Name a game game: "...and then it ends with you fighting A GOD."
Trope or not, gods just end up being a common target for games about heroes escalating in power while fighting increasingly world-destroying consequences.
So, for each post, name a game and describe it, with the assumption being that every description automatically ends with the phrase:
"...and then it ends with you fighting a god."
God of war?
I mean you fight all the Gods
And it starts with you fighting a God!
To some extent the majority of JRPGs fit into this trope. It's a long running joke that it isn't a JRPG if you don't end up fighting a god with the power of friendship.
In fact, there are particular reasons behind this that are influenced by Japanese culture and history.
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Hey hey hey, SPOILERS! I'm only ~8,000 hours into the game and haven't gotten there yet!
Morrowind
How can you kill a god? What a grand and intoxicating innocence.
I remember that the sound of his voice surprised me a lot, but I really like it. It honestly sounds a lot more normal than I would have expected - but I guess the voice is the difference between a god and a fake god!
Someone had to put it in a song https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iR-K2rUP86M
There is an argument to be made that neither Dagoth Ur not the tribunal are strictly speaking "gods" by Elder Scrolls' definitions. They have godlike powers thanks to the heart, but they are referred to as false gods by all the Deadric gods you interact with.
Heck, the main quest is basically Azura using you as her vessel to expose the falsity of the Tribunal's claim to godhood.
Although, if you go one level deeper and you buy into Vivec actually achieving Chim, then it could be argued he is at least as godlike as Talos (who used his understanding of Chim to retcon the actual history of Tamriel). Which is another can of worms, because his godhood is also questioned and the whole reason his worship was outlawed in the white-gold concordant....
Oh Elder Scrolls lore, how I love your convoluted nature.
And oblivion, and skyrim
Bayonetta invents an entirely new god in the last 10 minutes of the game that was never explained or alluded to before, and then has you piledrive it into the sun.
sounds neat tbh
I haven't seen it mentioned yet, but Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is a great game...
I do agree on it being a great game, and she fights gods on her way to her final goal but
::: spoiler spoiler
she doesn't really fight any gods though - it is all in her head :::
I found when they used that same device to explain the ending of Hellblade 2 really unsatisfying.which is a shame because I'd really enjoyed the journey.
That is a shame, I would have thought that she would have some measure of control after the events of the first game
Especially, since the burden she was carrying was lifted.
::: spoiler spoiler I guess she has a severe case of the "blessing" that she disassociates with reality regularly and is unable to discern what is real and what is not as she lives a life of what she thinks is real as truth.
I guess I can see that happening without any form of medication or therapy and only having her own thoughts to live with after the traumatic events of her past :::
Kirby Superstar: Milky Way Wishes. Ohh you think it's a game about pink ball stopping the sun and moon from fighting? NOPE, here's a jester with power of god.
Pokemon. Technically you don't end with fighting god but somewhere you're fighting a pokemon that's basically god of something.
Also does Hades count lol.
You can always spot a Kirby fan based on how they react to a butterfly appearing late into the game.
Even better for Pokemon, God (Arceus) lets you capture it in a pokeball
Even better, Arceus is given out for free like christmas in the og gen 4. Only in the remake they have you battle and capture it.
Path of Exile has you clearing out the entire pantheon. Then the main campaign is over and you begin the post-game part, which is what actually matters.
Hollow Knight is a game where you start out as a little bug discovering a bug's nest. Then you unlock some secrets, find the secret true final boss, and next thing you know, it ends with you fighting a god.
Another Crab's Treasure is a cute, fun, cartoony soulslike game where you play as a hermit crab whose shell has been stolen! He heads out on an adventure to get it back.
The original Baldur's Gate story (1 and 2 + expansions) begin with you being a barely trained orphan sent on an unexpected journey by your foster father...
Fantastic games. Irenicus while not the god boss you're referring to, is my favourite villain ever.
The Talos Principle.
Elohim DESTROYED with Facts and Logic!
Pretty much any Final Fantasy game fits this to some extent.
Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous.
You start as a level 1 pf1e character and get thrown into a war against demons. This game is pretty hard if you don’t know 1e rules but completely viable, i played it before knowing any 1e. And you don’t end with a level 20 character, you end up much more powerful.
If you are good at making builds, you can have some wild combos, it’s great. It balances the power trip you can have with some brutal fights. Fuck those Bodaks.
I highly recommend it if you enjoy real time CRPGs. Turn based mode exists, but it makes some fights (cough cough tavern *cough cough) take multiple hours.
I would say anyone interested in the game a general rule of thumb would be trash mobs and easy fights = real time and bosses and difficult fights turn based.
One can luckily change that on the fly.
I mean if one is confident in their micro, then one can do most of the game in real time, but the game does have enemy encounters that just feel unfair when fighting real time while feeling better tuned in turn based.
Good game though as one journeys through one of initially 2 "ascension" paths that can eventually branch out into one of 10 different paths as one takes the fight against, technically, gods - but not in the heavenly sense.
Im about four months into my first playthrough of Wrath. Love it.
I've owned this game for years and I love RTwP combat in games like PoE and Baldurs Gate (first two). You've convinced me to give it another try!
Recently finished that game as an Azata and transcended. The story is great and the mythic paths are really quite fun, but I found combat to be a slog on the higher difficulties. Ended up turning it down to normal (from core) in act 4 due to the sheer amount of fights that take ages. The Defender's Heart battle took me almost 2 hours! I get they want to make it feel grand, but it just slowed it down too much. For any new players, I recommend picking a lower difficulty, and use liberal use of real time for easy fights, of which there are far too many. You also need some resilience against bugs, as there are many. Only a few are game breaking, but most are really annoying and cause you to lose actions or items or something. Despite all this criticism, behind all that is a great game and I do recommend it to crpg fans, especially if they like pf1e (which I hadn't played at the time).
Azata was a fun character. Love myself some elysian whimsy.
But good lord the defender’s hearth fight. I played a build based on stunlocks and didn’t have good dps at that point. I ended up wobbling enemies for about 5 hours. I started the fight drunk and finished it sober -_-
Yeah, I was built around slumber and coup de grace, so I feel your pain. I nearly died to the Minotaur too as I started using levelled spells just to make it go faster and then I was out when it attacked. Had Ember give him a run around while Lann killed him lol.
No one has mentioned Noita yet? In Noita, killing a god is part of exploring the game.
Nier Automata gets really meta...
Fable
As a kid you get your village burned down but you're rescued at the last minute by a Hero.
You're raised in the Heroes Guild and become one yourself. You help people, kick some chickens, and learn magic.
And then you fight a god, twice.
And then I get the solus greatsword and berserk and win the game.
Persona 5 is a JRPG where you role play as a high school student, who was transferred to a high school far from home in Tokyo due to being expelled...
Persona 3, 4 and 5
I know it's not out yet but I feel pretty confident adding Persona 6 to this list too.
Breath of Fire 3. People find a dragon that had been dormant in a crystal for centuries. It wakes up later as a human child. That child travels the world trying to figure out who they are. And then you fight a god, or not it's your choice.
first game I thought of too, that Boss fight knocked My socks off.
I'm a notorious grinder in JRPGs. I love to power level, and that boss took me 45 minutes to beat. For reference the end boss in Tales of Symphonia took three hits from Presea when I got to them.
I felt the same way.
I grind it until I could comfortably beat every regular enemy in the game, but I'm pretty sure it took me over 2 hours actually beat that God boss, barely hanging on and getting one shot in every three healing turns or whatever
In the first Witcher game, you fight a god from the Cthulu mythos (Dagon) on like a side quest, and he's not even that tough.
Most persona/smt games fit the bill
Xenoblade Chronicles
Technically you don't, just a very powerful being who was allowed to powerful by an AI "god".
Yeah, but you don't find that out until later games. At the end of Chronicles, it certainly looks and feels like fighting a god.
The AI stated that it was an computer intelligence at the end of the first game. There's even the cutscene of the project at one point showing what happened, with the computer having the same voice.
Shin Megami Tensei 2 and it doesn't just end with you killing a god. You get to kill THE God, YHWH, aka the Abrahamic God!
Terraria.
And Calamity mod.
"Doom" is a pretty good one.
"Advent Rising" you find out you are a god.
"Dread Delusion" prisoner to decider of gods fate.
A lot of Kirby games.
Even with the weird Mormon allusions, I really wish we could've gotten an Advent Rising sequel.
I had no idea it had some basis in mormanism, but I also really wanted a sequel to it. It ended on such an interesting cliff hangar and with Orson Scott Card it seemed like the plot would actually go somewhere.
Most Final Fantasy games and JRPGs in general.
Final Fantasy Legends!
You are in a theater group and steal a magical princess. Yada Yada Yada, you find out your twin brother is using magic life mist to build an army of dolls... Yada Yada yada, the princess turns a castle into a giant robot to fight the doll army... Yada Yada yada, you go to your alien space ship to find all of your other clones, yada yada yada your clone brother kills you and the only way to realive is to kill Necron the god of death and then the game ends.
Final Fantasy 9, the pinnacle of FF games doing this.
Another favorite for me though would be Breath of Fire.
You are a man, you become a dragon man, you find out you were always a dragon, find the goddess and have to chose between killing her or becoming a dragon god and killing your friends.
Firstly, I feel offended you reduced the giant mecha vs a dragon cinematic to robot vs a doll army :P
Ff9 did the "all powerful god" but it is really a wtf out of no where momement that can feel jarring with the themes of the game - a ludonarrative narrative dissonance, unless I missed some obscure reference to it somewhere
I would argue that ff6 wrote a less jarring "kill a god" fight:
::: spoiler spoiler Although pulling ideas from christianity, it has a psychopathic clown ascend to godhood, shatter the world and sit a top his "heavenly throne" shooting god rays from the sky on a whim
The fight then is a series of killing his "angels" before finally destroying him and shattering his "heaven" :::
mass effect. Shepard kills many reapers, which are pretty close to eldritch gods in another setting.
Earth Defense Force 5 ends with you fighting a god. EDF 6 basically starts and ends with this.
Kid Icarus Uprising. You play as a goddess's right hand man, and end up fighting several other gods.
The Age of Mythology campaign. It starts with you heading to the Trojan War because some pirates stole your statue's trident…
The entirety of Final Fantasy 14
Final Fantasy 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 13
Haven't finished 1,2,3 but spoilers below:
::: spoiler spoiler Ff4 - have to stop a vengeful manifestation of an advanced race
Ff5 - stopping a tree
Ff6 - stopping a clown's divinity
Ff7 - well, that is more an alien with support from the spirit of the planet protecting itself
Ff8 - sorceressess and time shenanigans
Ff9 - ends with an abrupt challenge from a death god to convince it not to delete the current universe
Ff10 - and be transported to a land where a dominant religion is enforced through the power of a wmd that is maintained by "faith"
Ff12 - prevent the folly of a man trying to become a god, through the power of a renegade of the universe godhood pantheon
Ff13 - become pawns of higher beings wanting to stop the nihilism of one of its brethen tired of the infinite cycle
:::
::: spoiler FF8 spoiler
Was Ultimecia characterized as (a) god, or wanting to be one?
I think Ultimecia wanted a world that consists of only her, hence she could be considered a god in her own world. She succeeded until the power of friendship and love defeated her but ...
:::
I don't think it counts under what I understood the prompt in the OP is all about. But then again, it's been a while since I last played that game, and I hardly paid much attention to the story (got too icked out by the love story). Cool game mechanics tho.
::: spoiler spoiler
In a way, I guess technically her goal was very godlike as she wanted to control and compress time to create a favourable timeline for herself.
That goal however just created a self-fulling circular loop prophesy as her fear of SeeD was ultimately her demise.
As for the time shenanigans:
I suppose one can think of her desperately trying to win a time loop and going mad from failure :::
Edit
::: spoiler spoiler
Laguna's Love Story wasn't too bad, although a little on the nose for Squall falling in love with Laguna's first Crush, but him settling down with Raine was bitter sweet at the end. :::
That last sentence in the first spoiler is more or less my take on her situation.
::: spoiler FF8 spoiler
I saw Ultimecia as more of a tragic character than someone who really wanted power for its own sake, which is why I don't really see her as wanting to be a god. She just wanted a way out of the time loop. As you've said: she went mad from repeated (?) failure.
Coincidentally, I thought Squall, at the very end, could have had ended the time loop. In that cutscene after Ultimecia's defeat, as he was wandering back to his own time, he met a much younger Edea, who has then just inherited Ultimecia's power. He could have chosen not to tell Edea about SeeD at this point, but I don't think he's aware he was talking to that Edea he knew (even though I think the surroundings should have sufficiently clued him in).
:::
::: spoiler FF8 B-plot spoilers
I found Squall falling in love with the daughter of Laguna's first crush to be a nice little thing. I also liked Laguna far better as a character, and his love story with Raine a far superior love story than the main one. I think he really fell in love with Raine, but his fatherly love for Ellone far outweighed it.
:::
FF8 spoiler response ::: spoiler spoiler
Yeah, I agree especially with her being a tragic character her final lines sounds line someone desperate:
"Recall a memory from your childhood. The sensations, emotions, the words from back then. Growing up means leaving something behind and throwing something away. Time will not wait, no matter how hard you hold onto it, it escapes you. And ...",
especially considering how Ellone's powers work
I think it is repeated (at least once already) or she achieved some form of omnipotence with her time compression as her plans seem to have a definitive goal to them like she knows who to look for (Adel and Ellone) and what to do to achieve her ends. Edea (forgot her name) probably still had enough power to "guide" her a bit but ultimately she was overpowered most likely, until Ultimecia released her power to hop to the next one.
Yeah, Squall could have finished that in a few ways - although, I guess seeing Ultimecia survive (especially after she implanted that final thought, in retrospect), his instincts probably didn't want to take the chance of her time hopping again and wanted the time line to be prepared. Also he couldn't kill an innocent person either and risk one of the orphans getting the power as Edea tells him
The love story between Squall and Rinoa can be melodramatic, but it is done well enough with Rinoa peeling away the layers of edge off of Squall.
Laguna and Raine though, I agree was a lot better and I think Raine understood the type of person Laguna was and supported him - her personality was like his in some ways. She probably saw Ellone as a daughter as well and knew how far he would go to protect her, which is why she probably kept her pregnancy quiet to not distract him on his quest to save their "daughter". :::
Oh! Forgot which event happened after which other event in that long cutscene after the final boss battle.
::: spoiler FF8 spoilers
I thought Squall met the younger Edea after receiving Ultimecia's powers. I only remembered the fact that Squall implanted the idea of SeeD into Edea, but I couldn't remember how exactly it happened.
As for Rinoa, back when I first played the game, I was a bit younger than Squall is, and Rinoa annoyed the hell out of me—far more than I got annoyed with Selphie, supposedly the annoying one. Younger me would have preferred if Squall fell in love with someone else, heck, even Seifer would have been a better love interest for Squall as far as younger me was concerned. I guess then, their love story worked nicely, and younger me was just too stubbornly edgy to appreciate that.
I think Laguna and Raine's love story resonated with me far better because it's far less "abrasive" and in-your-face. It might be a more bland and ordinary love story, but it's a nice foil to the main love story between Squall and Rinoa.
:::
EDIT: failed my spoiler formatting
FF 8 Spoiler Response
::: spoiler spoiler
If I recall, Squall sees a defeated Ultimecia staggering and ready to pass her powers on before dying, but Edea stops him from finishing her off They sort of have a conversation and SeeD is mentioned and young Squall comes running to Edea
Rinoa grew on me, at first hated the brattiness but over time she grew on me as a character who acts a blunt force determined to break Squall out of his shell. The Ragnarok scene and her becoming a sorceress locked her in as she matured and leaned on Squall for support in a reversal of her wanting to be his support and Squall being more "human"
The real love story is Zell and Hot Dogs (oh, almost forgot, Pig-tail girl)
Laguna and Raine was a lot more wholesome and mature with it not having any internal drama. The drama is more external elements leading to a more bitter sweet tale of Laguna accomplishing his mission but living with guilt of his failures :::
Immortals Fenyx Rising
Loop hero has you trying to rebuild a forgotten world as you traverse round a simple loop...
Depending on how you define all powerful God, Fallout New Vegas
Asura's Wrath, DMC1, Bayonetta
Basically this
Grim Dawn.
One moment you're dying on the gallows, the next you're fighting the tongue of a long dead god trying to reclaim it's appropriated flesh.
And the stakes only get higher from there for the DLCs.
Most of the Dark Souls are like that, ain't they? I'm too weak sauce to ever reach those levels, though. Black Myth Wukong has you starting Heaven's entire army, so I guess that qualifies too (I'm assuming you end up fighting a god at the end, but again, I'm not worthy)
Monkey canonically kicks all the gods' asses, but then loses to Buddha, who is not a god. That's because instead of using force, Buddha preys on Monkey's ego by giving him an unwinnable bet. And THEN Buddha drops a mountain on him.
Mario and friends find a secret door while on their quest to defeat weapon invaders from another dimension.
Final Fantasy Legend, on the Game Boy. There are multiple worlds, and in every world there's a giant tower, and when you enter the tower, each level leads to a different world. Eventually you get to the very top and you fight God, who is guarding the door at the top level that leads to paradise.
Silent Hill and Silent Hill 3 - both games revolve around a cult that is trying to bring about the rebirth of their deity. You play as someone who finds themselves in the town of Silent Hill in search of a person. You solve puzzles, battle monsters, and navigate the town… and then it ends with you fighting a god.
Yakuza 0 goes through all the emotions with its storytelling: you start by singing karaoke, then become a fugitive, you go bowling, lose a friend, watch a dirty video...
Also, holy shit, most of you guys missed the point. Edit: Wait, did I miss the point? I thought this post was about wrong games for funsies
Though you DO actually fight a god in Yakuza 5 as a sidequest.
Grezzo 2 (you fight the actual Christian god)
OG Chrono Trigger
I mean... Dark Souls is the game that essentially created this meme.
Your entire goal is to beat up God and take his place so you can keep things going as they've been going for an untold number of centuries. Though IMO that's one of the bad endings; the good ending is ending the status quo and becoming a new, different god. A god a humanity instead of... Whatever the fuck the gods before were (they are separated from humanity, even though they look like humans) 🤷🏻♂️.
For a much older game... EarthBound. Starts off just being a quirky, modern day (modern day being the 90's in this case) RPG; ends with you fighting a literal space god that looks vaguely like a fallopian tube.
I'm fairly sure the meme was popularized way back with old JRPGs; just that they tended to be the ones with long enough stories to gain that kind of path of progression.
Yeah if I had to take a guess shin megami tensei series (1987) is solidly in the "... And then you fight God", but a lot games even earlier probably did the same.
Actual gods, or do self-proclaimed gods that are actually something else count?
Cuz if the latter, Final Fantasy 1 (same year, few months earlier) might be Patient Zero for killing "gods" in jRPGs.
I just checked, and Dragon Quest 2 released in January of the same year as both of those games and ends with you fighting Malroth, god of destruction. If anything is patient zero, it's the Dragon Quest series.
Haha, I think it's very likely there are even earlier examples than both of those. I debated counting final fantasy, and did not recall the final boss of Dragon Quest 2.
I think ultimately, Man v God is a story that's existed for a looong time.