I just finished KOTOR for the first time. The last couple hours sucked, rest of the game aside. Suddenly the game is all about endless trash mobs for hours and an end boss ten times more difficult than anything in the game before him.

A lot of games do this. A lot of games make the end really annoying, seeming to think that is how we want games to end. The truth is by the time I'm at the end I am probably ready to play something else, and your endless annoying changes just make me want to throw my mouse at my monitor.

So... calm me down. Make me smile. What are some games that get the ending right? Gameplay wise, obviously. What are games that end on a high note?

As much as I hate to say it, Modern Warfare 3 >_>

Well, Half-Life 2, arguably.
*spoilers*
It just says "Oh, you got trough all of my challenges. Very well, here you go, have this superpowered physics gun, go, enjoy"

As much as I think of older games first (and HL2 is still a new game in my mind), I thought of it first. It was just such a great moment of achieving power, that still managed to give you time to enjoy it.

I also think that Starcraft did it very well also, vanilla and Brood War. Really good unit and mission design that made you look at your units and wonder how anything could stop you, and then slowly making you realize how in trouble you were.

I like end-boss fights where the success comes from understanding what you are supposed to do to defeat him/her, not so much countless retries until you get lucky enough to kill all his millions of hitpoints. Kind of a puzzle then, I guess.

I think there are many games like that, but for now I recall e.g. the end boss fight in ICO (a PS2 game). IIRC, it was purely about understanding what you need to defeat the end boss, and how to use it. After that, it wasn't that hard at all.

Was that an example to get the ending right (like the OP asked), or wrong?

I recently replayed HL2, and I think I liked the ending, or at least it wasn't an example of a bad ending to me. And I had forgotten how audio-visually pleasing the last few levels were.

Hmm, then again, the ending of the first Half-life? I am unsure if it sucked or not. I think it was supposed to be much harder (ie. you probably were supposed to jump around on the high ledges to shoot at his brain or something), but in the end I think it was enough to just hide behind one big rock down below, and from there snipe with various guns to his forehead enough many times, until he died. I am unsure if that was the way to defeat him that the game developers intended.

Big headed alien. One of the worst final bosses in history.

I am not saying it shouldn't have action, just that it is not just about same old fights as before, but much harder than anything before in the game. What the OP was complaining about anyway, I think.

There was still action and timing needed in the ICO end-boss fight, and at least to me it wasn't apparent at first what I am supposed to do. So you have to find a way to survive the uber-boss, and then utilize it.

Example of what I hated was the boss in Heretic 2. But it was actually already the first boss, but I stopped playing there. The boss fight seemed to be nothing but "Ok here is this powerful boss levitating in mid-air, and all you can do is to run around in a small room without any hiding places, hoping his shots will not hit you, and shoot him enough times. Good luck.". Or then I missed something obvious in that boss fight.

It may have also affected my frustration level that I was playing the game in the hardest difficulty level, which was completely fine for me, until that boss fight... Not quite the worst, but then as I found out that defeating him wasn't that hard after all. Maybe I would have hated it if I really had to jump around on those ledges above me, but fortunately I didn't.

I liked the boss itself, it was intimidating and bizarre at the same time. Like a big scary baby.

Come to think of it, there were quite many bosses in the original Half-life (and its two expansions) that fall into the category of a mini-puzzle, where you don't directly fight the enemy, but you come up with a way to kill it. Like, say, the pit monster which would react to your sounds, and wouldn't die until you were able to launch the space rocket that scorches it to his pit.

I enjoyed it that way much more than if it was merely about running in that pit room, trying to shoot the monster constantly with your weapons enough times while trying to evade the hits from his sharp limbs, until it dies from your shots. I would have disliked that kind of encounter a lot, and that was what the Heretic 2 boss fight appeared to me.

I'm afraid that epic, unforgiving battles at the end of the game is basically what most gamers want. Otherwise they will get angry and start flaming that the ending was "totally anticlimactic". I like endings that are smooth and logical consequences of the plot like Thief, Alan Wake and American Nightmare (those three just came to my mind but I guess there are some more). Only one of them (Alan Wake) had an actual boss fight but it was not really difficult. I've heard, however, that a lot of people hate those endings...

Yeah, that was pretty good, but I don't categorize this as a boss fight. But a very clever level design indeed.

Binary Domain. Final fight is tough (but not too tough), dynamic and it vary a little based on your previous decision. Also there are different endings based on your decisions.

They actually did it all what I wanted to see in action game, but it sold extremely bad, so I believe that I won't see it again.

I hate those with a passion. "Every enemy we've thrown at you until now have taken damage in the ordinary way. Now kill this guy. Oh, what is that? He doesn't take any damage when you attack him, and you think that's completely illogical given the rest of the game? Well, then you'll have to try something else, won't you? No, we won't tell you what it is, you'll have to go look at a YouTube video to find out. And once you've done that a few times, we'll change it, so you'll have to do something completely different and unrelated to hurt him. And we'll do that to you 3 or 4 times before you can finally take him down for good."

Still, in some games they do give you enough clues about what you're supposed to do to make the boss fight enjoyable. I thoroughly enjoyed the end of Portal, but then that was also the only fight in the game, so it didn't break "the rules of fighting" already established by the gameplay up until then.

Portal boss was good, but I don't really like that kind of "hints" either. Many times I feel like I'm being treated like an idiot. (for example, big glowing red part of the boss' body to show where to shoot at). I wonder why some bosses don't come with a ATTACK HERE card attached to them.

So did you hate e.g. the mid-level pit monster boss in Half-life, since you couldn't just shoot it down with your weapons like you could all the ordinary monsters before it? Instead, you had to traverse around to be able to launch a rocket, which would finally scorch it.

That's the kind of boss fights I probably prefer seeing at the ends of my games. And naturally the game should make it somehow semi-obvious, or hint to you, what could be the way to beat the boss.

Besides Heretic 2, I disliked the boss fights in e.g. XIII. They could be killed the same way as any the other enemies in the game, ie. just shooting at them, but they were just made much more powerful than ordinary enemies. The challenge merely came from your shots making very little damage to them, and their shots (like mere surgeon knives the mad doc throws at you) making massive damage to you, even though you have a helmet and a bullet-proof vest on you and the doc has nothing.

If I understood you right, you prefer that kind of boss fights where the same rules apply as to the rest of the enemies?