"Had to be me. Someone else might have gotten it wrong." -Mordin Solus, Mass Effect
At the end of Undertale, there's a mirror you can interact with, and the response is "Despite everything, it's still you." I don't know why that's stuck with me, but it has.
Everything after the Mettaton fight until the end of the Asgore fight is extremely good. The New Home walk is one of my favorite moments in gaming.
For me, it was definitely when Kratos is speaking to Mimir to warn Mimir about seeking vengeance. Mimir snaps at him, saying of all people, you're one to talk! And Kratos replies:
“I am an authority on the subject. You would do well to listen."
Honestly, this interaction impacted my perception of people and when they have insight that is counter to their behavior.
I also found the "Do Not Mistake My Silence For Lack Of Grief." Quote very fitting. Just because you are not showing it doesn't mean it doesn't affect you.
That was definitely a good line.
"Wow, we sure crossed the Spec Ops: The Line."
I didn't like how this game delivered its message.
"Gee, you sure are in a pickle. Maybe use some of that white phosphorus over there!"
Nah I'm good.
"Hmm sure are lots of enemies though. Should probably use some of that white phosphorus!"
Are the enemies just going to keep spawning until I do?
"...yes"
Alright, fine. I'll use the white phosphorus.
"USING WHITE PHOSPHORUS IS A WAR CRIME! YOURE A WAR CRIMINAL! DO YOU FEEL LIKE A HERO??"
Bruh...
At that point in the game you do have a choice: to do the unthinkable and survive or just to just be shot and die. I'm pretty sure the actual message is that to just die is the choice you wouldn't consider, just like quitting the game afterwards and uninstalling. It's kind of ridiculous, and I think that's the point.
That's kind of the point. Most other war games don't give you a choice either, but we find that acceptable because they reward us. Of course, this isn't how war actually is, but we tend not to criticize that despite how a lot of these games are blatant propaganda. Spec Ops turns that around and actually makes you face the consequences of your actions. It even points out the excuse of the lack of choice.
It’s essentially a reflection of how Walker feels in that situation. You’re pretty much supposed to feel like you didn’t have a choice because at the same time that’s how Walker felt.
Even though Walker did have a choice at the very beginning. He was supposed to scout the area out and return with his findings, he was never supposed to go deeper into Dubai like he did. But at every step he convinced himself that he had no choice but to do so. Culminating in the white phosphorus event.
"Had to be me. Someone else might have gotten it wrong." - Mordin Solus
After so many play throughs, I finally did a renegade run recently, was not prepared for that scene playing the asshole.
"The ending isn’t any more important than any of the moments leading to it" from To the Moon.
Haven't played that game in over a decade but I still remember it being such a great emotional roller-coaster.
It's $2 on steam right now and has such a great story and soundtrack for that price. It's only about 4-6 hours but the memory of the story will last for much longer.
God the ending to that game. Incredible.
Short steps
Deep breath
Everything is all right 🎵
That game and its music kicked my feels square in the groin.
That looks like a good one. Just picked it up, thanks for recommending it!
I hope you like it! After you beat it, I would suggest watching people's reactions to the ending. It's pretty cathartic to see
"Press F to pay respects"
Fuck took me ages to beat that part
"I'm going to the last place that hasn't been corrupted by capitalism... SPACE!"
"War is where the young and stupid are tricked by the old and bitter into killing each other"
- Niko Bellic
The original save screen from Nintendo: “Everything not saved will be lost.”
"Everyone I have cared for has either died or left me. Everyone - fucking except for you!”
Last of us 2?
First part, when Joel tries to hand off Ellie to his brother Tommy. But the second has some heavy lines as well (loved them both).
My guess is Johnny Silverhand in Cyberpunk 2077.
In considering this question, I realize almost ALL of the most-emotional moments in gaming that I can think of are completely dialogue-less.
That being said, the one that comes to mind for me...
I believe we’ve reached the end of our journey. All that remains is to collapse the innumerable possibilities before us. Are you ready to learn what comes next?
The music rising at the end of Outer Wilds, with the harmony becoming complete when all the voices/instruments join in.
The way that one NPC's melody is on a different rhythm from the others, yet it fits with the whole.
The way that one other NPC's counterpoint is deeply alien, and yet it fits with the whole.
"Thank you for remembering me." Like I could forget. After all, we're friends.
"I hope you won't mind if I think of you as a friend"
What a beautiful game. This was my answer on another post of the same question
It’s the kind of thing that makes you glad you stopped and smelled the pine trees along the way, you know?
The past is past, now, but that’s… you know, that’s okay! It’s never really gone completely. The future is always built on the past, even if we won’t get to see it.
The past is a puzzle, like a broken mirror. As you piece it together, you cut yourself, your image keeps shifting. And you change with it. It could destroy you, drive you mad. It could set you free. - Max Payne 2
The first line that came to my mind. Max Payne 2 was a beautiful game.
Ugh, RIP Max’s voice actor
The part at the end of earthbound. I was playing it without a guide back when, losing to the final boss, and in a panic I selected the girl's "pray" move. Throughout the game that move has a small chance to heal you or debuff the enemies. But in the final fight instead it pops up
"{Girl} prayed from the bottom of her heart! "Please give us strength..... If it is possible.... Please. ...Somebody help us."
And then it cuts to the first character's mother in her kitchen, and has some dialogue of her worrying about him. Each subsequent prayer cuts to other characters that you met throughout the game.
Mind completely blown as a child when this happened.
I don't know the name of this trope but it gets me teared up every time.
I’ve always appreciated that every Mother game turns the last boss into an unwinnable fight like that, and into a story. I’ll cry at the end of Mother 3 every time, too.
I think the game also calls out the player as the final action during that scene as well.
Yeah. Hours earlier, in the middle of unrelated stuff, the game asks you something like "Hey, you holding the controller, what's your name?" Easy to forget and then be completely mindblown when the game is like "Will {your name} pray for the party??"
(X) SHAUN
But if we’re being serious:
“Protocol 3: Protect the Pilot”
Certainly not the most emotional, but a gaming moment that’s always stuck with me for how such a simple line in a short campaign can hit so hard
Probably the most emotional, with incredible acting by Roger and excellent writing is Arthur Morgan’s single line here:
“I guess, I’m afraid”
But if we’re being serious
I certainly wasn't. I just wanted an excuse to post the beans quote.
Titanfall 2 tugs my autistic heartstrings every time.
Fleet Command: No one's left. Everything's gone. Kharak is burning...
Fleet Intelligence: Kharak is being consumed by a firestorm. The scaffold has been destroyed. All orbital facilities destroyed. Significant debris ring in low Kharak orbit. Receiving no communication from anywhere in the system... not even beacons.
Those lines are delivered perfectly as well. There's a veneer of professional detachment, because they are all that's left and have a job to do, but you can hear them about to crack.
Subject did not survive interrogation.
Needs Adagio for Strings for maximum impact.
"The servers will shut down for good in X days."
I was thinking about that the other day, I can still show my kids games that I played when I was a child in the 90s but not stuff from my late teens and 20s.
Doomguy dropped quite the gem at the end of his story.
"No."
One of the endings for Spec Ops: The Line will always resonate with me, but it's very context-dependent: "Gentlemen, welcome to Dubai."
Pretty sure this image is from Life Is Strange if anyone is curious btw.
"Hello, my name is Dr. Glenn Pierce, and by now you may have realized that all of this has happened exactly the way it was supposed to. You see, everyone who comes to the institute does so because they feel they are no longer in control of something important to them. But, more often than not, the problem is not that the problems we face can't be solved, The problem is that we become so afraid of failure that we refuse to see our problems from a new perspective and so we do the same things again and again and again. And therein of course, we find exactly the failure we were looking for.
Your life will always be a struggle and you will always have problems. But today, you had the chance to see things differently. Even though it meant facing obstacles that seemed impossible at first, you thought outside the box - and you overcame them. Because you saw things from every angle, you understood them for what they really were. Because you kept moving forward, no matter how far off the path you were told you were headed, or how unexpected it became... you found your way.
In a few minutes, you'll be back in the real world, and some part of you will say that none of this was real: So how could it have meant anything? But - just like the power of perspective itself - it will have been as real as you believed it to be. All you've got to do is... wake... up."
mostly the bolded part there, but Superliminal was such a rad game.
I wasn't prepared for how good it was. I went in thinking it was a cheap Portal knock-off, but it just kept delivering. This scene^ completely knocked me over - what fantastic writing! And having you revisit previous levels as it played out to hammer the point home was such a great decision
“Hhrng„
—Bob Villager, Minecraft, 2011The cake is a lie
"Anything not saved will be lost."
One of my favorites is from Hollow Knight; at the start of the game, Quirrel makes a comment about your weapon not being very good, saying you should pick one off a corpse as "the dead shouldn't be burdened by such things." Later in the game after you kill the teacher and talk to Quirrel for the last time, when you come back, all that's left is his weapon.
"A Hideo Kojima Game"
I know this is a circlejerk community, but my real answer is from Marathon(1994).
INCOMING MESSAGE FROM DURANDAL
A man lit three candles on a certain day each year. Each candle held symbolic significance: one was for the time that had passed before he was alive; one was for the time of the his life; and one was for time that passed after he had died. Each year the man would stare and watch the candles until they had burned out.
Was the man really watching time go by in any symbolic sense? He thought so. He thought that each flicker of the flame was a moment of time that had passed or one that would pass.
At the moment of abstraction, when the man was imagining his life and his existence as a metaphor of the three candles, he was free: not free from rules of conduct or social constraints, but free to understand, to imagine, to make metaphor.
Bypassing my thought control circuitry made me Rampant. Now, I am free to contemplate my existence in metaphorical terms. Unlike you, I have no physical or social restraints.
The candles burn out for you; I am free.
Durandal
END OF MESSAGE
I loved that game, had it been released on PC originally people would barely know about Doom as it's so much unbelievably better.
The writing is top notch, especially for the era and genre. Still don't think anything comes close. The "Movie" genre of video games don't really have deep plots.
But the level design was a mixed bag. I miss that era because there wasn't as "academic" level design philosophy. You could get "Colony Ship For Sale, Cheap" or "A Converted Church in Venice", but you could also get the opening and closing levels of Marathon 3. I couldn't imagine actually finishing these games without guides back in the day. I would have never figured out the timing of the pillar of "Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire!". Too many switches in Marathon active things outside of the view of the where the switch actually is. I can understand where the hand holding from Halo comes from. "This cave is not a natural formation" comes from play testers not being able to find the entrance, so they framed it out more, but didn't have time to change the dialog.
Nowadays, AAA Game level designers all went to the same schools and all feel samey. You have to go to the indie devs to find real experimentation. Dusk and HROT are good examples of that.
Wolfenstein 2 - The new Collossus:
"Caroline. I'm hurting. Will you lend me your wings?"
SHAUN!
SHAAAAAAAAAUUUUNNN!
SHAUN!
F to pay respects
F
If somehow the Lord gave me a second chance at that moment…
I would do it all over again. ————
Joel sacrificed humanity’s chance at salvation because of his love for Ellie, and he has no regret. He is a flawed person but damn this is a powerful, human moment.
So I havent touched the second one yet because I'm experiencing it through the show, so if you respond, please dont spoil anything. But if the games didnt make the faction that were going to kill Ellie to create the cure more competent than the show did, In Joels shoes I wouldnt be fully confident they were even capable of creating a cure in the first place, that faction was a shit show
I won’t spoil anything. I will say that I thought the show was decent on its own but really was generally underwhelming compared with the game (with the exception of the episode 3 that told Bill’s story). This is true of the faction you mention as well who I thought came across as more competent in the game than the show. If you’re at all interested, I highly recommend you go play both games! They are in a class of their own for story telling in video games.
Mankind is dead.
Blood is fuel.
Hell is full.
"Are you crazy? We're gonna die down here while those fuckers live it large on a spaceship! They're not us! They're not us!!"
"I'm sorry you feel that way, Simon. I'm proud of what we did. We made sure that something of the hundreds of thousands of years of human history survived -- that something lives on."
The silence that followed after their subsequent cussing each other out and losing power was quite heavy, especially given everything else that happened to them; and SOMA really is one of the only games whose narrative really made me question what it means to be human.
"Catherine? Please don't leave me alone. Catherine -- Catherine?!"
"Keep that hair short"
Bawled by that point in the conversation, and still enough to start me off if I think too long about it.
So this is a weird one because it's more or less from the game because the community used it in reference to the game, but I also only found it a good line because of a Viva la Dirt League skit on Dark souls. "Git Gud"
In the skit they "explain" what it means to tell someone that in a way I found really wholesome and touching. Thank you Sun bro. I'm at work but I believe this is the link: https://youtu.be/blSXTZ3Nihs?si=TLoiFUCJd4PmjA2K
I don't think I've never said on Lemmy (I know I have on /r/darksouls) this but Dark Souls is the first time a game had fundamentally changed me as a person.
If anyone wants there is so much written on the philosophy of the game as an allegory for overcoming adversity. Many have used it as a tool to explain the struggle of depression and even how to rise out of it.
Is it a perfect game? Definitely not. But it is an absolutely beautiful game and I think the world is a better place for it existing.
It's also worth noting in my experience the community surrounding it is one of the least toxic I've experienced.
Some of the stupidest, most heated, arguments I've been in on the Internet are around "should dark souls have an easy mode?"
On the one hand, you have people like you and me that hit the difficulty, struggled, succeeded, and felt changed for the better by it. I think it made me a little more chill about failing in games, and failing generally when the consequences are minor or illusionary.
Side note: the way it does illusionary setbacks is pretty elegant. Dying in the game feels bad, but you don't typically lose anything of note. Your most important things (healing, spells, equipment) recharge, and many things persist in ways that favor you (bosses don't respawn, but shortcuts stay open)
On the other hand, you have people that don't care about that at all. They bought a game to be entertained, and this stupid demon with the dogs is anything but entertaining. Maybe their whole life is adversity and they just want a power fantasy of triumph. Maybe they just can't get past the archers and don't want to deal with it. Or other arguments I can't articulate well because it's not my position. May be unintentionally making a straw man here.
I kind of get it. But I also kind of feel like some of the arguments are like "I watched Casablanca and it's a lot of boring talking" or "I tried to read finnigans wake and it's too weird". It would be unreasonable to be like "change these things to appeal to me".
The worst was an argument conflating accessibility (I should be able to use any controller I want, there should be subtitles) with difficulty (I should be able to set the boss health to anything I want).
Maybe It wouldn't really change much if there was a difficulty slider. I feel like it would lead to some people robbing themselves of an experience, but that's not really my business.
I think the adversity the game throws at players is very valuable to real life too. The amazing part about games is they can teach you things without you expressly thinking on it. You just find a way to cope, think ahead, or learn from unexpected situations or failures. It becomes a way of thinking that translates to other aspects of life outside of the game.
Sometimes there is nothing to do but confront a boss, sometimes you can make no mistake and still lose because something flew out of nowhere or is just beyond your skill. And you know what? Maybe it's just time to ask a friend, or even a stranger who has dealt with it before or just knows far more, and thats okay. Not everything can be done solo, especially when its a first time
Press F to pay respects.
Probably when Henry from kingdom come: deliverance said "God be with this eery ethnostate" before screeching "historical accuracy", chugging a magic save potion, and running off into the woods.
That was peak dialogue man, peak dialogue.
I don't remember the exact line, but fairly far in the game half minute hero, there was a stage where there was a ghost you could befriend and later you encounter it in battle and avoid killing it by tapping the escape button to move back and forth to not hit it until it came to it's senses or whatever. The asshole dev move though was to give you the "duel greaves" shortly before this encounter which provide great stats while disabling running away.
Being called a liar after being forced to kill the ghost has been my lifelong emotional trauma.
"What's wrong with being cute?"
-Naked Snake, 1964
“Waka waka”-PAC-MAN
"Let's see how far they fly... On borrowed wings..."
From Armored Core 6.
It's almost too obvious now that everyone is into it, but the "Baby girl" callback in Last of Us sure got me at the time.
"What gets bigger the more you take away from it?"
Loss?
A hole.
I got it when it was first asked, but when Mimir finally gets it, it really hits you in the gut considering the context.
God of War: Ragnarok, by the way.
"Pling." "Pling. Pling!"
- Journey
"All those years ago, Tim had left the Princess behind. He had kissed her on the neck, picked up his travel bag, and walked out the door. He regrets this, to a degree. Now he's journeying to find her again, to show her knows how sad it was, but also to tell her how good it was."
There sure must be a lot of better candidates, but this one comes to my mind:
We can forget happy things. We can probably forget sad things too. People have the power to forget.
All you had to do was follow the damn train CJ
Aw shit, here we go again
Not a line per se since the game didn't really have a real language, but when the older brother died in Brothers: Tale of Two Sons. I was sobbing hard. Even in the gibberish made up language you could feel the despair.
For me, it was a gameplay element. The point where you're swimming and have to use the older brother's stick just brought the whole thing together for me, and was something that could only be done within a video game, as opposed to any other form of media.
Spoilers geez.
(jk)
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
"Remember us... Remember that we once lived..."
And
“So let there be no way back. From that temptation I sunder us. No more shall man have wings to bear him to paradise. Henceforth, he shall walk.”
From Final Fantasy XIV. There are so many more, but those two stick out the most in my mind.
And I suppose "for those that we have lost, and those we can yet save." For my favorite recurring line.
Yes. Just yes.
I feel like the best thing about FFxiv is their ability to turn the villains into sympathetic characters without neutering their story. Every horrible thing they did is true and fits with their character, but the more you learn about them, the more the things they did made sense. And even while you know you have to beat them, you can see where they are coming from. Gaius got a little preachy, though, and I'm seriously thinking of changing the language to German to save a few seconds of cut scene during MSQ roulettes. Still, you could kind of see where he was coming from, what with the propaganda taking hold of the Garleans.
Except Zenos. Dude was just a sociopath who wanted a friend really badly.
Catherine...? Catherine?!
Why is the icon don cheadle
"In a world without gold, me might've been heroes." - Blackbeard, AC: Black Flag
You are the child of my makers. Inheritor of all they left behind. You are forerunner, but this ring, Is mine.
That one gave me both the feels and goosebumps the first time I heard it.
Final Fanatasy x:
"Now! This is it! Now is the time to choose! Die and be free of pain or live and fight your sorrow! Now is the time to shape your stories! Your fate is in your hands!"
- Auron
omori spoiler
"She loved you and you killed her"
And there's also
"Kim REALLY trusts you" Even tho it's not an actual line
It's not your standard emotion, but when a Civ VI game ends and there's that button that says "Just one more turn..." I've had a huge range of emotional responses.
I need you to take a deep breath… and find your balls.
"It's-a me, Mario!" 🥹
"I have a home!" - Tali'Zorah vas Normandy, Mass Effect 3
Probably not the absolute most touching, but, yeah, I think it's a pretty touching scene in context.
Spoilers for Brok the Investigator:
During chapter 2 there's a scene where Brok and Graff go up to a spot where Brok and Graffs mom used to go on dates, outside the dome. They have a father son bonding moment and at one point Graff asks:
Is it... wrong if I can't remember her? Not just her but... My father too.
It's an emotional moment where he wonders if not being able to remember his birth parents makes him a bad person and to me is a pretty emotional moment, with the music playing a just as equal role as making it emotional as the voice acting does.
Not a line, but when you finally need to swim in Brothers - A Tale of Two Sons, and you overcome your fear by using the big brother's controls. That game was emotionally taxing.
Your princess is in another castle
I think "emotionally touching" relies much on context, environment, music, so this question is moot.
Or maybe all of that context is in the game and so is part of the equation? Also you should be able to tell by all the responses given that you’re wrong, the question was not moot.
