True Final Boss/Playing With

Basic Trope: If you play well enough, you have to fight a much harder Final Boss.

• Straight: After beating the final boss without having lost any lives, another, much harder, boss appears.
• Exaggerated: You can only fight the true final boss if you play the game with your monitor unplugged.
  • Alternatively, there's a True True Final Boss after beating True Final Boss when requirements are met.
• Justified: The true final boss only shows himself for those he deems worthy of his challenge.
  • The True Final Boss is The Man Behind the Man.
• Inverted: If you do well enough, you scare the Big Bad away and only have to fight one of his minions.
  • Alternatively, the True Final Boss appears because you play the game poorly. Cue Curb Stomp Battle.
• Subverted: After you defeat the boss very quickly, a cutscene shows you chase down and confront the Man Behind the Man, and then gun him down without the cutscene even ending. It turns out to just be a better cutscene you get for 100% Completion.
• Double Subverted: After you gun down the Man Behind the Man, you have to fight off The Dragon Behind The Dragon.
• Parodied: After you defeat the Final Boss, hundreds of Men Behind The Man (and one woman) appear, each claiming to be the true Big Bad. After fifty or so battles, the main character screams for it to end. The game complies, leaving you to face the True Final Boss: the credits.
• Deconstructed: Your character is battered and exhausted from the epic battle with the Final Boss, and you are only able to watch in horror as your character struggles to move while the true final boss slaughters him.
• Reconstructed: ...Unless you accomplished the secret tasks in each level, in which case you get control back, your character gets a second wind, and you engage in the most epic battle of the game.
• Zig Zagged: After you defeat the final boss, The Man Behind the Man appears to fight you, only to be blown away from offscreen. However, it turns out he was blown away by the Final Boss, who wasn't so defeated after all, and wants to challenge you to one last fight. If you don't lose a single life to him, he then goes One-Winged Angel and you face his true final form.
• Averted: No matter how well or poorly you play, you fight the same Final Boss.
• Enforced: The programmers want to give the players a reward for 100% Completion.
• Lampshaded: "I must have done really well, if you're impressed enough to fight me in person."
• Invoked: The Man Behind the Man laughs at you after the credits finish rolling, saying "Now try doing it without continues."
• Defied: As Invoked, but he adds, "We won't give you anything for it, but it'll be fun!"
• Discussed: "...If you're so powerful, why didn't you fight me first?"
• Conversed: "Don't miss that room! The real bad guy won't show up unless you've covered the whole map!"
• Played For Laughs: The True Final Boss is invulnerable to all damage except for the Joke Item.
• Played For Drama: If you do not fight the True Final Boss, you get only the Bad Ending as he takes over after you're gone.
  • The True Final Boss is so goddamn hard that nobody, not even the developers, can beat him. And to make it worse, if you lose against him, you get a Downer Ending in which he slaughters you. Because defeating the boss is the only way to win the game and get the True Ending, an outrage is caused in the real world. Eventually, the fandom all force the developers to sign a contract saying that they will never put any True Final Boss in any of their games again. Or else the fandom will firebomb and shoot up the developers' headquarters.

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Look out! The True Final Boss just appeared!.