: Re: Anticlimactic ending as a surprise after climax? Note: my story is for a video game, but that should hopefully be irrelevant to the question itself. Our heroes spent a long time fighting their

@Sent2472441

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As a gamer, when you gear up for a battle, you want to get a battle. Mass Effect 3, for example, was criticised for not having a final boss, even though the way the story was structured there was no way it could have a final boss. (Instead there's surviving waves of enemies, followed by an extended dialogue scene. So there's a major, hard, satisfying battle, just no boss.)

You plan to go further than Mass Effect 3 - you want to have your players gear up for a battle, and then give them no battle at all. That's not going to be taken well.

If you want a more complex end than just "and they lived happily ever after" after defeating the demon king, you have many options, some of them sequel hooks. For example:

Your characters never find a body. Some other hints make them concerned, so they need to look over their shoulders for the rest of their lives.
It turns out that removing the demon king doesn't suddenly remove all the political structures at the head of which he stood, and things are still not great.
The demon king surrenders at the end of the battle, saying something about repentance, like you planned for the epilogue. The player gets to decide whether to accept the surrender or kill him, but either way the characters wonder whether they did the right thing.
Etc.

What all those possibilities have in common is that you don't make promises you do not later keep, and you minimize the after-last-battle content to some text or some dialogue. Using those guidelines, I'm sure you can construct an ending that would suit the kind of story you want to tell, with the kind of moral choices and consequences that you find interesting, without sacrificing players' enjoyment.

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