Binding of Isaac: Repentance, the true ending. It hits harder because it’s the first time we got a definitive ending since the original game came out in 2011.
Man. The moment in there where you have to actually do the digging… Still haunts me. It’d be a cutscene in any other game, but the impact of the change in the control scheme and everything in that moment. Brutal.
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.
spoilerNear 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.
You put that into words perfectly. I think it’s the only game that proscribes an emotion so successfully through a gameplay mechanic. It’s the most real, raw and visceral sense of loss I’ve ever felt in a game, film or book. Truly unique.
You missed the very end when the dad finds out that his son basically died to save him. As a dad with two sons, this would break me. Leave me to die, boys. That’s not a trade I’d ever make.
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 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.
:::
Trails in the Sky, at perhaps two moments. They’re very long JRPGs, and I could argue longer than they need to be with some not so great moments - but the payoff for their better characters is really good.
It’s often cited as “establishing backstory” to the rest of the Trails series. 1 and 2 are basically one complete story; but even the first game sets up a villain and resolution well.
(There is a third that dives a bit too far into setting up “background lore for twenty more games and little else”)
Same one as you, Rosalina’s backstory made me tear up a little bit. It was really really well done, and so unexpected in a Mario game of all places.
When first reading through Katawa Shoujo, Shizune’s path (botched as it is) still hit me really hard with Misha being an aside that can’t fit in, then later Rin’s neutral ending also got me really bad.
Teenage me at the end of disc 1 of FF7, of course.
The ending of Signalis just recently.
And probably a lot more. FFXIV has a lot of sad and emotional moments, although none of them hit me quite as hard as some other games did.
Ugh yeah, FF7 when Aeris is killed by Sephiroth. And the scene where Cloud carries her into the water... I was bawling. Afterwards I think I just sat there dumbfounded, staring at the empty spot in my party until after like 5 minutes I turned off the game cause I needed a break to mourn. I know the graphics don't really hold up these days, but it was all to real to me as a child and it was one of my first experiences with death even though it was just a video game character.
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