I love the logic of the aliens there. ‘Ghidorah will beat them all because he’s an alien! Never mind that two monsters were enough to get him to retreat last time- oh, fuck.’
It works for the trope because the alliances are temporary and purely practical. Everyone shows up not because they like each other. But because the alternative is worse.
Technically not a "Final Battle" due to the game never having an "ending" but in November of 2025, Fortnite essentially assembled a shitton of crossovers of both heroes AND villains to team up against their Original Character antagonist:
- The Simpsons
Godzilla & King Kong
Hatsune Miku
Power Rangers' Dino Megazord
Star Wars' Rebel Alliance AND Empire
The K-Pop Demon Hunters
The Thunderbolts (Marvel)
Iron Man
Rocket Raccoon
James Gunn's Superman
Mark, Atom Eve, and Allen The Alien from [TITLE CARD Invincible]
Scorpion & Sub-Zero
The Bride
Italian Brainrot
Squid Game
Scooby-Doo & The Mystery Gang
Beavis & Butthead
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
HALO Spartans
Marty McFly from Back to the Future
Playboi Carti
A collection of various Fortnite Content Creators from IRL
Which at the time nobody expected. Snake wasn't in Smash 4 so everyone thought he was gone for good and some of Smash 4's guest characters were expected not to return. Cloud especially was seen as having a good chance of not being back.
During the final battle in Astro Bot, all of the bots you have saved through the course of the game come together and join you to assist in finally defeating Nebulax
The novel does it even better too since it's not limited to footage from past episodes. Basically the First, War, Tenth and Eleventh Doctor's work on saving Gallifrey like in the episode. What they're doing makes the planet unstable so Twelve uses the military war room to monitor the disasters happening and sends all the other Doctor's around the planet saving people with little character traits they each had being described.
The Victory Fleet in Mass Effect 3, depending on your choices it can functionally be formed of basically every major character and faction in the entire trilogy, with the only major characters that can never be part of it being Thane and Legion.
Everyone you've saved, kept alive, won over, from Wrex and Kirrahe in ME1, to the members of your Suicide Squad from ME2 such as Jack, Miranda and Grunt. The former two also are inroads to proper beneficial alliances with the Krogan (if Wrex is dead then simply put the Krogan aren't proper allies) and the Salarian special forces. and your choices with Tali and Legion's missions in ME2 have a massive effect on whether you ally with the Geth, Quarians, or both.
particularly gratifying because it's not just every character coming together, but you, the player brought them together.
Awesome cutscene, but the sad part is that you don't actually see them fighting alongside you during the final missions on Earth though. The Citadel DLC did have a bit of that at least.
One of the things ME:A got right was everyone showing up for the final battle and actually participating, not just in cutscenes; while you fight your way through with your squad you see other characters fighting further away, and hear constant chatter and updates over the radio.
Can't really blame Bioware for that, pretty difficult to make such a massive game in 18 months or so while also releasing two other games in the same window (Dragon Age 2, Star Wars The Old Republic, and Mass Effect 3 were all released in the span of a year.)
ME:A was much the same story (fucked over for time and resources with the entire game being rebuilt in DICE's inflexible Frostbite Engine as part of EA's idiotic cost-cutting decisions) but in reverse, all of that game's production quality showed up in the last few hours, whereas a lot of the prior runtime was incredibly inconsistent, where ME3 showed its teeth throughout the entire game but ran out of steam a bit for the final Earth section.
The Avengers, Huntr/x, Marty McFly, the Bride (from Kill Bill), the Rebellion and the Empire (Star Wars), the Megazord, a bunch of streamers, and a shitton of Fortnite’s original characters returning.
Also this makes complete sense from a lore perspective, as Doomguy/The Slayer wore the crown of the night sentinels at one point, so he’s regarded as a very high ranking Night Sentinel, even the guards in Sentinel Prime shout “RIP AND TEAR!” The slayers battle cry, when he arrives to that level
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Season 9: Episode 25, The Ending of the End.
All the ponies, creatures and more that the main cast befriended, helped, or turned away from evil come back to help the Mane Six stop Tirek, Cozy Glow, and Chrysalis from fully taking over Equestria.
MLP: fim season 9 ep 25 (everycreature they reformed/became allies with showed up to help in the last battle against a super charged Tirek, Queen chrysalis and cozy glow)
I would argue this is one the more interesting ones in this entire thread for one reason
Multiple Jedi Masters and even multiple members of the Jedi High Council show up for this fight. Not just Windu. Coleman Trebor, Even Piell, Ki-Adi-Mundi, Plo Koon, Shaak, Kit Fisto, Agen Kolar and others are present. It was essentially the strongest Jedi that existed at the time (minus Yoda), backed up by multiple other high ranking, highly skilled Jedi
And while they fight valiantly, they lose. There's mass casualties. The remaining survivors are completely surrounded, out manned and outgunned. And they too are almost executed
It's not until Yoda arrives with the clones to bail them out that they make there escape
Where as all other examples in this thread are 'everyone shows up and they win', this particular one is 'everyone shows up and it's still not enough'
It's also not even the final battle. It's literally the first battle in what would become a 3 year war. They almost completely lost from the very beginning
Not only do all the characters appear to fight against 2nd Dimension Doofenshmirtz’s army robots, but they also use almost all of Phineas and Ferb’s past inventions to do it. Robot Riot is also an amazing addition to the fight, if I do say so myself :)
Robby and his friends go to confront Ratchet and Madame Gasket on their plans to destroy all the outmodes, but even with their improvements they're outnumbered. The battle is pre-empted when everyone hears Piper, who'd been left behind, unscrew the door to the Chop Shop, asking if she's late for the butt-whooping. The wall then falls down to reveal all the junk bots Robby had repaired have come to lend a hand in the fight.
On Pokémon XYZ, all of the Kalosian gym leaders reunited with Ash and his friends to take out Lysandre and the rest of Team Flare whose actions had led to disaster all over Kalos.
Last shift in Dispatch: you get help with dispatching from Royd and Galen, you get to recruit the remaining hero you didn't recruit in episode 4 (Waterboy or Phenomaman, depending on which one you've chosen earler), and in the second half of the shift you get Blonde Blazer in your roster aswell.
This was truly a special moment. When everyone we had met over the course of Destiny, (alive) ally and enemy, came together to take on the big villain of the last ten years of the game. Not just in a cutscene either a lot of them actually fought along side us in the mission. Then they went further and made this the first 12 player mission in the game. Adding even more to the sense of scale the mission had.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, in the series finale "What You Leave Behind" most of the Alpha Quadrant, including long-time enemies the Klingons and Romulans, unite behind the Federation for the final assault on the Cardassian homeworld, where the invading Dominion is based in the quadrant. During the battle, the Cardassians themselves also turn on the Dominion.
Comics in general, though usually both Marvel and DC since they have the largest roster of characters to choose from, both companies have big final battles, especially during events or elseworld stories.
Main examples that came to my mind from left to right; Secret Invasion, World War Hulk (tie-ins he fought the X-men all the way down to heroes for hire by technicallity), Crisis on Infinite Earth's, Civil War, Marvel Zombies Dead Days, DC Death's Metal.
Numerous others as that I only thought of after making the collage; Death of Superman, Time Runs Out/Secret Wars 2015, the original Infinity Gauntlet where onslaughts of heroes and cosmic entities challenged Thanos then eventually Nebula, Siege where heroes and villains fought across Asgard, Annihilation, Ultimatum.
Just so many comics to take your pickings from for final battles where the majority come together to fight at the climax of the story.
In the Part 1 Finale of Fate/Grand Order, most, if not all, of the Servants Chaldea has encountered and befriended appear to lend Chaldea a hand against Solomon and his army of Demon Pillars.
In real life, the Solomon Singularity were raids where ALL the players on the server were fighting the Demon Pillars, so it's a case of everybody showing up for the final battle both in-game and IRL.
I remember someone saying that Gilgamesh was holding off the other like 66 demon god pillars or something, but I say baloney as I don’t recall this ever being mentioned
Pretender Solomon, who is Lev Goetia, has a dialogue for Gilgamesh, where he indeed says that he talked a lot for someone who didn't do much in the Temple of Time
G Gundam finale. The Devil Gundam has taken over the Neo Japan colony and is steadily absorbing the others. The Shuffle Alliance is being overwhelmed. Suddenly all the Gundam fighters from the series, as well as past suits to help fill out the numbers, show up to fight the Devil Gundam. Sadly they're not very effective, but they do buy enough time for Domon and Raine to reach the core and give the Devil Gundam a "heart attack."
I love this show, because they start to show other country’s gundams that we haven’t seen and half of them are windmills and crabs and bullshit gimmicks lmao
I know Endgame gets a lot of hate, but goddammit, seeing everyone come through those portals, the music building, the Avengers Assemble moment, all of it is so fucking cool. Maybe it's just because I grew up with the MCU, but it makes me emotional every time I see it.
In the part 1, the Highbreed were making their final move, destroying Galvan Prime and opening portals across the Galaxy to attack every major planet at the same time. Ben reunites the characters he's met during this series to face and stop their invasion.
Also the Day of Black Sun counts as the climax taking place in the midpoint of Book 3, featuring many of the characters Team Avatar has met, like Haru and his father, the tribesmen of the Foggy Swamp, the mechanist and his son, Sokka's father Hakoda, Toph's opponents in the earthbending tournament, and so on.
Kamen rider loves doing this in anniversary seasons, and while it wasn't ***EVERYONE*** everyone, we still got to see this happen with all of the main riders and all of the reds during super hero senki. All 50 and 45 years worth of them (Excluding Revice who IIRC didn't get the usual next rider cameo in the movie itself, and instead got its own short special played with the movie)
There is also Graduation Day Part 1 and 2, the season final of season 3. Not the definitive last battle of the series of course, but I still think it should count, since it is the definitive last battle of that phase of the series.
While not quite everyone is there, it is the largest and most climactic battle in the entire universe that is filled with enormous, climactic battles. Dozens of super important named characters, dozens of stories all converging into one place, prepped by a 54 book series + countless novellas, short stories, audio dramas, character books, and supplemental lore from the tabletop game, the Siege of Terra is the culmination of Horus Lupercal's war against the Emperor's Imperium.
Ten books to cover the entire battle, not counting the short stories that occur between some of them.
This arguably a tragic spin on the trope because almost everyone was there but too late.
"Repeat, we are nine hours out. Nine hours out. Deploying now to wide formation assault positions, inbound. Terra Control, do you receive? Terra Control, can you respond? ... Hold your positions. Just hold."
The current generation of 9 titan shifters fighting the past generations of shifters. (Attack on Titan)
(Of the current generation only Colossal, Female, Armored, Cart, and Jaw titans fought in the battle. The Warhammer, Attack, Beast, and Founding titans were non-active participants.)
Girls Und Panzer - Der Film technically doesn't count as it's not the final battle anymore but fuck it, neither is Endgame. With Oarai outnumbered 30 to 8 against the All Star University team and about to get absolutely destroyed, students from every school seen so far in the series show up as short term transfer students help them out. It's not literally everyone but it's like... I'd say 90% of the memorable and named cast.
Raven consumes every variant of herself and becomes "The unkindness" (sick name) to defeat trigon who's fused with his original counterpart from the Teen titans show.
Pokemon Legends Z-A has one of the coolest final sequences in any Pokemon game. Despite getting into Ange's control room with Mega Floette, Urbain/Tauine couldn't actually get the thing to shut down. Now, Ange has gone completely berserk, and is causing Pokemon all across the city to undergo Rogue Mega Evolution. So, the player, Lida, and Naveen hold an impromptou strategy meeting to discuss getting you to Zygarge. But during the meeting, literally every major character shows up to lend a helping hand in some way. Aside from helping you battle groups of 2 or 3 Mega Pokemon at a time, with this badass track in the background, they also help get you closer to Zygarde. Whether it be Gwynn holding off 3 Megas by herself, Ivor and his Falinks demolishing a pile of rubble to make a bridge, Tarragon and his construction crew making scaffolding to help you advance, Jacinthe helping the mayor coordinate evacuation efforts and using her holo walls to hold off another horde alongside Lebanne, Corbeau and the other Rust Syndicate members forming a human ladder, or Grisham and Griselle distracting a swarm of Mega Pinsir. It's genuinely really awesome.
Not a finale, but Paw Patrol has an episode called All Paws on Deck, where every pup ever associated with the paw patrol team up to stop an evil genius inventor girl from send all the people of adventure bay to the moon and stealing the town for herself.
On Zatch Bell demon kids from the demon realm were sent to earth to fight eachother and crown a new demon king, it was later revealed that when a demon's bood (what gives them their spells and allows them to stay on earth) is detroyes, instead of being sent back, their souls and all souls of the other demons remain in stasis, and when the new king is crowned he can erase anyone he wants.
The last bad guy of the series was hellbent on erasing every single demon, so the remaining ones banded toghether to fight him. During the fight the good guys seemed to have the upper hand, but with a new transformation he quickly turned the tables on them and all hope seemed to be lost.
But then all demons encountered in the series were watching the fight and decided to lend help to the main characters ,allowing them to acces their special abilities, allowing them to win the fight.
Babylon 5's the Battle for Earth serves as the final major battle of the series. Sheridan and the rebelling humans of EarthForce show up with their alien allies to take down President Clark's illegal regime. At first it's only the humans who will do the fighting as Sheridan doesn't want a mission of liberation to look like an invasion force.
Once the tide of battle turns against him, and members of his own military rediscover their backbones, Clark decides to punish Earth for failing his vision by turning the defensive satellites against the planet.
Sheridan: Delenn, we need you.
Delenn: We are here, John.
Cue Mimbari, Centauri, Narn, and every other ship in the Interstellar Alliance fleet dropping into orbit to destroy the battle platforms before they can fire.
While not the final battle, it is right at the end. You are on a tiny island base after destroying the enemy base. Suddenly, radar picks up 1,000 enemy aircraft, a mix of fighters and bombers. So you are your 2 wingmen fly out to fight them.
One of the main themes of the game is hope. You've been bringing hope to the people of your country by defying the odds, so it's time for them to return the favor. They start showing up, culminating with one of your previous wingmen, who had been shot down, arriving with a bunch of mercenaries to help you.
I'd also add Ace Combat 6. Also not right at the end, you have to fly through a canyon to destroy some chemical weapons that threaten your capital. Then you have to retreat, but the enemy keeps throwing fighters at you. You end up in a giant furball where you are just trying to stay alive. Finally, your allies all arrive as backup, and you can use a powerful Allied Attack to have them destroy most of the enemies. Very satisying.
It's effectively the final battle, as far as the greater world is concerned, since Sotoa's air force is completely spent after this. Mission 29 and 30 are to stop a madwoman from going too far and a corporation trying to silence you to cover up their involvement in the war, respectively.
The Battle of Exegol - Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker
After the Resistance puts out a distress call to every vagrant, bounty hunter, and outlaw in the galaxy asking for assistance in defeating the hundreds of Xyston-Class Star Destroyers that were about to destroy the entire galaxy, everyone shown up to fight for the future of the galaxy, resulting in one of the coolest moments in the entire series and one of the redeeming attributes of RoS
Luke’s heroics apparently didn’t inspire the Galaxy, despite what we were shown at the end of TLJ. Actually it was Lando somehow gathering everyone in like a day (I don’t know, JJ is bad with time and distance) and somehow getting them to a location that was expressly stated to be near impossible to travel to/from.
I condone the harshest of criticisms against TROS but won't hear a bad word said about my boy Wedge Antilles. Only pilot without plot armour to survive the attack on BOTH Death Stars. Hero of our times. And answers his pager when Lando says "everyone with a ship: last one to the final battle is a rotten egg!"
I suuuuuper love scenes like these. Gives me the goosebumps. And I feel kinda sad at the same time especially when you know that the show is about to end.
(Don't have any examples to add coz they're already mentioned.)
I've seen two posts of the Legendary Battle from Power Rangers Super Megaforce...
But none (afaict) giving its originator its flowers.
The Great Legend War—Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger
While it opens Gokaiger, it also closes out the previous 34 years of Super Sentai, so I'm counting it.
The invading Space Empire Zangyack attacks Earth with such ferocity that one Sentai alone isn't enough to repel them, so all 34 Super Sentai, from Gorenger to Goseiger, unite to push the Zangyack back... Then, to stop their armada, Akaranger and Big One give the order for everyone to sacrifice their powers, creating the Ranger Keys that serve as Gokaiger's gimmmick.
A Megazord battle* against the Black Cross Fortress goes disastrously, with the Black Cross Fortress summoning an army of enemies from Megazord battles past and effortlessly repelling GokaiOh, Gosei Great, and Gosei Ground, turning Gosei Ground back into Gosei Knight and leaving the other two Megazords badly damaged. All seems lost...
Until a kid that had shown up earlier with a toy DenziOh starts cheering the Super Sentai on, causing everyone around him—and all across Tokyo—to join him, including a suicidal salaryman with a toy Variblune he felt he had to sell. This legendary act of faith causes 33 different toy Megazords to start glowing...
And creating an army of Megazords to appear to reinforce Gosei Great and GokaiOh.
What happens next is the single coolest Megazord battle in all of Super Sentai.
*Yeah, I know they're mechs and Zord/Megazord is a Power Rangers thing, but I'm still ultimately a Power Rangers kid first and foremost, so they're "Zords" to me. So sue me.
Godzilla Destroy All Monsters. At the time, it was intended to be the last Godzilla film. The monsters of the world are freed from the mind control and all show up to fight the aliens who did the deed. It was almost every monster from a Toho movie up until that point who was still alive and they had the suit for. The aliens themselves send King Ghidorah who had been able to be beaten previously but not killed. The Earth monsters are finally able to put the planet killer down.
For the finale, titular Kings tricked their subjects into boarding an ark offworld to escape the main threat. They all refuse to leave and everyone (that is, every named character and even every [I think] background extra) shows up to the final battle Endgame style to fight the Galactinsect/Uchu army.
I don't have a picture because I refuse to look at that horrible movie but quite literally damn near everyone in the entire universe joins the final battle
The end of The Outer Worlds. Captain Junlei Tennyson shows up with every security guard and gun and half-assed scoundrel on the Groundbreaker to join the siege at Tartarus Prison.
I still think it was a missed opportunity in Endgame to not have some pragmatic villains coming out of those portals too. You can’t tell me a guy like Vulture wouldn’t side with the people trying to prevent Thanos from wiping out half (or all, later) life in the galaxy. He lives there! If Strange had bothered picking him up they would’ve basically had another Iron Man on their team.
Granted a lot of villains got killed in their movies in the MCU but we had a few survivors. Zemo, Abomination, Ghost, Yon-Rogg, Mordo…hell Kingpin and Justin Hammer wouldn’t have been much help in the big brawl themselves but they probably would’ve contributed some weapons or goons.
While every crossover film in the PreCure franchise has all the current leads come together for a final fight, the 20th anniversary film, "PreCure: All Stars F", featured the largest collection of main Cures to date - a whopping 78 - defending earth from a space entity that could reform entire planets. Needless to day, it's a visual blast 🥰
Han Solo in The Battle of Yavin-Star Wars.
The eagles in The Battle of The Five Armies-The Hobbit and The Battle of the Black Gate-Return of the King .
With his moon base destroyed, Alus invades the "source" Hiroto and the team came from to cut them from the world of Eldora, which is... Gunpla Battle Nexus Online. He gets ambushed by the entire lobby.
Riot at N's Castle - Pokemon: Black and White climax
The 7 Sages of Team Plasma planned to gang up on and get rid of the protagonist, but her friend Bianca arrives to save her, bringing along the Gym Leaders* of the Unova region to fight. It sets the stage for the "Battle of Unova", for one of the most epic events in the Pokemon games to take place.
Every TTRPG campaign I run. The situation is going to look hopeless but then the tide will turn when all their allies show up at the last possible moment. Except one time, when the players were the "arrived at the last possible moment" people.
Warhammer fantasy the end times the order tide with the elves humanity,Bretons. dwarfs lizardmen the undead and their gods fighting to stop chaos orcs skaven ...they didn't stop it but hey the effort counts for something
Ace Combat has done this a couple times now, though it’s not always against the final boss, it’s always a moment of pure desperation right near the end of the game when you need the help most, which then leads to the final boss
The War of the Last Alliance in Tolkien's Legendarium. EVERYONE of the Free Peoples except for the men of Dunharrow pulls up. Men of Gondor, men of Arnor, men of the north (I think?), elves of Lindon, elves of Rivendell, elves of Greenwood, elves of Lorien and dwarves of Khazad-dûm.
I do like the idea of having what seems to be almost all of the ships that have ever appeared in Star Wars for the last fight in the Skywalker Saga. But the execution was very poor. I don't buy that Lando managed to make so many phone calls in the span of... a day?
But the biggest problem is that although we get to see the ships, I doubt most people were able to recognize any of them since most of the ships are in the background, including well-known ships. Also, none of the ships besides the ones we see in the movie get their time to shine. A good example is the Ghost, which you can see in the background, but you don't see it in an active battle. I know it would be impossible to give all of the ships screen time, but they could have at least done it for the most iconic ones.
All that this achieved was an admittedly awesome shot!
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u/thatgameraguy-mobile 10h ago
Everyone vs. King Ghidorah (Destroy all Monsters)