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Golden Ending
aka: True Ending

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Fighting Eldritch Abominations has never felt so good

Igor, Persona 4




See also: Cutting Off the Branches, Multiple Endings, Nonstandard Game Over, Everybody Lives, and Earn Your Happy Ending. Contrast Earn Your Bad Ending, which is the polar opposite of this trope. No Final Boss for You is often mutually exclusive to this trope, but not always.

May overlap with Story Branch Favoritism, Easy-Mode Mockery, 100% Completion, and Golden Path. In cases like these, the 11th-Hour Ranger and True Final Boss might pop up as well.


And of course: Ending Trope. Spoilers ahead!



    open/close all folders 

  • In Max Payne 2, you can achieve an ending which Mona Sax survives, after finishing the game in the highest difficulty. Unfortunately, due to the events of Max Payne 3, this ending is revealed to be non-canon.
  • In the Gundam Vs Series entry Gundam vs. Zeta Gundam, the game's story mode goes from playing the game straight through canon to hitting every What If? scenario you can, ultimately leading to each of the game's three factions — Federation/AEUG, Zeon/Neo Zeon, and the Titans — bringing peace to the world and space. In their own way.

    Action Adventure 
  • In The Force Unleashed, there is the canon one, where the Rebellion is saved, and another where you end up as a tool of Palpatine and have become a Sith Stalker.
  • In Shadows of the Empire, the 'Easy' and 'Medium' modes end with Luke and Leia reunited at the rebel outpost, believing Dash to be dead after Xizor's skyhook blew, followed by a black screen that asks the question: "Did Dash really die?", urging the player to proceed to the next difficulty mode. At the end of the 'Hard' and 'Jedi', modes, the outpost aftermath scene is followed by a surprise scene that lets the player know that Dash survived. As the Outrider flies through a hyperspace vacuum, Dash exclaims that their escape was "one for the books". When his droid co-pilot, Leebo, asks Dash why he doesn't want everyone to know that they survived, Dash justifies keeping it secret because 1) Dash was never really paid, and 2) Xizor's thugs are out looking for him. Dash punctuates the ending with the casual remark: "Besides, it's better to be remembered as a martyr and still be alive, right?", and the Outrider flies away.
    • Particularly infuriating because many of the life upgrades are really well hidden, sometimes in places you have to backtrack to without any indication whatsoever that anything would be there, and quite a few of them can be Permanently Missable. Made worse by the fact that failing to collect them also means a less effective weapon and a smaller life bar in the final stretch.
  • In Guacamelee!, getting the good ending requires the player to gather five of the six Orbs of Chac Mool (you get the sixth one automatically for beating the final boss). This requires you to find and complete several brutally difficult platforming challenges as well as a combat gauntlet. The end result is that Juan's Mask of Power, restored to full strength by the orbs, sacrifices itself in order to bring El Presidente's daughter back to life. She and Juan go on to have a happy life together.
    • Guacamelee! 2 once again requires the player to beat all of the Brutal Bonus Levels to get the good ending. However, the "bad" ending is still much better than the one in the previous game. In this game, the only difference between the two endings is that Juan finds the correct portal to take him home to his family right away in the good ending, while in the normal ending it takes him several years.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the best ending is unlocked by defeating Ganon after recovering all of Link's memories and restoring all four Divine Beasts. (Not doing that second bit is very difficult, since skipping the Beasts adds a Boss Rush before the final battle and gives the final boss twice the normal amount of health; this is generally only attempted by speedrunners. Restoring Link's memories, however, is an optional sidequest, so some players skip it and don't get this ending.) After Calamity Ganon is vanquished, Zelda and Link both vow to work together to restore Hyrule to its former glory.

    Adventure Game 
  • Conquests of the Longbow had four different endings, each for a different level of player success. Having been captured by the Sheriff of Nottingham, the game's hero Robin Hood is tried for outlawry by the newly returned Richard the Lionheart. In the worst ending, Robin is convicted and hanged for his crimes. In the two intermediate endings, Robin and his men are pardoned, but he is not allowed to marry Maid Marian, and the wicked Sheriff remains in office. In the best ending, though, the Sheriff of Nottingham is arrested for his treason and replaced by Little John; the Abbott and the Prior of two groups of corrupted monks are exiled from Nottingham; Robin is ennobled as the Earl of Huntingdon; and Friar Tuck, who is named the new Abbott, presides over the wedding of Robin and Marian, with King Richard in attendance as a guest.
  • Rime has two endings: The common ending has the deceased son show up in his room to comfort his father, while the Golden one has his deceased wife join them as well.
  • Titanic: Adventure Out of Time: the best ending (where you get all the vital historical items) results in a world of peace and prosperity, where World War I, the Russian Revolution, and World War II never happened and the Nazis never even exist. This, incidentally, is also the only ending where you're not violently killed.
    • The objects you find prevent Archduke Ferdinand from being assassinated, results in the names of Russian Revolutionists being handed to the Czar, and make Adolf Hitler finally achieve success in painting.

    Beat 'em Up 

    First Person Shooter 
  • In a first for the series, Call of Duty: Black Ops II has multiple variations of the ending, with several story points providing a total of four distinct sets of variations.
  • Collecting all 29 audio files in the Mombasa Streets level of Halo 3: ODST changes a short section of the Data Hive level; namely, you can access the 30th and final audio file of the game. If you get all 30 audio files, you will actually end up knowing more about what's going on than the intelligence officer who gave you your mission! One of the final cutscenes changes too, in that instead of Dare stopping the Rookie from shooting the Engineer, it's the other way around.

    Hack and Slash 
    • Played Straight in the Nie R sequel, Nie R Automata with its final Ending: E. After 9S and A2 have a Mutual Kill, Adam and Eve state that their conciousness has been uploaded to the Ark, and that the Machine Lifeforms will wander to another planet in an attempt to finally find piece after the war. After that, the Pods go against their code to irreversibly destroy the three fallen Androids, and after an uplifting playable credit scene 2B, 9S, and A2 are all rebuilt, and their fate is left to the player's interpretation. Afterwards, the player is given the option to send aid to another randomly selected player for the final Bullet Hell sequence of the game, but in so doing, they must consent to the deletion of all save data.
    • Musou Stars has 15 different endings for the player to explore. The game's story revolves around 3 different factions fighting for power. There are 4 endings for each faction; one is the ending for that faction's overall story, while the other 3 are exclusive to specific sets of characters. The remaining 3 endings are for when the 3 factions realize their common enemy and join forces together. Out of these three remaining endings, one of them is the true, best ending, where Sayo is successfully released from Yomi's possession, and the heroes purify Yomi and restore her to her divine state.
  • While Nights of Azure has multiple normal endings based on the Relationship Values between Arnice and Lily, getting the True Ending requires completing the game normally, loading the completed game file, completing all the side-quests that appear (which includes beating two Bonus Bosses), before beating the Final Boss again. Only then will you get the ending where the world is saved and Arnice and Lily remain together.

    Interactive Fiction 
  • In Murder at Colefax Manor, the golden ending occurs if you find the evidence in the caverns and don't set off the dynamite, Lord Colefax and his associates end up arrested, the cult is revealed to the public, you achieve nation-wide fame, and you are promoted to chief inspector.

    • Interestingly, future games seem to imply that the bad ending of Sonic the Hedgehog CD (where Sonic fails to save Little Planet) is the canon ending. Sonic the Hedgehog 4 Episode II picks up immediately where Sonic the Hedgehog CD left off, showing the defeated Metal Sonic after his race with Sonic in that game — in Stardust Speedway Bad Future. In Sonic the Hedgehog CD, if you get Stardust Speedway Bad Future, it's impossible to get the good ending, because the next stage after that is the Final Boss, which means that canonically, Sonic fails in that game.
    • Sonic 3 & Knuckles has three endings per character: the bad ending, where you don't get a complete set of MacGuffin Emeraldsnote , the good ending, where you get all of the Chaos Emeralds but none of the Super Emeralds, and the best ending, where you get all the Super Emeralds. The good ending for Sonic's story leads directly into Knuckles's story, via The Stinger showing the Eggrobo that becomes Knuckles's recurring boss rising from the wreckage of the Death Egg. Getting the best ending with all three characters, then beating the game with Sonic (and getting the best ending) again, shows an extra scene of the three main characters posing in front of the game's logo.
  • In Akane the Kunoichi, if you've got all the bonus collectables by the time you rescue Goro, he starts to reciprocate Akane's affection for him, and they all live happily ever after. Otherwise, he just gets rescued and that's it.
  • Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest: The true ending, only accessible by completing the Lost World, sees the Lost World sinking and K. Rool escaping in a fit of Evil Laughter.

    Puzzle Game 
    • In fact, all the Myst games are like this. Myst has four different endings, following the "3 Bad, 1 Golden" formula. Myst III: Exile has four endings where you die, one really stupid mistake ending, one What the Hell, Player? ending, and one Golden Ending. That's a total of no less than six ways to screw up and only one correct solution. Myst IV: Revelation is much tamer, having only three endings (two of which are bad and one of which is Golden), and Myst V: End of Ages also has three (one causes immediate, noticeable failure, one's effects aren't apparent until you realize you can't use the MacGuffin anymore and have no choice but to meet with the baddie, whom you have failed, and the final one, which is rather unapparent at first, is the Golden Ending).
    • One thing that really sets the Myst games apart is that while there is one ending that's is not bad, per achieve your objective and return home alive at the expense of someone else's personal tragedy, which a lot of people would consider a perfectly acceptable outcome...the game does not treat it as a victory, and in fact ONLY the Golden Ending is ever canon regarding future games. In particular, if you only get the ending where you trap Gehn but leave Catherine to her doom in Riven, the entire premise of Exile will make no sense whatsoever.
  • The Portal 2 mod Aperture Tag normally ends with the player character being incinerated. You can deactivate the incinerator in the final test chamber, and if you do so, you will instead be led to an escape elevator.
  • In The Talos Principle, two of the three endings can be considered this. After completing all the basic puzzles and unlocking the (definitely non-golden) Eternal Life ending, you have to solve two different sets of puzzles (which overlap in that you have to get to the top of the tower for both) in order to unlock one of the two other endings. One is called Free Will, which involves one hard, timed puzzle at the top of the tower. In this ending, you finally fulfill the plan of the creators of the simulation, making this narratively the golden ending. The other, Blessed Messenger, requires finding all the stars and solving some extra puzzles, making it the most difficult to achieve, thus it is the golden ending gameplay-wise.


    Raising Sim 

    Real-Time Strategy 
    • Sadly, the Golden Ending is non-canon. The traitor is Avitus. Eliphas is alive as well, but it's implied he still died and found a way to come Back from the Dead. Captain Diomedes was spared and Martellus is still alive.

  • In Puella Magi Madoka Magica Portable, the best ending ensures that Madoka remains a Muggle Best Friend, and the Magical Girls themselves survive and accept their unfortunate circumstances. Though this is the best ending for the girls, it is not so for the rest of the worldnote  since Madoka deciding not to become a magical girl means that she can't defeat all witches before they are born, thereby dooming all magical girls to become witches like they always have, and even the heroes can only look forward to dying in battle one day.
  • Enter the Gungeon has the sixth chamber, Bullet Hell. Defeating the Lich in this level results in the player character being flung out of the Gungeon, instead of being placed back in the Breach if they took the Gun that can Kill the Past.
  • An inverted example in The Binding of Isaac: Ending 1, the first and easiest ending to get, is the only one in which Isaac may survive.

    Role Playing Game 
  • BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm has a bittersweet (but mainly sweet) ending that leaves a few threads hanging and ends with a rather ominous Stinger. But if you’ve taken the time to do all the Inbox missions, then the story extends into the epilogue. The heroes go to visit the Sky Queen (who has been The Ghost up until now), secrets are revealed, and things spiral totally off the rails in a way that pulls virtually every plotline together for a wild, triumphant Grand Finale. Let’s just say that it’s a sight to behold.
  • Chrono Trigger featured two golden endings, two bad endings (acquired by losing to Lavos or to Magus), and several so-so endings. Out of the two golden ones, the ending in which the Epoch is crashed (the "Balloon Ending") is considered the canon ending, with the "Epoch Ending" being a close second. The other endings don't necessarily wrap up all the plot threads, or are just plain silly (such as Marle and Lucca ranking every male character in the game).
    • Inverted in the DS remake: the 'real final 100%' ending is actually the one where they reveal that you screwed up big time, tying it to Chrono Cross. All the others are pretty cheery/cheesy.
    • Chrono Cross, meanwhile, has two different main endings depending on how you beat the final boss after going through the entire plot. The bad end simply treats you to a cutscene of the final boss escaping through a portal. If you jump through a few very well-hidden hoops, then you get the Golden Ending. After getting it, though, you can move on to the New Game+ and go after the 8+ other endings.
  • Any Compile Heart game is going to follow this route:
    • Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory requires you to see a series of optional events during the childhoods of IF, Compa, and Peashy, leading you to acquiring seemingly irrelevant mementos of their various shenanigans growing up with Neptune and Plutia. There is no indication that these are relevant in any way or when they pop up for viewing. These later turn out to be vitally important in restoring a Brainwashed and Crazy Peashy to normal, averting the bad ending route. Note that missing just one will lock you out of the better endings. Afterwards, depending on whether you see another series of completely optional events in a number of different dungeons, you may either go to the Good or True Endings. The dungeons in question need to be unlocked via the Scout System, and there is absolutely no way to influence the likelihood of these dungeons unlocking. However, there’s a good chance that a thorough player will eventually unlock those dungeons simply by playing the game.
    • Megadimension Neptunia VII continues the trend. Getting the Good ending simply requires watching four very obvious and well-alluded to events in the world map of the game's final arc. The Bad ending (which is simply a scene featured in the normal ending cut short, occurring soon after those events become available) is obtained by not watching said events. It's in the Golden Ending where it gets problematic. This time around, the player can lock themselves out of the Golden Ending as early as the first fourth of the game. This game differs from the rest of the series in that it's divided into three Story Arcs, and each one has conditions that all need to be met in order to reach the True Ending.The List  Like in Victory, there's a considerable chance thorough players will get this ending simply by playing, though the middle of the game can mess them up if they clear it too quickly. This is perhaps the most fastidious game in the series in terms of requirements, but it's really, really worth it.
  • Fallout: New Vegas has several endings where you join up with a faction to help them control the titular New Vegas and Hoover Dam, or you can simply take control yourself. Each ending has its ups and downs (except for the Legion ending), but with a lot of work, you can get the Golden Ending, which involves completing most of the side quests and companion arcs the right way, resolving all of the inter-factional disputes peacefully, and helping kill off all the various raider groups and other undesirables plaguing the Mojave. This gives you the ending where most of the factions and characters get happy endings. No matter who you choose to side with some town or faction will inevitably get the short end of the stick. As long as you don't side with the Legion (which wants to oppress or kill everyone in the wasteland), whether or not you get the Golden Ending depends more on how you handled faction quests and sidequests than it does on whether you side with NCR, House, or an independent Vegas.
    • Provided that you believe in his plan of restoring mankind's technological development capability and colonizing other planets, House's ending can be considered a golden ending in the sense that everyone will eventually benefit from it. The main issue with his ending is that some factions like the Kings and Brotherhood of Steel get destroyed, however the Kings can be spared under the right circumstances and there is a mod to restore the Dummied Out option to spare the Brotherhood under House.
    • For the Dead Money DLC, earning the Golden ending requires you to defeat Elijah, rescue all of your companions, and make sure that they don't die. The most difficult of this is Dean Domino, who, if you passed a Barter check when you first meet him and/or treated him poorly (which, given his ego and self-centeredness, means anything less than obsequious subservience in his eyes), will try to backstab you the last time you two meet.
    • In Old World Blues, the best ending involves not only upgrading all of the Sink appliances as well as the Stealth Suit, exploring the entirety of Big MT, and creating Roxie the Robodog, it also involves saving Dr. Mobius and convincing the Think Tank to stay in Big MT.
  • It's generally thought that the best ending of Fallout 4 is the one where you infiltrate the Institute for the Railroad, initiate the Institute quest Battle of Bunker Hill, and then inform the Railroad of the Institute's plans to attack Bunker Hill and help them defend it from the Institute. This results in your cover being blown and you are advised by Desdemona to lead the Minutemen in invading the Institute and sounding the evacuation order before you blow the place to hell. Doing this leaves the Railroad and the Minutemen as effectively allies, and it also means the Brotherhood of Steel will continue to co-exist with the two allied factions in an uneasy truce provided you leave them alone. In other words, this is the ending which involves the least loss of innocent life, with all three factions getting along, the Brotherhood of Steel still potentially around to provide security and technical support, and only the Institute (the designated Big Bad faction and the source of the conflict) getting screwed. However, this ending [[spoiler:will lead to your kidnapped son, currently leader of the Institute, to despise you for ruining the whole thing. Potentially not a big deal, since he is the Big Bad and has massacred so many towns by that point that it's hard to care what he thinks.
    • The main storyline of the Far Harbor DLC involves three factions on The Island: Far Harbor itself, Acadia, and the Children of Atom. DiMA, the leader of Acadia, wants peace on all sides, but the Harbormen and the Children of Atom are hostile toward each other, and neither side fully trusts Acadia. It is possible to get all three sides on friendly terms, though it does require some duplicity on your part, and the willingness to keep certain secrets of DiMA's from anyone else, and requires passing a tough charisma check to avoid having to kill High Confessor Tektus.
  • Final Fantasy:
    • Final Fantasy XV Episode Ignis has an alternate ending where Ignis trounces Ardyn and gets to keep his sight, Ravus defects to Lucis and befriends the protagonists, Noct successfully becomes the True King, and Ardyn fails to die.
  • Mass Effect 2:
    • Everyone, up to and including Shepard, can die in the final mission. You must have upgraded the Normandy to full and have done everything right to make sure that everybody lives. This includes doing all the loyalty missions and assigning everyone the right task during the final mission, and even then there are a few traps; Mordin is highly likely to die if he helps hold the line, so taking him with you for the final fight or having him escort the refugees to safety is a good idea. And ignore Miranda when she claims that she could maintain the force field with her biotics; she's not up to the challenge, so pick Jack or Samara instead. Finally, to save your crew, going immediately through the Omega-4 relay as soon as they are captured. If you don't, then either half or all of your crew gets liquified.
  • Mass Effect 3:
    • Getting the best resolution of the Krogan Genophage plotline requires that Wrex survives ME1 and that Maelon's data was preserved in ME2, and that you refuse the Dalatrass's suggestion of sabotaging the cure in ME3.
    • While fans debate endlessly on their personal favorite, Synthesis is the only ending choice totally closed off until you reach a certain EMS (with a "Shepard survives" scenario in Destroy being the total highest), as well as having the most overtly positive narration.
      • Fittingly, this ending is commonly referred to as the Golden ending.
  • Getting the best ending in Shadowrun: Hong Kong requires that you go out of your way to assemble scattered hints about the nature of the Yama Kings: Crafty Xu's research, Is0bel's recounting of an urban legend from the Walled City, the dreams you experience when you rest after a mission, and dialogue with Raymond you'll only hear if you stop him and Duncan from arguing. With enough information, you can trick Qian Ya into a deal that forces her to retreat to her realm, destroy the Fortune Engine, and release the enthralled people of the Walled City — all without having to sacrifice Raymond.
  • Undertale's best ending is only achieved by completing a True Pacifist Run without having ever allowed the First Child to destroy the universe at the end of the Genocide route. Doing a Pacifist Run after a Genocide Run is called a Souless Pacifist Run. It reveals the nature of "determination," the cause of the depression Alphys suffers from, and Flowey's true identity, and it's the only ending that features a credits sequence. You still get to see all of this if you finished the Genocide route first, but the First Child steals Frisk's body at the last moment, and it's implied that they kill everyone. Again.
  • Vampire: The Masquerade – Redemption has two bad endings (both ending with the death of your love interest) and one good ending, depending on your actions with the Final Boss. If you choose to drink the Tzimisce's blood — killing him in the process, you turn into a villain. If you choose to become his slave, you turn into his Unwitting Pawn. But if you choose to fight him, you can save the day and take the girl.
  • Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines follows down to the precise count of unquestionably bad endings. Siding with La Croix or Quei'Jin will get you either killed or left to torpor from lack of blood on the bottom of the ocean. In many other endings, things will work out just fine, though.
  • While it's a bit less clear in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, most of the fandom would agree that the ending where Radovid dies, you save Roche and his men, and Ciri becomes a witcher is the happiest, although this does end with Nilfgaard conquering Redania, Kaedwen, and Aedirn.
    • In the Skellige Isles, the best ending to the questline to choose the ruler of the isles is generally considered the one where Cerys becomes queen. While Hjalmar can also become king, his ending leads to both increased violence and death as Skellige more aggressively fights Nilfgaard, and also doesn't identify the conspirators behind the plot against his family.
    • In the Hearts of Stone DLC, the golden ending is generally considered to be the one where Geralt stops O'Dimm from taking Olgierd's soul, but in order to do this, you have to complete an optional secondary objective to find out how.
    • In the Blood and Wine DLC, the best ending is the one where Geralt and Regis kill Detlaff, Geralt receives a medal and a monetary reward for stopping him, and Syanna and the Duchess reconcile. Some players dispute how happy this ending is, considering that Syanna's unlikely to face justice for being responsible for everything that's happened, but the alternatives are much worse.
  • Wizardry IV, released in 1986, has possibly the first instance of this trope in any video game. You play as Werdna, the main villain from an earlier game in the series, and there are endings where you join up with the good guys or kill them and continue on with your evil ways. Yet all of those end by teasing you with the words "Have you forgotten something?" The final ending requires going through extremely obscure steps with barely a hint of them, such as walking on thin air from rooftop to rooftop to a specific spot which allows you to teleport back down below the level where you started. In this ending, Werdna throws away the notions of "good" and "evil" and sets out to make his own path.
  • Fable III gives the Hero a Sadistic Choice as ruler of Albion: do you ruthlessly exploit your citizens to prepare your army to fight the Darkness or undo your predecessor's tyrannies to the detriment of readiness for the final battle? To Take a Third Option and be wholly benevolent while protecting your citizens is possible, but requires you to donate an incredible amount of cash to keep the kingdom and army both afloat.
  • Parasite Eve 2 has three endings, with each one giving more details than the last. The best ending has a Where Are They Now moment, which includes Eve, the girl you rescued, becoming Aya's adopted sister and she lives a normal life by going to school — a very far cry from her previous life as an experiment.

  • Giga Wing has three tiers of endings:
    • 1-player, Final Boss not reachednote : Your character commits a Heroic Sacrifice in order to destroy the Medallion.
    • 2-player, final boss not reachednote : Depends on your team. Some endings end with both characters intact, in some others one character is shown alive and the fate of the other is ambiguous.
    • 1- or 2-player, final boss reachednote : Your character or team destroys the Medallion, and regardless of character or team, they go home alive.
  • Downplayed in Blue Revolver, in which the only effect difficulty has on the ending is a special message from the developers awarded for a no-continue clear on Parallel mode. Said no-continue clear includes beating the Parallel-exclusive True Final Boss, by the way.

    Space Sim 


    Survival Horror 
  • Amnesia: The Dark Descent has three endings; The bad ending, where the player does nothing during the final battle and results in Alexander fleeing to his home world and leaving Daniel (the player character) to die, the good ending, where Daniel destroys Alexander's portal, which kills him and breaks Daniel's curse, or the golden ending, where Daniel throws Agrippa's severed head into the portal, killing both Alexander and Daniel, but with Agrippa's help, Daniel is brought to the Afterlife.
  • A staple of the Silent Hill series. Although the happy endings are usually bittersweet, there is always an ideal outcome for the characters:
    • Silent Hill has two events that determine the ending (whether you found Kaufmann's stash and whether you saved Cybil), meaning there are four in total (not counting the UFO joke ending). The best outcome (known as "Good +") has Harry escaping Silent Hill with both Cybil and the reincarnation of Alessa. While possible to achieve in a first playthrough, it requires knowledge that you only get in the good endings, namely that (the red liquid you find can exorcise Cybil and save her.). As such, many believe that the standard "Good" ending is canon, but nothing has been confirmed.
    • Silent Hill 2 has three default endings. In the "Leave" ending, James forgives himself for killing Mary and accepts her request to live on. Laura forgives him and they leave together. The other outcomes has him either commit suicide or replace Mary with Maria. In this case neither ending is easier to achieve than the other, with the game tracking some actions made by the player. Still, the "Leave" ending is the most positive of the three. Interestingly though, most fans and creators seem to prefer the suicide ending and see it as canon.
    • Averted with Silent Hill 3 and Origins, both of whom have a happy ending by default, a bad ending that can only be unlocked on repeat playthroughs through extra steps and a bonus joke ending.
    • Silent Hill 4: The Room has four endings, determined by how haunted Henry's apartment is and whether Eileen survives the final battle or not. The best outcome sees Henry and Eileen defeat the final boss, escape together and ends with a minor Ship Tease between them.
    • The end of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories reveals that Cheryl has been creating a delusion and warping her memories to keep her father alive in her own psyche. There are three conclusions to the story, in two stages, depending on your answers during the therapy sessions and what kind of personality Harry developed during the game. In the bad endings, Harry and Dahlia's marriage fell apart due to alcohol, infidelity or Domestic Abuse. The best outcome has them part on more friendly terms, and Harry makes it clear that they still love Cheryl. Additionally, Cheryl can either blame her father for leaving her alone, refuse to accept that he's dead or tearfully accept his death and move on. The game has a rather clever way of telling you that you should try again if you didn't get the Golden Ending: Dr. Kaufmann outright spells it out for you in his psychiatric evaluation of his patient at the end:
      Am sure patient will be back - lots of uncovered ground. Don't believe we've seen everything yet. Might be worth going back to the start and re-examining with benefit of what we know now. Think patient will agree?
  • Pathologic has a strange variation. At the end of the game, you are required to choose how to deal with the city's situation, with more or less options depending of how you played the game. The Inquisitor's option is always available, while your chosen character's option requires you to complete your missions and save your Adherents. Saving not only your Adherents, but those of another main hero results in that hero's option being also available; saving all Adherents not only allows you to choose between all 4 options, but gives you an ending cutscene where the Executor and the Tragedian address the player directly. The subversion is that all the options are Bittersweet Endings at best, while the secret cutscene is... weird.
  • Cthulhu Mythos RPG: The Sleeping Girl of the Miasma Sea has its True Ending, requiring the player to save Sakura and defeat the final boss with everyone in your party still alive. To do this, the player has to fight two bosses instead of just the final boss. The Mother Plant is optional, but blocks off access to Sakura. To get to the Mother Plant in the first place, players must solve a puzzle. Even if you beat the Mother Plant, you then have to find a photograph in order to help her father wake her up, and this must all be done before you fight the final boss. Otherwise, you get a Pyrrhic Victory for your Normal Ending, resulting in the surviving party members stopping the miasma, but with Sakura's father killing himself because he failed to wake her up after that.

    Turn Based Strategy 
  • Several Fire Emblem games have variations on endings, but they don't drastically change between each other in terms of content. A straight example, however, occurs in the sixth game, The Binding Blade: Getting all eight Divine Weapons and ensuring that they aren't broken will allow the player to open a Bonus Dungeon that spans for three chapters, and defeating the True Final Boss with a specific weapon while having one specific party member still alive brings the true ending. If you don't get all the weapons, or one of them breaks before/during Chapter 22, then the game ends after you defeat King Zephiel. The resulting ending is anti-climactic: the war against Bern is over, but the dragons that have helped Zephiel have gotten away, and nothing comes of the events that happened.
    • Fire Emblem Awakening subverts this: during the Final Boss fight against Grima, you can either have Chrom or the Avatar land the final blow. Chrom slaying Grima with Falchion will lead to Grima sleeping for another thousand years; the Avatar slaying Grima will destroy him for good, as the Avatar and Grima are one and the same. One would think that they'd differ heavily, but they don't. Chrom slaying Grima leads to the Avatar's guilt, yet Chrom's happy, saying that he can't imagine a world without them, and while the Avatar does die when he/she slays Grima, The Power of Friendship revives them sometime later.
  • Ogre Battle, the original, has a ridiculous set of requirements to get the Golden Ending, which incidentally is canon. You need to collect 12 Zodiac stones, which is a Guide Dang It! in itself, have the sword Brunhild, and have recruited every character except for two nonessential ones and one which changes the ending to the worst one. And a full Chaos Frame.
    • Super Robot Wars V and Super Robot Wars X have two final routes that players can traverse to. To obtain the Golden Ending, the players needs to get 25 pilots to Ace status (60 kills required for a character) with one of them becoming a Great Ace (80 kills required to reach this status) and do a specific action in the game (firing the Wave Motion Gun in V when it's available during the Getter Robo Armageddon finale and lowering Mazinger Zero's HP below 30,000 when it first appears in X.) For V, it allows players to finally use the most powerful weapon in the game, the Yamato's Wave Motion Gun with no restrictions at the Final Boss and for X, it allows players to face off the True Final Boss and letting Hopes and Celric live plus allowing players to use Mazinger Zero. Kittan still dies though.
  • The Witness: Completing the game normally returns the player to the start of the game with a 0 Puzzles Solved progress status. The true ending is revealed by unlocking a hidden exit concealed in the starting area. This ending also allows players to piece together the game's plot.
  • Stella Glow: In Imageepoch's swan swong, by reaching rank 7 affinity with Klaus before he leaves your party, the choice to reject a certain character's last wish is made available. In this ending, the aforementioned character survives and you will pick up a powerful character later on in the game.
  • XCOM: Enemy Unknown lacks Multiple Endings, but the good ending is both incredibly challenging to accomplish and outright non-canon; in fact, it's said that when the developers were discussing ideas for a sequel, they decided to go with "La Résistance in the Bad Future" at least partly because so few players could actually beat the first game. What happens if and when a third game is released, given that the cutscene from the good ending includes a Sequel Hook this time, remains to be seen.

    Visual Novels 
  • Corpse Party has many, many dead ends, with one true ending per chapter, with the final one having the original 5 from the PC-98 game survive. As it turns out, though, the next game in the series, Book of Shadows, is spun out of the final wrong ending where the characters are stuck in a "Groundhog Day" Loop.
  • The second Fragment's Note implies that Yukitsuki's second ending is the Golden Ending mainly since it's the only ending where Yukitsuki finally manages to get over the events of the first title and live happily. However, Shizuku's second ending is noted to be the "canon" route.
  • The Letter allows you to get an Everybody Lives ending, and depending on your choices, it's even possible to obtain your preferred friendship and romance outcomes. However, this is not the true ending of the VN. That ending requires triggering multiple character deaths that are otherwise avoidable, and ends with only three of the story's seven main characters surviving.
  • Grisaia no Kajitsu has Amane's Route. The game itself has ten endings in total, one bad and good for each heroine, still either Amane's good or bad ending are the most developed out of all the others. Amane's good ending is the one who goes the furthest in the future, to the point that it actually shows the main characters dying, making it a complete story with no scope of continuation, while Amane's bad ending is the one which seems to reveal some vital plot details about Yuuji's life, loosely connecting this route with the sequel.
  • Monster Prom: THE SUPER SECRET ONE ending is an Omega Ending that requires, in the best case, 13 runs of the game and 6 secret endings, but, appropriately for a Sex Comedy game with a Lovable Sex Maniac player character is an orgy, in which all your love interest show up in the CG waiting for you to join them in a hot tub.
  • In Empress' Starless: Nymphomaniac's Paradise, in the Ending Room, the one good ending "New World" is literally represented as a large golden key on a keyring.
  • In Aviary Attorney, the best ending is when you save Cocorico from getting shot at the end of Act 3, and thus enter Act 4B "Égalité", where the revolution becomes (relatively) peaceful.

    Wide Open Sandbox 
  • Grand Theft Auto V has three endings — one where Franklin kills Michael on top of a factory tower, one where Franklin kills Trevor by setting him on fire, and one where all three of them kill the Big-Bad Ensemble: Steve Haines, Wei Chang, Stretch, and Devin Weston. The third one is the only ending that allows the player to keep playing as all three protagonists and keep the ability to hang out with friends. It's also the most satisfying and par for the course for the series, as in the other two endings, the villains get away scot-free.
  • In Batman: Arkham Knight, beating the game normally has Batman activating the Knightfall Protocol after his identity is exposed to the world by Scarecrow, leading to the destruction of Wayne Manor with the presumed deaths of Bruce and Alfred. If one beats all the non-DLC challenges, the ending is expanded on by revealing that since that day, James Gordon became mayor of Gotham City, his daughter Barbara is now engaged to Tim Drake, Gotham City is now a much safer place, and, hidden away, a mysterious bat-like figure still protects the city...
  • In Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, the best ending of the "Family" storyline requires you to make decisions that ensures the survival of Nikolaos, Stentor, Myrrine and Deimos. If done correctly, your family is reunited once again and the Cult's top soldier has defected.
  • In Red Dead Redemption II, while still rather bittersweet, the ending you get with high Honor, a fully bonded horse, making The Atoner-style choices in Chapter 6, and choosing to hold the line to allow the Marston family to escape is generally considered the best possible ending.

    Non-Video Game Examples 
  • Groundhog Day: After being trapped in the loop for God knows how long and getting God knows how many endings, Phil manages to help everyone in the town with all of their problems, woo Rita, and bring about a perfect day. Only then does the loop break. Unfortunately, even on a perfect day, someone just has to die... Even after literally thousands of loops and decades of time passing within those loops, Phil could never save that homeless man from freezing to death...
  • This is also the plot of the film, Mr. Nobody. The plot centers around the character of Nemo Nobody, who is aware of all the possible versions of his existence. His ultimate goal is to get to live as long as he has to in his current timeline, so he can go back to the perfect timeline he is now aware of and be with the woman he loves.
  • In Men In Black: Alien Attack at Universal Studios Florida, if the riders get an average score high enough, they'll receive the "Galaxy Defender" ending, where it's said that they'll be accepted into the MIB, and an alien is shown tailoring their future black suits. However, for no given reason, Agent J decides to wipe the riders' memories of the experience anyway and send them back home.
  • The Golden Ending in Inside UFO 54-40 can't actually be reached from any option in the book.
  • Invaders Of Hark has exactly one path to the good ending where your character manages to rescue the princess and get the highest possible score, but it's permanently missable with a single decision you make early on in the plot.
  • In the Return to the Tomb of Horrors module of Dungeons & Dragons, there are several options for defeating the Big Bad Acererak. Outright destroying his Soul Jar results in a Pyrrhic Victory that annihilates Acererak but leaves thousands of innocents Deader Than Dead, while the more heroic ending frees the souls he trapped and neutralizes him for centuries but leaves him alive to terrorize future generations. The real Golden Ending is to destroy every single undead in his fortress to keep him from Body Surfing while blocking all of his escape routes, and then releasing the trapped souls. Players who manage this get over twice the XP for the conventional good ending and are acknowledged as "very powerful, determined, and lucky."
  • Pretty much any pre-written adventure for a given tabletop role-playing game has multiple possible endings, including a golden ending for a Player Character team that did everything they're "supposed" to do and a Bad Ending for if the villains win. For examples, pick up almost any published adventure for any tabletop role-playing game.
  • Ruby Quest has a variation. The players got a very good ending for a Cosmic Horror Story — they escaped the Metal Glen and brought another survivor with them. However, it wasn't because they played it exactly right, but because they didn't. Had they not sequence broke their way into the medical cabinet or exercised Video Game Caring Potential by giving Stitches the group photo and saving Jay, the ending would have been bittersweet at best.
  • In the Pony POV Series Dark World Arc, this trope is one of the driving forces of the true Big Bad, Nightmare Eclipse, who often uses video game metaphors (such as referring to everypony who's not her past self, Twilight Sparkle, and Discord as NPCs). Her ultimate goal is to create a 'Golden World' with her Nightmare Gallery. This is impossible, as she's far too obsessed with Revenge on Discord to ever stop punishing him to actually achieve it, and thus would have kept resetting the "Groundhog Day" Loop she trapped the world in for eternity. Thankfully, Twilight and company manage to put and end to her and Twilight ultimately creates a 'Golden World' of her own (by sacrificing herself to create the prime timeline as a seperate universe). The irony of this is that, according to Loose Canon, had Eclipse actually done the right thing and saved her version of the timeline rather than throwing it away, she'd have gotten a much happier end than even the final group of Mane Six actually managed, due to not having her own meddling making things worse. Cadence, Pinkie Pie, and Fluttershy aren't Killed Off for Real, Magica, Poison Apple, and Amethyst Star never have to experience death in the first place (a still traumatic experience for them even after their revival), Twilight ascends naturally to become an Alicorn, Fluttercruel and Discord both have a chance for redemption while still alive, and the Princesses are still at full power and Celestia still has her memory. This is on top of a great many changes Eclipse made that worsened the timeline considerably never happening to begin with and the countless lives she sentenced to Oblivion never being erased. The only negative compared to the final timeline is Mortis not permitting Libra to do a mass resurrection to bring all of Discord and his minions’ victims Back from the Dead and Rarity not becoming Libra to begin with, but compared to the damage Eclipse caused, it's a fair trade-off.
  • Clue has three possible endings, which were originally chosen randomly by the theater. In the home video release, the endings play in sequence, with the last identified as "what really happened". It gives the most complex explanation to the whodunnit, and is the only one in which every single one of the main characters kills or directly contributes to the death of at least one person.
  • In the card game Hearts, the aim in each round is to get the minimum score. You score 1 point for each heart you acquire and 13 points if you acquire the queen of spades, therefore you want to avoid acquiring these cards. However if you acquire all of the penalty cards, then you actually win the round and each of the other players gets 26 points, instead of you. This is known as Shooting The Moon, which is a Golden Ending of sorts.


Video Example(s):

Alternative Title(s): True Ending



"Childhood's Beginning" Ending

Example of:

Main / GoldenEnding