It isn’t easy to pull off a good ending. Even a great game can fumble the ball right before it reaches the endzone. Conversely, a lackluster title can pick itself up and leave a good mark in your memory if it finishes strong. The games below perfectly conclude their stories with climactic endings both in terms of gameplay and narrative.
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It takes more than just doing something fancy. These endings are the culmination of everything you have done in the game up to that point. Sometimes, might even be the culmination of several titles in a series.
Updated on June 04, 2025, by Sam Hallahan:Games continue to offer in-depth experiences - stories that make us laugh, make us cry, and impact us in incredible ways. At the end of all these, though, is the ending. And many games use the experience it has built up to provide an equally impactful ending.
8Metal Gear Solid 4
A lot of fans have issues withMetal Gear Solid 4’sinflated cutscenes and the way it wraps up certain story threads. Even for a series filled with long cinematics, the fourth entry in this series arguably overdoes it. Regardless of how you feel about the game up until its final act, it’s hard not to be filled with emotion as Solid Snake crawls through a microwave hallway.
During this gameplay segment, a split-screen presentation shows up, so you can see all the supporting characters fight while Snake struggles to reach the Patriots AI and upload Sunny’s virus to save the day. As if this wasn’t enough, the final boss is an emotionalfistfight between Snakeand Liquid Ocelot as the UI changes to reflect the past games in the series. This is then followed by an absurdly long epilogue where Big Boss, who was long thought dead, returns.
7Resident Evil 5
Resident Evil 5ends with the showdown between Albert Wesker and Chris Redfield,with co-op partner Sheva Alomarthere to help. It is a rivalry first established in the debut entry. The fight itself is epic, starting in a research lab with a time limit before the heroes chase Wesker onto a plane.
The plane then crashes into an active volcano where the last section of the boss fight occurs. The two heroes are separated, and Chris Redfield literally has to punch a boulder out of the way to reach his ally. It then ends with the protagonists in a helicopter shooting two RPG rockets into Wesker as he drowns in lava. Talk about confirming a kill.
6The Last Of Us
The Last of Usis all about the developing relationship between the two protagonists, Joel and Ellie. Joel has been carrying around the weight of his daughter’s death and is then tasked with protecting Ellie. At first, he wants nothing to do with the task, but through the course of the game, he comes to view her as his own daughter.
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Ellie is important because she potentially holds the cure to the Cordyceps virus in her blood. When Joel finds out harvesting this cure means killing her, he decides to rescue her, which means killing people who were his allies just a few hours before. You are required to fight through members of the Fireflies in the hospital, a group who were your allies up to this point.
5Portal 2
The twoPortalgames make pulling back the curtain on the story feel like the most important and mind-breaking revelation in the universe. Where the first Portal ends with you leaving the lab for one shot before the credits roll, Portal 2 ends with a showdown between you and Wheatley, the malevolent AI thatforces you and GLaDOS to team up.
The real kicker is when, just for a moment, you manage to shoot a portal to the moon and transport yourself there. It feels like doomsday preppers seeing the sun for the first time after years in a bomb shelter; a simply unexpected and breathtaking moment.
Red Dead Redemptionfrom 2010 swiftly rolls towards its tragic ending. You spend the whole game chasing down the members of your former gang for the chance at seeing your family again.
Once you accomplish this task you have a brief period of a peaceful life, only to learn that the agents who blackmailed you are coming to hunt you down.John Marston sacrifices himself to protect his familyand is gunned down by a large group of law enforcement. The prologue puts you into his son’s shoes many years later, as he hunts down the man who killed his father.
3God Of War: Ragnarok
The ending of this series' storyline feels like the second and third parts of a trilogy put into one game. As such, it takes a long time to build up to its final battle. Instead of the outwardly malicious and greedy gods from the olderGod of Wargames, the gods in Ragnarok have more complicated personalities and aren’t just evil for evil’s sake.
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During the course of the game, Kratos personally prepares almost every element of the final battle, making it all the more satisfying when it actually comes. By the end, every plot thread set up and teased in the 2018 game is resolved, though not every character gets a happy ending. God of War will likely continue in some form, but the ending here is wholly satisfying.
While we mentioned the original Red Dead Redemption’s ending,Red Dead Redemption 2is arguably even more climactic. With so much at stake, Arthur Morgan does all he can to fight the inevitable.
After becoming ill and watching the gang fall apart, he sets his sights on getting those he cares about out safely, and hopes to have Dutch see sense and discard Micah’s advice. In a final showdown on a mountaintop, after seeing John away, Arthur battles with Micah and uses his dying words trying to get through to Dutch. Though not entirely successful, your emotions will be as high as the stakes at this ending.
1Final Fantasy 7 Remake
It is impressive to see how surprising and bombasticFinal Fantasy 7 Remake’sending is despite being the first of a series of games in a new Final Fantasy 7 continuity; albeit one connected to the old game in surprising ways. The 2020 game starts out as a straightforward remake, but strange mysteries make themselves apparent from the start. By the end, you are fully aware of massive changes to the story coming.
It is climactic both because of how it reveals that this is not simply a retelling of Final Fantasy 7 and also a cliffhanger because your mind races with wonder about what will change in the future games. In terms of actual set pieces, it turns the attack on theShinra Headquarters,which was initially just the ending of an act in the first Final Fantasy 7, into an epic battle that ends the first part of a trilogy.
