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Disc One Final Boss / Video Games

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  • Alien: Isolation: The first levels are already difficult and will take their time to complete, so when the story makes you carry on a plan to lure the xenomorph in a trap and eject it into space during Mission 10 (itself one of the longest levels, divided into three sublevels with plot twists and a lot of building tension), you are justified if you think that you completed the game. But then you suddenly realize that the game is continuing and you are still wandering inside the space station when you receive comms that the androids are behaving strangely...
  • A literal example in Countdown Vampires; it takes two discs to play the full game, and the first disc ends when the first boss is defeated.
  • Another literal example in Creature Shock, where Sumoki's monstrous form is the final boss of the first portion; defeat her and the game tells you to insert Disc 2.
  • Chase the Express sees you defeating the terrorist leader, Boris, roughly 60% into the game, but the game still goes on after Boris' dead. You still need to locate where the French ambassador is being held, battling leftover terrorists along the way until the revelation that the ambassador's aide, Philip, is The Mole and actual mastermind working for the bad guys, and the True Final Boss.
  • Criminal Case:
  • Densetsu no Stafy 3: The final stage's sole boss fight is against a souped-up Ogura who only has one phase, after which Starfy and friends escape from the Old Castle and head back home. It's only then you learn about the Evil Crystals that you have to collect in order to face Evil himself, prompting the second playthrough to begin.
  • Diablo:
    • Diablo II was divided into four acts, with one final boss per act. In Act 2, you're expected to kill Baal, one of the three Prime Evils (alongside Mephisto and the eponymous Big Bad), before he can escape his prison, but run into a giant bug called Duriel, one of the four Lesser Evilsnote  instead. Diablo is the final boss of Act 4, but the expansion comes and Baal turns out to be the true final boss of the game instead.
    • In Diablo III, the first major boss of the game is the Skeleton King, who is faced halfway through the first act and is largely unrelated to the rest of the game's plot (unfortunately for the characters in-game, he's literally barring the way to that plot). Then the player must face Maghda midway through Act 2, her master Belial at the end of Act 2 and the last remaining leader of Hell known as Azmodan in Act 3 before the real Big Bad is finally revealed to be Diablo himself once again, who is the final boss in Act 4. Then the expansion arrives and the true final boss this time around is Malthael, the Archangel of Death.
  • Dragon Age:
    • Dragon Age II is an interesting example. It spans three time periods, each with their final boss. However, no one in their right mind would actually think something as bland as the Rock Wraith was the final boss... and they'd be right. It's genuinely surprising, then, for people taken in by the marketing, that the leader of the strange race of grey-skinned horned men, the Qunari Arishok, isn't the final boss. If you look carefully, however, you can see all the hints the developers planted towards the real Final Boss... a power-mad Knight-Commander Meredith.
    • Dragon Age: Inquisition is kicked off by the opening of an enormous Hell Gate called the Breach. You seal it after the first major quest, before even getting to move into that fancy fortress you were promised in the marketing. Then the guy who opened the Breach shows up, and he's not happy.
  • Dragon Quest:
    • Dragon Quest II has The Man Behind the Man Malroth.
    • Dragon Quest III: After the entire world so far is explored, the apparent Big Bad, Baramos, is destroyed, and the apparent ending has started... the real Big Bad, Zoma, shows up from his home in the Hollow Earth and seeks vengeance for his defeated Dragon, requiring the hero to go into the Hollow Earth after him.
    • Dragon Quest V: After exploring the whole world, finding one way to reach a previously inaccesible area, storming the temple of the Order of Zugzwang, and fighting their way through a confusing and labyrinthine dungeon -Crocodilopolis-, the heroes battle and defeat King Korol, the head of Order... and then they find out he was only a puppet, and they must find the path to Nadiria -the underworld- to save the world from the real Big Bad.
    • Dragon Quest VII is very convincing; after you've recreated the entire world, you finally go to face the Demon King. After a big battle, you beat him, so now you can resurrect God and get to the ending... only to find that the Demon King wasn't dead after all...
    • Dragon Quest VIII featured a villain named Dhoulmagus, who stole a magical sceptre and went around killing people. After chasing him all over the world, finally catching up with him in a Disc-One Final Dungeon that does a very good impression of an actual final dungeon, and going through a rather difficult boss battle (including the mid-battle transformations that are standard for a Dragon Quest final boss), it turns out the sceptre made him do it, and the game is less than half over — now you have to go after the real Big Bad, a Sealed Evil in a Can named Rhapthorne.
    • Dragon Quest IX has King Godwyn, ruler of The Empire. He has all the trappings of a Big Bad: A fancy, foreboding dungeon, powerful monsters and minibosses, and a One-Winged Angel form. Surely, he's the main villain, right? WRONG! Turns out Godwyn was an unknowing pawn in Corvus' plot to destroy/remake existence. He does a poor job of hiding this: He isn't even mentioned until shortly before you meet him, where he takes credit for only the most recent plot developments. A single glance at his castle tells you that whoever fired the giant beam of death aimed at God is living in his basement.
    • Dragon Quest X features the Netherlord Nelgel, who destroys Tenton and seals Rendacia in darkness, forcing the Hero to reincarnate as a Ogre, Elf, Wetling, Dwarf, and/or Poppet in order to stop him. After traversing the Heart of Hell, full of deadly monsters and fighting his One-Winged Angel, the world is saved...except the seal he has on Rendacia is still active, setting the stage for Act/Version 2 of the game!
    • Dragon Quest XI has Mordegon, though it's subverted in the sense that he is defeated and the world is saved, the end. However, the party learns that they have an option to go back in time and attempt to stop Mordegan before he's able to rise to power at the end of Act 1 in order to prevent countless deaths, and you succeed in doing so. However, a massive floating object in the sky called Erdwin's Lantern was destroyed by Mordegon before it could make landfall in the original timeline after gaining power. In the revised timeline, he was stopped before being able to do such a thing and it turns out said object contains Calasmos' body, the true antagonist.
    • The Monster Scout Championship Finals in Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker. Interestingly, the game doesn't play it as a twist. Your supposed goal is to win the championship, but from the very start it's apparent that behind-the-scenes intrigue and the Incarnus' mission are guiding the plot.
  • Used in several Final Fantasy games:
    • Final Fantasy III: You play through a world, discover it's a floating island, find a land frozen in time, and battle your way through everything Xande, the guy responsible for all the misfortune in the world, could throw at you. You fight through 2 dungeons before you can reach him, without save points along the way, and up comes the Cloud of Darkness, the embodiment of all the dark power in the world, who forces you to go through yet another dungeon, filled with a couple of more bosses that are tough as nails, before you can face her down.
    • Final Fantasy IV: For much of the game, Golbez seems like he'll be the Big Bad, but it turns out he was a victim of Zemus's Mind Manipulation.
    • Final Fantasy V: Some people were fooled into thinking that the fight against Exdeath in Galuf's world was the final battle, despite the twleve legendary weapons having not been obtained yet.
    • The Ultima Weapon in Final Fantasy VI, who has access to powerful magic and who happens to be the final boss of the Floating Continent. Emperor Gestahl himself turns out to be a Big Bad Wannabe and he's not even faced in battle by the player. He's assassinated by his second in command, Kefka, who then proceeds to lay waste to the world.
    • Final Fantasy VII:
    • The Sorceress Edea in Final Fantasy VIII, who's the boss of Discs 1 & 2, but then turns out to be just a puppet for something far worse. She later joins the heroes as an ally, sans most of her superpowers.
    • Final Fantasy IX:
      • Queen Brahne, who is — as usual — killed by Kuja, who'd previously seemed to be The Dragon. He's a White Hair, Black Heart, so she really should've seen it coming.
      • Happens up to three times in the same game, in fact, since Kuja himself is then set up to be a Disc One Final Boss when he's revealed to be working for Chessmaster Garland, and then subverted when Kuja goes Omnicidal Maniac, kills Garland, and proves to be the Big Bad after all. And AGAIN, at the very end, where the actual final boss fight is fought against the physical manifestation of the inevitable cycle of birth and death, although technically that was just because Kuja had caused enough damage that the heroes had to break reality to reverse it. There's also Beatrix, the literal final boss of disc one.
    • In Final Fantasy X, the party isn't even halfway through the pilgramage when they hit the massive operation to kill the Big Bad Sin. Needless to say, it fails spectacularly. Also, Sin proves to be The Heavy; the real villains are Yunalesca and Yu Yevon.
    • Final Fantasy XIV usually has its own set of Disc One Final Bosses in each expansion's story that show the story's about to take a huge shift:
      • Heavensward has Nidhogg, originally set-up the main villain of the level 60 expansion, only to be defeated in a level 55 dungeon. After his defeat Thordan VII and the Heavens' Ward become the main threat and true final bosses. Subverted when Nidhogg comes back from the dead after Thordan's defeat, and serves as the in-spirit final boss of the Heavensward storyline in the patches that followed.
      • Shadowbringers has this in Vauthry, Lord of Eulmore and the final Lightwarden, before making way for the real villain of the story, Emet-Selch.
      • The biggest example, however, is Zodiark in ‘’Endwalker’’. Zodiark, long believed to be the Big Bad of the entire game, is taken over by Fandaniel, the antagonist of the current expansion, in a Thanatos Gambit, leading to a climactic battle (complete with orchestral remix of the main expansion theme) at level 83… the first trial of the expansion, only a third of the way in. With Zodiark’s death, the barrier of Aether protecting the planet fades and the Final Days begin in earnest, leading to the main conflict of the expansion.
    • Mateus in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. He's the last of the five main Totema bosses, each of whom represents one of the races of Ivalice and protects a crystal that Marche must destroy to go home. Once Marche defeats him, Queen Remedi/Li-Grim, the true antagonist, appears, and reveals that the world hasn't changed back because Mewt still wants it to exist.
  • Final Fantasy Adventure (which is actually part of the World of Mana series) features an obvious Big Bad simply named "Dark Lord" and his Dragon Julius. Unexpectedly, not only does the player face off with Dark Lord at the halfway point of the game, he's not even challenging. The Big Bad turns out to be Julius after all.
  • Genshin Impact introduces La Signora, Eighth of the Eleven Fatui Harbingers, early on and sets her up as The Heavy of the entire game and the Arch-Enemy of the Traveler due to her manipulations of events behind the scenes in the Prologue and in Chapter I, not to mention she is the one personally collecting the gnosis of each Archon to hand over to her superior, the Tsaritsa of Snezhnaya. Unfortunately for Signora, she meets her end nearing the climax of Chapter II when the Traveler takes her down and the Raiden Shogun, the Electro Archon, disintegrates her in a Single-Stroke Battle (without a gnosis) as punishment for losing. She isn't even the Final Boss of the chapter, that honor goes to the Raiden Shogun herself.
  • Vulka and her husband The Fatherboard in Iron Twilight acts as this. You go through their spaceship and when you reach the arena, it turns out that Vulka was helping a friend by holding on to their tools. Then they fight Vulka... ...but she bursts into light afterwards. The fatherboard was grieved by Vulka's death and sends out himself and his minions. When the Fatherboard is killed, he also bursts into light causing James and Tenor to speed towards the door, ending the Fatherboard arc.
  • The King of Fighters 2001 reveals that the Zero fought in the previous game was actually a stand-in for the real Zero that is fought in 2001. And once you beat Zero in 2001, his boss Igniz appears, who then kills his own boss to remind you that Igniz is indeed the SNK Boss.
  • Halo:
    • Halo 2 has a Covenant force attack Earth before fleeing to a new Halo, where their leader, the Prophet of Regret, plans on firing it and wiping out all galactic life in a huge radius, similar to the plot of the first game, except that Regret is leading only a small fraction of the Covenant and is defeated roughly halfway through the game. The main antagonist turns out to be the Prophet of Truth, who also plans on firing the Halos (and unlike Regret, survives the game intact). The final boss, on the other hand, is Tartarus.
    • In Halo 3, the Prophet of Truth himself drives the plot at first and stopping his plan soon becomes the primary focus of our heroes. He ends up killed about 80% of the way through the campaign, allowing the Gravemind to take center stage. The Arbiter sums it up:
  • Brute Force has Shadoon, a Seer overlord who leads his own cult, starts the Feral outcast uprising on Ferix, and manipulates several factions against the Confederation of Allied Worlds. Turns out, he was doing all of this to weaken the system for the Shrikes.
  • Baten Kaitos:
    • In Origins, you spend about 78% of the game fighting the sinister Lord Baelheit (and another 20% being Mental Time Travel in which you fight against Wiseman, an apparently unrelated villain millenia in the past). Then, in the last hour of the game, you defeat Baelheit, he gives a Motive Rant explaining that he's the true Spiriter, and has been a Well-Intentioned Extremist trying to stop the real villain... your boss, Quaestor Verus, who suddenly turns out to have been an Omnicidal Maniac with an Evil Plan. Nice job killing him, Hero. And then Verus is also upstaged by Wiseman.
    • Eternal Wings has Geldoblame, who goes insane after infusing himself with Malpercio's power and is killed by Fadroh's soldiers, after you've beaten him.
  • Inverted in Overlord where you discover at the end of the game that the Player Character is really The Dragon for the titular Evil Overlord (and that you're a Fallen Hero suffering from Laser-Guided Amnesia to boot), and you must defeat him to usurp/reclaim your throne.
  • The Tales Series does this frequently. A Recurring Element of the series is pulling a Wham Episode out after the Disc One Final Boss is beaten so that it can pull a Decon-Recon Switch later. Quite often, the Disc One Final Boss will be truly evil, whereas the Final Boss is a Well-Intentioned Extremist.
    • Happens roughly a million times in Tales of Symphonia, which was made of Your Princess Is in Another Castle!. Particularly with Remiel. While you know that Lord Forcystus isn't a final boss by any means, you do fight him at the end of Disc 1 (Symphonia uses two discs on Nintendo GameCube).
    • Tales of Vesperia has the second part concluding with an epic battle against The Man Behind the Man, Alexei. In fact, this boss is easily the most evil character in the entire game; in comparison, the final boss Duke is just misguided.
    • Tales of Destiny has Lydon Bernhardt, who kickstarts the plot by stealing the Eye of Atamoni, but is defeated- at which point Hugo Gilchrist steals the Eye instead. Then he turns out to be controlled by the Swordian of Darkness Berselius, who himself is possessed by the real Big Bad Kronos/Miktran.
    • Tales of Legendia has Vaclav Bolud, who kickstarts the rest of the plot by getting Stella killed while trying to destroy a city on the mainland.
    • Tales of the Abyss is notable for having the Disc One Final Boss and the final boss be the same guy. Van Grants appears to be the Big Bad, and this is seemingly subverted when Grand Maestro Mohs enters the picture, Big Bad it turns out Van was manipulating Mohs. Then, after defeating Van the first time, it looks like he falls to his death. But nope, he comes back stronger than ever, and the final boss battle is with Van fused with the soul of Lorelei.
    • Tales of Berseria also has its Disc One Final Boss and final boss as the same person, which the game makes it clear from the beginning who it will be: Artorious. However, it's also a Final Boss Preview and a Hopeless Boss Fight. When your party members will be lucky to be at level 20, Artorious is at level 66, and your attacks do Scratch Damage, at best. When the party reaches him as the final boss, he'll use all of the same attacks and then some, but with the expectation that the party has to win.
    • Tales of Arise once again has the Disc One Final Boss and the Final Boss be the same character (technically). The party does face The Great Astral Spirit of Rena in a two-part epic clash. Afterwards Alphen faces off one last time with Vholran as the final fight of the game, but since Alphen can now use his Blazing Sword skills without draining his HP, Vholran goes down easily.
  • The giant living brain Agathos in The Adventures of Rad Gravity. After you beat him, he returns to human form, and reveals that the Big Bad is none other than your robotic partner Kakos, who has been manipulating you.
  • Oddly enough, shows up in Bomberman 64. Altair is hyped up for the entire game to be the Big Bad, except if you've gotten all of the Gold Cards. If you do that, when Altair tries to flee after you've beaten him, Sirius, the guy who has been helping you out, showing up on almost every level and giving you hints, and dropping you the Remote Bomb powerup before every boss, flies in and kills him, then points out that the guys you've been fighting stole the superweapon from him, and you've been unwittingly helping him recover it. After that, all of the hint-givers in the previous levels tell you that you should die because it would be easier. They aren't lying. The hidden final world is way harder than anything and everything that came before it.
  • Might and Magic IV is a special case. The Big Bad is Lord Xeen, who is only able to be harmed with a special weapon and can eradicate you at a touch. Once you kill him, another Big Bad shows up and proclaims you have defeated his general. If you only have IV, this is a Sequel Hook — but if you have V as well, the two games combine into one (each game is one side of a flat world), effectively making Lord Xeen into a Disc One boss (this is especially as without context from previous games in the series, the only real clue in the combined game about which side is supposed to be finished first is that the V side is designed with higher level characters in mind).
  • Mega Man:
  • Castlevania, particularly the Metroidvania-era games, is a big fan of this one, with the twist that frequently, the Fake Boss can be the final boss, depending on what you've managed to do throughout the game. This being a video game series about the eternal war with a certain vampire, however, the Disc-One Final Boss tends to be hijacked by Dracula when you do things right.
    • Symphony of the Night: Alucard's final foe appears to be Richter Belmont, and if he's defeated normally, Alucard gives a solemn monologue and you get a Downer Ending. If he puts on a certain piece of equipment, though, he can see that his foe is actually being mind-controlled by a weird ball of light; if Alucard focuses his attacks on this, it's revealed to be the evil priest Shaft, and the entire second half of the game, the Inverted Castle, is unlocked.
    • Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow: Graham Jones inherits the powers of Dracula, and has an epic battle with Soma. If Soma defeats him normally, the game ends with Soma and his friends escaping the castle, but with him getting a strange feeling. If Soma equips three certain souls, however, and defeats Graham, he absorbs Dracula's powers and finds out that he's actually the reincarnation of Dracula, after which he must travel to The Very Definitely Final Dungeon and do battle with the essence of chaos within him to set himself free.
    • Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow: The game ends rather anticlimactically if Soma just defeats Dario straight-on, with the other cult members escaping the castle and Soma getting another weird feeling as he leaves. If he gets another certain soul, however, he can enter the mirror in Dario's room and cut Dario off from the fire demon that's fueling his powers. After a long series of events that result from this, he eventually goes to The Very Definitely Final Dungeon and does battle with the manifestation of the mutated and out-of-control powers of Dracula. Or something.
    • Portrait of Ruin: If Jonathan and Charlotte beat the vampire sisters head-on, Brauner stops them and flees the castle with them, leaving Eric's wish unfulfilled and sending the duo on what would likely be a country-wide hunt for the vampire and his hostages. If Charlotte manages to cast Sanctuary on them, they're cured of their vampiricy and, grateful for the forced Heel–Face Turn, grant access to the second half of the game and the eventual battle with Brauner himself... only for Brauner to be hijacked by Dracula at the very end. And Death. At the same time.
    • Order of Ecclesia: If Shanoa defeats Albus without having saved all the villagers (one of which is hidden behind a breakable wall), she goes home with all the Dominus glyphs for the ritual ...which ends in her life being sacrificed and her mentor gloating over his plan coming to fruition. If she does manage to save all the villagers, Albus gets a chance to warn her about what's coming up, leading to her calling out her mentor for the Treacherous Advisor he is, resulting in an epic boss battle with him. Which ends when he gives up his life to summon Dracula's castle. Nice try, Shanoa.
    • Castlevania 64: Used on two different occasions during the game. The first example is the Behemoth encountered in the Castle Center, which uses the same battle theme as the final boss. The second is Dracula's Servant atop the final stage, which has a unique battle theme to himself. Notably, both of these Disc One Final Bosses can become the game's final boss by either playing the game on Easy Mode for the Behemoth, or for Dracula's Servant, by taking too long to reach the final stage.
    • There doesn't even need to be Multiple Endings for this to be in effect. Case in point — Castlevania: Lament of Innocence, where the game builds up to Walter Bernhard being the Big Bad and final opponent, only for Mathias Cronqvist to appear after Walter's defeat, reveal that he was manipulating both Walter and Leon Belmont to gain eternal life, make a We Can Rule Together offer to Leon, then sic Death on Leon when he refuses — Death turns out to be the final boss, and Mathias goes on to become Dracula. And then there's Castlevania: Curse of Darkness, where after beating Isaac for the second and final time in Dracula's Castle, Zead shows up, reveals that he was manipulating both Isaac and Hector to resurrect Dracula, then seals Isaac in a coffin to use his remaining life-force to bring the Count back. Zead then reveals himself to be Death and takes Hector on. After Death's defeat, Hector proceeds to the throne room, where — surprise, surprise — he arrives just in time to watch Count Dracula be reborn, after which Dracula promptly attacks him, serving as the final boss.
    • If Dracula isn't declared in charge from the get-go, the villain's plan will usually involve reviving him and/or taking Dracula's powers. Dracula worshippers hoping to revive the dark lord get exactly what they wanted. Dracula ursurpers, not usually so lucky. Either way, they're demoted to Disc One Final Boss or The Dragon in the process.
  • In Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, Kaileena turns out to be the Empress the prince has been seeking and the ensuing boss battle takes place. The fake aspect is that this battle occurs halfway through the game and the Prince's troubles don't disappear afterwards. Kaileena becomes the final boss in the bad ending if you haven't gotten the water sword.
  • Legend of Legaia pulls two of these. First, after you beat Zeto and clear the world map, you discover that there is another region (and later a third) to explore. Later, after Prince Cort has been defeated and the Mist has been eradicated, Songi shows up and has Juggernaut eat your town.
  • Loopmancer has the dreaded triad leader of Dragon City, Wei Long, who ruined your life 5 years ago in the backstory, including trying to have you assasinated, killing your daughter and leaving your wife crippled and confined to a wheelchair. You spend the game's first half trying to bring Wei Long to justice, and finally defeats him in an epic boss battle halfway through only for another villain, Wei Long's subordinate Song Bo-yong to take over the main villain position.
  • The 5th Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People installment, 8-Bit is Enough, has a fake final boss against the supposedly invulnerable Trogdor, who gets defeated with a single slash, emitting final words of "I could not handle your style!". Even Strong Bad himself concedes that it was easier than expected. Cue walls coming down and Ultimate Trogdor appearing.
  • Spider-Man (Insomniac):
  • The Binding of Isaac sets up Mom as the Final Boss. However, killing her and later what seems like the True Final Boss (Mom's Heart) is really only the halfway point. After defeating Mom's Heart enough times, the player has a choice to pursue one of three different final bosses and endings. Going to Sheol/The Dark Room confront's Isaac's religious confusion and pits Satan and The Lamb as the final bosses. Going to The Cathedral/The Chest has Isaac coming to terms with his imminent suicide by suffocation and pits Isaac and ??? as the final bosses. Going to the Blue Womb/Void confront's Isaac's physical and mental degradation and pits Hush and Delirium as the final bosses.
    • In Repentance, Mother - formerly known as The Witness is the Disc-One Final Boss to The Beast.
  • Banjo-Kazooie:
    • The first game leads you to believe that the final showdown with the Big Bad, Gruntilda, is a quirky board game/quiz show where you test your memory about the game and run through a few minigames. After you beat it, she skedaddles, Banjo and Kazooie rescue Tooty, and the whole gang goes back home for some well-earned rest and relaxation. The credits roll... and as soon as they're done, Banjo and friends are shown busy throwing a party when Tooty pops up and tells Banjo that he must also defeat Grunty, so they return to the lair.
    • Lampshaded in Banjo-Tooie. After the quiz, Grunty has no idea what to do next, so Kazooie suggests that she run off again like in the last game before they beat her up.
    • Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts has a challenge that feels very much like the ending: you have to incorporate every different aspect of the vehicles you've built before into one multitasker, complete with mid-challenge quiz (as featured in Banjo-Tooie). Once you beat it, Grunty requests a final battle, although it can easily be won using overwhelming firepower.
  • In Legend of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse, the Sorcerer of Darkness is the Big Bad for most of the game, as he has dammed up the River of Time to prevent the Water of Life from flowing, withering crops and making people unhappy. King Pete sends Mickey on a quest to recover the Water of Life (as he is unwilling to do so himself), but finds out from his advisor that whoever does bring back the water will be crowned the new king of the Kingdom of Pete. After Mickey defeats the Sorcerer, he returns to the Kingdom of Pete, where Pete attempts to arrest Mickey for impersonating a king despite Goofy and Donald's protests. Thus, King Pete is the game's final boss.
  • Happens a lot in The Legend of Zelda games:
  • Live A Live has a rather strange case due to the game's structure.
    • Initially, all of the stories appear entirely separate, all ending off with a final boss. However, by the second chapter completed, a player will likely know something's up due to them bearing similar names, but it's not clear what. A straight example even in the middle of a chapter is Ode Iou; you get to fight him once after beating Miyamoto Musashi, but he escapes to the roof after the fight is over, revealing his demonic true form Gamahebi in order to fight you again.
    • After completing the seven chapters, a hidden eighth chapter is revealed, a normal medieval quest to save the princess from the Lord of Dark... but while he set things in motion, he's small pickings next to the real Lord of Dark, whose presence still influences the story, and Streitbough, the actual boss of the chapter. And once Streitbough is dead and Alethea kills herself, Oersted becomes the new Lord of Dark, Odio.
    • The fight wth Odio ends off with the player being given the choice of either killing or sparing Odio; while killing him ends the game, sparing him has him send you to fight the earlier bosses again. The remake adds another layer of this by giving Odio one last battle after the boss rush as Sin of Odio.
  • Ōkami features two very convincing instances of this with Orochi and Ninetails. Both of them are heavily foreshadowed and reside in their very own big honking evil lairs, each of which constitutes a Point of No Return and has its own ridiculously dramatic lead up sequence. The fact that Ammy hasn't learned all of the skills necessary to restore her godhood and there's a lot of empty space on your weapons screen should be a dead giveaway to the status of these (admittedly imposing) nasties. Considering that you have twelve of the skills by the time you face Ninetails and Issun making a comment about how their adventure is almost over, it was fairly believable. Ninetails appearing in a constellation made this theory even more believable. However, there's still empty space on the weapon screen, sooooo...
  • Ōkamiden. You've got all the brush techniques, all the divine instruments (bar the one you get for New Game Plus), and the apparent final dungeon has the unique trait of coming in two parts. The threat level is high as well, as King Fury has a Humongous Mecha Moon Rabbit that will destroy Nippon. You beat King Fury, and hey, who's this guy called Akuro? As it turns out, all the previous bosses, including the aforementioned King Fury, were just fragments of Akuro that had taken on their own personalities. So, technically speaking, you were fighting the same guy the whole time.
  • Jade Empire sets up Emperor Sun Hai as the apparent Big Bad of the game, with hints that his Dragon Death's Hand may actually be the real driving force behind the evil plot. The player character fights and kills the Emperor at the end of the fourth of seven chapters of the game, after which your supposed kindly mentor Sun Li emerges as the true Big Bad.
  • In BioShock, Jack battles his way to the apartment of Andrew Ryan in order to kill him, only for Ryan to point out Jack's Tomato in the Mirror status. After which Ryan commits Jack-assisted suicide in a cutscene. Only then does poor Jack realize that he's been listening to the real Big Bad all along.
  • Kingdom Hearts:
    • Maleficent is not, in fact, the last boss in Kingdom Hearts, despite what everything up until that point has led you to believe. After beating her the first time, it’s quickly revealed that Ansem has been manipulating her from the start. Then you have to fight her again in dragon form, and then fight Riku again (this time possessed by Ansem), then escape Hollow Bastion before returning to fight a Behemoth and seal the final Keyhole, and then make it through End of the World before finally facing Ansem as the true final boss.
    • In 358/2 Days, Xion is not the last boss, despite having all the trappings of one. No, there's still an epilogue chapter, with the true (and less challenging) final boss fight with Riku, as you re-enact the Deep Dive trailer.
    • In coded, Sora's Heartless likewise is a Sequential Boss which behaves very much like the final boss. However, the final boss of the game is actually Data-Roxas.
  • Metroid has Mother Brain, a Load-Bearing Boss with its own final dungeon. After the escape from the exploding dungeon, you are treated with victory music and a victory cutscene ... as long as the game in question isn't the Zero Mission remake, in which it quickly turns sour as your escape ship falls under attack and you lose all your equipment and have to work through part of the Very Definitely Final Dungeon without it.
  • Throughout Guild Wars Nightfall, you're trying to stop Varesh Ossa from completing her final ritual to release her god, Abaddon. The game even does a good job of disguising the mission where you confront Varesh as the final mission before pulling a Your Princess Is in Another Castle! in the ending cutscene: Varesh's rituals weakened Abaddon's prison enough that he can punch through unless you take the fight to him.
  • Chrono Trigger: Crono and company venture to 600 AD to stop Magus from summoning Lavos and to stop it from raining destruction upon their future. It turns out that Magus was only trying to summon Lavos to kill it himself. You later end up going up against Queen Zeal, a woman from 12,000 BC who wanted Lavos's power. This leads to a second Disc-One Final Dungeon, the Ocean Palace. This is even more convincing, as it is very likely that the main character, Crono, will either be close to unlocking his final ability, or will have actually unlocked it, making it seem like the end is nigh. It isn't. You fight Lavos at the end of the Ocean Palace, but it's a Hopeless Boss Fight, and Crono dies. This then leads into the final portion of the game, and is also the point at which your party starts actually changing history, beginning with undoing Crono's death.
  • Chrono Cross is clearly building you to take on Lynx/Dark Serge and Fate itself, whatever that may be. Turns out it's the computer that's keeping everyone from being killed by the dragons. And it wasn't evil so much as trying to resolve its programming. Er... Well anyway, then you take on the dragons who are planning to destroy the Earth, only they/it aren't/isn't the final boss either because the Time Devourer ate it long ago. The final boss is a Giant Space Flea from Nowhere because while Lavos is mentioned a couple times, it never does anything throughout the entire game.
  • This happens a couple of times in the Wild ARMs series, but the most infamous example is probably in the third game, when the party finishes Part 3 by fighting against the Blue Menace, Siegfried, that had been foreshadowed the entire game. When the epic battle with him is concluded, the game goes into Part 4, which is only a few hours long and introduces, and puts an end to, Beatrice, a little girl who had been randomly appearing throughout the game all along, and was manipulating everyone, including Siegfried, to her own ends. Even then, she's not the final boss: her pet planet-organism...thing is.
  • Wild ARMs 2 does this with Vinsfeld, who is the final boss of disc one. Defeating him even brings a full and concrete end to his plans, allowing for a completely unrelated and not even foreshadowed threat to become the focus of disc two. Granted, there is a factor that ties them together, but it's tenuous enough to call them two seperate plots.
  • Disgaea:
    • In Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, you go through the whole game believing that the final boss will be Vulcanus, only to find out at the end there's still one more battle... and, Vyers/Mid Boss is a parody of this.
    • Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice makes a big deal of how the final boss is going to be Mao's dad, but it turns out the real final boss is Super Hero Aurum. However, you can actually beat the "fake boss" on a second playthrough and get a secret ending.
    • Parodied in Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten, where Desco actually has the title "Supposed Final Boss". Then there's DES X, with the title of "Final Boss"... who's also actually this trope. Finally, there's Nemo, with the (accurate) title "True Final Boss".
  • In [PROTOTYPE], the game is not over when you kill Elizabeth Greene. To be sure, the infection slackens off considerably when you do, but there's still Blackwatch to deal with. And The Starscream.
  • In The World Ends with You, everything in the game seems to build up to it being done when you defeat Higashizawa. After all, it's the 7th day, when the Reaper's Game is supposed to be done, and defeating Higashizawa, the Game Master, is the objective of the last day. However, after defeating him, Neku wakes up on the first day...of a new Reaper's Game. Finished? OH NO.
  • Fire Emblem:
    • Gaiden has Emperor Rudolf, the Tin Tyrant who started a giant war to conquer your country. You spend 4 long chapters making your way to his castle, but once you kick his ass, he reveals that Duma is the true villain of the game.
    • Mystery of the Emblem has Emperor Hardin, the Tin Tyrant who started a giant war to conquer your country. You spend 20 long chapters making your way to his castle, but once you kick his ass, it's revealed that he was possessed by Gharnef, who has resurrected Medeus. Again.
    • Genealogy of the Holy War has the Battle of Belhalla. You finally get to battle Duke Lombard of Dozel and Duke Reptor of Friege, the two nobles who framed Sigurd's father for the murder of Prince Kurth, and better still, after seemingly cooperating with them throughout the plot, Velthomer's forces turn on Reptor once you draw close. Okay, yes, the fact that your allies that left about two-thirds of the way through the plot showed up again as NPCs only to get slaughtered before you could do anything is rather disconcerting, a Player Punch for no apparent reason, but it seems that this whole misunderstanding is about to be cleared up—oh, wait, Arvis was playing the two sides against each other all along because he wanted them both gone. And now they are. You just got TPK'd in a cutscene, and now we're going to have a fifteen-year timeskip so the Tagalong Kids of your party, as well as Sigurd's and Quan's mentioned-but-unseen infant sons, Seliph and Leif, and any other children that your party may have produced if you've been pairing them up, can grow up enough to become combat-ready.
    • The Blazing Blade:
      • Before the main story, you play through Lyn's Story, whose villain is Lundgren, the scheming power-hungry great-uncle of Lyndis. Every chapter builds him up to villain status, including Kick the Dog moments, culminating in finally getting to kick his ass in the story's Final Chapter. Afterwards, the main story starts proper.
      • Lord Darin is by far the most direct opponent for the first half of the main story, and when you finally face him on the battlefield, it's in what can only be described as The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: the gate where dragons were thrown out of the world, and through which the Black Cloak plans to let them back in. Though this is somewhat of a subversion as you know Darin is not the Big Bad by this point, it still plays out like the end of the game: after defeating Darin, you meet the real Big Bad, learn his evil plan, stop his evil plan, which proceeds to go nuclear, annihilating the Evil Chancellor in the process, and rescue the Mysterious Waif. Then, your Disappeared Dad, who had been used as an Unwitting Pawn to provoke a war, knifes the Big Bad in the back before dying himself and leaving you heir to the province he rules. Everything seems pretty adequately resolved and — wait, what? Chapter 20?
    • Emperor Vigarde looks like the Big Bad of The Sacred Stones, being responsible for the war you're trying to end. But you only get to fight him on one of the two main characters' different routes. Not that you've defeated all the evil Generals yet, but assuming you played Ephraim's route first, it ends when you DO defeat him and he... vanishes? Turns out the Emperor was really Dead All Along, and his son Lyon is the one that started the war — and Lyon is himself possessed by the Demon King, the true Big Bad of the game.
    • Radiant Dawn loves this trope, considering that it's split into four different parts, each one with different baddies. The first part has the Begnion Occupation Army led by Jarod, the second part has Crimean Rebels led by Ludveck, the third part alternates by mission between the Begnion Empire and the Laguz Alliance, and the fourth part has the goddess Ashera and her minions.
    • Awakening has this happen three times. The first is Gangrel, who has been set up as the main antagonist throughout the game thus far. And in some ways, he is a final boss of sorts — there's a two-year timeskip between his defeat and the next chapter, so his defeat did at least temporarily bring peace to the realm. The second one, Walhart, is far less convincing, as Validar has already been introduced and appears to be the greater evil, not to mention that Lucina has revealed her true identity by this point and identified the return of the Dark Dragon Grima as the catastrophe that she was fleeing, but the fact that he's the boss of two consecutive chapters and that the latter is a nice round number makes Walhart seem like the final boss. And the third, of course, is Validar himself, in a battle that mirrors your Taste of Power from the beginning of the game. With his plans seemingly all falling apart after Basilio reveals he'd been Faking the Dead and had switched out the jewels, there's no way that the battle atop the Dragon's Table can't be the end... until Grima manages to revive anyways thanks to the Grima from the Bad Future Lucina and the other future kids came from, who followed them to the past in order to ensure his resurrection succeeds and was the one behind Validar the whole time (even reviving the man from what should have been his death early on in the game).
    • Fates has an odd example due to the way the routes work. On the Birthright and Conquest routes, you are led to believe that you can bring peace back to the realm by killing King Garon. This seemingly works out on Birthright; on Conquest, Takumi has other ideas. Either way, it seems like you've won after you take out the Final Boss. However, the Revelation route reveals that both of them were just patsies for the true villain, Anankos, who takes center stage.
    • In Fire Emblem: Three Houses, the Flame Emperor is the main antagonist throughout Part 1. Once you unmask them as Edelgard in the Holy Tomb in Chapter 11, if you're with the Black Eagles and witnessed her coronation, you can choose to join her, making her into this trope while Rhea is the true Big Bad. Otherwise, she becomes either The Heavy (if you abandon her as a Black Eagle or are a Golden Deer) or the Big Bad (if you're with the Blue Lions).
    • In Fire Emblem Engage, King Hyacinth of Elusia serves this role, as he sends his army to invade the kingdoms of Firene and Brodia to collect the Emblem Rings necessary for the Fell Dragon Sombron to regain his full power. You fight him in the first of two chapters of consecutive battles after a Point of No Return once you've gathered half of the rings, and then he gets Eaten Alive by Sombron, and Veyle reveals her evil side and steals all of your rings for Sombron to corrupt while the party is Forced to Watch. The second arc of the game entails dealing with Sombron's Quirky Miniboss Squad while searching for the other six rings to stand a fighting chance against the Fell Dragon's army.
    • Fire Emblem Heroes: Book VI initially features a conspiracy against Princess Veronica of Embla, with the mastermind being Letizia, a relative and older sister figure to Veronica. However, after Veronica is saved from her execution and the conspiracy is thwarted, Embla, dragon god of the nation with her name, takes over as the Arc Villain.
  • Pokémon:
  • The Dark Lord in Miitopia is hyped as the game's Big Bad through 4 long chapters of the game. But after you defeat him, it's revealed that he was only an Innocent Bystander possessed by an evil entity, which promptly pulls a Grand Theft Me on the Great Sage, creating the Darker Lord. The party will need to go through five more worlds to catch up on it and defeat it.
  • The NES Ninja Gaiden trilogy has this for the second and third games. In II, Ashtar is set up as the Big Bad, but the story doesn't end with his defeat. After facing a familiar monster in the next stage, Ryu goes through the final lair and discover that the real mastermind is Jaquio, the villain from the previous game. Ashtar was merely a pawn whose death allowed Jaquio to be reborn. Then in III, Foster is presented as the main antagonist, but then Clancy, who initially helps Ryu take on Foster, reveals that he was merely using Ryu in his plot to reclaim a doomsday weapon from Foster. Unlike the previous examples given, Ryu never gets to fight Foster, as Foster is killed by Clancy instead.
  • In the original Time Crisis, after saving Rachel from the Big Bad Sherudo, The Dragon, Wild Dog, kidnaps her and becomes the True Final Boss.
  • Kid Icarus: Uprising:
    • The game is set up as Medusa's great return and vengeance, with the game building up to the final confrontation with her in Chapter 9 and even ending with a credits sequence in the retro-8-bit style of the original game...and then the real Big Bad Hades shows up to tear the credits screen apart while telling the heroes and the audience the party just got started. In fact, Medusa's defeat only spells the end of the first third or so of the game.
    • Lampshaded with Dark Lord Gaol, whose title screams "final boss" despite the fact that she's only the second boss of the game.
    • Eventually, everyone (even Hades himself briefly) seems to be getting along at least somewhat well after facing off against the Aurum, but after they're defeated, Palutena reminds Pit that Hades' Underworld Army is still the "real enemy" as he has no intentions of stopping his own master plans just because the Aurum were a thing, after which everything falls right back apart.
    • Happens yet again with the Chaos Kin, although it is the last Arc Villain that must be dealt with before finally moving onto Hades himself.
  • In Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura, you finally corner ultimate evil devil-figure Arronax within the prison dimension he's on the verge of escaping from to lay waste to the world. Psyche! Another one of the evil villains banished to the Void defeated Arronax centuries ago and stuck him in a magic bubble. It's not the evil elf wanting to enslave Arcanum you've got to worry about, it's the First Necromancer coming back to wipe out all life on the planet.
  • The first three sectors of Iji set you up to find Krotera, who you fight as soon as you see. That's all to set up the arrival of the Komato.
  • Happens throughout the Persona franchise:
    • Takahisa Kandori is build up as the main antagonist of the original Persona but after he is defeated, Aki vows revenge on the party and awakens Pandora, the nihilistic aspect of party member Maki Sonomura.
    • Persona 2:
      • For the first half of Innocent Sin, the main antagonists are the Masked Circle led by Joker (Jun Kurosu) but after he is defeated, the party is left to deal with the Last Battalion led by a revived Hitler and the remaining members of the Masked Circle led by Akinari Kashihara. However, the leaders of both factions turn out to be Nyarlathotep in disguise, who's revealed to also be the same being responsible for the events of the previous game.
      • JOKER (Tatsuya Sudou this time) is once again the main antagonist for the first half of Eternal Punishment but after he is defeated, his father Tatsuzou Sudou replaces him. It turns out that Tatsuzou is also another pawn and the true culprit is Nyarlathotep again.
    • In Persona 3, after the final Arcana Shadow is defeated, the main characters think the Dark Hour is finally over. Obviously, there's still a bit more to the game, what with STREGA possibly still out there and you never finding out more about Pharos... and you're right. The Dark Hour happens, but with the added twist of a main supporting character being a villain. And you still haven't found out who the Big Bad is yet. That new classmate of yours is an avatar of the real Big Bad, Nyx.
    • Persona 4:
      • The game has a variation on this trope, in that the game's story is a murder mystery, so it's less a case of a fake final boss and more a case of a fake culprit. The murder case seems to wrap up once you apprehend Mitsuo and he confesses to the murders. But the player can easily figure out there must be a twist in store, since you're only in the middle of the summer, and catching the killer would mean the game is, well, over. Sure enough, after a couple of in-game weeks of peace, our heroes discover that Mitsuo is just a copycat, and the real killer is still at large.
      • Later on, there's a Disc Two Final Boss, in the form of Taro Namatame. This time, however, everybody's too pissed off to realize that he's also not the real killer, and, if you agree to kill him, you get the bad ending. If you let him live and find the true killer, the game goes on for another month.
      • Even after you figure out and defeat the real killer, Tohru Adachi, the game is still not over — the fog and the threat of Shadows are still out there, and there's still one final Big Bad behind the scenes that you have to take down to get the True Ending.
      • The Updated Re-Release, Persona 4 Golden, does this a third time with Marie, who, if you level up her social link all the way before the new winter month events exclusive to Golden, pulls a Disc Three Final Boss by turning out to be another part of the real Big Bad, taking the powers of both Namatame, Adachi, and the fog into herself to become Kusumi no Ookami. She intends to die in order to free humanity from the threat of the fog, and defeating Kusumi no Ookami is the only way to save her. Also played with in that you have to beat her to get the True Ending's new epilogue, despite her still not being the final boss.
    • Persona 5:
      • The Phantom Thieves are led to believe that defeating Masayoshi Shido will end the Conspiracy, but they are proven wrong when his fellow conspirators continue their nefarious activities. The true Conductor is actually Yaldabaoth, the God of Control, who had been impersonating your guide Igor the entire time.
      • Persona 5 Royal turns Yaldabaoth of all people into this, provided the player is able to reach the highest possible rank for the Consultant Confidant before the start of the third term. Even though the Metaverse has apparently been destroyed and the Conspiracy is foiled in their schemes, the protagonist begins to notice unusual occurrences throughout the third school term. It's revealed that the source of these occurrences is Takuto Maruki, the new guidance counselor for Shujin Academy, who turns out to be a Persona user with the power to manipulate people's cognition to grant their deepest desires. Yaldabaoth's influence, Maruki's failures, and his anger at his research being stolen by Shido have caused Maruki's Persona to go berserk and carry the risk of bringing back the Metaverse, forcing the Phantom Thieves carry out one last heist in their school term.
    • Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth has the boss of the fourth Labyrinth, "Best Friend," or perhaps better said, Shadow Rei. After you defeat the boss, you find the last of the treasures, and learn the truth; Zen is one half of Chronos, one of the Deities of Death, and Rei is a girl who died young. This leads to the final dungeon in the Clock Tower, and the final confrontation with Chronos.
    • Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth has you face Doe at the end of the Hikari Labyrinth. At the end of the fight, it turns out that Doe actually isn't evil, before it's revealed that Nagi is the true villain behind trapping Hikari and many others into cinemas, and you have to make your way through the Cinema District to defeat her.
  • Star Ocean: Till the End of Time has the Vendeeni. For the entire first disc, you have four goals unrelated to the idiots of Elicoor II: 1) Get off of Elicoor II, 2) Get your girlfriend back (she acts as if they are cousins, but it says in the manual that she is just your girlfriend), 3) Get your dad back, 4) Destroy all of the Vendeeni for taking your girlfriend. There is no legitimate boss at the end of the first disc, but right at the start of the second, you beat up the leader of the Vendeeni and then new enemies pop up from nowhere and start blowing up bits of the galaxy. In fact, it really is from nowhere because the programmers of the universe decided that that galaxy needed to get bits of it blown to bits by giant monsters (instead of, say, deleting that one galaxy or, say, running some sort of program that deletes all instances of the tech that they don't like and making all of the AI forget that it existed to begin with).
  • Interesting examples in the BlazBlue series: The final bosses in the arcade versions of both games appear to be the main villains, but become this in the story mode of the console version. Translation: When Calamity Trigger was ported to consoles, final boss Nu-13 effectively became The Dragon to an NPC, who was made the final boss of Continuum Shift, only to himself become The Dragon to another NPC upon that game's console release. Later on, Chronophantasma reveals that the Big Bad Duumvirate, Relius Clover and Hazama/Yuuki Terumi, are not the real Big Bad, as they were revealed to be an unwitting pawn to the "true" Big Bad — Izanami, the Goddess of Death, who is using Saya as a vessel (being the Imperator of the NOL). She later abandons the duo after their defeats, leaving Terumi seemingly Killed Off for Real and Relius a broken man...until Central Fiction, where Izanami and the sole remaining Dragon/potential Starcream Phantom/Nine end up being taken out by the heroes, but the still-alive Terumi comes back and goes One-Winged Angel to become the True Final Boss. Relius, meanwhile, gets his act together and decides it's time to bug out.
  • Golden Sun:
    • A case in the first two Golden Sun games, since they're essentially one complete story — it would be a straight example if the games were just one. You fight and defeat Saturos and Menardi — up to this point the main threat — at the end of the first game, and after they proceeded to go One-Winged Angel on you. You think it's over; their evil plan is thwarted even though two lighthouses are lit. Becomes a subversion when, after Felix declares he will continue their plans himself, he's knocked into the sea and the game ends. Then The Lost Age comes around — Saturos and Menardi's ally Alex becomes effectively the Big Bad for the next game and Felix becomes the protagonist lighting the lighthouses. Alex then proceeds to become The Unfought, subverting this trope even further — on the other hand, one of the major themes of the dualogy was about people from different backgrounds putting aside their cultural or philosophical differences to save the world from a greater threat. As the Wise One reveals at the end of the game, the true enemy isn't each other, but the evils within humanity in general, which led to the sealing of Alchemy — and the gradual entropy of the world — in the first place.
    • The third game, Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, has this with Blados and Chalis at Belinsk Ruins. Note that your original mission has already been fulfilled, and, if not for the villains manipulating an NPC, you probably could've been done with this quest. And then Luna Tower activates and triggers the Grave Eclipse. Of course, a quick look at the party screen should tell you that the game's far from over, as you just acquired a new party member and still have space for two more.
  • Super Robot Wars:
  • Fassad from Mother 3. You encounter him near beginning of the game, as in before the Time Skip, and witness him as he sadistically tortures an innocent monkey while he's trying to corrupt your hometown by introducing money to the villagers. He remains The Unfought until he seemingly dies at the end of chapter 5, but by that point, the player party has become aware that Fassad is a relatively low-level operative in the Pig-Mask army. Fassad does come back as a cyborg you fight later on, but it's still obvious that he's just a minion to the real Big Bad, Porky Minch.
  • Children of Mana pulls this twice, once with the Mana Storm and then with the Mana Lord.
  • In Wings of Liberty, the first third of the Starcraft II campaign, Kerrigan plays this role. She even fights your forces personally in the final mission (although you can't kill her; she'll teleport back to her base when her HP is low). The end strongly hints that she's going through a Heel–Face Turn, and there's a Greater-Scope Villain looming in the horizon. She is. Also, Mengsk is the Disc Two Final Boss.
  • Phantasy Star:
    • Phantasy Star IV does the rather expected example of the first bad guy, Zio, being a minion of Dark Force, the perennial boss of the series. But after beating Dark Force a few times, you finally find out about his master.
    • In Phantasy Star Online 2, the story gradually builds up to a confrontation with Dark Falz Elder. However, he simply escapes after being defeated, and it's then revealed that he's just one of four incarnations of Dark Falz that are running rampant...
    • Dark Falz shows up early in Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis, and is a major threat throughout the first four chapters, culminating in its demise in the fifth (this runs parallel to an Urgent Quest against its evolved form, Dark Falz Aegis, which is how it meets its end). And all this time you still haven't gone to the aerial facility Leciel, which Manon goes to alone to get some answers, setting her 'master' Zephetto up as the Big Bad... of the first Episode. Once he's defeated - which he wanted, by the way - he lets you know about the Starless, and at that point you know you're not done. Not by a long shot.
  • Fallout:
    • Benny serves this role in Fallout: New Vegas. He kills your character in the opening cinematic (you get better), and you spend the first half of the game chasing after him and trying to figure out what his plot is and why he put a bullet in your brain. By the time you finally deal with him, though, you've learned that a major conflict is about to ensue between the region's 3 major superpowers, and you get to decide which one wins. In fact, if you choose to go for the NCR or the Legion, you don't even have to deal with him.
    • Kellogg serves this role in Fallout 4. After you and your spouse are placed into cryogenic preservation in Vault 111, Kellogg comes along after about a hundred years and change, murders your spouse, and kidnaps your son. The first act of the game involves chasing him down in the hopes of finding your son.
  • Touhou Project:
    • In The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, Reimu believes Patchouli, the stage 4 boss, to be the mistress, but she isn't fooling Marisa.
    • Imperishable Night has Eirin Yakogoro, the creator of the fake moon, as the initial final boss on a character's first playthrough. Starting a New Game Plus with said character reveals a new path to the real moon and the True Final Boss, Kaguya Houraisan.
    • Seirensen ~ Undefined Fantastic Object managed to have the Final Boss be the Disc One Final Boss, with Byakuren having nothing to do with the UFOs while Nue, the Superboss, was the one who started the protagonists on the fruitless quest for treasure by planting the seeds of non-identification.
  • Medabots AX: Metabee and Rokusho: Your goal for the entire game is winning the World Robattle Championships, which of course demands you defeat its champion. Doing that however, isn't the end of the story.
  • Metal Gear:
    • Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker does this twice. The whole game appears to be building to a battle with Coldman, Peace Walker, or both. You fight Peace Walker at the end of Act 3, after which there are some plot twists. A few stages later, at the end of Act 4, Coldman dies and you fight Peace Walker again after one of the longest, most action-filled stages in the whole game, and everything looks like it's resolved. In fact, there are six more missions and the average game's worth of plot twists before the real final boss.
    • In Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain Skull Face is the Big Bad Diamond Dogs must defeat. After he is killed, along with his Humongous Mecha that he loses control over, you discover that the whole event was the conclusion of Chapter 1. You also discover that Skull Face was an Anti-Villain who wanted to get rid of different languages, especially English, because he believed it was the source of world discrimination and wars. However, Chapter 2 doesn't have a Big Bad, so Skull Face is still the overall villain of the game.
  • Super Mario Bros.:
    • Super Mario Bros.. Every fourth level until World 8 finishes with Mario defeating Bowser and saving the Princess... except, he has really only defeated a mook disguised as Bowser, and has only rescued a Toad who thanks you and then tells you that you ain't done yet. Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels does it the same way.
    • In Super Mario 64, you face Bowser (the real one) three times, and the first two times have this written all over it. This is also true with Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Galaxy 2.
    • The first two New Super Mario Bros. games do this. In New Super Mario Bros. for the Nintendo DS, it is Dry Bowser, and in the Wii sequel, it is the third battle against Bowser Jr.
    • Bowser again in Super Mario 3D Land. The first time you defeat him, the captive Peach actually turned out to be a cardboard cutout. In the case of Super Mario 3D World, when it seems like Mario and his friends have defeated Bowser for good in World 7 and rescued the seventh Sprixie Princess, Bowser reappears and kidnaps all seven Princesses once again, taking them to the true final world.
    • This is subverted in Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon. Big Boo and Tough Possessor would fill this role, but the thing is, while Luigi doesn't know that King Boo is the true Big Bad and Final Boss right away, this is obvious to the player from the start.
    • Subverted in Super Mario RPG. After the prologue, you spend roughly half of the game in search of the Princess, who had been thrown from Bowser's Keep (along with Bowser and Mario) when the sword Exor fell from the sky. Near the midpoint of the game, you finally find her... being held captive by some random lunatic named Booster, who intends to marry her. After pursuing Booster through a series of weird minigames, you finally confront him in the wedding hall... but instead of facing off with him in a climactic showdown, the wedding cake randomly comes to life and attacks you. The cake turns out to be one of the most difficult bosses in the game and a major wake-up call if you haven't been leveling up effectively. Booster then eats the cake, the "wedding" is concluded, Mario rescues the princess and the second half of the game (which focuses on defeating the real Big Bad) begins shortly after. None of this is ever explained or brought up again. And, unless you failed the "Hide Behind the Curtains" minigame in the last floor of Booster's tower, Booster remains The Unfought. You will be excused if you thought that the giant sword that crashed into Bowser's Keep at the begining of the game is Smithy, the Big Bad everyone keeps talking about. Once you reach the roof of Bowser's keep and come face-to-face with "Smithy"... it turns out that no, the sword's name is Exor and defeating him merely creates a portal to the Final Dungeon. Smithy is at the very end, creating copies of the Smithy Gang bosses.
    • Paper Mario does this a couple of times:
      • Sir Grodus in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. As the leader of the X-Nauts, he's the Big Bad for most of the game, and you face him deep in the Palace of Shadow. After winning, Bowser falls from above and knocks him out, resulting in you fighting him and Kammy Koopa. During the fight, Grodus escapes, leading to the resurrection of the demon inside the Thousand-Year Door, and the fight with true Final Boss, the Shadow Queen.
      • Count Bleck in Super Paper Mario. You face him in the final level, only for Dimentio to betray him and become the Final Boss.
    • Mario & Luigi also does this:
  • In Jak II: Renegade, Jak ascends Baron Praxis' palace for a showdown only a third of the way through the game. Near the end, Praxis is killed by the real Big Bad, Metal Kor.
  • Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando has The Unknown Thief on Siberius cap off the first third of the game, and the Thugs-4-Less Leader's second mech on Snivelak for the second third.
  • The Marquis de Singe seems to be the Big Bad for the first four chapters of Tales of Monkey Island. In the climax of Episode 4, Guybrush finally defeats de Singe and cures the Pox of LeChuck... only for Lechuck to show up and reclaim his voodoo power. LeChuck resumes his role as the Big Bad in Episode 5.
  • Portal 2: The game has 9 chapters. You face GLaDOS in Chapter 5. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that this won't be the end.
  • Red Faction:
    • Red Faction: Halfway through the game, you kill Capek, who has been experimenting on your fellow miners using nanotechnology, but Ultor sends in reinforcements.
    • Red Faction 2: You know that villainous dictator you've heard so much about, has fucked your country up almost beyond repair, and you have been gearing up to assassinate? He's not the Big Bad — he gets his Karmic Death halfway through the game, and you spend the rest of it fighting the anarchic new regime led by your former team leader, Molov.
    • Red Faction: Armageddon: Adam Hale, the head of the Apocalypse Cult responsible for destroying the Terraformer and unleashing a horde of alien horrors upon Mars, is killed in the middle of the game. However, the goal quickly shifts to bringing down the alien queen.
  • In Drakensang, about halfway through the level you find out that there's a young purple dragon named Japhgur who's raiding the country. However, after you kill him, there are still a lot of things to do.
  • Heavy Weapon has X-bot, at the end of the Disc One Final Level. When you beat him, you are teated to a scene showing your tank driver celebrating, untile he learns that it was a diversion and that the enemy had amassed a reserve army 10 times the size.
  • Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals and Lufia: The Legend Returns have Gades, a god of destruction, who firstly appears to be a Big Bad of the game, but defeating him only reveals that there are three more of his kind. Subverted in the first game, where the heroes already know Gades has friends, and they don't even get to kill him until the final dungeon.
  • Saints Row
    • The first two games have multiple discs, where the player can choose which gang they want to dismantle first in a non-linear fashion. Only after the three rival gangs are defeated do the true Final Boss characters reveal themselves (Richard Hughes for the first game and Dane Vogel for the second).
    • In Saints Row: The Third, Phillipe Loren is set up as the Wicked Cultured, mafioso-like leader of The Syndicate, but is killed in a mere handful of missions. In his place, Killbane, seemingly a dumb thug in a wrestler's mask and cheap suit before, takes over as the Big Bad of the game, with Matt Miller as his second-in-command. There's also the commander of the technologically-advanced, anti-gang military force who is determined to put an end to the urban war on terror. In Saints Row IV, Loren is brought back as the boss of Johnny Gat's loyalty mission by Matt (now an ally), since he wants to give the two of you a chance to settle things personally.
  • Fossil Fighters:
    • The first game fakes you out with the BB Boss, Captain Bullwort, and his Olympus Mon, Frigisaur. He's the head of the Goldfish Poop Gang that's been chasing you everywhere throughout the game, he's trying to take over the islands, and in order to stop him, you have to get your own godlike powerbeast from the climactic Mt. Lavaflow. Afterwards, you'll fight the final stage of the tournament To Be a Master, so clearly he's the final Big Bad, right? Not even close.
    • The second game does it twice. The first time is when you confront Don Boneyard, who is once again head of the Goldfish Poop Gang. However, someone who played the first game might quickly catch wise to the fact that he's not the real villain. However, it catches you again when you go to face the real Big Bad for the first time. It plays up the confrontation big-time, you prepare to seal him in a can... However, you don't succeed in catching him, and have to go to the Very Definitely Final Dungeon to finally get him.
  • Bruno's chase after the medallion to awaken Lares and Take Over the World is the major conflict of Solatorobo, and he's set up to be the final boss. The final boss of part one, that is. Cue the second part of the game, where you get to meet Nero, Blanck, and Baion. They're worse.
  • Kirby
    • King Dedede is this in most games in the series.
      • In Kirby's Adventure and its GBA remake, he's the one responsible for splitting the Star Rod into 7 pieces, and having it guarded by his numerous allies. He's doing this to protect Dream Land from Nightmare, the evil wizard responsible for causing all the nightmares in Pop Star. Kirby fights him once he gains the last piece from Dedede. While the original NES game makes it fairly obvious he's not the Final Boss since the typical Boss Theme is being used, the remake does a much better job at hiding it — using a variation of Gourmet Race (basically the GBA version of the Fountain of Dreams soundtrack in Super Smash Bros. Melee).
      • In Kirby's Dream Land 2, Dedede is once again causing problems to Dream Land — except this time, he's possessed by the Dark Matter. This game takes it up a notch in which Kirby has to collect all the Rainbow Drops for to face the Dark Matter itself as the game's True Final Boss.
      • In Kirby's Dream Land 3, this is repeat of its predecessor (Kirby now has to get pieces of the Love-Love Stick), except this time, Dark Matter itself is also a Disc-One Final Boss to its true master, Zero!
      • Kirby: Squeak Squad has King Dedede seemingly causing all the problems once again by stealing Kirby's strawberry shortcake. Except Dedede himself is only the first boss of the game; as soon as he is defeated, Daroach and the Squeaks reveal themselves as the true culprits. Kirby goes all the way to Ice Island and defeat Daroach — there's a chest that should have the shortcake, right? Except Meta Knight steals it, prompting Kirby to go after him. Kirby defeats Meta Knight, but the chest doesn't contain the cake. Instead, it contains the Sealed Evil in a Can that is Dark Nebula, the Lord of the Underworld who possesses Daroach and becomes the game's ultimate threat and Final Boss.
    • In Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards has Kirby and co. face Miracle Matter, the supposed core of the Dark Matter. However if they get all the Crystal Shards, the Dark Matter form the Dark Star, leading Kirby and Ribbon to confronting the true source of the Dark Matter — Zero, now revived as Zero Two!
    • Kirby & the Amazing Mirror starts with with Dark Meta Knight as the Big Bad of the story, and he even does most of the bad guy work. However, not only can he be the second boss you can beat in this game, it's later revealed after your rematch that he was a flunky to Dark Mind the whole time.
    • Kirby's Return to Dream Land amps it up by doing this twice. At the start of the game, your mission is to help reassemble the Lor Starcutter, which has been split into five pieces, and the Traversible World Map is clearly divided into five sectors. The final boss of World 5, the Grand Doomer, certainly has the feel of a Final Boss, both with its status as a King Mook version of the Sphere Doomers, which are themselves extremely challenging Mini Bosses, and the epic finisher required, but the fact that even if you've collected every Energy Sphere to this point, you'll still be well short of the full 120 makes it fairly obvious that it's not. Okay, so now you've gotten to the end of Dangerous Dinner, Landia, Magolor's hated enemy and the one responsible for dismantling the Lor Starcutter, must be the Final Boss, right? Wrong. Post-battle, Magolor reveals that you've been an Unwitting Pawn all along, and you have to fight him in three more face-offs.
    • Kirby: Triple Deluxe
      • The main story has Taranza controlling Dedede as the ultimate boss Kirby must face...except Taranza reveals his mistress, Queen Sectonia, who blasts him out of the sky and faces off Kirby for a few more bouts.
      • Sectonia herself is a Disc-One Final Boss in the Dededetour to Shadow Dedede and Dark Meta Knight, the latter of which is the true mastermind behind Sectonia's insanity.
    • Kirby: Planet Robobot:
      • Susie is the game's most active threat, but she's The Dragon to Haltmann Works Co. CEO, Max Profitt Haltmann himself. Haltmann faces you off at the end of Access Ark, but prior to that he reveal a grand MacGuffin, the Star Dream, and shows off its power. This becomes very important after you defeat him.
      • In the Meta Knightmare Teturns mode, after Meta Knight defeats Haltmann 2.0, the Star Dream analyzes him as its new administrator and tests him by summoning three powerful swordsmen bosses in past Kirby games: Dark Matter Blade, Queen Sectonia, and finally — Galacta Knight.
    • Team Kirby Clash Deluxe does this twice as well. The game hypes the battle against Landia EX at the Decisive Battlefield to be the final one in the game. Even the credits roll upon beating him. However, once the credits conclude, it's clear the game isn't over yet, as more bosses appear that have to be fought. Only after defeating King D-Mind in the True Final Battle does the game officially come to an end.
    • Super Kirby Clash does something similar, but the Disc-One Final Boss also incorporates Bait-and-Switch Boss, as it looks like Parallel Nightmare will be fought for the final time at the Decisive Battlefield, only for him to instead summon King D-Mind. Sure, the credits roll after winning, but the cutscene afterwards shows that the game isn't over after the battle. Only after defeating Aeon Hero (Light) in the True Final Battle does the Story Quests officially come to an end. The absolute True Final Boss is Aeon Hero (Dark).
    • Kirby and the Forgotten Land does this multiple times. King Dedede is the apparent Big Bad as the leader of the Beast Pack and is inexplicably far more evil than he's ever been before, enslaving his own Waddle Dees in cages. Beating him for the first time causes him to pull a Your Princess Is in Another Castle! by capturing and retreating with Elfilin. Beating him in his final form, Forgo Dedede, near the end of the game reveals that he was unsurprisingly Brainwashed and Crazy yet again, after which the true leader of the Beast Pack is revealed - Leongar. Defeating him, however, leads to the revelation that he was being controlled by Elfilin's Evil Counterpart, Fecto Forgo, who then assimilates countless Beast Pack members to battle Kirby. Once that form is beaten, Forgo merges with Elfilin to become the Final Boss and their shared original form, Fecto Elfilis. Even then, the bonus missions at Forgo Dreams and the Colosseum reveal that there is a Bait-and-Switch Boss encounter with Soul Forgo, who gets absorbed by Morpho Knight. Once it's taken care of, Soul Forgo escapes and combines all the powers and data it gathered from every enemy throughout the game, Morpho Knight included, and becomes Chaos Elfilis, the True Final Boss.
  • The demon Mal'ganis is this in Warcraft III. He appears to be the man behind the Zombie Apocalypse and his death is the objective of the final mission of the first campaign, but he's actually far from it. Ner'zhul and Archimonde are the true Big Bads, the latter being the Final Boss.
  • Subverted by the huge golden mecha from Dogyuun. It appears in the intro where he kills the protagonists' friend, then flies off in stage 1 (and the start of stage 2). However, instead of a mid-game boss, it's only the stage 2 boss.
  • In Max Payne 2, the story is mostly about Max trying save Mona Sax and help protect his mafia friend, Vladimir Lem, from Vinnie Gognitti and his men. However, it isn't until later that you find out that Vladimir Lem is the real Big Bad and was using Max, while at the same time, setting him up to get killed throughout the game.
  • The fight with Luca Blight in Suikoden II. He had been played up as the main villain up to that point and the characters talk as if his defeat will end the war. The fight itself is much harder than anything up to that point, even split up into three teams and is capped off with a duel between Luca and Riou. And yet, with his defeat, you're maybe two-thirds done with the game.
  • In Dishonored, your goal is obviously to rescue the kidnapped future Empress and then get revenge on the Lord Regent who had the previous Empress assassinated and framed you for her death. After doing this, you might think the game is over... but you'd be wrong. You get betrayed again by the leaders of the resistance group that was helping you get your revenge, opening another chapter in the storyline.
  • The Valahaia leader is this in Ace Combat: Joint Assault.
  • In Asura's Wrath, there are two examples. First is Deus, the one who instigates one of the main plot points of the game, kidnapping Asura's daughter for more power. Vlitra, who's the other Big Bad, reawakens and you fight him after defeating Deus. Played with here in that it's outright stated Vlitra was ready to return by the time Deus is defeated by other characters. Played straight with Vlitra, that, if you download the DLC, the True Final Boss of the game, the Golden Spider, whose real name is Chakravartin, turns out to be the true bad guy behind the plot.
  • Crash Bandicoot 2: N-Tranced is an odd case in that the Big Bad of the game is clearly Dr. N. Tropy taking orders from Uka Uka, and N. Trance is The Dragon despite being billed as the main antagonist. Once N. Trance is defeated, you're sent to collect Plot Coupons to unlock three hard extra levels, after which you fight N. Tropy.
  • Donkey Kong Jungle Beat has the Cactus King, who appears after the first 12 kingdoms have been completed. This appears to be the final boss at first, especially after the ending ceremony plays and the credits start rolling. However, during said credits, you will see footage from levels you haven't been to yet. After the credits roll, you'll unlock a new kingdom barrel, containing 4 new kingdoms. Once those are completed, you can fight the real final boss, the Ghastly King.
  • In Bio Menace, once you beat Dr. Mangle, he reveals that the actual person behind the infestation is Mr. Cain. You have the next two episodes to kill him.
  • NeoQuest II has Ramtor, who you fight twice (he runs off the first time). Beat him, and you get a hero's welcome. And also several more chapters of the game.
  • Messiah does this with Father Prime, who is the main villain initially and is reached and killed quickly, but once you defeat him, it turns out you've merely allowed a greater bad guy to take over.
  • An unusual example — in Carmen Sandiego: Great Chase through Time, you appear to catch all the criminals and are told to take a rest after catching Jane Reaction in the 15th Century. However... insert Disc 2, and Carmen breaks out all the criminals and gives you new cases to work on.
  • Monster Hunter does this often, both in its base installments and (by logic, due to their increased scope and content) the expansions:
    • Monster Hunter Freedom 2: In the original version of the game, Tigrex fills the role. You finally get revenge from the monster that gave you a terrible experience at the start of your adventure, but there are more tasks given to you; so you continue doing them until you unlock an urgent quest where you have to protect a city from the giant, powerful Shen Gaoren, the actual Final Boss. In the expanded version Freedom Unite, the role is given to Shen Gaoren itself, because you're now offered a set of high-rank quests by a revered Felyne (Nekoht), meaning that the quests you did so far are now labeled as low-rank ones.
    • Monster Hunter 3 (Tri) has Lagiacrus, which is fought during an urgent quest for 5-star quests and is thought to be the cause of the earthquakes affecting Moga Village. But after the monster's defeat, earthquakes still occurs, and it's later revealed that the true responsible is Ceadeus, an Elder Dragon; you have to defeat that monster to solve the ongoing problem for real. In Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate, Ceadeus itself is the disc-one final boss, as solving the whole earthquake problem only concludes the set of low-rank quests; afterwards, a slew of new missions and chapters in high-rank opens up. Finally, in high rank itself in 3 Ultimate, it appears like hunting Zinogre and exploiting its electric power will be enough to restore the power of the Ultimate Mask, but this is not the case; the actual monster they have to look for is Ivory Lagiacrus (ironically the subspecies of the normal Lagiacrus), which is also revealed to be the monster responsible for forcing the chief of Moga Village to retire from his hunting career, and which also serves as the actual Final Boss of high rank as well as the game's whole campaign in single-player.
    • Monster Hunter Portable 3rd: Zinogre is the major threat for most of the game, but defeating isn't the end of the campaign as you still have to deal with the Elder Dragon responsible for its presence, Amatsu. Turns out the whole reason Zinogre went nuts is because Amatsu chased it out of its normal habitat.
    • Monster Hunter 4: Gore Magala plays with the trope. After a lengthy campaign taking you all over the world, you learn about this ultra-dangerous monster spoken of only in legends, and you fight it. You then play some more, and the characters reveal that Gore is still alive, and has evolved into a more powerful version (the Shagaru Magala), later settling the actual Final Boss battle. You beat the monster, you get a satisfying ending sequence, and that marks the end of your adventure (Playable Epilogue notwithstanding)... and then in 4 Ultimate, this only marks the end of the low-rank story, which leaves Magala as a straight example in this version. There is now a whole other campaign and loads of monsters more powerful than the ones you just beat, taking place in a familiar city from Monster Hunter 2 (dos). And that's just the single-player campaign; if you want to do multiplayer expect a whole other set of missions and ranks to earn.
    • Monster Hunter: Rise screws with the player quite a bit. Magnamalo is a particularly nasty beast and is mistakenly presumed to be the source of the Rampage, but after taking it out in a 5* Urgent Village quest, it becomes quite clear that it isn't responsible at all and merely uses it as an opportunity to feed. It's worse in Hub quests, as it is settled in the 3* Urgent Hub quest, but after busting an Apex Arzuros during a Rampage, the real threat is exposed: Wind Serpent Ibushi and Thunder Serpent Narwa, whose mating ritual sends shockwaves through the environment and causes everything else to flee, which is basically the Rampage in a nutshell. And while defeating Narwa qualifies you to travel to Elgado for a whole new threat, the Rampage is truly quelled after one last fight with Narwa the Allmother. The Sunbreak expansion is no different. While Malzeno is considered a grave threat, when it is defeated the bat-like parasitic Qurio it once harbored flee to find new hosts, only to eventually return to their progenitor, Gaismagorm, who emerges to wreak havoc. And while killing it prevents a greater calamity from befalling the world, the Qurio scatter and infest several other monsters, opening up the Anomaly quests.
  • Ni no Kuni: The PS3 version has Shadar, who was the actual final boss in the DS version, and whose defeat sparks a cutscene that could easily be the end of the game. Then cutscenes are shown to make it clear to the player from the beginning that the White Witch is the real Big Bad and Shadar is just The Dragon. The real point is how the characters react when they find out.
  • In Dragon's Dogma, once you defeat the Dragon, the world is changed for the worse (the sky is always dark and the monsters are given a massive boost in power) and the Everfall opens up. Once you collect 20 Wakestones, you then deal with The Seneschal and take his place.
  • RefleX has Cancer, the last of the human-made pseudo ZODIAC units and your last bit of opposition from the Global Unified Army. For all intents and purposes, it seems like things will be wrapped up after this...but after defeating it, ZODIAC Virgo makes its appearance, destroying Cancer and blowing up the Valkyness lunar bases, and the Raiwat invade Earth. Notably, in Reflection, which RefleX is an expanded remake of, Cancer is the True Final Boss instead.
  • Literal example from The Legend of Dragoon: Emperor Doel is presented as the main antagonist throughout disc 1, and the main focus of the story at that point is to end the Seridan War by reaching the Imperial Capital and slaying Doel. Of course, his defeat at the end is only the beginning of the story.
  • Grand Theft Auto:
    • In Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, your goal from the start of the game is to get revenge on those who ambushed the deal at the beginning. A few missions later, it is revealed that Ricardo Diaz was the one behind the ambush, but when you finally kill him and look at the in-game stats, you see you're only about 30% into the game. The final bosses are actually the man you're working for the entire game, Sonny Forelli, and your own sidekick, Lance Vance.
    • In a way, Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories counts as this as well. Being loyal to Salvatore and the Leone Family, Toni's goal is to help wipe out the other rival mafia families, the Sindaccos and the Forellis, from Liberty City so that the Leone's will be unchallenged. Shortly after you kill the Sindacco don and wipe out their family, as well as weakening the Forellis beyond recovery, the real antagonist of the game is actually the Sicilian Mafia, that has been planning for the three mafia families of Liberty (Leone, Sindacco, and Forelli) to wipe each other out in the mist of gang warfare, and then claim their territories after the carnage. Thus, they have been pulling the strings, making deals with their business rivals in the area, which have caused friction and rivalry between the mafia families in the first place.
    • In Grand Theft Auto IV, the Big Bad is revealed to be Dimitri Rascalov about a quarter of the way through the game. As the rivalry between him and Niko heats up, eventually the player is hit with a choice between two endings. In the "Revenge" ending, Niko kills his adversary and the role of Final Boss goes to Jimmy Pegorino. In the "Deal" ending, this trope is averted and Rascalov remains the Big Bad and the Final Boss, while Pegorino becomes his sidekick (he later gets betrayed by Dimitri).
    • In Grand Theft Auto V:
  • In Undertale, King Asgore Dreemurr is often said to be your final challenge and the one who sent the monsters out to kill you. Once you get to him, he turns out to be an Affably Evil Anti-Villain who declared war with humans while not thinking clearly and sticked to the plan only for the sake of his people. The real Big Bad turns out to be Flowey the Flower, who kills Asgore if you spared him, and then absorbs the souls of the dead humans and becomes a One-Winged Angel known as Photoshop Flowey. And that's all in the Neutral Run. In the Pacifist Run, Asgore doesn't even get to fight you as he's stopped by your friends who didn't want either of you to die. And then, Flowey absorbs the souls of both humans and monsters, where it's revealed he's Asriel Dreemurr, the King's son, and then becomes the God of Hyperdeath, the Final Boss of the Pacifist Run.
  • Terraria has the Wall of Flesh, an Eldritch Abomination that could very well be a final boss. By the time you're ready to fight it, you've very likely already defeated the Eye of Cthulhu, Eater of Worlds, and Skeletron, and obtained what seems like the highest tiers of weapons and armor possible. However, that doesn't mean it's the final boss. It simply means that all the really good items aren't unlocked until "Hardmode", a permanent change to your world that makes it much more dangerous, is activated.....which occurs as soon as the WoF is defeated.
  • Tears to Tiara 2 has Izebel, the traitor who killed Hamil's father and is ruling Hispania for The Empire, play this role. Turns out none of it is true. Hamil takes the fight to The Empire after killing her.
  • Total War: Warhammer III: While in the first and second games, playing as Karl Franz had him facing down the Vampire Counts as an intermediate threat while having time to consolidate the Elector Counts through confederation before the end-game massive chaos invasion, in III's Immortal Empires the Empire faces the chaos invasion from the north on day one, alongside the original vampires to the east, and the greenskins coming up from the south. All of this before the actual end-game crisis scenarios that emerge later on, which are supposed to be the true final boss.
  • The second season of The Walking Dead seems to build up William Carver as its Big Bad. He's not seen, but his presence is strongly felt in episode one, he's established as a Hero Killer in episode two's climax, and he's the central antagonist of episode three. Then he gets kneecapped and has his skull bashed in by Kenny at the third episode's end, permanently ending him as a threat.
  • Shin Megami Tensei:
    • Shin Megami Tensei II has the Boss Bonanza with Uriel and Raphael, Michael, and the fake YHVH. Having been responsible for everything wrong with Millennium, the fights with them are in sequence and even have a special battle theme. After beating them, however, two more villains show up: Satan and Lucifer. Anyone expecting them to play the same roles as Michael and Asura in the previous game are ultimately shocked when they turn out to be the Disc Two Final Bosses. You fight one or both depending on the route, but then it turns out there's one last boss that must be taken care of.
    • Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey gives us Maia Ouroboros in sector Eridanus, who is the final demon guarding the way out of the Schwarzwelt. Beat it, and escaping turns out to be more complicated than previously thought...
    • Shin Megami Tensei IV:
      • The first is when you fight the Minotaur in the final stratum of Naraku, who has forbid the Samurai from traveling to Tokyo for the past 1500 years. His defeat is a major violation of the Samurai code, yet is necessary in order for the Samurai to proceed to Tokyo and hunt down the Black Samurai.
      • The second depends on a major choice that determines which one of two companions you choose to go with after the group you've been traveling with splits up. If you went with Jonathan, you and him go to Tsukiji Hongwanji to kill Lilith. If you went with Walter, you take on several National Defense Divinities, culminating in a showdown with Yamato Takeru. This entails a major Wham Episode involving traveling to Alternate Timelines.
    • Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse:
      • Armageddon, in which you have to fight Merkabah and Lucifer back to back to finally save Tokyo. Notably, one of these two bosses can be the Final Boss if you side with the other one, but if you refuse both, another dungeon opens up afterwards.
      • Vishnu-Flynn, the fusion of Krishna and Flynn at the heart of the Cosmic Egg. This is where the game's overarching plot largely ends, and it's also the final battle with the Divine Powers. There's ultimately one last dungeon after this one, though, with its own bosses. It's less of an issue in the Massacre route, as Dagda not only wants you to kill Krishna, but also YHVH, something he's been boasting about planning to do for a good portion of the game.
  • In The Denpa Men, the game's Big Bad, the Evil King, is this in both his main encounters (in the third encounter, he's an Optional Boss). The first time you defeat him, he escapes with Crystal and makes you go through more dungeons, and the second time you beat him, the main character decides that he wants to do even more dungeons so he can get married. The actual final boss ends up being a set of chess piece-themed monsters unrelated to the plot.
  • South Park: The Fractured but Whole: Eric Cartman in the community center, after you tracked him after the Coon's riddles. He later escapes custody.
  • Sword of Paladin: Every Extra and Royal Gem using villain is revealed to be a pawn of Loquius Ragnarek, a vengeful fallen emperor who is using Miasma to corrupt people and destroy the world. He's defeated at the end of Chapter 3, but the final chapter reveals that he's just one of many pawns of Anguis, the source of Miasma and a Multiversal Conqueror who has used similar villains to destroy many worlds.
  • Resident Evil series:
    • Resident Evil 2 has Birkin's fourth One-Winged Angel mutation, generally considered That One Boss, as the end boss of the A scenario.
    • Resident Evil 4: The middle act of the game, set in the Castle, ends with Leon fighting the Salazar/Verdugo/Queen Plaga chimera in the central tower, before travelling by boat to Saddler's Very Definitely Final Dungeon. It's also a literal case in the original version on the GameCube, because the first disc ends its content right after Leon and Ada travel to the industrial island where Ashley was escorted, prompting the player to swap to the second disc for the last chapters.
    • Resident Evil Village: After months of promotional material and build up Lady Dimitrescu turns out to be the first major boss Ethan faces after exploring the castle, with her three daughters being mini-bosses he faces while looking for Rose.
  • In the NES port of Super Contra, Emperor Devil Gaba/Jagger Froid, the arcade version's Final Boss, is demoted to a Disc One Final Boss, with the NES final boss being a strange human-faced alien spider.
  • Far Cry 3: Vaas is the leader of the Ruthless Modern Pirates who are infesting the North Island, so when you beat him … hang on, did you say North Island? And even after beating the South Island boss, there is still a set-piece battle to be fought before you decide which ending you will have.
  • The promotional material for Mars: War Logs makes it look like Sean will be your primary nemesis. Nope, he buys it about a third of the way into the campaign.
  • Double-subverted in Star Wars: The Old Republic's expansion Knights of the Fallen Empire and it's continuation Knights of the Eternal Throne where the villain at first seems to Emperor Valkorion, the reincarnation of the Sith Emperor, until he's killed in the first chapter by either the player or his Starscream Arcann, the latter of whom becomes the villain from then on. However, Valkorion lives on as a Force Ghost who manipulates things from behind the scenes before finally attempting to hijack the player character in the finale.
  • In Until Dawn, the threat presented to the heroes is The Psycho, a Jigsaw-esque maniac hunting down the main characters in revenge against the Washington family. He gets caught halfway through the night, and is unmasked as Josh, who was trying to give the main characters a good scare in response to a cruel prank they had played the year before that resulted in his sisters going missing. After this, he gives way to the real danger on the mountain- Wendigoes, monstrous creatures born from acts of cannibalism, one of whom possessed Hannah.
  • Marketing for Batman: Arkham Origins presented the lesser-known villain Black Mask as the primary antagonist. The game proper agrees as he's the most powerful and feared mob boss, and has hired eight assassins to kill Batman, each of whom has their own boss fight. However, roughly half way into the game, The Joker is revealed to have been pretending to be Black Mask, is the one who hired the assassins, and is the real villain. Black Mask himself has lost his power, and is reduced to a Big Bad Wannabe much to the disappointment of many gamers.
  • Sinjid has Warlord Asura, the last Shogun warlord Sinjid must kill to end the war between the Imperial Army and the Shogun so he will be pardoned for his alleged crimes. While the war ends after Asura's death, Sinjid's adventure doesn't, as he must still continue his quest to find his master's true killer and bring them to justice and figure out the identity of a strange man named Kazuro who somehow knows about his past. They're one and the same.
  • In Arc Style: Baseball!! 3D, the game against Team Crystal is labeled as the final round of Tournament mode... but then there's an extra match if you defeat them.
  • In River City Ransom: Underground it is Slick, the Big Bad from the original River City Ransom, who by all appearances is once again the main antagonist for the game, and the kidnapping that kicks off the plot seems to match his old modus operandi, but after he's defeated, it turns out that he was actually working for someone else.
  • Dark Watch: The vampire lord Lazarus Malkoth serves as the Big Bad, having infected the main protagonist and spread a curse raising dead across the Old West. However, after killing him, his position is stolen by Tala in the good ending, or by you in the evil ending, forcing your Spirit Advisor to fight you as the Final Boss.
  • NieR: Automata gets points for having perhaps the most convincing one of these in video game history. At the end of route A, you fight Eve in a climatic boss battle, after which the credits roll and you are allowed to access New Game Plus. Eve again serves as the final boss of route B, but after winning a second time... you unlock the entire second half of the game.
  • Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana has Okeanos, the giant squid-like creature that sank the Lombardia, causing everyone to become stranded of the Isle of Seiren, and stands as the main obstacle in getting off. Once it's defeated, the approach of the Lacrimosa shifts everyone's priorities.
  • Randal's Monday: The business bum. Kramer is also a bit of one, since they're built up as Randal's most constant antagonist, but it would make little sense since Kramer has no villainous intentions, he's just trying to do his job. The latter disappearing from the game is brought up for mockery in the end credits by the Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
  • In Soul Calibur VI's Libra of Soul mode, Azwel is set up to be the final boss, but after you defeat him, there's another chapter of the story to go through that has you tracking down the Black Demon, a.k.a. Grøh.
  • Wolfenstein:
    • Return to Castle Wolfenstein: The Super Soldier at the end of mission 5, regarded as the hardest boss in the game. BJ is also a little beat up after the battle. The game then returns to the occult theme, focusing on the resurrection of Heinrich I (in which three Super Soldiers are being used to do so).
    • Wolfenstein (2009): General Zetta, the "man" in charge of the Nazi occupation of Isenstadt. You kill him halfway through the game, and he is replaced by Deathshead. The final boss, on the other hand, is Deathshead's enforcer, Hans Grosse.
    • Wolfenstein: The Old Blood: Rudi Jäger is the boss at the end of the game's first chapter. The second half of the game has you going after Helga von Schabbs, who later releases a strange gas that causes a Zombie Apocalypse. At the end, she awakens King Otto's Monster, the final boss.
  • The arcade game Night Slashers manages to pull this off twice. The game initially sets up the vampire boss as the main villain, but the conflict isn't over after the vampire is defeated. After the player completes the goal of sealing off the portals to the netherworld, it then looks like The Grim Reaper will be the final boss, but he also turns out to be a mere underling. The real final boss of the game is King Zarutz, a skeletal robot demon.
  • Red Dead Redemption does this twice in regards to Bill Williamson and Dutch Van der Linde. John Marston is tasked with taking down Bill, who forces him to chase him all the way down to Mexico. Afterwards, he's told that he now needs to go after Dutch. And after he's dealt with, the game goes on for quite a bit before the actual ending where John dies fighting off government forces and his son Jack eventually grows up and avenges him by killing the crooked government agent who was forcing John to go after his old gangmates.
  • Due to Copy Kitty being in open development for so long, the game ended up with two of them by the time it was finally finished. The swordsman Arikan was the Final Boss of the original freeware release, before getting pushed back to being the boss of World 8. After that was Fortress Virs and Giga Dengrahx, the dual final bosses of the original retail release, before two more stages were added in afterwards, with Supreme Thremnat or Isotope if you're playing on Hard Mode, or Lymia if you're playing as Savant being the ultimate Final Boss of the game.
  • Just Shapes & Beats: After collecting the three triangular Macguffins, you face off against a boss, which is unique for a game where the only hazards are environmental. Afterwards, you're sent to "Paradise", a geometric Sugar Bowl, and walk through it while the credits appear to roll. Eventually, you come across a cave and give a smaller triangle to what looks like a plant of some sort. Then it jams it into its head, turns into the boss you just fought, makes a mess of the place, and steals the large triangles while its theme plays. Congratulations, you just finished the tutorial.
  • The Evil Within 2 has Stefano Valentini, a Mad Artist turned Serial Killer obsessed with capturing people at the moment of their deaths with a Magical Camera to create grotesque art pieces. When you finally take him down and the events of the game should be wrapped up, however, a couple of new antagonists are revealed and the narrative continues. Surprise, you're only half way through the game!
  • Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: The battle with Galeem in World of Light only marks the midway point of the story, something savvy players who have explored the map may see coming when they notice that they only have about half the roster recruited. Immediately after Galeem's defeat, his dark counterpart Dharkon appears and the Dark Realm is unlocked, which has all but four of the remaining fighters. But in turn, Dharkon's defeat renders it another example of this trope, since both it and Galeem have to be fought at the end (which also has the last four fighters), with the True Ending being acheieved by fighting both of them at the same time. Galeem is still (half of) the final boss and main villain, it's just that his initial fight in the Light Realm was not the end.
  • The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind has Dagoth Gares. The first several missions of the main quest involve your character gathering information on the Nerevarine and Sixth House cults (as well as doing favors for the sources of that information). Finally, you are sent to investigate a Sixth House base directly. After battling your way through Ash Creatures, you run into and defeat Gares. As he dies, he afflicts you with the dreaded Corprus Disease to bring you under the influence of the true Big Bad, the resurrected Physical God, Dagoth Ur. This kicks off the rest of the plot which revolves around you getting "cured" and then finding a way to defeat Dagoth Ur before he can spread the disease (and do much worse) to the rest of Tamriel.
  • In Punch-Out!! for Wii, defeating Mr. Sandman at the end of the World Circuit will net Little Mac the title belt of WVBA champion, and the game's credits roll... now it's time to retain that title, which marks the start of Title Defense mode. Mr. Sandman once again displays this trope at the end of Title Defense itself, as even after defeating all boxers once again Mac has to keep fighting until his planned retirement in the true last mode, Mac's Last Stand.
  • Taz: Wanted: Sam is presented throughout the game as the Big Bad, but the final boss reveals he was actually working for Tweety.
  • In Rocket Knight (2010), Ulfgar the Merciless is the game's Big Bad, and Sparkster has to team up with Axel Gear and the Devotindos Empire to defeat him. After Ulfgar is defeated midway through the game, Axel Gear and the Devotindos Empire turn against Sparkster so that General Sweinheart can take over the Kingdom of Zephyrus. Thus, Sweinheart is the Big Bad in the game's second half and the Final Boss.
  • Played with in Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. Our first supposed main villain is Drake's rival Eddy Rojas until we learn he's really a henchman for a man named Roman. He is set up as the main villain until towards the very end his right-hand man Navarro tricks him into his own doom and ultimately becomes the final boss.
  • Monolith has the Overlord. After defeating him for the first time at the end of the Sanctum, your run ends, but you gain one of four seals. Defeat him again after obtaining the other three (you buy one from Kleines and get the other two from Optional Bosses), and you gain access to the actual final level and final boss, who varies based on your character.
  • Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time has it twice.
    • The first time happens in the sixth world. Usually the player fights Cortex as the final boss, but players will likely notice they haven't fought N. Tropy or gotten the final Quantum Mask yet. After Cortex's defeat, N. Tropy casts him aside to become the Big Bad.
    • The second time comes after defeating N. Tropy and his female alternate universe counterpart. After one breather world, Cortex ends up betraying the party by kidnapping Kupuna-Wa and using her Time Master powers to go back to right before the events of the the first game and prevent himself from creating Crash becoming the Final Boss of the game.
  • In Skies of Arcadia, Galcian restores the lost continent of Soltis and uses the Silver Gigas, Zelos, to cause the Rains of Destruction upon Valua destroying the country. The heroes proceed to join together to fight off Galcian's armada and fight and storm his fortress ship before facing down the man himself. Players might notice they still haven't fought Ramirez, Zelos, or ever set foot on Soltis. After Galcian's death, Ramirez goes full Villainous Breakdown and the heroes go to face off against him and Zelos in the three part Final Boss.
  • Cho Ren Sha 68k:
    • The game presents what appears to be the final boss in Stage 6. It features a different and much more dramatic boss theme as opposed to the theme used for the first five bosses, and it takes longer than usual for the boss to approach from the top of the screen. However, when the boss is destroyed, you have to go through another stage, Stage "0".
    • Even the boss of Stage 0 still counts. Despite using the same boss theme as the Stage 6 boss and being much larger than the other bosses, defeating it simply sends you to do all 7 stages over again, this time with enemies firing revenge bullets upon defeat. When you beat the boss of Stage 0 again, the actual Final Boss appears, heralded by a theme not used by any other enemy in the game.
  • Unusually for a party game, WarioWare: Get It Together! has one in the form of the Mega Bug, the biggest of the bugs running around and breaking the game. After clearing the level that it corrupted and defeating it after it takes the form of a purple-skinned, voxelated Wario, Wario and the crew are able to return to Diamond City... only to realize Red, Master Mantis, and Lulu are still stuck in the game, requiring everyone to go back in.
  • In Inscryption, your game master's story comes to a climax when you confront him personally, defeat him, and then use a camera to capture him a card. This unlocks the "New Game" option on the menu screen which resets the game to its actual state: An 8-bit adventure game where your enemy, Leshy, is one of four opponents.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles 1 has Metal Face, AKA Mumkar, who acts as the main villain for the first half of the game. He’s even the one who motivated Shulk to go on his adventure since he killed Fiora. However, as the mystery of the Mechon starts to unfold, he gets overshadowed by Egil and later Zanza. Once the main characters get to Mechonis, they defeat Metal Face, which ends in his death.
  • Rengoku: After defeating Gryphus in the second game, Beatrice unlocks another tower called H.E.A.V.E.N., with the high-level AI Deucalion, named after the company that created ADAMs, at the top.
  • Dragalia Lost: For the first half of the main campaign, Morsayati acts as the game’s main villain, as he’s the one who kidnapped Zethia and is the one who’s plunging Alberia into darkness. When Euden finally confronts Morsayati in Chapter 14, the latter is easily subdued by Beren, and the gang fights Volk instead (thankfully, the player gets to fight Morsayati in an event that came shortly after). After that, Nedrick replaces him as the main villain, and later, Xenos becomes the true Big Bad.
  • Rabi-Ribi: Noah is built up as the final boss and during Chapter 5 has an epic multi-stage boss fight like you'd expect for such an encounter, along with a monologue of her plan and how she set things in motion. You even get a credits roll and ending picture for defeating her. Except... the game then immediately begins Chapter 6. Astute players will have noticed that there are some plot threads (like the UPRPRC and the "Bunny Phenomenon") that were not resolved with Noah's defeat, so there's clearly more going on. The actual final boss, fight in Chapter 8, is Irisu.
  • Fable: Whisper. The rivalry between the Hero and her that is set up early on actually resolves itself about halfway through the game, right after the game's actual Big Bad first appears. You either kill her or you find her in an inn later where she informs you that she's leaving the Heroes' Guild, never to be seen again.
  • Brutal Orchestra starts the story off with Nowak making a pact with a demon to get revenge on the person who killed him. When they stumble across him, Nowak's killer is revealed to be a Zero-Effort Boss who is bleeding out on the ground named This Pitiful Corpse. Choosing to ignore Bosch and sparing him will reveal that the corpse is Nowak's own after being Driven to Suicide, and a race against the clock to find peace in death as two "invaders" enter purgatory begins with the unlocking of Hard Mode.
  • Kero Blaster:
    • "Dark 2" (the giant Negativus Legatia blob) serves as this in normal mode, where it's supposedly the source of the Negativus Legatia, but after defeating it, Kaeru's exit is interrupted, and the problem becomes infinitely worse by the time he makes it back.
    • Since Zangyou mode contains redesigned levels and a completely different storyline that serves as a continuation to Normal mode's plot, the final boss of Normal mode, Boss Plate, is this for the game overall.
  • X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse has Apocalypse, who at first appears as the main antagonist and responsible for the mutant imprisonment in Genosha, but he's quickly demoted and replaced by Magneto upon defeat.
  • Pikmin 4: The final challenge before the credits is a Dandori Battle against the red Leafling, who reveals himself to be Captain Olimar and finally lets you cure him after his defeat. Then Louie shows up during the credits, and it turns out that you have two areas left to explore before the game is truly over.
  • The Sakabashira Game: In the Leave route, some sort of corruption befalls Evan and Alex ends up battling him. We're led to believe this is the Final Battle, but then the Big Bad host says the final Horror hasn't been cleansed yet. Ceci, who Evan apparently killed minutes prior, comes back to life and reveals herself as The Mole and actual Final Boss.
  • In Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Wong Tou is the last of the three criminal faction leaders to be fought, and the most likely lead on the whereabouts of Ichiban's mother. But when Ichiban and Kiryu interrogate him in front of his men, shit hits the fan the second Wong identifies the "Overseer" he and Dwight Mendez took orders from, setting up Bryce Fairchild's role as Ichiban's Big Bad.

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