This is an article published by Gamespot on Yahoo, but I seriously disagree with the list. It looks like a list made by people who have only played games recently or only played popular games.
I realize now I look at my list that some are tears of joy, but they still induce overwhelming moments so I included them.
I’d say, in no particular order:
Celes trying to commit suicide in Final Fantasy VI
All of To The Moon. Well, especially when you realize the protagonist has arranged for the guy to both go to the Moon and be with is Asberger’s girlfriend. Touching to no end.
The ending of Planescape Torment. How you learn who you are(were) and how you deal with it and the consequences of it.
Walking Dead Season One - They got this one right. If you choose to kill or if you choose to leave Lee, it’s emotionally crushing.
This war of mine: The moment where one of your people gets sick/wounded/starving, you look at your supplies and decide that, even thought there are enough supplies to heal/feed him, you’ll let him die over several days because he’s not useful enough to the survival of the group to expend those meager resources.
It’s even worse when the soon-to-be deadly wound was inflicted in a depressed bout of rage by an asshole character whom you are expending resources on because he has a skill which is critical to the group.
I thought that the canonical Number 1 tearjerker moment in gaming was you having to incinerate the Companion Cube in Portal? I dunno; I’ve never played it. That, or the end of Red Dead Redemption. Nuking the helicopter in one of the CoD games was supposed to be really moving too.
Mine from what I’ve personally played is the end of Operation Flashpoint’s third game, Resistance IIRC, where your character, after stopping the Soviets from carpetbombing your island, is trapped in a box canyon and machine gunned to death. And all he wanted to do is retire to the country and ride his motorcycle around.
Nope, not a tearjerker. It’s a humorously quasi-sad moment, but the Companion Cube is a joke, it’s just a cube with a heart on it. The protagonist doesn’t actually have a bond with it, the narrator / villain just asserts that. Portal 2, iirc, has a legitimately sad moment or two.
OP’s examples are probably quite sad, but plot-heavy RPGs are rarely my cup of tea, so I can’t much comment.
The biggest tearjerker moments that I can recall:
The epilogue of Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past. Seeing all the random side characters made everything about that game feel somehow very important.
Several points in Walking Dead, not just the ending. Every time you see another piece of Clementine’s childhood chipped away…
Also, I’ve never played it, but the original title of The Sun at Night (Laika Believes) is still the saddest thing I can imagine.
The canonical one is the death of Aeris/Aerith in Final Fantasy VII.
In Fallout 3, if you choose to blow up Megaton, the view of the explosion is… sobering.
The ending of Diablo, where it’s revealed that Diablo was in fact the young prince (which we knew, but seeing the boy’s corpse is disturbing), and then our hero falls victim to Diablo.
Oh, man. I knew I forgot a big one when I posted before. Towards the end of Bastion, when you have the choice of trying to save Zulf and the enemies slowly stop attacking when they realize you’re risking your life to save your enemy. One of the most moving moments I’ve had in gaming, all the moreso because it’s so subtly and actually achieved through gameplay.
I don’t play video games any more, but when I was growing up, the fate of Edge’s parents in Final Fantasy II/IV was always very sad. Dr. Lugae’s image changes from that of a comical mad scientist to a disgusting sadist.
The game ends, the world is doomed, and you already have sacrificed yourself to give humanity a tiny bit of hope. You watch the last human ship fly away, as you man the planet-based turret meant to clear the way.
The enemy is getting into position to annihilate the entire planet from orbit, taking you out along with all of their own expendible forces. Yet you can still choose to fight, pointlessly killing dozens of these monsters until they inevitably break you. There is no way to “win.” In the last sequence, you can either sit in calm acceptance of your fate, or die in a blaze of glory, but nobody will ever know which choice you made because the entire surface of the planet will soon be nothing but glass. The player and character both already know this, yet anyone who has a heart will reload his fucking assault rifle and fight, until the bullets run out and he’s smashing skulls with his fists, as his armor cracks and the vacuum fills his lungs and he finally collapses.
Getting to the end of Super Mario Brothers 1-1 (NES) and finding out the "Princess Is In Another Castle and realizing you didn’t just win the game (after 2 minutes)…then seeing that at every castles and realizing that this is going to be a long game. Remember, before the internet, you didn’t even know how many levels there were going to be. It just kept going.
I’ll probably sound quite lame with these choices but:
Final Fantasy X: Tidus hugging whatshername and disappearing. Meant to be a powerful moment, and was, especially since the twist was delivered well, so it’s something you’re still coming to terms with.
Zelda: Ocarina of Time ending. I felt quite emotional going back to that scene where Link meets Zelda since ISTM the whole timeline now doesn’t exist.
Grand Theft Auto 5. The scene where you slap this guy who…OK, now I’m just kidding.
Beyond those, I’m actually strugging. There are plenty of games with music that make me well up, but stories? Not so much.
A few other FF examples that aren’t the Death of Aerith…
FFVIII - Honestly, every plot development on the middle two disks was built around a skeleton of tearjerkium, but one in particular really strikes me - Cid and Edea (who were married) talking about how they created SeeD knowing full well that they’d eventually have to fight, and probably kill Edea.
FFIX - The death of Brahe - even though she was the party’s enemy for most of the game up to that point, it wasn’t that long ago that she was the mother that Garnet loved and vice versa. And in the minutes between when Kuja attacked her and when she succumbed, that Brahe came back…
Another from FFIV - the deaths of Ifrit and Shiva…I’m not sure why those two, in particularly, over the masses of other Espers, or Cyan’s home, or the entire world…but something about watching them offed for their Magicite always gets me.
And another from FFX - when Tidus finds out what the real purpose of the Summoner’s Pilgrimage is, and has his freakout about it…everyone else’s ‘well, how do you think we feel?’ responses kill me.
And one from FFVII that isn’t Aerith - the plate drop.
Leaving FF, the ending of Saints Row III, if you (inexplicably) choose to kill Killbane instead of rescuing Shaundi and Viola. ‘I hope it was worth it.’ I’m gonna go with ‘no’. (Even if declaring Steelport an independent state under Saints control is pretty cool.)
Diablo II, when you return to the village of Tristram to find that most of the people you knew and loved from the first game are dead… except for the blacksmith, who’s been turned into a minion of evil, who you must kill. The bastards even play the same background music from the first game…
Minor on the overall scale, but in Borderlands 2, the big bad kills Mordecai’s Bloodwing - in a rather shocking and unexpected twist - after you’ve fought valiantly to save it. Only worth noting because BL is not a high-drama game and the goofy twists far outnumber the serious ones.
In the Fallout 3 add-on The Pitt, there is that crushing moment when you realize that there is no way for you to resolve the situation that does not screw somebody over who doesn’t deserve it.
Without a link to look at I don’t know if this was included, but “No Russian” in Modern Warfare 2 was rough. Massacring scores of innocents, even in a video game, was just too much.
Dom’s self-sacrifice in Gears of War 3 was another rough one.