Ending

An ending is an event in a visual novel where a story, branch, or route is concluded. This is often accompanied by credits for the game's creation, or a 'Game Over' message. Multiple endings are a key part of the visual novel medium; VNs with a single ending and no choices are often called kinetic novels.

Common Conventions of Endings in Visual Novels

Visual Novel endings often have three main types: The Good, The Bad, and True. As the names suggest, good endings are endings where things turn out well for the player character, bad endings are where they don't, and true endings are considered the canonical ending, whether good or bad. Many true endings are good, or 'best' endings, though they are not required to be.

The One Good and Many Bad

Some visual novels employ a significantly higher volume of bad ends than good endings. Many of these visual novels run a gauntlet of choices or mini-games to determine where the players end up. Bad endings are numerous and the result of making the wrong choices in a given situation. This convention is common in visual novels where the player character's death is likely, like horror, action or thriller visual novels, but may appear in visual novels where there are lower stakes, like failing to impress a particularly picky love interest in a romance visual novel, or failing to solve a puzzle at various stages of completion in puzzle visual novel hybrids.

Character Ends

In character driven visual novels individual characters will have both good and bad endings associated with them. In romantic visual novels, it's often love interests that have both good and bad endings each. In horror visual novels, individual survivors may have their own good and bad endings. These visual novels also sometimes have pure failure state endings, e.g, you court no one in a romance visual novel, or no one survives in a horror visual novel.

The Black-Screen Bad End

Some visual novels are not written to have bad ends, but still have failure states. When a player selects choices that do not lead to a good ending, but also do not lead to scenes where a bad end scenario is played out, this is a Black Screen Bad End. These endings often cut to either a 'Game Over' message, return the player to the title screen, or outright close the visual novel.

Meta Endings

Meta endings are a type of ending where the events are connected back to the real world, narratively acknowledging that a character, or sometimes the story itself, is aware that they are part of a visual novel. This is not to be confused with visual novels set in real world settings. These types of endings are most often seen in horror or comedy visual novels where they are added as dramatic twists or genre-aware self-referential humor.

Some visual novels use this type of ending to cue the player into mechanics that exist outside of the story and in the nature of the game, its interfaces, and even its technical end, encouraging them to experiment outside of how the game is ordinarily interacted with.

Loop Endings

Loop endings are false endings where the player is lead to believe they are restarting or resuming play from a previous point, but are continuing play as part of a contiguous story. Some or all characters need not be aware of the existence of the loop for this to be a looping ending, but the information that is carried between instances of the game needs to be accessible to at least one character, most often the player character, supporting character, or even antagonist.

This does not include games where information is retained only by the player themselves. If no characters acknowledge that the events have happened before, then it's not a loop ending.

Some visual novels employ characters mechanics where previous play throughs are factored into the state of the current play through.

Hidden/Secret Endings

Visual novels sometimes have hidden endings. Hidden endings are often endings achieved by completing a series of choices or other obscure combination of events. True endings are the most common type of hidden ending, but joke endings in more dramatic works, harem endings in romance visual novels, and meta endings find themselves in hidden endings.

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