Games that make you cry?

[prog rocker]

Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII (no explanation needed)

If you want to make it even sadder, there's a video with "Calling to the Night" from Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops playing during that scene. The fact it's an anti-war song from the point of view of a soldier makes things worse.

 

[Kitasuki]

I remember that the NBA 2K story mode that was directed by Spike Lee made me cry in the end.
Also the first last of us right at the beginning. My biggest dream is to be a dad, so my biggest fear is to have my child die. That happens right away. I cried like hell.

 

[ReturnofMCH]

I remember that the NBA 2K story mode that was directed by Spike Lee made me cry in the end.
Also the first last of us right at the beginning. My biggest dream is to be a dad, so my biggest fear is to have my child die. That happens right away. I cried like hell.

TLoU1 in general counts.

 

[toastghost]

omori. oh my fucking god omori. the duet scene was the breaking point for me. god it's brutal. also that game capitalizes on my fear of lonelines and abandonment. it's so brutal

 

[MC.Princess]

Well there are a few games that have made me cry. Granted, one of them has already been listed, but I'll list it just cause:

Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth Complete Edition (Our protag for Cyber Sleuth hecking dissolves into digital nothingness at the end [He's brought back, but still!] and our protagonist for Hacker's Memory gets it the worst. The world gets reset, all the friends he made are now gone, the girl he was in love with doesn't exist anymore, oh and did I mention that due to the world reset HE'S THE ONLY ONE WHO REMEMBERS THIS?! That poor son of a glitch.)
Just Shapes and Beats (Before the final boss I kept trying to initiate the "It's not over" sequence, and kept failing due to the Boss being way too OP now. It was more tears of rage, but still.)
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Everything. Just... all of it.)
Dragon Quest XI: Definitive Edition (The whole situation with Heliodor, Veronica's death, the post-game universe reset, man that whole fudging game gets me in tears.)
Digimon Survive (Same as BoTW, all of it is s a d.)
Pokemon Scarlet and Violet (The 4th story, The Way Home is basically tear-jerker incarnate. How does a game where rats can kill gods make me sad AHHGNJFHDNB-)
That's about it. I think...

 

[Strawberry Cupcake]

Final Fantasy X (the ending specifically) is the only game that I cried while playing.

 

[InfiniteBakuphoon]

I’m not much of a crier, to be honest, in the sense that it’s rare for anything — media in particular — to outright send me bursting into tears. However, a lot of that is because I think I’ve kind of trained myself to hold them back more than anything else, because I’m actually an extremely emotional and sentimental person, and it’s very often that I’m nearly sent into tears over certain things, even if I never end up actually flat-out crying.

That said, the one game that actually made me cry was Katawa Shoujo, specifically the ending of Rin’s neutral route.

Spoiler: C/W: Mention of suicide

Rin’s route — and, in retrospect, her entire presence in the game — basically amounts to a rather brutal deconstruction of the Cloudcuckoolander archetype. Rin is presented in most other characters’ routes in rather typical Cloudcuckoolander fashion as someone for the player to either laugh or gawk in disbelief at for her quirkiness and overall “out-there” personality, as well as her frequent and usually failed attempts to communicate her thoughts and feelings to others in any meaningful way. It’s to the point where one character even suggests that Rin doesn’t even expect to be understood, despite her best efforts. But Rin’s own route forces the player to confront the reality of her as, surprise!, a human being with thoughts and feelings who is painfully aware of her inability to communicate and does want to be understood, but has absolutely no idea how to. Rin is ultimately pushed to her absolute limits in her route, in no small part thanks to Hisao, the player character and her love interest in her route, being at his least sympathetic here, throwing tons of emotional and verbal abuse at her in frustration at his inability to connect with Rin on his terms, all while neglecting her increasingly precarious emotional state. Making a particularly bad choice with Rin at the culmination of something that was supposed to be good for her leads you to the “neutral” ending, while she basically comes to the conclusion that she is too broken to ever be truly loved or understood. “I can’t hug anyone, Hisao,” Rin tells him in the route’s final scene, using her non-existent arms as a metaphor for her inability to communicate with others in even the simplest and most recognizable of ways that most people would take for granted, and indeed have throughout her whole life. “I’m a bad person like that.” Her guilt and self-pity at her painful, crippling difficulties that she never asked to have, and a stunned Hisao’s complete inability to do anything about it, hit me… rather hard, to be honest. I related a lot to Rin’s feelings and struggles as a socially awkward — and perhaps even kind of “weird” — person, and especially with her attempts to use art to bridge that communication gap, which is exactly what I tried to do when I was younger as well. I would never want anyone to go through so much pain in their struggles that they feel like they’re unlovable or broken, so seeing Rin sink that low into the pits of despair and hopelessness, well… sent me places that I wasn’t expecting to go to, I’ll just say. But the real tearjerker was when Rin reveals to Hisao how she plans to learn to “hug people in (her) own way”: by abandoning Hisao and running off to a prestigious art academy, where she will abandon her true, authentic self — that true self that she learns to despise in this route — in favor of something that people can more easily relate to and understand, but will never reflect her true feelings or all that she really is, flaws and all. This is about as painful and unsustainable as it sounds, especially considering the existence of another character that the game references throughout Rin’s route who, many years before the events of the game, went down an eerily similar road as the one she’s prepared to take… said road led to suicide. And while Rin’s fate is left ambiguous — with the neutral ending’s final image being Hisao just standing there watching her walk away, realizing too late the full enormity of his mistakes and their consequences — there’s a sinking feeling that even if she doesn’t physically die, she will most certainly spiritually die. There’s a reason why this so-called “neutral” ending is considered by some fans to be Rin’s “true” bad ending, as well as arguably the most emotionally devastating ending in the entire game…

 

[Okido]

It's very, very rare for me get all too choked up while playing a game, so it takes a lot for one to make me cry. I think the only video games that have actually made me shed some tears are MOTHER 3, Mega Man Maverick Hunter X, and Professor Layton and the Unwound Future.

MHX is probably the least gut-wrenching of these, but its OVA The Day of ∑ and the cutscene with Zero in Sigma Palace 3 really emotionally crushed me back in like high school, lol. As for the other two, I won't spoil anything about their endings; but if you know, you know. Those games' stories have stuck with me for years and I still think about them every now and then.

 

[Die-Hard Dragon Devotee]

This. This always makes me cry.

 

[wanderist]

I don't think anything's managed to actually make me really cry, but I've had plenty of close calls.

Any Xenoblade game at least gets me a bit emotional. The infamous chapter in Xenoblade 3 brought me so close to tears that I had to close my bedroom door in case any family members walked by and thought something had happened. Literally just an hour of pain and agony.

Digimon Cyber Sleuth and Hacker's Memory both almost made me cry (and I was actually somewhat prepared for HM's ending).

Also back when I was a kid the endings to both The Legend of Spyro TEN and DOTD nearly made me cry because I loved my purple dragon and he kept almost dying.

Heck even Pokemon's managed to make me a bit emotional a few times. Certain parts of the Unova games, the Alola games, and the engame of the SV all got to me a little.

Monster Hunter Stories 2 also made me almost tear up at a few scenes because I loved Ratha so much. A few scenes on the bond between Ratha and the player almost made me tear up the first time. Still do sometimes.

 

[toastghost]

your turn to die got to me a lot. joe's death was super upsetting, but something that was worse to me in my opinion were sara's hallucination nightmares of him. great portrayal of survivor's guilt. another scene involving joe that made me cry was when shin turned on his ai right before he died, and sara got to reconcile with him, even though it wasn't real.

witch's heart was also brutal. god that game is fucked up yet beautiful. that scene in noel's route where claire is in her dream world, unaware that she's gonna be killed again, and noel embraces her. i didn't cry at that at first watch, but replaying the game after the bonus stage makes it all the more tragic.

 

[colours]

Okami is enough of an emotional game that got me bawling by the end. :c it really us such an amazing game.

add nier automata and dragon quest ix to that list @_@

 

[Insanish Danish]

Since my first post in the thread I've experienced several more games that have made me cry lol. Not a complete list, but:

Spoiler

Ace Attorney, specifically Trials and Tribulations and The Great Ace Attorney 2. Like just full on sobbing throughout the credits lmao

Paper Mario: The Origami King. I had forgotten how emotional Mario games could be. This one destroyed me.

Persona 5 Royal. So many little moments here and there had me tearing up, and then just the overall weight of the third semester made me very emotional. Also made me really sad on a meta level with Billy Kametz (who voiced Maruki) having passed away only several months prior to playing it. It was almost hard to listen to the character talk, sometimes.

Pokemon Violet. Arven. Arveeeeeen

Persona 3 Portable. Shinji!!!! ;_____;

And for games that I didn't actually play but rather watched playthroughs of, I had my emotions thoroughly destroyed by Zero Escape (999 in particular, but Virtue's Last Reward got me in certain places too), Metal Gear Solid 4, and Yakuza: Like a Dragon.

Yay for being someone who cries way too easily!

 

[Emmy]

Spoiler

Persona 3 Portable. Shinji!!!! ;_____;

Spoiler

One of the main reasons why I never re-play P3P as the Male MC is I can never bear to have Shinjiro die on me again after going through his Social Link.

 

[carpology]

the house in fata morgana... the whole game is just brutal, but there's a scene towards the end of the game that destroyed me: when michel's story about being a trans man is revealed to giselle, and she tells him "you are the greatest man i've ever known!"... that line in particular killed me, but the whole scene is so touching and heartrending.

 

[Insanish Danish]

Spoiler

One of the main reasons why I never re-play P3P as the Male MC is I can never bear to have Shinjiro die on me again after going through his Social Link.

Spoiler

I've only ever played as FeMC and this is one of the reasons why I can never play male MC's route lmao...like I know that he'll wind up dying eventually due to the suppressants anyway but I liked knowing that I could at least buy him a little more time as FeMC...even if him being comatose isn't a whole lot happier than him being dead

 

[DigitalGen6]

I think something in Harvest Moon made me cry
That or Pokémon (idk) When I released my poor Blaziken by accident (my first AS data), I cried a lot and deleted the data and started over
It was named Baby Torchic, what a world

 

[Calvinッ]

Cant think of anything in recent memory, but years and years ago I cried at the original PMD, and then whenever explorers of Sky came out (2010ish?), I cried at that aswell, although I think it was the Sky version that I first completed. I think younger me thought I wouldn't be able to stay with the Pokemon even though your character really wants to.

Then slightly older younger me clearly didn't put 2+2 together in the sequel, and thought again that i'd actually leave the game and not be able to play without starting again. I don't know why I didn't learn from the first one. But on a positive note of those situations, it was nice to see the games have a decent post-game to enjoy!

 

[Zexy]

Pokemon Sun/Moon, the whole story about the Mohn/Lusamine/Gladion/Lillie family is a bit sad.

World of Warcraft : Warlords of Draenor had two minor ones too. The deaths of Baros Alexston and Admiral Taylor. They are rather minor characters, not exactly friends, but you do share experiences and goals, and if you look at the story from an RP perspective, they absolutely feel relatable.

The first one is involved in the breadcrumb and part 2 of a major questline trilogy for one of the 6 original early game options (with a part 4 lategame), complete with his emotional backstory and personal stakes against your common antagonists. You part ways for like a decade, but a while before his end you kinda reunite and get a bit closer than before (he runs your errands instead of you running his), just for him to be killed off.

And the other one had a story that spanned for like 4 expansions, you saw him starting from Private and I think then became Colonel, General and eventually Admiral, in questlines where he grows stronger, ALONGSIDE YOU, only to then die, as you have to avenge him and move on...

 

[Emelie]

The ending of Link's Awakening was my first heartbreak as a child. I like how the game prepares you for what is about to come when the sad truth is revealed at the Face Shrine. Death is final in LA and something you must learn how to cope with. I like Majora's Mask as well but the fact that you can always go back in time and save (almost) everyone makes the game's portrayal of death and loss less realistic.