen Syndrome.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Akira, full stop. Most of the movie makes sense enough, but good luck deciphering the ending on the first viewing once the plot jumps its ball hitch and takes off without you.
- The last three or so episodes of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann - whenever that space ocean shows up.
- Beyond the Gate in Fullmetal Alchemist. Not all that dreamlike, but a finale-approaching, WTF-inducing departure from the given setting nonetheless.
- Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch has its final battle in Michel's realm, which appears to be the dream of a drugged-up Evilutionary Biologist: the pillars in the sky are DNA strands, fish are flying, and everything has wings grafted onto it. There is evil genetic engineering involved, but Michel, being a Fake Boss, is not aware of this.
- Inverted in Futari Wa Pretty Cure: after spending a couple of episodes in another dimension, the heroines return to the Garden of Rainbows (i.e. Earth) for the final battle.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion. Even the non-Gainax Ending version of the finale is pretty damn trippy.
- There was a non-Gainax Ending? IIRC, neither ending is even remotely comprehensible.
- Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha pulls out all the special-effects stops and headache-inducing magical locations for its Final Battles, despite the battle fields (in the first two seasons, at least) normally being pretty low-key.
- The final battle of Outlaw Star borders on an action-packed Mind Screw, what with Big Bad Hazanko and protagonist Gene Starwind apparently merging with their ships to fight each other both physically and in Cyber Space. Of course, the final few episodes are made up of the characters basically running around inside what amounts to God, so all this isn't coming completely out of left field.
- Shadow Skill ends with a bizarre near-death dream sequence involving giraffes and lions, with lots of Fauxlosophic dialogue. It's pretty clear what is going on, but the way they choose to illustrate it is decidedly trippy.
- The finale of Rah Xephon had several characters running around inside Yolteotl(something approximately like Nirvana) with lots of trippy symbolism whilst Quon and Ayato tried to figure out how they wanted to retune the world.
- The manga version of Chrono Crusade takes the heroes to the demon world Pandaemonium for their final battles against Aion. Pandaemonium is really a Cool Starship, so it's filled with demon technology that's completely anachronistic for the setting, architecture that's obsessed with hexagons, demons who've had their legion corrupted, driving them feral and making them look like mutant starfish and Pandaemonium herself, the demon's Hive Queen.
- The Grand Finale of the first season of Darker Than Black was very clearly inspired by Evangelion. However, unlike Eva, they had the decency to give at least a little explanation.
- The second season, well... Let's just say that a Contractor copying the entire planet is one of the easier things to understand.
Comic Books
- Breakdown: One's character is brainwashed by a computer and sees himself where he was trained. Everything is now filled with a green haze, the steam shoots from random places, and the television screen is filled with static. He has to shoot all of his partners, then is attacked by large, half naked men while a light flies around him.
Film
- Perhaps the archetypal example and the source of the image for this page, The end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, as astronaut David Bowman goes to "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite". Do not pretend to understand it.
- In Perfume, Grenouille finally uses his perfect perfume at his execution. Overcome by the beauty of his fragrence, the crowd universally proclaims him innocent and then falls into a massive orgy. Unsatisfied with the perfume's hollow effects, Grenouille kills himself by dumping the remainder of the perfume over his head, causing a nearby crowd to devour him out of overwhelming love.
- The otherwise conventional western Blueberry (aka Renegade) ends with the hero and villain taking peyote and entering the spirit realm to do battle. The hero then has an epiphany that is visualized with trippy abstract images and Native American chanting. It has to be seen to be believed.
- Busby Berkeley's movie musical numbers often border on the surreal, but the finale of The Gang's All Here, "The Polka Dot Polka," is easily as bizarre as the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Its kaleidoscopic patterns will make your eyes bleed in Technicolor.
- Disney's The Black Hole.
Literature
- The King's Cross sequence in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
- Literature example: the mystical and dreamlike "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" sequence from The Wind in the Willows is quite different in tone from anything else in the book, which up to that point has been a cosy story about anthropomorphic small animals.
- Not actually a finale, but enough of a gear-shift from the rest of the story to be fully deserving of inclusion. This troper still remember the feeling of "what the hell" inspired by that chapter.
- Dragon Ultimate, the seventh and final volume of Christopher Rowley's Dragons of the Argonath series, sees heroes Relkin and Bazil transported to the Sphereboard of Destiny, an abstract representation of the multiverse, to inhabit a pair of giant constructs (reminiscent of the piloting of giant Japanese robots) and battle a golem for the fates of all oppressed peoples in all realities. Needless to say, it's a bit of a departure from the series's usual, relatively traditional, fantasy setting.
Live Action TV
- "Fall Out" in The Prisoner
- "Forever Charmed".
- The television adaptation of Sword Of Truth pulled a time travel stunt in the hour-long season finally, then had a rather anticlimactic...grappling sequence for the previously Dismantled Mac Guffin between Richard and Darken Rahl.
Video Games
- The Final Fantasy series suffers from this, in general.
- The Very Definitely Final Dungeon of Final Fantasy IX is a dark orb of collective ancestral memory.
- Final Fantasy XI has the Chains of Promathia expansion end in the Celestial Capital of Al'Taieu, conveniently located in another freaking plane of existence.
- The entire world becomes like this in the final disc of Final Fantasy VIII due to Ultimecia's "time compression".
- Final Fantasy II involves traveling to the capital of Hell. Though it makes sense, as the final boss is an evil emperor who has become the local equivalent of Satan.
- Final Fantasy VII: The cloned alien turns into a demon, angel who destroys the solar system and a man on black background.
- Final Fantasy X sends the party into the innards of Sin for the final dungeon. The first section is basically a bunch of tubes filled with shallow water and floating magical symbols (which maybe makes sense because Sin is a creature created by magic). The next section is the ruins of an ancient city that is inside Sin... for some reason.
- The city is probably some part of the original Zanarkand.
- Final Fantasy V may well have them all beat. The final dungeon is the "Cleft of Dimension" a twisted landscape of everything that has been trapped between the worlds for a thousand years, including a town where time has stopped flowing. The final battle involves the main characters being trapped in the Void and being rescued by the souls of their dead friends and family, and then taking on Exdeath, who is then sucked into the Void himself to become Neo Exdeath, a massive monster formed from countless evil spirits including a dragon, a woman, and some kind of corpse, who's stated goal is to destroy everything then destroy himself. After defeating him, the heroes are trapped in the void, and then the four spirits of the elements show them a vision of the universe that was created, which somehow brings them home.
- Even the first film loses coherence by the end.
- In Chrono Cross, the Final boss is fought in The Darkness Beyond Time - the place where things go when they no longer exist. The finale also seems trippy just because all the dialogue on Disc 2 is dedicated to explaining the back story of the game... and even after reading it all, you still need a Master's Degree in Strange Back Story-ology to understand it.
- Need I even mention Kingdom Hearts? Too late, I just did. Especially noteworthy because of the escalating levels of trippiness the closer you get to the end.
- The Legend of Dragoon has The Moon That Never Sets.
- Devil May Cry and Devil May Cry 3 (I didn't play Devil May Cry 2.)
- It's the same. Probably weirder than the original.
- The final battle in 3 takes place in a river. A river in Hell. It doesn't appear to be Styx...
- And the final battle in 4 takes place in the normal-by-comparison, surprisingly-squishy innards of a giant demon made of animate marble.
- Stage 18 of Devil May Cry 4 is an apocalyptic battle, held on floating platforms, against a mobile statue and corrupted angels.
- Technically, you are in a different world by the end of Drakengard, and it definitely shows. This trope applies most literally to the fifth ending however.
- The final area of The Legend Of Zelda : Majora's Mask takes place inside the monstrous moon itself. Which, in fact, appears as a vast and beautiful green field with a single large tree in the center, surrounded by children at play.
- And then Link goes to fight the boss in a room painted like an acid trip... and in its second stage, Majora's Mask runs around very fast making clucking noises.
- They were already established outer planes in the Forgotten Realms setting, but Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark has its final chapter in the frozen hell of Cania, and Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer has its finale in The City of Judgment on the Fugue Plane.
- And in Planescape, well...you skip around a bit, and end up in The negative energy planes. Evil tower of Shadows.
- The final stages of Mega Man X5 are some sort of unexplained crystal holographic disco thing.
- The final part of Lands Of Lore 2 involves Luther entering the Chamber of Voices
 in the Huline Temple, there raising the city of the ancient gods and travelling through Belial's mother beast to the rebirth chamber.
- Metal Gear Solid 2: The Colonel makes insane comments like "I hear it's amazing when the famous purple stuffed worm in flap-jaw space with the tuning fork does a raw blink on hara-kiri rock! I need scissors, 61!" He then reveals that he is within the A.I. that is actually the collective consciousness of the spirit of American freedom that controls the White House. Raiden's girlfriend is also a part of the A.I. but she appears in reality. Then things get weird.
- And in Substance, one of Snake's missions is an outright parody of this aspect of the original game, as well as Raiden's status as a Replacement Scrappy.
- Half Life goes from a somewhat realistic physics lab with No OSHA Compliance to the alien world of Xen, a bunch of Floating Continents. There you fight a 4-legged giant testicle, and a huge 3-armed floating baby. The gameplay likewise suffers.
- The R-Type series' final stages got progressively trippier as the games went on. Most notable of all, a Bydo dimension filled with crystal-encased human fetuses, strands of DNA, free-floating sperm the size of the ship, and fertilized ova... And that's not even mentioning the neutral ending of Final, in which the screen-filling silhouettes of a man and a woman embrace and make love in the background.
- Eternal Sonata had the Elegy of the Moon zone. In contrast to the bright, colorful, and vibrant zones previously seen, the Elegy of the Moon is a rather... odd zone which is essentialy purgatory for the souls lost to the mineral powder.
- Wild ARMs 3 has its final battles literally take place in a trippy dream sequence.
- Baten Kaitos: Origins: Defeat Wiseman 2,000 years in the past and he becomes the final boss in the present and is revealed to be the man inside Verus's body. He appears as a demon in space, no sound expect for an ominous chant, then All of the dead partners from 2,00 years earlier return to finish the battle.
- This is basically a requirement for Shadow Hearts. In the first one, set before World War I, the heroes head into space for the final battle.
- Earthbound's final area before the final boss battle looks like a giant bizarre vagina. If that's not bad enough, said final boss battle sure as hell is.
- The final battle was in part inspired by the time the director walked into a porno movie when he was a kid.
- The last race of N64's Mario Karts, Rainbow Road.
- Phantasy Star IV features an ethereal crystal world inhabited by a disembodied voice named Le Roof who arms you before sending you off to a huge hole in the ground, where you enter a twisty-backgrounded epileptic-rainbow maze to fight the personification of evil. PS Online does a shorter version by having you arrive in a flower-filled field that quickly turns into a desolate wasteland when the Big Bad arrives.
Western Animation
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