Multiple Endings

Multiple Endings means a game offers more than one authored conclusion, and the useful question to ask about any given case is whether the endings differ in kind — different meaning, different tone, a genuinely different claim about what the story was about — or only in degree, a few swapped lines of epilogue text bolted onto an otherwise identical final scene. Plenty of games marketed on having multiple endings deliver mostly the latter.

This is worth separating cleanly from Branching Narrative. A story can be almost entirely linear through its middle and still fork only in a final choice, producing several distinct endings without branching being a structural property of the whole game — a "final choice" shape, common in games that want the drama of consequence without paying the combinatorial cost of branching earlier. Chrono Trigger ties several of its endings to conditions carried over via New Game Plus, which is itself a way of avoiding the cost: rather than authoring every ending as reachable within one playthrough, the game spreads the cost of access across multiple runs.

NieR:Automata is the case worth knowing for a different reason — its endings aren't alternatives the player picks between so much as sequential layers, each one recontextualizing the last rather than replacing it, which sidesteps the usual complaint that multiple endings undercut each other's weight by making all of them simultaneously "true."

The convention of a "true ending," gated behind extra conditions and implicitly ranked above the others, is worth treating skeptically: it quietly undoes the premise that the endings were a real choice by declaring, after the fact, that one of them was always the correct answer — a move that sits close to what Ludonarrative Dissonance describes when a game's stated values and its actual reward structure pull in different directions.