Disappointing Last Level / Role-Playing Game

• .hack//Quarantine. Forcing you to go through the same dungeon three times, after which you must face a boss that isn't hard but is incredibly tedious - which is a shame as an otherwise decent dungeon turns into a Scrappy Level due to the plot. Giving you the best armor in the game and then pitting you against the second of Those Two Bosses immediately afterward. Giving you ten new dungeons to take on right around the time you think "I'm almost done!", five of which are mandatory. Of those five, four of them require an obscene number of high-letter Virus Cores. These had always been scarce, but until now this wasn't a problem. So you have to item grind in the hopes of eventually finding that... one... missing... virus... core. Once you FINALLY get through those four dungeons, you go to the fifth one, which you just know will be The Very Definitely Final Dungeon. Nothing else even comes close, not even the dungeon at the end of disc 1 (in which every enemy is a Goddamned Bat and the boss is one of Those Two Bosses). The Virus Core hunt is made even MORE annoying by the non-standard Game Over of using Data Drain too much. Have fun balancing out mass-Data Drain kills and avoiding death by character corruption.
• Baldur's Gate III's third act suddenly starts moving the plot at a breakneck pace with certain sidequests that imply they will be completed later apparently going nowhere. The ending displays a lot of permutations, but doesn't have an actual epilogue - with certain characters seemingly disappearing from the plot. Dataminers have found boatloads of cut content - which includes much more ending. What's more, even after a few patches the game suddenly becomes much much buggier.
• Betrayal in Antara's final level consists of walking through a mansion fighting dogs. It has long corridors without any towns, any NPCs, or any real plot until the very end. Fan consensus tends to be that it's the worst part of the game. Made all the worse because a bug made it impossible to access without a patch.
• Bravely Default: After you've gone on a journey to awaken the four crystals, you have to do it again ... four more times. That's not to mention the plot twist that probably everyone saw coming a mile away. There's some interesting character development, and the last dungeon/boss is pretty good, but it doesn't quite make up for having to fight all the crystal bosses four extra times each.
• Breath of Fire II while in other ways a superior RPG, absolutely fails on everything having to do with the final dungeon. It's long, monotonous, tedious, hard and lacking in save points, items or any real rewards. And it's HUGE. The fact that even getting to this dungeon is a Guide Dang It! is just insult on top of injury.
• Chrono Cross loses track of where the plot is going somewhere after the Dead Sea area and never quite finds it again. Disc two is particularly bad; most of it is spent either wandering through Chronopolis or climbing Terra Tower.
• CIMA: The Enemy is a Teamwork Puzzle Game mixed with an Escort Mission, yet while the main levels are a mix of ups and downs, the last level is just a straight run to bosses. And the endgame pits all your combat-capable settlers against various bosses, whether they're ready for it or not. Didn't think upgrading The Medic's stats was all that necessary? Sucks to be you.
• In Crystalis, the floating tower is awfully straightforward compared to the rest of the areas.
• Dark Souls suffers from this regarding its last few areas. What makes things worse is that these zones lose a lot of what made the previous parts of the game so compelling; varied enemies with varied movesets combined with unique environmental hazards and arenas to form a gauntlet of interesting enemy encounters.
  • Lost Izalith is generally considered the worst level in the game and is divided into two parts. The first part is what bothers most people. It's a huge Lethal Lava Land filled with about 30 of the most obnoxious enemies in the game (which are also considered incredibly lame for being just a repurposed asset, the lower half of the body of a rotted dragon, given some basic animations to turn it into an unconvincing enemy). Most players will spend about half an hour just sniping at them with a bow rather than directly engage them (since the only small blessing is that they don't respawn once killed). There is a way to skip that part, but it doesn't make the obvious reduced quality of the zone any better. The Demon Ruins immediately afterward is better in that it is mostly merely dull, but it culminates in the Bed of Chaos - an infuriating boss full of Fake Difficulty. Even the developers admitted that the area was not what they wanted it to be, but there was too little time.
  • Tomb of the Giants is an underground Blackout Basement filled with even more obnoxious enemies; the Feral Skeletons. One of the worst things about this game is that there are only three ways to get light into this area. Two of them are very easy to miss and the third way, the skull lantern, requires to you travel through a good chunk of the level practically blind. Thankfully, with the drop rate increase that came with one of the patches, you're much more likely to obtain a light source before entering this level.
  • The Crystal Cave is a beautiful zone which comes after the Dukes Archives, a well liked zone. It's one giant Bottomless Pit you have to navigate by crossing giant crystal shafts. However, about halfway down, several of the shafts turn invisible. Getting through them can take dozens of tries and comes down to trial and error, and once you get it down, it takes about a minute to run through. It's just an irritating little extra tacked on to the end of an otherwise excellent level. This is also a very popular invasion spot due to how easy it is to make someone lose their footing.
  • The very final level is a tiny (but pretty-looking) linear path filled with Black Knights right before the final fight with Gwyn, Lord of Cinder... which would be a pretty good Final Boss if it wasn't so easy to trivialize the fight via Good Bad Bugs or parrying.
• Dark Souls 2 suffers from this trope as well. After the Dragon Aerie, the game main story has you go fight a rather easy boss before going to the Throne of Want, a short hallway with no enemies. It ends in a room with the final boss fights, the Throne Watcher/Defender and Nashandra, both of which are also disappointingly easy and followed by a rather cryptic Gainax Ending. Fortunately, the Scholar of the First Sin Updated Re-release has the more interesting True Final Boss Aldia, Scholar of the First Sin and a much more fulfilling ending.
• The Arx in Divinity: Original Sin II is this to some people. It's smaller than the previous game's last level (The Phantom Forest) and much much more straightforward. In-Universe this is one of the most important cities in Rivellon equivalent to the Vatican, yet it's a Thriving Ghost Town with an Absurdly Spacious Sewer. The game has fewer conversational options than the previous acts, fewer sidequests (so you better hope you didn't skip a bunch and end up underleveled!), and plenty of bosses that aren't hard but more annoying. The game can get pretty glitchy at this point, too; sometimes characters will speak to people who aren't there, not acknowledge quest items in your inventory, quests will not count as closed, quests will be unable to progress despite hitting the trigger to do so, and some more. While the Definitive Edition fixed some of this, it still shows that they were running out of time and money.
• The Dragon Age games frequently run into this, as the generally-expansive nature of the preceding levels gives way to boring, linear romps:
  • The final setpiece of Dragon Age: Origins (the fight through the Darkspawn horde in Denerim) may be a letdown. Despite having some cool moments — namely, your tendency to inflict slow-motion kills on enemies goes way up — the area is filled with bugs, glitches and ridiculous errors. Once you make it through several glitchy areas, you're forced to go into Fort Drakon (which, depending on a certain battle earlier, may be the place you were imprisoned in and had to fight your way out of and now have to backtrack through all over again). The final fight, while large-scale, is also prone to bugs and the odd Scrappy Mechanic (namely, waiting for ballistas to circle around so you can shoot the Archdemon, while you're being harassed by Darkspawn). And if that wasn't enough, there are plenty of problems with characters not recognizing who the king you choose is, female players getting called by male pronouns and more.
  • Like the base game, Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening suffers from a litany of bugs during its major setpiece, including a PC-specific bug (during the assault on Vigil's Keep) that can render the game Unwinnable unless you resort to console commands, and even then, the intended sequence plays out of order. If you get past that, the Very Definitely Final Dungeon is a linear slog through a horde of Darkspawn, with several abrupt endings to several storylines (like Velanna's sister and the Architect), along with a final battle that chugs even on high-end computers.
  • Witch Hunt is the final DLC produced for Origins — and it smacks of being pushed out the door early due to the then-impending release of Dragon Age II. The DLC itself is a romp through several locations which the player has already visited in the base game, with nothing much that's new and little of note besides killing more enemies. There is only one sidequest in the game (limited to a single area), the final boss arbitrarily jumps up to Nintendo Hard status, and the final conversation is an abrupt, unsatisfying affair that only gives extra content if the Warden was in a relationship with Morrigan. And even worse, some versions of the DLC import decisions incorrectly, making it so that you'll miss out on some things without even knowing it.
  • Dragon Age II suffers from a short and abrupt third (and final act), consisting solely of a pair of starter quests that are borderline Filler before immediately starting the Mage vs. Templar finale, which is another linear slog through a city with waist-high fences and barricades. Depending on your choices previously in the game (and how overpowered your build is), the final boss is either incredibly tough or a Curb-Stomp Battle (due to a boatload of other NPCs arbitrarily showing up to help just before the final battle).
  • The last mission of Dragon Age: Inquisition consists of the Final Boss, having already lost everything else, obligingly marching up to your doorstep. This leads to a "Get Back Here!" Boss fight only broken up by his dragon.
• Dragon Quest IX in a twist has this AFTER the game — the postgame can in fact last much longer than the main game, yet the large majority of it is simply running though random dungeons over and over with only minor story additions in the downloadable quests. The non-story quests often have you searching for hours just to find a random dungeon with the correct enemy(s), and that is even WITH a guide. That's not even getting into the thousands of random ingredients one must find to get and alchemize all the items and equipment in the game (made harder by the best ones having a random chance at failure... and needing the failure items as well), and boss battles that you need to fight over and over (at least 99 times each) just to face their hardest forms. Combine all this with the only reason to reset your level more than once (and taking forever, especially if you don't get to have the King Metal Slime map which is only the result of a bug) is for the sake of... better chances at harder random dungeons. And even on top of all of THIS, the game practically begs you to spend all that time with its database, yet one could easily miss many items as a result of simply not connecting to the online shop in the right week of the year... or even more, the randomize screwing you over even when you DO connect.
• Etrian Odyssey:
  • The first game of the same name: While the 5th Stratum has some suitably dramatic reveals such as the now-iconic twist that the series takes place in a post-apocalyptic future, Yggdrasil being built to reverse the circumstances that caused the apocalypse, and its lead scientist being the Chieftain of Etria who is actually over 1,000 years old, this final stratum can ultimately be a disappointment for two distinct reasons:
    • The dungeon design leaves much to be desired, featuring lots of long, winding corridors that end in dead-ends, and no through-the-wall shortcuts save for a single one just before the Final Boss, which makes repeat trips extremely tedious. The paths also go up and down floors so it's easy to think that going down to B24F means you're almost there since your final destination is on the next floor (each stratum has five floors, and this one begins on B21F)...only to have to travel back up to advance. You eventually unlock elevators that do serve as shortcuts and take you to new areas, but not before you've probably had your patience worn down to nothing from long treks with a million Random Encounters along the way from what can feel like Fake Longevity. While it lacks the outright malicious design of the 6th Stratum, it can make the game's climax overstay its welcome. Even if you're playing the Origins Collection / HD remaster and set the difficulty to Basic to make the fights easier or Picnic to outright eliminate the difficulty, navigation can still be a massive chore.
    • There are no entirely new random-encounter enemy designs; they're all based on previous-stratum enemies but with a mere Palette Swap, with the only new enemy designs being the FOEs and the final boss. Sure, palette swaps exist as early as the 1st Stratum, but at least you get new enemy designs as late as the 4th Stratum (most iconically, the Forest Folk enemies), and the 6th Stratum does feature new enemy designs, which begs the question of why the 5th Stratum has only recycled sprites for randos.
  • Etrian Odyssey Nexus: A common criticism aimed towards the final standard dungeon (Yggdrasil Labyrinth) is that, aside from swapping its tileset's colors from green and gray to blue and related shades, it feels too similar to the four main Shrines (themselves criticized for their lack of variety in their contents).
• Final Fantasy:
  • A general series example: Somewhere after you get the airship but before entering the final dungeon you are left to your own devices as far as advancing the plot and thrown out there to complete side quests and level grind up to being able to fight the final boss. However, there is a positive aspect to this gameplay change, as the last part of the game often opens the sandbox and provides a boatload of interesting sidequests, resolution for individual character plots, and minigames to make your own fun with.
  • Final Fantasy III: The conclusion is a long underground dungeon that leads straight to the final dungeon. It's not that you can't return to previous areas, you just really really don't want to because the trip is so long. The final dungeon itself is ludicrously long, leading up to a fake final boss, four more bosses, and then the final boss who is way too powerful compared to the last five. And since you can only save in the overworld, that is at the very least an hour of action from entering the final dungeon up to the end, with no opportunity to save and an assurance of failing in your first attempt.
  • In Final Fantasy IV, the Lunar Subterrane is a very long dungeon with twisting hidden passages, Demonic Spiders, and the last four floors have every random encounter being a Boss in Mook's Clothing.
  • Final Fantasy IV: The After Years begins its final tale with the characters heading to the final dungeon, which is a Level in Reverse of the original game's final dungeon, which was long enough as it is—but once you get to the point with the mentioned last four floors, the dungeon changes entirely and eventually totals out to forty floors full of powerful enemies and entirely random boss encounters with no purpose but to pad out the dungeon and throw powerful equipment at your party. There's also no plot development at all during all this. aside from Cecil coming to his senses a third of the way down—just short scenes to provide closure to character subplots.
  • The last disc of Final Fantasy VIII is a single long dungeon with an obnoxious gimmick and no character interaction or dialogue. You enter the final battle to prevent the Final Boss from unleashing "time compression"... which might have been more dramatic if we were ever given a real idea of what "time compression" is. There's better characterization for some of the Superbosses than for the Big Bad.
  • On Final Fantasy IX's fourth disc, the story runs out of steam with the destruction of Terra and Garland, and descends into Mind Screw territory with the introduction of Memoria as the final dungeon, an odd pocket universe made up of the accumulated memories of the world with numerous Giant Space Flea from Nowhere bosses, including the Final Boss, Necron.
  • Inverted in Final Fantasy XIII: The first half of the game feels like it was either extremely rushed or the management at Square Enix was overcompensating for the openness XII suffered from. (One apt description being tossed around is "Final Fight RPG".) The second half has much better design, with actual sidequests and dungeons that aren't just one long tunnel. This is even mocked in Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei. This is apparently done deliberately; Square-Enix wanted the players to become attached to the characters, hence the more story-driven first half.
  • Final Fantasy XIII-2 plays it straight. Academia 500AF is a drawn-out platforming level with rotating platforms, many, many switches, and lots of waiting for platforms to rotate towards you. It's also full of Demonic Spiders that can decimate most characters with ease. It takes about an hour to get through a fairly small area, and several reviews criticized it for slowing the game down to a crawl right before the final boss fight.
  • This is one of the most common complaints about Final Fantasy XII.
    • The first third of the game shows the party coming together to track down the relics of the Dynast-King to prove Ashe is royal blood and give them a leg up on inciting rebellion against The Empire of Archadia. However, once you get to the Jahara the game then sends you on a long trip to Mt. Bur-Omisace, then a dungeon, then a very long trip to Archadia through no less than four new areas and a dungeon, then a dungeon in Archadia after completing a short series of fetch quests. The plot picks up again after that, and the areas are at least Scenery Porn, but the middle stretch of the game is essentially one long Marathon Level with no real plot advancement or character development.
    • The climb in the tower near the end of the game is such a long haul that many players quit before reaching the top. Not only is the climb to the tower's top stupidly long, you're also forced to go through several floors with an ability disabled at your choosing (no items, no magick, etc.). Once you do reach the top, you're treated to a lengthy cut scene and have to fight three bosses one after the other with no breaks in between. If you're aiming for 100% Completion, you'll be forced to go back to the tower and explore the basement levels that aren't even on the map and are filled with Demonic Spiders.
• In the first SaGa game (The Final Fantasy Legend in America), you suddenly have to go through the tower again but this time through an escalator. You honestly could have cut the escalators in half.
• Dragon's Dogma has The Everfall. You are endlessly falling down the same large pit over and over again, and try to cling onto ledges (which might be a Scrappy Mechanic in itself) to get into the actual chambers of the dungeon, which (except for one) all look randomly generated due to their cut-and-paste nature. Compared to what the game normally does (encouraging you to explore every last bit of a huge world map), grinding through the same few rooms with the same enemy patterns a couple of times feels a bit uninspired. Made worse by the fact that the game subtly forces you to actively farm Wakestones (instead of just earning the necessary amount to complete the quest) since selling them for 30,000 each is the only way to afford most of the best weapons which are offered down there for insane prices.
• The last level of Dungeon Siege II is at least 40 minutes (possibly an hour) of fighting the same not-very-challenging enemies over and over and over without interesting scenery, before the game deigns to give you a teleporter location to save your progress with. At least it's not something you have to repeat if the final boss kills you.
• EarthBound Beginnings is very difficult and annoying with the sadistic random encounter rate it has (to be fair, running away is very easy). But in the end of the game, the enemies suddenly turn so strong that you'll need hours of Level Grinding or a Crutch Character just to be able to beat the game. The author of the game admitted that this had happened because near the end of the production he got tired and wanted to finish the game as soon as possible, so the last bits have little to no balance. It's worth noting that players who can survive Mt. Itoi long enough to get the last of the Plot Coupons are rewarded with one hell of a Wham Episode, and the ensuing final confrontation with Giygas/Geigue/Gyiyg is near-universally considered to be the highlight of the game.
• In Elden Ring, the last open world areas, the Mountaintops of the Giants and the Consecrated Snowfield gained a lot of flak. In theory they're very cool: the former is the highest peaks of the continent filled with the corpses of ancient giants, and the latter is a huge, scenic snow field. In practice, they're tedious, meandering zones with many enemies that are just blatant reskins of older ones with bloated health and damage, not much to actually explore compared to past areas and barely any sidequests. The good thing is that the dungeons they lead to, Crumbling Farum Azula and the Haligtree respectively, are considered to be top-tier zones.
• The Elder Scrolls
  • The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind heavily suffers from this right before the final boss fight in the main story, which is really a very simple Puzzle Boss. After traveling and fighting far and wide, you must individually convince eighteen people (minimum) to vote yes on you being The Chosen One. "Convincing" fourteen of them means either bribing or hitting the Persuade button enough times, and if you're not willing to fight some of the baddies, this goes up to twenty-one. Mind you, this task of convincing the dozen involves the least amount of fighting possible, irritating and tedious fetch quests, and running around all ends of the earth. Most of the people that you have to talk to recognize the fact that, hey, they really ought to comply with you in order to save the world, but no, if you want to be named Nerevarine by one of the Ashkhan, who already admits that he should, you need to find him a bride. So first you go to another town (it should be noted that none of these destinations are quickly reached, nor is the journey exciting at all), buy a slave, go to another town to get her some nice clothes, go to another town to get her some perfume, and then escort the slave all the way back to the Ashkhan while tolerating some of the worst pathfinding ever. And this quest comes shortly after some fairly exciting and intriguing quests, too. If you gain enough levels and reputation (at least level 20 and 50 reputation), you can skip this quest altogether by talking to the right people: they'll send you straight to the Archcanon instead, which starts the final quest to defeat Dagoth Ur.
  • The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has this with Skuldafn Temple. While the dungeon is far more interesting than the "straight line" that most of the games' dungeons have been, it just goes on for awhile. The Final Boss itself can be be beaten mostly by the NPCs aiding you.
• Etrian Odyssey V: Beyond the Myth: The final stratum may still have level design and enemies that keep the player on their toes, but it's also rather lacking in Adventure Episodes that populated the previous strata and kept things less monotonous. The postgame stratum is completely devoid of Episodes that aren't story-based cutscenes, and only has one sidequest tied to it.
• Fable II doesn't have the best plot, but it does at least have pacing. However, the endgame comes immediately after you recruit Reaver with no warning, and consists entirely of one long fight against generic guards and a big rock, then you one-shotting the Big Bad in the middle of his Motive Rant. And if you don't shoot him and instead wait for him to finish his rant, Reaver will shoot him instead.
  Reaver: I thought he'd never shut up. Oh I'm sorry. Were you wanting to kill him?
• Fallout:
  • It's clear that the final level of the Fallout: New Vegas DLC Honest Hearts was never fully playtested. The last leg of the game charges you with either defending the New Canaanites with their escape from Zion or helping Joshua Graham destroy the White Legs. The plot tries to present this as an important choice, but it changes nothing except some flavor text and a pair of slides at the end of the DLC - the mission is completely the same. Aside from random crashes and bugs (White Legs enemies can randomly get stuck on walls and in bridges), the entire game map is almost completely empty, there's no background music, only a pair of fights at opposite sides of the maps, a weak final boss encounter, and Joshua can randomly disappear and reappear at random despite being your companion. Worst of all, there is no fast-travel option, so you'll have to slowly walk across the entire game map with hardly any enemy encounters. And that's not even counting the unintentional hilarity of Joshua being set on fire (again) by flaming sword-wielding enemies, or his "Yesssss...." battle cry.
  • The later levels of Fallout 3, atypically for this trope, aren't actually very hard; quite the opposite. It seems that the creators wanted to keep in mind the fact that the player could potentially be entering the level having sped through only story missions, and so cranked the difficulty way, way down. The result is that you spend most of the last third of the game's story missions being escorted by Brotherhood soldiers, important NPCs, likely a major companion or two, or Liberty Prime, any of whom are capable of annihilating the meager Enclave defenses on their own. Low-level characters can sit back and watch them finish the game, and mid-high-level characters (especially if they're melee characters) may find it more challenging to get in kills before their backup crew turns the Enclave into a pile of limbs. The apparent Final Boss, Colonel Autumn, is one unarmored guy with a pistol and two standard Enclave troops.
• Golden Sun: Dark Dawn has a decently paced build up in the story and the conflict, but after the Grave Eclipse event starts, you are forced to go on a series of fetch quests for several pieces of items (all that are helpful for one of your party members and are her infinity plus one equipment) and a MacGuffin or two. The story falls flat at this point and doesn't pick up again until the Final Boss fight.
• Jade Empire loses its way during its final three chapters. The game has a solid beginning and builds from there, and chief amongst its selling points is a morality system with nuance. Then after The Reveal in which your kung fu master shows he's the real Big Bad and kills you, the endgame comes hard and fast after the first two hub areas. The morality becomes far more black and white, with none of the nuanced exploration that was attempted in previous chapters, each chapter is a straightforward slog through an army of enemies with very little dialogue and only a handful of trivial side quests, the ending is decided by a single choice that completely overrides your existing karma, and the whole thing feels rushed.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • Kingdom Hearts coded and its Updated Re-release Re:Coded, which consists of going around in Castle Oblivion (the setting of Chain of Memories), speaking to NPCs and solving very easy puzzles, reaching the final boss, watching the last scene and then having the game just... end.
  • Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories and its remake unlock a second gameplay mode where you play as Riku. Though his style of gameplay is enjoyable, especially in the remake where it's made more unique and strategic, the progression of the game is the same system as the first playthrough — make your way through the rooms to get the gold card needed to unlock the next room so you can get another gold card to unlock the boss room. Most of the time there aren't even cutscenes, you just hit a checkpoint and are directed to the next goal. And ultimately, all the areas you explore are the same ones you just went through on the first playthrough, and the bosses are the same too. The plot is also stretched very thin, most scenes are cutaways to other characters rather than actually involving Riku, and the word "darkness" is repeated ad nauseum (and in this series, that's saying something!). There is also Riku's version of Castle Oblivion, whereas Sora's version is a long and gruelling level filled with powerful heartless along with two confronations there. Riku's version? Only three rooms long with the Final Boss at the end of the room. You could easily pass through the whole castle without encountering a single Heartless in that room.
• Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader: After you're transported into the final gameplay area (the desert and final dungeon), all pretenses of fairness (or any sort of polish) goes out the window. Your character will most likely be alone at this point — and if you have squadmates, they will likely die instantly from the numerous high-level scorpions prowling the desert. You can and will spend most of your time chipping away at these creatures (and conducting hit-and-run attacks) even if you're high-level. There's only one friendly NPC left in the area (a merchant), and the whole place is monotonous and lacking any visual fidelity. Get inside the final dungeon and you'll find instant-death traps, weird gameplay mechanics (run through a tunnel before it floods with lava) and hordes of enemies who have seemingly been placed as padding. Get through that and you'll face a final boss, which is either laughably easily to kill in direct combat or nigh-impossible to talk down because it relies on a speech skill that the player has been given next-to-no reason to upgrade throughout the game. This game did nothing to solve publisher Interplay's woes, and they folded right after its release.
• Lufia:
  • Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals - after a great game with lots of creative puzzles, just before the final dungeon you have to face three towers where it's pretty obvious that they never got around to adding the puzzles into the rooms they were meant to go.
  • The remake Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals is better here; it's not until the final dungeon that the gameplay takes a dive. Said final dungeon consists solely of boss fights, one of which was difficult the first three times you fought it, but you've now greatly outleveled (and you likely never wanted to see it again). The next was easy the first time, and is now slightly easier. After that you have a survival boss, which is intensely boring. Then you have the final boss, who is possibly the easiest boss that wasn't designed to be an Anticlimax Boss. Then if you're playing a New Game Plus you get a ludicrously difficult True Final Boss. The plot had problems a bit earlier; most of the end game is running through the towns talking to people, generally hearing more or less the same thing at each stop.
  • As per Curse of The Sinistrals example, Doom Island being retconned into a monsterless area since the second game makes it a lot less threatening with only a few floors and bosses avaliable. Lufia: The Legend Returns's final dungeon has only one Giant Space Flea from Nowhere boss residing in it, since apparently you have already killed all the Big Bads in the previous tower.
  • Lufia & The Fortress of Doom has the final dungeon being the eponymous Fortress of Doom, which lacks some of the epic atmosphere because the player already went through this dungeon in the very beginning of the game, only 99 years earlier and with a slightly different party.
• The final exam dungeon in Magical Diary suddenly changes from being a free-roaming increasingly-complex RPG where you the player have to think and solve puzzles, to being "choose from a list of strategic options" with emphasis on your interactions with other characters. The majority of the playerbase is playing the game as a Dating Sim and is happy to get on with things. The players who were enjoying the RPG aspect, on the other hand, find the last exam a massive disappointment.
• Mass Effect:
  • While the series in general manages to avoid this, the Pinnacle Station DLC for (and by extension the last bit of Mass Effect many gamers played) is a cut-and-paste arena with boring enemy spam and the announcer from hell ("Get moving Shepard") made worse by being timed straight combat levels, so that level 60 engineer you have? Useless. Your lightly armored infiltrator? Too bad. If you are anything not a direct combat soldier, some of the challenges are nigh-impossible. And as a bonus, your no-XP kills there count for no other achievements, because it's all a hologram. Understandably, while "Bring Down the Sky" is packed in with the PS3 version, "Pinnacle Station" is left out. Pinnacle Station had been intended to be included with the PS3 version, but had to be left out by the developers because the archived source code for the X360 version wound up getting completely corrupted during the attempt to adapt it to the PS3. Even the game hated it. This corruption meant it also didn't make the cut for the Legendary Edition.
  • Mass Effect 2 ends with a fairly weak DLC in the form of The Arrival. Coming off one of the franchise's most beloved DLC in Lair of the Shadow Broker, and a well-produced DLC in Project Overlord, Arrival comes off as completely half-assed; boring linear mapping, no unique gameplay, being forced to travel alone with ONLY the help of a flat guest NPC, and no boss fights more unique than the giant-robot mook that's seen throughout the game. The last couple minutes of dialogue are, sadly, the only interesting moments of this DLC. The short conversation with the Reaper and the revelations surrounding the asteroid and Mass-Effect-Relay collision are often seen as the most memorable parts of the DLC, if only because they actually acknowledge player choice from 2.
  • The final level of Mass Effect 3 is not as enjoyable as the previous sections for a variety of reasons. To start with, people expecting something like the Suicide Mission from Mass Effect 2 will be left disappointed, as none of the war assets the player has collected make any significant appearance during the mission. London is a wrecked Earth city that we've all seen in every other modern shooter, and the gameplay mostly consists of advancing down linear, claustrophobic corridors through massive hordes of husks or holding the line against waves of husks (using the same "wave" system seen in the multiplayer mode and N7 missions), and at no point are there any significant twists to this formula. The last battle is especially brutal, since it requires you to survive hordes of Marauders and Banshees while a Reaper destroyer fires a One-Hit Kill laser at you. Coming after the Cerberus Base, it's underwhelming and frustrating. In addition, the sound drops out during some cutscenes, the mission is punctuated by a pointless turret Mini-Game, and you never see any of your War Assets in action besides a short conversation with your various squadmates from the previous games. Things get even stranger when you get up to the Citadel - the subtitles stop being consistent (Anderson starts being referred to as an Admiral again), you're in a short, linear corridor you've never visited before (which displays properties that make little sense), and there's no proper Final Boss fight either, just a Cutscene Boss that can be easily killed via interrupt prompts. And that's not even mentioning the legendary backlash against the ending itself... The release of the Extended-Cut calmed the backlash against the endings to a point where most of the fans at least find the updated RGB endings and the additional Reject ending somewhat acceptable compared to outright hating and loathing the original endings.
  • Mass Effect: Andromeda has easily the blandest and most forgettable final mission in the series. While it's at least not as arduous as that of Mass Effect 3, the end result is that it doesn't really feel too different from any other combat-focused mission in the game, outside of having a brief section where you get to play as Ryder's sibling. The Final Boss isn't really anything too memorable either, although at least this time the game actually has one. On top of all that, there aren't any decisions of any actual importance you have to make — not that it would have mattered, seeing how the game won't be getting any sort of direct follow-up — and none of the decisions you made throughout the game affect the mission in any meaningful way, short of a few bits of background dialogue being different or omitted entirely.
• The PS3 version of Ni no Kuni post-Shadar - at least until the actual dungeon and the final boss battles, which are considered to be the Best Level Ever and what most people remember.
• In Octopath Traveler, none of the travelers' Chapter 4 dungeons qualify, but The Very Definitely Final Dungeon does. To sum it up, you will have to defeat no less than eight bosses (stronger versions of four party members' Chapter 3 bosses and the other four's Chapter 4 bosses) that, while not difficult, are time-consuming, before fighting the True Final Boss, a two-phase battle that requires all your party members. It's very likely that you'll lose a few times, especially if you've been lax in leveling your less frequently-used members, and if you do, you have to start the entire thing all over again, since there are no save points inside. The dungeon has some interesting revelations that tie the stories together, but the ending itself is rather disappointing compared to the individual party members' endings.
• Paper Mario:
  • Paper Mario: Sticker Star completely drops the ball for Bowser's Sky Castle. Not only is the level very short, but it doesn't have anything going for it besides a couple empty hallways, the final fight with Kamek, and the fight with Bowser. Not only is this fight frustrating, but it's outright impossible without the right items. The last phase is a joke when you play it the way the game intends, but it's an Anti-Climax Boss even if you take the fight Off the Rails. The last world as a whole is a letdown, having half the general amount of levels a world has in this game. Besides the disappointing final dungeon, 6-1 is little more than an interactive cutscene. The second stage is the only one that happens to be complex and involved, and after the last 3 games, you'd expect much more than that.
  • Paper Mario: Color Splash has Black Bowser's Castle, which looks great and has awesome background music, but the actual level is a letdown. It consists of an empty hallway, a fight with Roy, a couple puzzles, an epic Escape Sequence, another empty hallway, and then the fight with Bowser. This fight, while being well-handled, especially compared to Bowser in the last game, still draws criticism for being Bowser again and having a timed final phase. After this is another Escape Sequence that has a Kaizo Trap if you take too long or fall behind. If you die during this sequence, you have to fight Bowser all over again.
• Persona 3:
  • If you succeed in finding the route to 100% Completion, then midway through December you should have maxed all but two or three social links. It's very likely you'll have absolutely nothing worthwhile to do over Christmas Vacation. After New Year's Day, the plot is all done except for the last few battles, which can't happen until the end of January. January therefore boils down to an extended Action Film, Quiet Drama Scene where there's nothing to do except Level Grinding and wrapping up the last two Social Links.
  • The "Journey" portion of FES is a well-built and challenging JRPG with memorable characters and original gameplay. The "Answer" portion is a glorified Dungeon Crawler which removes the Social Links in favor of a Postscript Season story with Nintendo Hard battles and a bit of Fake Difficulty too.
• Persona 5
  • The Ship is the final Palace and very long, to the point of being draining. Outside from having a rather uninteresting ship design, majority of its puzzles involve the party being turned into rats and needing to press switches to move on. And those become tedious and overstay their welcome. The dungeon also contains five mini-bosses, with the last being immediately followed by a showdown with The Dragon, and finally the ruler of the palace himself. And the ruler has five phases to his battle, too.
  • The final dungeon(s) are Mementos Depths and Qulipoth World. If the player has been doing Mementos quests on the side, reaching the final floor to get to the Depths is rather simple. But Mementos Depths suffers from Checkpoint Starvation in that it only has two Safe Rooms in the entire place, the only puzzles to solve are Hamiltonian Path ones, and mostly filled with cutscenes, and a bleak design. And Qulipoth World only unlocks after several, very lengthy cutscenes. The dungeon itself is only four short levels that pit the team against each of the four archangels, before getting to the Final Boss with its two phases. This means that the player has almost a dozen boss battles to get through near the climax of the game.
  • The endgame takes place in late December, earlier than in Persona 3 and around the same time for the original version of Persona 4. The final day is Christmas Eve, before plot reasons speed the in-game calender up to Valentine's Day, and finally to March, when the final cutscene shows the protagonist having to prepare to go home because his year of probation is over. It is worth noting, though, that the game has a lot more night-time Confidants than the previous two games, so that extra month may not be needed.
• There's no doubt that the ending sequence of Planescape: Torment is way too hard, especially since you're separated from your companions and must get through a massive slog of a battle against very tough enemies. It's also quite a badly structured puzzle section, and the endgame is the only area where you have to fight and a defeat a powerful opponent (which one depends on your alignment) one on one, where in every other area running away was an option. This reveals the Thief class as inviable at the very last minute. There are no shadows to hide in to attempt a backstab, you have no magic powers and your physical attributes won't be potent enough to take your opponent on. You have to hope you bought and kept the right offensive items stored in the PC's inventory, have lots of healing charms and a lot of luck. Similarly, as a magician, you won't have good armour to survive the absolutely brutal close combat-fighting enemies and you'll run out of mana very quickly before dealing with them all. Plus they resist a decent amount of magic types. If you played as a fighter most of the game (which is unintuitive since the game prefers brain over brawn), though, battling the shadows with a decent magic weapon is a cakewalk.
• Pokémon:
  • Pokémon Gold and Silver:
    • Victory Road is a nice little Nostalgia Level, but aside from an encounter with Silver and a few hidden items, there really isn't anything to write home about there as it is otherwise a straight walk all the way to the end. It was much more of a dungeon in the previous games.
    • Kanto as well. You get to explore an entire second region crammed onto a game boy cartridge, complete with a few dungeons from that region. It sounds cool, but unfortunately you had already beaten the champion and thus nobody except Blue can even pose a challenge to you. Storywise, there isn't much to do - you just fix the power plant, challenge the Kanto gyms, then go to Mount Silver and that's it. Fortunately, the remakes improved upon Kanto.
  • Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire. You spend the first two-thirds of the game exploring beautiful environments like volcanoes, beaches, and rainforests. Then, what happens after Lilycove? Water. And a lot of Tentacool/Wingull. The segments are actually quite short if you know where you're going and make a beeline, but for a first time player or one dead set on fighting all enemy trainers and grabbing all the loot, the ocean areas are exasperatingly massive. Additionally, like many later entries note, the games narrative and emotional climax is the battle with the box art legendary to save the world from eternal drought/torrential rains. After that, the final gym, Victory Road, and the Elite Four and Champion battles feel almost like an afterthought.
  • Pokémon Diamond and Pearl. The level gap between the 8th Gym Leader and the Champion is one of the biggest in the entire series (50 - 66), leading to a whole heap of Forced Level-Grinding with really drags down the game just before the climax, and the path to the Pokémon League is probably one of the most boring in the series. Even worse, this comes right after the conclusion to the Team Galactic plot and the battle with your version's legendary, which is the real high point of the game. Platinum lowers the Elite Four's levels considerably to mitigate this.
  • Pokémon X and Y. After the awesome Team Flare arc, there's almost nothing significant in the plot following it, which is topped off with an Elite Four who, as with Generation V, only have four Pokémon (and they never upgrade their teams, unlike Generation V), and a Champion battle that is regarded by several to be not only an unmemorable character, but provides an even worse battle than Black 2 and White 2.
  • Other Pokémon games' Victory Roads, the paths to the Elite Four and Champion, are long gauntlets filled with trainers using high-level Pokémon with advanced strategies. In Pokémon Sun and Moon, the equivalent, Mount Lanakila, is a straight path up the mountain devoid of any obstacles and only two trainers, both of whom are main characters you've fought many times prior. Then Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon made Mount Lanakila into a more fitting final dungeon.
• Radiant Historia, in spite of an awesome penultimate dungeon, completely drops the ball in its endgame. For the 30 or so hours it takes to get to that point, you deal with interesting time travel puzzles and a grid based combat system. The final dungeon, on the other hand, is largely comprised of a single long corridor that is nothing but one big block pushing puzzle (with the added catch of having to kill the blocks beforehand), unavoidable, constantly respawning encounters loaded with immobile enemies which fly in the face of the most important elements of the combat system, Checkpoint Starvation, an absence of dialogue (a shocking contrast to the penultimate chapter) and a mandatory Boss Rush just before the Final Boss which is given incredibly flimsy justification and is, for the most part, comprised of bosses which already held That One Boss status. At the very least, the Final Boss and the ending are spectacular.
• Robinson's Requiem is a notoriously Nintendo Hard "Survival Sim" where the main challenges are managing your resources and solving inventory puzzles. The last level is a crawl through some volcanic caves where you battle robots. You get an infinite-ammo heavy laser to make it fair, but the real issue is that you have to go through nearly the entire thing (plus the desert immediately before) with no way to replenish your water supply, meaning death by dehydration on the last stretch is a very real possibility. And there's the OHKs from magma pools that look almost exactly like the normal floor.
• Rogue Galaxy is great fun for most of the game as you cruise around the galaxy picking up various characters for your small-but-varied cast, and search for Eden. Things start going downhill after you beat Seed about 60% through the game, with a couple of cliched twists, but all sense of pacing or real motive trainwrecks when you enter Mariglenn, the Eden you've been searching for. The game suddenly pulls a new Big Bad out of nowhere, the only way to beat it is to suffer through last-minute exposition for every one of your characters, and then trekking through possibly one of the longest and most repetitive final dungeons ever made. When you eventually fight and defeat the suspiciously easy "final" boss, suddenly the game's previous antagonist flies in to completely muck things up, requiring you to fight a series of one-on-one battles with every single one of your characters, in which losing will make you have to do it all over again from the initial final boss.
• Shadowrun:
  • In the Sega Genesis game, it's all-too-easy to build up a character who is perfectly capable of handling the entire game... except the Final Boss, who'll consistently kill you without a prayer of hope if you fail to raise your Magic Resistance sky-high, in a game where Magic-wielding enemies are usually very rare and very squishy. Deckers, in particular, are virtually impossible to win with, since they usually compensate for lacking combat-skills by having access to the best and most expensive weapons and armor in the game. Armor has zero effect on magical damage, and even the best weapon won't take down the boss before he's cast enough spells to kill you 3 times over.
  • The SNES version has this to some extent. After you've defeated the The Dragon, you then have to go destroy the Big Bad's supercomputer in a building that operates much like the one you were just at. The enemy guarding the AI computer is little more then an Elite Mook, and the sequence inside the computer is no different from the dozens of other Matrix segments in the game. The game ends somewhat abruptly right afterwards, with the Big Bad and any non-kitsune party-members dying in a cutscene.
• Shin Megami Tensei:
  • Shin Megami Tensei I gets to be ridiculously aggravating due to shoddy game mechanics, namely the map. The final level has one floor with a metric ton of invisible walls in a very large space, and you have no way whatsoever to tell if you're going the right way, as the dot on the map does not indicate your direction, and the game itself hands out so few clues it is possible to spend over an hour on this floor alone just trying to find the exit. Then, after finally getting to the final boss(es), you can just hit them with a Charm spell and watch them kill themselves for you. Yes, Atlus actually forgot to give them immunity to the most broken ailment.
  • Shin Megami Tensei II is slightly less painful in this regard since the map mechanics are vastly improved, but thanks to giving the player no hints whatsoever, the final dungeons of Kether Castle and the highest floors of the Tokyo Millenium have some epic Guide Dang It! floor puzzles that can make getting to the end more difficult than the bosses themselves. Given that this is Shin Megami Tensei- a series with bosses so ridiculously hard that the publisher is nicknamed "That One Company" on this site- that says something.
  • Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey seems alright for the first five sectors. The seventh sector is simply a mishmash of the first four sectors, narrowly Hand Waved by the endboss being a Master of Illusion, and remember the teleport maze from Sector Eridanus? You get to experience ANOTHER one! Fully half of it isn't accessible until a New Game Plus... and that section is a long, boring, and incredibly infuriating linear "maze" full of teleports and pitfalls, which leads into a true maze of one-way doors in the basement. However, where the similar one-way-door area in the first half let you get from any of the entrances to any other point if you took the right route, one wrong turn in this one and you have to hike all the way back from the near the start of the dungeon. On the plus side, the aforementioned last part of The Very Definitely Final Dungeon is, once you get past the Moon Logic Puzzle that you need to walk onto empty air, in the running for Best Level Ever.
  • Shin Megami Tensei IV: Getting onto the Neutral Route is a serious Guide Dang It!, to the point that most FAQs just advise avoiding all unnecessary sidequests and always picking the first option for any alignment-affecting question. So naturally as soon as you successfully get back to Tokyo on the neutral route, your next order of business is...finishing every non-DLC sidequest in the game, including unmarked ones.
  • Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse's final dungeon, YHVH's Universe, is an obnoxiously big four-floor dungeon full of teleporters to get yourself lost in. On top of that, all of the enemies are non-recruitable souped-up versions of demons you've previously encountered with their analysis data obscured, forcing you to recall from memory what their weaknesses and resistances are. Fortunately, you have Awakened Power at this point to bypass resistances (unless for one reason or another you chose not to take it up), as well as an Almighty-elemental Combination Attack with Flynn that can be activated if you're Smirking, but even without this bit of enemy-encounter Fake Difficulty and with Estoma to ward off encounters, the whole dungeon is just needlessly tedious to navigate with almost nothing particularly interesting to do aside from tying up some plotline loose ends.
  • The final levels of Shin Megami Tensei V are lacking in life compared to the rest of Da'at. The Temple of Eternity uses its mobs as obstacles to be navigated around, and the Empyrean's only fights are a few minibosses before you get to the Route Bosses and the Final Boss (whom you don't actually fight if you take the standard Neutral ending). There's in-universe justifications to the lack of demons to be found in these areas but it still means the final areas are a lot less exciting.
• Star Ocean:
  • Star Ocean was rushed, and the final dungeon seems to come out of nowhere with an attendant Giant Space Flea from Nowhere. In the PSP remake, it's expanded to a few more events and dungeons, but it still completely changes the feel of the game, and what's worse, unlike the original, it refuses to allow you to return to the main game after beating it, meaning you're stuck in a tiny overworld with little exploration to do.
  • Star Ocean: The Second Story's final dungeon is a monotonous slog through a dungeon whose floors all look almost exactly the same, punctuated by a handful of boss fights (including the final boss himself) that are absolute pushovers if the player's party is near level 100, which is incredibly likely. Even more inexplicably, the process for finding the Bonus Dungeon require a series of steps so esoteric and confusing as to be nigh-impossible (including traversing back through the same dungeon to the overworld again), and the reward for it intersperses better armor and weapons for a handful of characters with another monotonous dungeon, weird and frustrating puzzles found nowhere else in the game and three Superbosses who are virtually impossible to beat unless the player has spent hours grinding up to maximum level.
  • In Star Ocean: The Last Hope, the final dungeon requires the player to fight every single previous boss without any chance to save. If played without doing all the side missions or grabbing optional gear, the entire chain of bossfights can take up to thirty minutes, making it rather infuriating if you happen to die before reaching the final boss. You can technically avoid all the boss fights leading up to the final boss if you know what you're doing and where to go, but if you don't know this before hand you're in for an interesting surprise.
• Tales of Arise's final act suffers from this. Once the party goes to Lenegis, the plot warps to light speed with fewer explorable areas and Info Dump after Info Dump. While it had quite an interesting atmosphere with the final dungeon, many players would have liked to have had more playable sections between the various amounts of info dumps interspersed with characters simply reacting to all the revelations given.
• The final third of Tales of Vesperia is known when the Greater-Scope Villain the Adephagos "Ate the plot". While it was indeed foreshadowed, it basically stopped all plot and character beats on the spot. Yuri and Karol may have had their plots continue for a bit but they very abruptly stop. To make matters worse, the Adephagos isn't even the Final Boss - it's reduced to a Cutscene Boss. Even the Definitive Edition doesn't really "fix" it.
• Two Worlds II has a rushed and somewhat confusing final level. After making your way through the castle, the prophet you've been following all game long reveals herself to be a dragon and attacks. Rather than using the abilities and equipment you've been building up all game long, you are left to face her on the roof of the castle while firing ballistas at her while she flies around. Oh, and her fire is capable of a One-Hit Kill if you aren't careful, meaning you'll likely be replaying this level several times until you figure out her patterns.
• Ultima:
  • The rush to complete Ultima VII Part II: Serpent Isle resulted in the loss about the middle third (if not more) of its storyline. Certain NPCs still show evidence of what they had planned, but it was never finished. The last segment of the game instead consists of the same two or three puzzles repeated over and over again; the entire last dungeon has no NPCs and only a single group of monsters.
  • The Castle of Fire in Ultima III is even worse. Even with the marks to nullify the fire and force fields, you still face five tough battles against Griffons, Dragons, and Devils, and then in the final room you get attacked by the goddamn floor. The entire rest of the game can be completed at level 10 with starting stats, but to beat the Castle of Fire you need invest hours of Level Grinding to get to level 20 or so, plus max your stats at the shrines.
  • While it's hardly unheard of for an Ultima game to have a puzzle instead of a final boss, Ultima V may take it too far. After gathering three plot coupons and a magic word you need to reach a very long and difficult dungeon, working your way through room after room of tedious "secret door" puzzles, and reaching the center of the world ... there was a fourth plot coupon never mentioned anywhere else in the game. Didn't bring it? Hope you backed up your save, and prepare to do it all again.
• In Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria, the last two dungeons are overlong, mostly-linear trudges through tough enemies and annoying battle maps that serve no real purpose other than to deplete your stock of healing items. Even more annoying is that the game keeps monkeying around with your party. First you lose Rufus, after losing your other storyline characters earlier. You get a few of them back, but until then you're forced to rely heavily on your Einherjar. Then the Einherjar themselves become useless as you get no less than four brand-new high-level party members just for the last dungeon, making you wonder why the hell you bothered raising your Einherjar to be combat-capable all game. Then, just as you're getting used to fighting with them, three of the newcomers are removed from your party for the final stretch. Finally, to top it all off, the Final Boss can only be substantially hurt with the main character's Eleventh Hour BFS. Your party is just there to help charge up the Quad Soul Crush capping Nibelung Valesti. Oh, and by the way, those crafted weapons and armor you spent forever grinding for the components to? Antiquated by stuff you find just lying around in the endgame areas. It doesn't help that the final dungeon itself—which is supposed to be comparative to the Tower of Lezard from the first game—is more or less composed of three dungeons sewn into one, with very little to offer in the way of interesting exploration or puzzles. The bonus dungeon makes up for this failing, at least.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 1: While the story at the end is usually praised, the gameplay generally takes a dive from Mechonis Core to the end of the game. The difficulty goes way up, a lot of areas in the game are now inaccessible or greatly changed, there are few new areas introduced, and the one new area is full of Goddamned Bats and has That One Boss.
• Disc 2 of Xeno Gears. The gameplay is replaced by a bunch of cutscenes interspersed with occasional boss fights and one or two lackluster, short dungeons. This was not what the developers intended, as they ran out of time and didn’t want to release a part 2.

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