For me, it was Princess Rosalina’s backstory in Super Mario Galaxy.
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“To the moon” Nice little point and click adventure. I played it through one afternoon and was sad for the following two days.
I convinced my partner to play it recently and the way I knew she’d finished it was that I could hear sniffling from the desk behind me.
spoiler alert
Witcher 3 when Ciri wakes up, hands down.
But also Priscilla’s song.
And also in RDR2 the cutscene with Unshaken. Arthur is alive and out from prison but broken, sick, and the writing is on the wall.
Shaauuunn! Shaun! Shaauuunn! Shaaauuun! Shauuun! Shaauuunn!
The completion of Lohse’s character arc in Divinity:Original Sin 2.
League of legends. Top picked teemo. Mid was saying that he couldn’t speak because of chat ban. Jungler went afk after dying to wolves. Bot yelled at me all game for his feeding.
I cry everyday.
Brothers: A tale of two sons.
The game has a pretty unique mechanic. It makes you control two characters at the same time. It’s not a coop game, with optional solo. It’s strictly a single player game, where you use one controller to move two characters, the titular two sons, one on each control stick. Throughout the game you use movement and interactions with the environment to solve simple puzzles to remove obstacles in your way and travel to your destination. Usually, by having you do different things with each character simultaneously. After a while, it becomes second nature to control both brothers in a synchronous and flowing manner when you get used to the challenge of moving and paying attention to two different things at the same time.
spoiler
Near the end of game though, one of the brothers dies. Now, you are left with two control sets, but only one character. Puzzles similar to ones that you already solved, now you have to figure out how to solve them, on your own. This on its own is gutwrenching as you developed a familiarity and affection to both characters and their dynamic, as they grow from mutually annoyed siblings, to a well coordinated team of brothers who care and protect each other.
But through the game, you’re also taught that the younger brother can’t swim, he doesn’t know how to. So whenever you had to cross a body of water, the elder brother had to carry the younger brother on his back. He is deadly afraid of being in the water since their mother apparently drowned herself and he saw her die.
At the climax of the game, alone in the middle of the ocean, you have to swim to shore. The emotional kicker is as you discover that using the dead brother’s stick on your controller, which you haven’t touched in at least half an hour since the other brother died because it doesn’t do anything anymore, calls however upon the memory of the older brother when you swim. You have to use both controller’s sticks to swim effectively and survive, and you can hear him cheering and supporting the younger brother to find his strength and swim on his own, back home, to carry on and save their father’s life.
It’s such an empowering and emotional moment.
The ending of that game still makes me tear up after all this years as it makes me think of my own family. Even writing this comment I’m getting emotional. And it does it all without a single line of dialogue, text or voice acting. All by animation and vocalizations along with game mechanics. It’s one of the most effective uses of gameplay I have ever seen in a video game and forever has made me think of this as one of my favorite games of all time.
Other video games, and things people call emotional are usually about story elements, plot lines, events on a character’s arc. Things that have books upon books of analysis and history. Not that they’re any less valuable or deserving of praise, but using gameplay this effectively to convey emotion is, however, kind of unique and rather harder to pull off effectively.
Lots of moments in Honkai Impact 3.
There’s literally a YT channel that collects tears from streamers playing the game.
There’s a lot of context needed to understand why anyone would cry playing through HI3 though. I’ll give a high level summary here, but I highly encourage people to play it, even if it’s a gacha game. You can really ignore the gacha and just play the game for the main story. Do be warned that the story isn’t something suitable for kids — it can be quite a bit too heavy for them.
The theme of self-sacrifice is covered quite extensively, with the main character being the centrepiece of the theme. There’s also deep self-loathe, with an eventual self-acceptance, also from the MC. Mix that all in with some sense of duty.
There’s also a tragedy, but from the tragedy, a narrow path to hope was born. The people in the tragedy mostly hoped only for a simple life, or to live their lives atoning for their sins, but circumstances forced them to become warriors against a great, unstoppable force of destruction. As if to make things harder to swallow, their digital clones that survived into the future have to experience yet another tragedy that would eventually destroy all of them, and the player will see this through. Yet, in the second tragedy, these clones further sowed the seeds of hope for the future.
Chinese company or not, HoYo has pumped out a lot of very human stories that I think deserves attention and praise. Genshin Impact has also started to go down a similar path.
Lisa the joyful. Broke me and people should just play it and not look up any spoiler.
A weird one that I’ve not seen mentioned: the intro to Battlefield 1. It is really well crafted and was emotional in a way I’ve never felt from a war FPS.
The multiple unavoidable deaths and brief epitaph shown on screen, before hot swapping to the next soldier felt poignant. Really hit me with the pointlessness and futility of WWI, the plight of the common soldier and the sheer scale of death.
I was pretty emotionally stunted and depressed as a teenager and had trouble crying even when I wanted to (it’s a horrible feeling, physically) so Earthbound and Mother 3 were therapeutic
I’m not really a crier when it comes to games, but what brought me close most recently was when I was doing a run of the entire Metro trilogy for the first time.
Spoiler ahead for Metro Exodus
If you’re doing the good ending run of Metro Exodus, then you spend most of the game beating the odds and being able to save everyone…
So watching Colonel Miller, someone you become fairly attached to throughout the series, succumb to radiation poisoning while you drive out of Novosibirsk, knowing that there was absolutely nothing I as the player could do but watch was heart-wrenching.
He’d completed the mission, but he just couldn’t make it home - it’s such a bittersweet ending, but including his speech at the end, it’s a good one.
Portal endings. Especially the ending of Portal 2.
There have actually been a lot of games that have made me cry over they years. Some of the ones I remember are:
Metal Gear Solid 1, 2, 3 and Peace Walker
Kingdom Hearts 1, 2, BBS, Re:Coded and 358/2 days
Final Fantasy 10 and (obviously) Crisis Core
Castlevania Order of Ecclesia
I’m pretty sure there are more but I can’t really remember any others. I’ve kind of always been very sensitive to emotional things, so a lot of games get at least a tear or two but the ones I mentioned were games that I remember being wrecked after playing.
There are so many seens in Metal Gear that tear me up. MGS1 has my favorite moment, in the bad ending with Otacon and Snake, but Sniper Wolf’s scene is brutal to me too.
“Keep that hair short”
There’s a few moments in Telltale’s The Walking Dead series, but especially season 1
crazy how telltale had the only good walking dead game 😂
