Joke Ending

In games with Multiple Endings, there are many different kinds, like the Golden Ending, True End, or Bad End. These endings can vary in tone but usually stick close to the established tone of the game.

And then there is the Joke Ending, a frequent type of ending where the previously-serious game goes full-on Surreal Humor and wackiness. Due to this, it often overlaps with Gainax Ending (though not all Gainax Endings are Joke Ends). Characters might start acting wildly different from how we know them, random explosions might happen for no reason, and the fourth wall might be shattered in a game that otherwise leaves it intact. Paradoxically, these are often among the hardest endings to obtain, on the level of an Easter Egg, often only being available if playing on a New Game Plus, despite not playing a significant role in expanding the story — sometimes, games that list their endings somewhere may not even have this on said list.

Important Note: this trope is one of contrast. If all the endings are comedic, then none of them qualify. The Joke Ending has to contrast other, more serious endings.

Also, since this is an ending trope, spoilers are unmarked.

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Examples:

Action-Adventure Games

• Hollow Knight: The "Mr Mushroom" ending is unlocked by deciphering a lore tablet in a well-hidden secret area inside another secret, and then following a series of obscure clues. The reward for all this is a scene in which a goofy-looking cartoon mushroom flies off into space, followed by the words "To be continued".
• NieR: Automata has several "bad" endings that are hysterical due to the absurdity of how they're achieved, putting them firmly in joke ending territory.
  • Ending K, a.k.a. death by mackerel. You need to catch a mackerel and eat it. Mackerels are an instakill for androids due to the chemical reaction the mackerels have when they're ingested. According to the text box, though, the mackerel was delicious...
  • Ending U, which you get when you self-destruct in the command bunker. The flavor text goes on to say that the Bunker exploded, but it looked pretty from Earth! It also says that the Commander still floats in space with a stern look on her face.
  • Ending T, where you disconnect your own OS chip, which naturally kills you instantly. You can even sell it! (for an insultingly cheap 28G, no less). Oh, and the interface explicitly warns you about it too:
    Caution: Handle With Care!
    Removal of the OS chip will result in death.
  • Ending L. 2B spends ten years on the run from both android and machine assassins so she can keep playing the fishing minigame.
  • Ending O has the snarkiest narration of them all.
    Some YoRHa units abandoned their mission, the operation failed, and every android met their demise. ...Well, except for the really selfish ones. They were fine.
  • Of the game's 26 endings, only 5 actually advance the plot (A and B cap off the first arc from different perspectives, C and D are different flavors of Bittersweet Ending, and E is the Golden Ending). The rest are generally just acknowledging when player actions cause things to go Off the Rails, and even when they are important or genuinely tragic, they tend to be hilariously abrupt and have the credit scroll past in literally two seconds.
• Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell gives the player a choice of five different endings. Four of them are very consequential and bittersweet in their own ways. But the fifth has Gat learning all the secrets of the universe... of which the animated segment solely consists of Gat giving an understanding "Ohhhh...". The End.

Adventure Games

• the white chamber: Getting a perfect score on the Karma Meter leads to the Comedy Ending, where the entire horror plot becomes the setup to a Scary Surprise Party for the player character.

Fighting Games

• Mortal Kombat 9 has a few blatant joke endings:
  • Kitana's ending involves her, Jade, and rival/clone/"sister" Mileena forming a Charlie's Angels-esque alliance (complete with an Angels Pose!)
  • Sheeva's ending, which seemed good in theory, has her being able to bring all the many different races in the game in harmony but ends with her becoming Queen and settling in Australia (a Take That! towards the country for banning the game).
  • Stryker's ending is less on the "jokey" side and moreso on the "illogical Character Shilling" side. He ends up being lauded by the fans, treated as a hero, and becomes so famous that he has action figures made of him and an autobiographical film that he personally vetoes Johnny Cage from starring in.
• Tekken has a longstanding tradition of giving joke endings to the less serious characters, like Kuma and Rodger Jr, but sometimes even the serious characters get silly endings. Paul Phoenix, for example, accidentally caused Earth to be invaded by aliens in his ending in Tekken 5 by trying to have himself declared "the strongest in the universe," a pretty far cry from his ending in the previous game, where he became a decadent playboy after winning the tournament before realizing that he'd lost sight of why he became a martial artist and giving up his wealth.

Platform Games

• Sonic Mania: If you clear the game on "& Knuckles" mode as Knuckles so that there are two Knuckleses, the entire thing is revealed to be a story read by Knuckles to the animal buddies.

Puzzle Games

• Meteos: Ending E for the branched-path setting is called "The Galactic Fork". It features the Meteos fusing into a giant fork and cutting up Meteo like a delicious steak. The text is accompanied by a childish drawing of that happening and the ending name has kooky letter formatting unlike the rest.

Roguelike

• The Binding of Isaac: Ending number 9 has Isaac opening up The Chest and finding Dr. Fetus inside of it, which he does an Item Get! animation with. Then it cuts to him recreating the Dramatic Gopher meme while dressed as Dr. Fetus, complete with a music sting. Most of the Mom's Heart endings are less serious than later ones, but this is the most outright goofy ending in the game.

Role-Playing Games

• Chrono Trigger has two:
  • The "Memory Lane" ending features Marle and Lucca discussing the various male characters and what they really think about them. Then Heroic Mime Chrono appears, gives his only line in the entirety of the game, and they all run offscreen.
  • Defeating the final boss Lavos (which you can access at almost any time) before defeating the leader of the reptile people in the ancient past results in the reptiles becoming the dominant species, changing the timeline such that all of the main characters are now reptilians. Though in the sequel, Chrono Cross, an alternate timeline with dominant reptilians is a major plot point.
• The various Disgaea games tend to have at least one of the endings be more comical than the rest of them. These include losing to Vyers and him celebrating his victory over you, winning against Laharl and him deciding to Rage Quit by blowing up the entire Netherworld, and Almaz becoming the next Overlord and everyone turning against him.
• Expeditions: Rome — an otherwise gritty military and political simulator of the late Roman Republic — has one Non-Standard Game Over where your Player Character is transformed into a cat and spends the rest of their life happily doing cat things instead of saving Rome.
• The secret ending in OFF reveals that the whole thing was a plan by a trio of space apes who wanted the world destroyed so they could build a robot factory in their war against a race of flying brains.
• Pokémon Rejuvenation: Early in the game, the player is given a one-time-only option of leaving Aevium and going on a one-time-only free trip to Hoenn. If you accept, the game ends by telling you that you spent the rest of your life in paradise while everyone in Aevium suffered. You are then given the option of returning when you received the offer.
• The Outer Worlds: A character with low Intelligence can, upon beating the game, decide that they would rather eat ice cream than face down the colony's problems, leading to an ending slide describing the flavor of the ice cream you are eating, instead of the usual ones about the grave perils that must still be faced.
• Sincere Deceit:
  • “Congratulations”, outright called the Joke Ending in the walkthrough. If you find all Grand Items and keep them, then give them to the white pedestals in the Tower and to the Arbela Guardians, you are treated to a recreation of Neon Genesis Evangelion's infamously bizarre “congratulations” scene (where the whole cast just says congratulations one-by-one for seemingly no reason), an A Winner Is You screen, and the Batter calling the ending stupid.
  • “The Strongest Boy”, while not marked as such, is another non-serious ending achieved by beating Azathoth as Jericho. After beating the Fusion Dance of two powerful gods, Jericho ultimately befriends Azathoth, who congratulates him on his victory. Then the Batter shows up, gets mad about the others doing the ending without him, and attacks them while fake end credits with names like Todd Howard and Hideo Kojima roll, and Zacharie turns out to be watching the whole thing on his TV. The Batter also calls this ending stupid in the Test Room.
• Undertale: If you kill only the four main bosses aside from Asgore (Toriel, Papyrus, Undyne, and Mettaton) and spare all regular monsters, Sans will call to say a small white dog^note referencing Toby Fox's Author Avatar took over the Underground in the King's absence. Despite him doing nothing but sleep, this is the best life for everyone. This is notably the only ending where you can kill Papyrus and not have Sans be upset about it.

Survival Horror

• Alone in the Dark (2024): By completing the "All The World's A Stage" Lagniappes set you'll get the option to give Grace "something to play with" before the final boss. Doing so cuts to her playing with the toy talisman while Carnby and Emily leave a play that was the events of the game, with it suddenly turning out they're Grace's parents and then leaving while Carnby says the play left him "Alone in the Dark". Emily proceeds to say the play should have had a hedge maze and pirates, two of the most infamously derided parts of the second game.
• Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator: In three of the game's seven endings, the situations are downright comical depending on the player's choices:
  • The "Mediocre Ending" occurs if the player buys or does nothing for their pizzeria, leading to the announcer giving a passive-aggressive speech about how lazy the player is and giving them a "Certificate of Mediocrity" before firing them.
  • The "Bankruptcy Ending" occurs if the player runs out of money. The announcer gives a lengthy speech about the player's incompetence before giving them a "Certificate of Bankruptcy" and flatly telling them to "get out".
  • The "Blacklisted Ending" occurs if the player has too many high-liability items and dangerous situations. They are fired and called dangerous and reckless, with the announcer saying that the company will have to wipe security camera footage and remove all traces of the player having ever worked there, before giving them a "Blacklist Certificate" and telling them they will be "lucky if [they] ever find employment in this town again".
• The Silent Hill series usually has one per game involving alien abductions in what is otherwise a supernatural psychological horror series. Though ostensibly non-canon, the "UFO" endings from the first three games all appear to share a loose continuity with each other.
  • Silent Hill has one where Harry is abducted by aliens.
  • Silent Hill 2 has two of them.
    • In the UFO ending, Harry from the first game (still rendered in PSOne graphics) arrives at the hotel and James is also abducted by the aliens.
    • In the Dog ending, it turns out that a Shiba Inu dog was the one controlling the titular Silent Hill.
  • Silent Hill 3 has Heather return home to her father, Harry (in every other version of the story, Heather returning home to discover that Harry has been killed is a major twist, but here he is still alive for some reason), who is having tea with an alien, while James from the second game is standing in the background. Harry speaks in an electronically distorted voice and refers to Heather as Cheryl, none of which seems odd to her in the slightest. Heather tells Harry about her encounter with the cultists, and subsequently visits the Otherworld and fighting the monsters, setting off his Papa Wolf instincts, leading to him bringing a bunch of UFOs to Silent Hill and blowing the town to Kingdom Come. Then the credits roll as a Japanese MC leads a karaoke performance of a song about the characters of the game, including some very off-kilter interpretations of them, before finally ending with the sound of Heather's sub-machine gun shooting the MC and singers.
  • Silent Hill: Origins swaps to a very Animesque style for its UFO ending, where Travis attempts to enter the motel room where his parents died, only for the key to not work. Suddenly, an alien appears with the dog from the second game's dog ending. The alien explains that since Travis left his truck in the middle of the road at the start of the game, the aliens moved the trick to their planet, and invites Travis to visit and pick up the truck. Travis agrees, and enthusiastically asks if he can pilot the UFO, to which the alien asks "Do you drive stick", and they both laugh as they get pulled up by the tractor beam.
  • Silent Hill: Downpour has the Surprise ending, where Murphy is suddenly digging his way out of prison with a spoon. He then digs up, and enters a dark room, then the lights turn on as a bunch of characters from the past games reveal a surprise birthday party for him. Pyramid Head from the second game walks in, dragging his BFS behind him. He then swings it to cut the cake and cuts the table in half with it.
  • If you manage to don't forgive Alex's parents, but manage to save Wheeler in Silent Hill: Homecoming, you get the UFO Ending; Alex reunites with Elle, but then they both get abducted by aliens. Wheeler runs out, but he's too late to interrupt the abduction, shouting how he knew aliens were responsible for the disappearances.
• Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion: If monsters are turned off in the settings, making it to room 1000 has Spooky bluntly tell you to leave and say that she will contact you if anything changes. The ending text states the player character tells people about the empty mansion but isn't believed.

Visual Novels

• Katawa Shoujo: The Kenji ending, which you get if you avoid getting into any of the girls' routes by the end of Act 1, is a bad end consisting of Hisao deciding to spend the school festival with his eccentric Conspiracy Theorist hallmate, Kenji, with them promptly getting drunk on the roof, Kenji going on more of his ramblings, and it about to bizarrely transition into a sex scene, complete with one of the sex scene themes playing, until a drunken Hisao falls off the roof and presumably dies an Undignified Death.

Other

• Some of the bad endings in A Cadet's Adventure (an online game parodying Star Trek: The Next Generation) were comedic:
  • In one of them, allowing Reg Barclay to take Troi's panties results in the whole crew catching an alien STD off her, which makes them act like zombies.
  • One way you can be killed is to offend Riker by calling him "Number Two" (his actual nickname is "Number One").
• If you score zero points in Bonnie's Bakery by the end of the lunch hour, you are treated to Ending 5 of 5: Bingus, consisting of a CG of an image-editing software full of Stylistic Suck where Bonnie is said to have been arrested because her food gave everyone food poisoning.
• Darius and Darius Gaiden each have an ending where the protagonists are shown beating the game you just played on an arcade cabinet, unlike the other endings that either have "Congrats, you saved the planet Draius" endings that range from generically happy to Bittersweet Endings where the protagonist dies.
• Dreaming Mary has one where if you enter SUPERMARY when you are prompted to enter a code, Mary goes up to the shadow monster representing her abusive father, who has been a haunting presence throughout the game, and destroys him using a Hadouken. The narrator admits that this was only put in as a joke.
• Henry Stickmin Series: Infiltrating The Airship has an ending that is so much of a joke that it isn't even counted as an ending or even made a path choice for Completing the Mission. Henry manages to steal a safe from the Toppat's airship the instant he breaks in, resulting in the "Lightning Quick Larcenist" ending. As soon as the government opens the safe though, all they find inside is a teddy bear leaving them disappointed in Henry and Rupert Price slowly raising a rifle in his direction. This ending is ultimately counted as a fail instead. However, you need to get this ending to get the Multiversal Correction ending.
• House of the Dead 3 has an ending where as the heroes are leaving, Lisa finds her car jacked by zombies, and she gives chase with Daniel following behind.
• In Outer Wilds, there are two possible ways to use black holes and time travel to violate causality. Both end with a black glass-cracking visual effect spreading from the source of the paradox until everything is consumed, then a text message bluntly informing you "YOU DESTROYED THE FABRIC OF SPACETIME". Then the credits roll, with a kazoo rendition of the main theme playing.
• Rail Chase 2 features an Easter Egg where you can reactivate the crosshair during the heroes' getaway at the end and shoot down their airplane. Doing so will replace the Credits Montage with an empty minecart slowly rolling along a track set to the final boss music. Eventually, the track suddenly ends in a sheer precipice towards the end of the credits, wiping to black just as the cart goes over the edge.
• Shoujo Kidan and its sequel both have one.
  • In the first game, putting in AAAAAA when asked your name will unlock a brief route where you play as the titular generic RPG hero guided by snarky mage girl BBBBBB, and the spooky Explorer Horror inside a Haunted House is turned into a dungeon-crawler with traps and fighting the Big Bad ghost girl in an RPG battle, with the characters lampshading everything and not a hint of seriousness.
  • In Shoujo Gidan, as in the first game, putting in AAAAAA at the name-select screen unlocks another short route where you play as AAAAAA and the game becomes a comedic, fourth-wall breaking RPG.
• Streets of Rage Remake: Beating any route on Mania difficulty shows an ending that seems to be as poignant and serious as the rest, until Opa-Opa flies in and makes everyone disappear, which leads to credits where Super-Deformed versions of all playable characters dance to a happy tune.
  Fail: A winner is you.

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