Best Retro Game Endings of All Time

Best Retro Game Endings: The Stories That Stayed

A great game ending requires that the game’s mechanical and narrative elements have built investment sufficient to make the resolution meaningful. A boss fight that concludes a poorly-told story produces nothing; a narrative revelation after dozens of hours of mechanical engagement can produce genuine emotional response.

The retro game era produced endings that have been discussed for decades — not because of their production values (the hardware limitations were real) but because the investment the games built made the endings resonate. Link’s Awakening’s revelation works because the player spent 15+ hours in a world that was always a dream. Shadow of the Colossus’s ending works because the player spent 8+ hours doing what it depicted.

Link’s Awakening — The Dream Ending

The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening (1993) ends with the revelation that Koholint Island, where Link has spent the entire game, is the dream of the Wind Fish — and that waking the Wind Fish, the game’s goal, will cause the island and everyone on it to disappear. The characters Link has befriended — Marin, who dreams of flying away from the island; the village NPCs; the animal companions — will cease to exist.

The game earns this ending by spending 15+ hours making Koholint real. Marin’s backstory and her dream of seeing the world. The specific relationships Link builds with the island’s residents. The ending’s emotional weight is proportional to the investment the game has built. Link’s Awakening is among the earliest games to use the relationship between player investment and narrative payoff as a deliberate design element.

Metal Gear Solid — The Nature of War

Metal Gear Solid’s ending — Solid Snake’s defeat of Liquid Snake, Otacon’s choice to help Snake escape, the walk through the snowfields while Snake questions whether there is any future for a genetically engineered soldier outside of war — addressed its themes directly. The post-credits monologue (Snake and Meryl driving away, Snake’s reflection on living) brought the game’s question (“can soldiers choose a life beyond war?”) to a resolution that acknowledged the question’s difficulty without pretending to answer it.

The ending’s final act — where Revolver Ocelot’s allegiances were recontextualized in the post-credits scene — set up Metal Gear Solid 2 with information players didn’t yet understand was relevant. The multi-layer ending rewarded players who paid attention throughout and created ongoing discussion about what the game’s resolution actually meant.

Chrono Trigger — Multiple Endings Done Right

Chrono Trigger’s twelve endings were the first successful implementation of meaningful multiple endings in a major JRPG. The “Dream’s End” ending — accessible only by challenging Lavos immediately at the game’s start — rewarded players who pushed the game’s New Game Plus mechanic to its limit. The “What the Prophet Seeks” ending, accessible mid-game, produced a different interpretation of Magus’s role. The canonical ending’s credits sequence — each time period restored, the party saying goodbye to each era — used the time travel mechanic for emotional resolution as effectively as any narrative device in 16-bit gaming.

The “Frog’s ending” specifically — where Glen returns to being fully human and visits Cyrus’s grave — required playing a sidequest to unlock and produced an emotional resolution that players who discovered it described as the most affecting moment in the game.

Shadow of the Colossus — The Cost Ending

Shadow of the Colossus ends with Wander’s transformation into the entity he has been serving — Dormin has used the colossus kills to reassemble its scattered essence within Wander’s body. Wander is killed and reborn as an infant. Mono is resurrected. They ascend to a secret garden above the castle.

The ending’s emotional register is deliberately ambiguous: Wander gets what he wanted (Mono lives), but at the cost of his own identity and memory. The final shot — the infant Wander and Mono in the secret garden, with a tiny baby horse suggesting Agro’s presence — offers a fragile happiness that the player has just learned not to trust. Shadow of the Colossus’s ending is among the most discussed in gaming because it refuses to resolve the ethical questions it has raised.