Bioshock/Tear Jerker

• The ending of Bioshock 2, when Delta is dying, and it takes every last bit of energy for him to crawl to the top of the craft to be with Eleanor. Oh, god...
  • The neutral ending, if you choose to sacrifice yourself.
• Two of the audio diaries you find in the game 'Masha Come Home' and 'Saw Masha Today' are spoken by a woman whose daughter has gone missing. In the second one we find out that her daughter has been turned into a Little Sister. And to really rub it in, the second audio diary is found next to the corpses of the woman and her husband who have presumably committed suicide upon finding out the fate of their daughter.
• Everything involving Mark Meltzer in Bioshock 2, namely his tragic end.
  • Oh, God. It's enough of a tear jerker when I kill regular big daddies... imagine what it'll be like when I have to kill Sinclair and Meltzer.
  • You don't necessarily have to kill him. Just don't be like this troper and charge through the labs like a baboon with a machine gun, blindly shooting every Big Daddy without checking it.
    • I wonder which is more of a tear jerker - stumbling upon Mark Meltzer's lifeless body, which moments before was just another Big Daddy, or letting him roam around that crumbling nightmare for the rest of his life, alone (since you are probably just going to save "Cindy" in the next level - saving every little sister.)
• Speaking of suicide, how about the family in Mercury Suites, all lying dead on the couch with what's probably a bottle of cyanide pills on the coffee table? There are various ways to interpret that, but they're all depressing.
• The Alpha Series who lost their little sisters and have become highly unstable.

Gil Alexander: "Today I saw one kneeling near a Gatherer's Garden and... and crying."

• The whole game's premise, if you consider it. The best thing to happen to the adults of Rapture, formerly some of the best and brightest the world had who left everything on the surface to participate as part of Ryan's dream? They went into hiding if they somehow got lucky. Most died, became insane, or became Big Daddies.
  • It's even worse if you consider the fate of the children. The Little Sister thing is horrifying enough, but at least the girls got to survive if you Rescued them. The little boys and other girls? Yeah, ponder that.
• In the second game, at Ryan's Amusements, you find some audio diaries from a woman named Nina Carnegie. She chaperoned a children's sleepover at the park on New Year's, 1959, when the Rapture civil war broke out. Her last tape is next to her corpse. She helped the children hide from the Splicers for weeks until she starved to death because she gave the children all the food. You don't know what happened to the boys and girls she was watching, but you get a hint from the fact that her body is carefully hidden on a ledge, laid out on a rug and surrounded by decorations and chalk drawings of smiling little girls.
• When you realize that there really was no way to save Delta after his link with Eleanor was severed, and the entire reason she had him collect the Big Sister suit was so she could extract the ADAM from his body to preserve his memories and, in a way, his mind.
• The good ending for Bioshock. If you kill the Little Sisters, you kill the ones that save you and wage war on the surface world with an army of splicers. But if you save them, you take them to the surface, where they live happy, normal lives, and are with you at your deathbed. It's such a marvelous and human ending, especially after all the violence and Body Horror of the preceding game.
• Andrew Ryan: "A man chooses! A slave obeys!" and it's the fact that you really couldn't stop hitting him that made me cry.
• This troper was personally hit hard by Atlas' family being blown up by Andrew Ryan. Of course, when Atlas Fontaine double crossed you, and you were forced to kill Andrew Ryan...yeah...
  • "I really wound you up with that wife and child bit: 'Oh, me poor Moira. Ah, me wee baby Patrick.' Maybe one day I'll get me a real family. They play well with the suckers.
    • This troper had a lot of money on the fact that Atlas was lying to you and going to betray you but that scene still got him. An Irish accent isn't the only thing he can fake convincingly .
• Listening to Masha's parents sob over her on the audio diaries was bad enough. Getting into their room and finding their two corpses curled up on the bed together next to a picture of their daughter and a bottle of pills that they had apparently overdosed on was heartbreaking.
  • There's another apparent suicide scene in the game, in Mercury Suites. There's just something about the fact that after downing the jar of poison, they apparently sat down to watch one last TV show together as a family before they succumbed to it. As someone whose family has always had a "family movie night" once a week, this hit a little close to home for this troper. Oh, and by the way, God only knows if the kids actually realized they were taking poison.
• Near the beginning, you see a woman cooing to a baby in a crib. Once she sees you, she'll attack you, and you have to kill her. When that was done, I looked into the crib and saw that there was no baby in the crib. There never was.
  • It's been a while since I last played the game, but I think if you kill her before she sees you you find out that the "baby" is actually her revolver.
  • This section is even more horrifying than that - listen to what she says carefully (subtitles are your friend). She's not cooing. She's mourning. 'Baby and me, BABY AND ME'
  • Something even more horrifying: 'baby and me' implies the baby has also become a Splicer Yikes.
• Sure, Tenenbaum might have had a dodgy past, but even before she mentions being involved in experiments in a prison camp, you have to realize something: if she was a 'Kraut' of Jewish descent, she probably was separated from her own family before being sent there. It somehow makes everything happening with the Little Sisters worse, especially since she grows such a pure devotion to them. Even then, listening to her narrate her maternal revelations is so moving. And then, if you didn't save ENOUGH Little Sisters for the good ending, but didn't kill enough for the bad, the fact that she sounds so sad while explaining your descent into spliced-up maddness makes this troper sort of feel like she thought she could've saved Jack, given that she was Fontaine's agent for buying the embryo off of his birth mother.
  • More specifically, for this troper it was Tenenbaum's 'Hatred' audio log. At the end, right before she cuts the recording, you hear her voice break followed by the briefest of sobs.
  • On the topic of female characters in Bioshock with sad stories, Diane McClintock. Her fiancee, Ryan, slowly goes crazy and probably spends more intimate moments with Jasmine Jolene, anyway. She's eventually left alone after the New Year's attack ruins her face (and from what the audio diaries and the 'ghost' outside his door imply, Steinman didn't help). Then she goes on to work for Atlas (and it sort of sounded like she was starting to fall for him too, or was at least very loyal) but she walks in on his longest con and he kills her before she can blab his true identity. It's sad because she seemed so normal; there was no hint of going insane. She was just a sad woman caught up in a nightmare. She might be the closest to The Woobie aside from the Little Sisters.
• Finding Jasmine Jolene's body on a second playthrough and working out that Jack is her child. Now that was a player punch.
• Sullivan's diaries are definite tearjerkers, especially once you start finding the ones where he's given orders to assassinate Anna Cullpepper simply because Sander Cohen hates her music. Then there's the one you can find in Cullpepper's apartment, where a broken Sullivan talks about finding a blanket Cullpepper was knitting, and how he took it, because it just didn't seem right, leaving it unfinished....
• "Mr Bubbles... please, please wake up! Please!"
  • And, in the sequel's demo, a happy tearjerker "Mr. Bubbles? You're all better!"
• As someone who has a few dogs, this troper has only this to say: poor little puppy...
• Finding the Skinner boxes the Little Sisters were subjected to.
• Somehow, this troper forgot to go in Sinclair Spirits the first time around and thus failed to trigger "How Much Is That Doggie in the Window". Which means his first time ever hearing that song in its original form was in the Little Wonders facility. Turns out, in this context and with the full orchestral backing, it's less Soundtrack Dissonance as Lyrical Dissonance.
  • Oh, and if said lyrics happen to remind you of Suchong's mind control test all over again...
• This troper just discovered the premise of Bioshock2: The 'Big Sisters' are little sisters too mentally broken to adjust from being in Rapture. This troper previously found the 'moral option' in Bioshock ridiculous, thinking the 'good' and 'bad' options blatantly obvious and that practically everyone would choose 'save'. Then to find out that was probably the BAD option.... OUCH.
  • Bioshock 2 has a Tear Jerker as one of the endings. If you played as a gray area character, you get to choose at the end to either let Eleanor save you, turning her completely evil, or to sacrifice yourself and let her choose her own path. If you go with the latter, The game ends with the sad violins fading out and the screen going to black as a tearful Eleanor's voice says "But Father, wherever you are... I miss you." Cue waterworks.
    • The worst part, for this troper, was the look Eleanor got after Delta pushed the needle away. How it dawned on her that after all that happened, he would rather die than stay with her. And that everyone else she even knew is dead. If you need me, I'll be in the bathroom with an industrial box of tissues.
    • For this troper, the moment When Delta turns to look at her before he dies and she begins to cry in earnest. For the last portion of the game she is a badass, nigh gamebreaker of a character, but at that moment... At that moment she's just a scared little girl who doesn't want her Daddy to die.
    • For the entire game, you can't quite get a clear answer to if Delta is simply fulfilling some protection programming in saving her or if he truly does care. That simple gesture, using the last of your strength to get one final look at your daughter before you die, gives you your answer.
  • The "morals" of Bioshock 2 only affect the ending, right? Wrong. Eleanor will be affected by your actions. Kill a few characters or harvest a few little sisters and she'll adopt a similar do-whatever-it-takes-to-survive attitude. That's not the tear jerker. After looking through the eyes of a Little Sister, seeing how they view the world-- golden and beautiful, the splicers as pretty costumed people, blood as rose petals, debris as pillows-- is saddening on its own. (The music, "My Heart Belongs to Daddy", does not help.) But after giving Eleanor her Big Sister suit, she talks to you, explaining the previously mentioned attitude.

Eleanor: (as she picks up the Little Sister) That means that what I'm about to do is completely natural...

• • • Yes, the little girl you've been playing as is harvested and it's still through her point-of-view! As soon as the game let her, this troper paused and cried for a few minutes.
• No mention of Bioshock 2's opening cutscene? Aside from the hauntingly sad violin music, and when we realize this is from the view of a Big Daddy, which carries its own brand of sadness, the ending, when Sofia Lamb shows up, and uses mind control to make the player character shoot himself, all while her own daughter whom she doesn't even love and who is bonded to the player character, is forced to watch... Eleanor's look of horror and the sheer helplessness of the situation, just... this troper felt equal parts Tear Jerker and Unstoppable Rage.
  • For this troper, the saddest part of the cutscene was at the very beginning. You walk towards a Vent as a lumbering Big Daddy and pull out your Little Sister. Only instead of the demonic children you remember from the first game, you see only a cheerful young girl. As she pulls you along the hallway, you glance at your reflection in the window... it's an incredibly moving moment considering Big Daddies are creatures the player views as emotionless fodder in the first game. For the first time, they are shown to be sentient beings who truly care for the girls they're bound to protect. Even more heart-wrenching is watching the scene after having beaten the game. This is not just a Little Sister... this is Eleanor. Your /daughter/. Cue the tears.
• We can't forget about Mark Meltzer now, can we? This troper was spoiled on it so it probably didn't hit him as hard as it would have, but he still felt pretty bad when the name showed up over the corpse. He followed this up by getting his Master Protector achievement with Cindy, in the very same room her father fell. Don't worry, bro. She's safe with me.
  • With Eleanor, you mean. Delta doesn't make it out alive either.
    • No, that troper doesn't. She's safe with that troper, and the player character, no matter who they are (evil players notwithstanding)... She's safe with the player because said player will not permit a splicer to lay a hand upon her. The danger for the girl was in Rapture. Delta got her out... he did his part, as her father... adopted father or no.
      • Whoever Cindy's safe with regardless, the actual experience of walking into that lab room, seeing what is probably your last Big Daddy getting attacked by splicers, and triumphantly grenading him or what-have-you, only to pan the camera down to his now dim face port to see the caption 'Mark Meltzer', and pan over to sobbing Cindy? If you followed Something in the Sea, and got emotionally involved in his story - following his desperate search for his daughter, reading his scrawls and notes, solving Lutwidge's insane riddles and puzzles, discovering the message hidden on the record, getting Cindy's pleas for help, waking up on a ship, the list goes on - it's all the more heartbreaking. This troper read every document of Sit S, loved Mark Meltzer almost as much as Sinclair, obsessively listened closely to every audio diary, and shouted with joy at hearing his voice behind the main doors of Dionysus Park. I excitedly asked a friend who had already played the game - will I get to meet him? To which she slowly replied "...Yes." To listen to his conversation with Lamb, and realize what you've just done - I shut off the game and sobbed for a good half hour, to the same friend.
• And there's "Minerva's Den", a new single-player story mode, available as DLC. After the twist revealing that Subject Sigma is Porter, and that it was The Thinker impersonating Porter's personality in order to guide you, it gets even sadder; Sigma/Porter, optionally, finds an Audio Diary where Porter has put his recently-deceased wife's personality into the machine so she can still be with him... but he realizes that he can't live with a fake wife. In the end, Porter follows Tenenbaum to the surface, where not only is his human self restored, but he visits his wife's grave one last time to leave a letter saying he's ready to "let her go her way" on her tombstone, accepting the fact that she's gone. After receiving a PlayStation 3 Trophy for beating that campaign, I put the controller down and sobbed.
  • "Minerva's Den" had a truly bittwersweet ending, but putting aside the story for a moment- when the DLC itself was released and the chance to go back to Rapture was presented, this troper couldn't speak. Being able to go back as a new experience itself, to be able to experience Rapture with fresh eyes, once again- it was a beautiful moment. Just to be plummeted back into Rapture, especially with your last memory of leaving it- being Subject Sigma and having that beautiful, terrible city once again in your grasp... more than a few tears were shed.
• The pre-Little Sister Eleanor audio diaries you find, knowing what happened to her between then and now. Especially the last one, "My Name Is Eleanor":

ELEANOR: I'm all alone here. Mr. Diary. You're my whispering friend. A doctor keeps coming to see me. He says Rapture needs me, and tomorrow I'll be leaving with him. I ask why... and he just smiles. I'm not an orphan. Mum's alive somewhere. And Aunt Gracie is still probably looking for me. But I can't wait for them. I'm going to escape and find Amir, and we'll steal a submarine. Before it's tomorrow, I'll know what sunshine feels like...

• One of the loading-screen quotations in the multiplayer mode of the sequel is from a man who tried to protect his home with Geyser Traps. Someone close to him named "Ditty" apparently tried to mop them up, thinking they were puddles, and the quote is of the man holding the dying woman and begging her not to leave him...
• In the first game, go to the Little Sister Orphanage. In one of the girls' rooms, there are two gravestones drawn on the wall. One says "Mommy" the other says "Daddy".
  • The Little Sisters Orphanage itself is a Tearjerker. It's an orphanage, parents probably gave-up their children because they thought their child would have a better life. Instead the girls that survived the process (and some didn't) were turned into Little Sisters. You even hear advertisements for it over Rapture's PA saying 'Give your little girl the life she deserves.' No child deserves that life...
• "*horrible choking cough* So long, kid *cough* ... an' thank you." Then Lamb starts in, saying how you didn't care about Sinclair anyway...
  • This troper has been unable to summon up enough willpower to actually proceed due to putting down the controller, turning off the PlayStation 3, and sobbing for a good 10 minutes. Between Sinclair and Mark...
• How, in the name of all that is holy, did harvesting Little Sisters in Bioshock 2 not come up? In the first one it's pretty sad. In the second one it is absolutely heartbreaking, with the girl screaming "Daddy, no!" the entire time. I was planning to be evil the first playthrough. I couldn't do it.
• The Pigskin Splicer's dialogue in the first Bioshock is downright wrenching. While most of the Splicers are just drifting through their own little worlds in between bouts of psychopathic rage, the Pigskin spends most of his time weeping and begging to have ten seconds inside his own head, while occasionally hallucinating that his parents have come back to pick him up. When you evade him, he pleads for you to show yourself, because he doesn't want the others to kill him.
  • Especially since his lines seem to imply that he was pressured into/convinced to take plasmids to 'enhance his game,' several of them trying desperately to convince "Mr Ryan" and possibly others that he's "good enough." Not to mention a few seem to be addressing a girlfriend and may veer back into Nightmare Fuel.

"Uh... Baby? I'm... I'm all calmed down now, okay? So... just open the--" "Hey, c'mon-- Joey's gone, all right? You... You can come out now..."

• In the novel Bioshock: Rapture, Bill McDonagh's goodbye to his wife and daughter, Elaine and Sophie as they're being allowed to escape from Rapture, with him getting left behind. It wasn't helped by the fact that it reminded this troper strongly of her father, and is the sort of thing he'd say.

Bill's daughter looked over her shoulder at him. Bill tried to fill his mind with the last sight he would have of her. "Good-bye, love!" he called, waving once. "Your old dad loves you!" Then Elaine pulled Sophie along with her, through a doorway, and out of his sight...

• • The disintegration of Rapture was a tearjerker by dint of being a Foregone Conclusion: Yet it starts out so optimistically, with people being proud and awestruck that they built a city under the sea. Then begin the leaks both literal and metaphorical, women forced into prostitution because they can't find any other niche in Rapture and can't get away, the growing prevalence of both Splicers and firearms and finally the death of McDonagh, who was part of Rapture from the start and probably its biggest believer, being shot in exchange for letting his family go free. It's as if that moment marks the exact end of Rapture's total conversion into the hellhole of the first game.
    • The above was the first time This Troper felt bad for Andrew Ryan. Watching his descent into paranoia as his paradise crumbled was one thing, but he can't even be there to watch his goons carry out his order to execute McDonagh, as if he's aware that this was the last person left who had trusted him and had been trusted.
    • This troper literally choked up reading that chapter during one of his work breaks.
• When the Lady Smith splicer isn't being hilarious she dips into Tearjerker territory, believing herself to have been evicted from her estate, rambling about how it was inherited from her parents and how she raised her children there. It's Mood Whiplash to hear her go from insulting Rapture's interior decoration to wondering if her three little angels miss their mommy. They're all gone. Adds another level to Lady Smiths going after Little Sisters, since they think they're "saving" the girls and say things like "Let go of that poor child, she's helpless!" or "Unhand that child, you monster!" Did her own children just grow up, or... ?
  • The rest of the time she believes she's being evicted, seeing you as ruffians from "the bank" who are invading her house, smashing her family's heirlooms, and stealing her mother's pearls. For a second or two she's just an aging society-lady forced to watch heartless thugs destroy everything she has left.
  • Her Establishing Character Moment is when you see her and another Splicer in front of a Big Daddy corpse, and her out-of-place comment shows that this woman was in the High-Society of the East Coast not long ago, but is now down to cutting apart genetical abominations for food.

You call that tenderloin? If you serve that in any respectable hotel in New York, they'd laugh you out of town.

• Sander Cohen, believe it or not, actually made this troper feel so sorry for him. On the surface, he seems like a goofy sociopath with no redeeming traits, what with him turning people into statues and ordering you to kill other artists just because he doesn't like their artwork, but listen to his audio diary "The Wild Bunny". It starts off as an innocent poem about being a little bunny... but then quickly escalates into loud, screaming sobs. Hearing Sander so desperate and vulnerable made this troper's gut wrench at the thought of how this madman is trapped in his own mind, and is possibly well aware of his own madness (the "Ears", as he calls it), but try as he might he can't escape it. It certainly makes those white masks everyone wears all the more symbolic...