Basic Trope: Beating the game awards you with a very rudimentary ending.
- Straight: In the video game Alice The Adventurer, after defeating the Emperor Evulz, the Final Boss, the ending is just a single screen reading "Congratulations! You have defeated Emperor Evulz. Thanks for playing!"
- Exaggerated:
- The above, but then it also boots you to the Game Over screen before freezing.
- It's a three-disc-long fantasy RPG, and all you get for beating is a screen that says "Congratulations!".
- The moment Alice's final attack connects with Evulz, the game suddenly closes.
- Downplayed:
- Alice The Adventurer is a shallow and easy game aimed toward younger audiences, and the ending consists of Alice saying goodbye to the player and thanking them for their help.
- The game shows a simple sequence of the fate of Alice and congratulates the player as the credits roll.
- It's a lengthy game with a complex, in-depth plot but the ending, while an actual conclusion and not just a single screen, is still remarkably brief and unsatisfying compared to how long and complex the story was.
- Justified:
- The ending is the culmination of An Aesop repeated as a motif throughout the game: It's the Journey That Counts.
- You used the Konami Code, you rate Flat Joy at best.
- Evulz was holding all of reality together, and now that you killed him, reality has degraded to the point where even having an intelligible sentence there is a miracle in and of itself.
- Inverted:
- Alice the Adventurer is a ridiculously easy game aimed toward toddlers who had never played a game before, and yet the ending is a climatic, half-hour-long cutscene.
- The game gives you the most cinematic iconic ending of all time, with so many awesome completion bonuses.
- Subverted:
- At first the ending seems hollow, but when you remember all the past plot points...
- There are Multiple Endings in the game, and you need to fulfill the requirements in order to obtain the true ending.
- Double Subverted:
- Nevermind, it's still hollow. Oops.
- Even if you fulfill every requirement possible, the "true" ending is still a single screen saying "You found the true ending. Thanks for playing!"
- Parodied:
- In the middle of awesome action, the game suddenly ends with a random penguin saying "Congratulations!", much to the annoyance of other characters present.
- Evulz tries to deceive you into quitting the game with a fake ending screen reading "CONJUGATIONS! YOU'VED GAME WINNER. THANKS TO PLAY"
- Zig-Zagged: In Alice the Adventurer after you defeat Evulz, you get a single line of text congratulating you, but an angry Alice complains about the ending and the game delivers a proper one, but it's still lackluster. But it turns out there is a true ending and the player has not met the requirements for it. Despite trying everything the player can, the ending is still the same. Turns out the true ending was in the game's files.
- Averted:
- The game has an up-to-standard ending.
- The game has a short ending but the game itself is very short as well.
- Enforced:
- The publisher demanded that the developing team concentrate on gameplay and put them into a very tight schedule, so as the deadline approached, they had to just whip together a lazy ending instead of the better ending they had planned.
- The current ending is merely a placeholder for Beta-Testing.
- This is how the programmers reward cheating.
- A bug causes the game to skip the 0x010th (Scene switch to Victory Hall) to 0x10Fth (Fade to black) events to the 0x110th (call up FIN overlay).
- Lampshaded: "That's it? That's the ending? Man, what budget was the game developers running on?"
- Invoked: The creator wanted to piss players off after having to make their way through a Nintendo Hard game.
- Exploited: Alice hides in the ending's inexplicable dark void in order to Jump Scare the players.
- Defied: Alice starts complaining out loud about the ending until the game gives in and delivers a proper ending.
- Discussed: "... Somehow, I feel dissatisfied... As if I'm not getting what I deserve for going through all this. I guess I'll have to live the rest of my life as if none of this ever happened..."
- Conversed: "Hey, you played Alice the Adventurer yet?" "Yeah, and I was having fun up until the really crappy ending." "Yeah, I know right?"
- Deconstructed:
- Many players resent the game after all the effort they put into beating the game was all for a single screen of text.
- The creator of the game is ashamed of the ending and as a result doesn't like talking about the game as a whole.
- Alice the Adventurer gets a sequel called Alice the Adventurer 2: Fighting Depression in which Alice deals with the depression caused by going through the trouble of saving the world and getting zero recognition.
- Reconstructed:
- The game's playerbase learns to appreciate Alice the Adventurer for its fun gameplay instead of its ending.
- The creator of the game decides to make fun of the game's ending on the Internet, causing the game to gain popularity again.
- Alice the Adventurer 2: Fighting Depression gets another sequel again called Alice the Adventurer 3: Regaining Recognition, where Alice begins to make appearances on media and television to gain more recognition.
- Played for Laughs: "So, you wanted a decent ending, huh? Well, too bad. Now get out!"
- Played for Drama: All the suspense that was building up in the story prior has been Left Hanging. We'll never know if it was ever resolved...
Congratulations! You win! Back to A Winner Is You!
