So, you've reached the final dungeon and face the gauntlet before you! And it sucks!

Maybe the final dungeon is a slog of a dungeon that introduces some 11th hour gimmick.

Perhaps the final boss is just a slugfest of attrition instead of actual skill.

Or bless the seven stars, the game fakes out and there's ANOTHER dungeon in the dungeon.

Any circumstances, it just leaves the ending of the game feeling less like a victory, and more like a chore.


YO, SPOILERS IN THIS THREAD AHEAD, OBVIOUSLY.

So what spurred this thread was that I was playing Lenna's Inception and enjoying it for the most part. It's a game about making a Zeldalike in a randomly generated but connected world, where the dungeons are also products of generation.

EXCEPT THE LAST ONE.
The Palace is treated not like a dungeon, but an interior building. Therefore, no map. That's a pretty big suck factor right out the gate. And is designed to use the item you got in the final dungeon to navigate it. This multiple-layer navigation would be fine, had there not been one rude element introduced.

Warp panels. Not a teleporter maze, that would have been nice. But instead they're treated like a penalty akin to getting caught during the fortress invasion in Ocarina of Time; you get sent back to a designated spot and have to do all the navigation all over again. Which when thinking cylindrical can get old quickly.

So then there's the penultimate boss. Which is boring. Wait for opening, deflect projectile four times, slice. Final waves have the boss in pissy mode where it tries to cheaply drain your health.

Final Boss: Is nearly always open to attack but chooses the life of spam. Multiphased, no real strategy, just whack at em. Final phase is even more spammy, and it becomes a slog of attrition that could probably be countered if you blow money on healing potions.

The thing is, if you lose the war of attrition (because there basically is no pattern to many of the attacks), any items or such are voided; no refunds on spent items. Meaning you'd have to LEAVE the entire dungeon complex..

Of course, the final slap in the face: BE PSYCHIC, OR YOU DON'T GET THE GOOD ENDING.


So. that's how Lenna's Inception went from Four stars to Three* due to completely botching the last 10% of the game.


So, have any of you tales of otherwise great games that just don't stick the landing at the end and stumble over themselves?
(*According to the GOG rating system, by the way.)

Broken Age springs to mind. The game had a "split personality" development in that the first half's Kickstarter (received $3.3m) far exceeded what they requested ($400k), so they massively scaled up spending and blew large sums on celebrity voices then ran out of money and had to release it in two parts. The first half is regarded as a little too easy but still enjoyable, but they then overcompensated on the 2nd half into making overly obtuse puzzles that were more tedious than clever. The final "robot rewiring" puzzle followed by a rushed and very flat ending was widely disliked by a lot of players who thought the game would have been better had they kept spending in check and made the game in a non-Episodic single piece. Rating ended up 3.7/5 (vs Thimbleweed Park's 4.7/5), and most negative reviews comment on the same "great start but tedious ending".

Well, that sounds more like a bad half than a finality, but it fits with the spirit.