Secret video game endings

The ending of a game is arguably the most important part. Depending on how the events of your journey are wrapped up, you could feel content and satisfied, or completely disappointed and let down. After putting in dozens – possibly even hundreds – of hours, the game better make the ending worth your while. Some games opt to have multiple endings to feel more appropriate to what each player does (or doesn’t) do in their game. Then there are games that hide alternate endings behind either incredibly challenging or cryptic methods.

Secret endings are nothing new but have never gotten any easier to find. You could play a game 100 times and never manage to stumble upon the correct steps or requirements to unlock some of these endings. Most secret endings are meant as jokes or little extra prizes for the most dedicated fans, but sometimes they even act as the “true” ending, which is just cruel. These are just a few secret endings from gaming that I doubt you ever knew about or would have found on your own.

1 Chrono Trigger

Join the Dream Team

Fun fact about Chrono Trigger: It invented the term “New Game +”. The function had existed before this game, but this was the first time that specific term was used, and is required to get the most difficult secret ending in the game. On a new game + run, you have to defeat the final boss Lavos in the Ocean Palace at the very start of the game. This means you will only have Crono and Marle in your party at most. If you can somehow pull it off, you will be sent back to the End of Time, but with new people around. If you talk to Gaspar he will introduce you to the game’s developers, such as Yoshinori Kitase, Tetsuya Nomura, Akira Toriyama, Nobuo Uematsu, Hironobu Sakaguchi, and many more. Each has a fun little line, but talking with Sakaguchi will add you as a member of the Dream Team and add your name to the credits.

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2 Final Fantasy X-2

Not worth the effort

The first mainline Final Fantasy game to get a sequel, X-2 had a very different structure to the original. The gameplay and battle systems were great, and it was cool to see how the world and characters moved on after the events of X, but this secret ending is way too much trouble. If you’re not playing with a guide on your lap, it is effectively impossible to get. There are several endings you can get in X-2 that all depend on if you lose to a specific boss, or how much story completion you have if you win. The secret ending, of course, requires you to beat the game with 100% story completion. Doesn’t sound too bad, right? Wrong. This is more than just doing all the quests. You also need to talk to every NPC each time they get new dialogue (and you can’t skip it) plus give the correct answers every time. You also can’t skip any cutscene, and some quests have to end in specific ways. It’s a complete drag that sucks all the fun out of the game, only for an ending that undermines the impact of the first game.

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3 INSIDE

Break free

Understanding the regular ending of INSIDE is already a task, but that’s nothing compared to what it took just to find this alternate one. Without a single word of dialogue in the game, players had to suss out and collaborate on all the little details and hints in the world to realize there was something else to be found. The easy part was finding and breaking all the 13 collectibles in the game. After that, I would never have made it a step further. Turns out the board where you find the final orb lights up a dot with each one you find. Once you have 12, the hatch ahead will open revealing the last one to break. Oh, and you also have to pay attention to a set of background notes specific orbs make for the next step. Hidden in a cornfield is a trapdoor you just have to know is there to access. Head down and you will find a lever that can go left, right, and up. You need to input a code based on those musical notes to open the following door where you can go inside and trigger the alternate ending.

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4 NieR: Automata

Ending T

NieR: Automata has exactly 26 endings, each tied to one letter of the alphabet. A through E are considered the “main” endings, while the remaining letters are kind of joke or hidden endings. Ending T isn’t hard to get once you know how to do it, but isn’t something you would really think to even try. You will spend a lot of time swapping out various chips to augment your abilities in NieR to add or augment your fighting abilities, but space will always be an issue. Different chips take up different amounts of space, but there are always 2 slots dedicated to your OS chip. That’s not enough to tempt you to remove it in almost any case, but if you ever do decide to, you will instantly deactivate and credits will roll. This makes perfect sense when you think about it – your android can’t function without an OS so removing it would obviously be suicide – but is still a fun option for a secret ending.

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