The first time a video game made me actually cry, I was twenty years old in 1998, sitting in my cramped dorm room at ASU playing Final Fantasy VII on my roommate’s PlayStation. Yeah, I know – I was a Sega guy playing on Sony hardware, but the Saturn was basically dead by then and I needed my RPG fix. Anyway, you probably know the scene I’m talking about. Aerith, the prayer, Sephiroth with that stupidly long sword, the materia bouncing down those steps. I’m sitting there with the controller getting sweaty in my hands, waiting for some miracle save, some Phoenix Down that would fix everything. But Square wasn’t playing around – she was gone, permanently, and all those hours I’d spent leveling her up and learning her limit breaks just… didn’t matter anymore.
I remember my throat getting tight as Cloud carried her into that lake, and by the time her materia sank to the bottom, I was wiping my eyes like crazy, hoping my roommate wouldn’t walk in and catch me crying over a bunch of polygonal characters that looked like they were made out of Legos. This was 1998, remember – we didn’t have fancy motion capture or realistic faces. These characters barely looked human, but somehow Square had made me care about them more than most real people I knew.
Looking back now, I’m not embarrassed about those tears. That moment was huge for me because it proved games had evolved beyond the simple arcade experiences I’d grown up with on my Master System and Genesis. This wasn’t about reflexes or high scores – this was storytelling that could gut-punch you emotionally in ways I’d only experienced reading books or watching movies. But there was something different about it, something more intense than passive entertainment.
See, that’s what makes gaming tears hit different than movie tears or book tears. Aerith wasn’t just some character I was watching – I had controlled her every move for dozens of hours. I’d chosen her equipment, selected her materia combinations, decided when she’d cast Heal or when she’d attack. She felt like my responsibility, my teammate. When she died, it wasn’t just sad – it felt personal in a way that watching a movie character die never could.
My buddy Mike was a huge Final Fantasy fan too, and when I told him about getting emotional during that scene, he just nodded and said, “Yeah, man, that part destroyed me too.” Turned out this was a shared experience among gamers, this moment where we all realized our hobby had grown up alongside us.
Fast forward to 2013, and The Last of Us nearly broke me all over again. There’s this scene near the end – just Joel and Ellie looking at some giraffes in post-apocalyptic Salt Lake City. On paper, it sounds ridiculous. If you described it to someone who doesn’t play games, they’d probably wonder what the big deal is. But after twenty hours of violence and moral compromise, watching infected people tear each other apart, making impossible survival choices, that moment of pure beauty and wonder hits you like a freight train.
I stood there for probably ten minutes, just letting Joel and Ellie watch those giraffes. The game wasn’t forcing me to move on – I could have stayed there indefinitely if I wanted. That choice to linger made it more powerful than any scripted movie scene could be. My girlfriend Sarah walked into the living room during this part and asked what was happening. “Just… looking at giraffes,” I said, aware of how stupid that sounded. She watched for a minute, then said, “You look like you’re about to start crying.” She wasn’t wrong.
The Walking Dead’s first season finale completely wrecked me emotionally. I’d spent five episodes making choices to protect Clementine, this eight-year-old kid who depended on my decisions. When the final moments came and I realized what had to happen – what I had to make Lee tell her to do – I actually put the controller down and walked away for a few minutes. I couldn’t bring myself to select the dialogue option because I knew it would break my heart.
That’s something unique about games that other media can’t replicate. When the sad part happens in a movie, you can look away but the scene keeps playing. In a game, sometimes you have to be the one pushing the story forward, actively participating in your own emotional destruction. I talked to other players online afterward, and tons of them described the same experience – that moment of resistance, of not wanting to proceed because the weight was too much.
But gaming tears don’t always come from tragedy. Journey made me cry with pure beauty and this incredible sense of connection with a complete stranger. There’s this part near the end where you’re climbing up this mountain, your character getting slower and weaker in the freezing wind. I was playing with another person – someone I’d never met, would never speak to, didn’t even know their name. When my character collapsed in the snow, this other player stayed with me, chirping those little musical notes that were the only way we could communicate. They waited, encouraged me, helped me get back up.
When we finally reached the summit together, with that amazing music swelling and this gorgeous visual payoff, I found myself crying from joy and relief and this weird gratitude toward this anonymous person who’d shared the journey with me. No other form of entertainment could create that specific emotional response – that bond with a stranger through shared digital experience.
Mass Effect hit me in yet another way. I’d spent three games building a friendship between my Commander Shepard and Garrus Vakarian. We’d fought through countless missions together, had conversations about life and duty and what it means to do the right thing. In the third game, there’s this quiet scene where you meet up with him on the Citadel for some target practice, just two friends taking a break from saving the galaxy. The conversation ends with Garrus saying, “There’s no Shepard without Vakarian,” and it absolutely destroyed me.
I’d been building that friendship for probably 200 hours of gameplay spread across several years of real time. That relationship felt more developed than some I’d had with actual people. When my brother asked what I was playing that night and why I looked upset, I tried to explain and he just gave me this look like I was crazy. “It’s just a game character,” he said. But after all that shared experience, Garrus didn’t feel like “just” anything to me.
Technology has definitely helped games become more emotionally powerful. The performance capture in The Last of Us lets you see genuine grief in Joel’s face during the opening sequence – subtle expressions that would’ve been impossible back in the PlayStation days. But it’s interesting that those technical limitations didn’t stop earlier games from hitting emotional beats. They just had to be more creative about it.
Music plays a huge role too. Game composers understand how a returning musical theme at the right moment can completely wreck you emotionally. I still can’t listen to “To Zanarkand” from Final Fantasy X without being transported back to that beach scene where Tidus learns the truth about the pilgrimage. There are certain video game soundtracks – Nier: Automata comes to mind – that I actually avoid listening to while driving because I know they might make me too emotional to safely operate a vehicle. That probably says something about either the music’s power or my questionable emotional stability.
Player choice adds another layer that’s unique to gaming. When a character dies in a movie, it’s predetermined. When someone dies because of YOUR choices, that responsibility creates a different kind of emotional response. I still feel guilty about certain decisions I made in Mass Effect that led to characters getting killed. There’s an ownership of those outcomes that you don’t get from passive media.
The length of games contributes too. You spend way more time with game characters than with movie characters or even TV show characters across multiple seasons. I put about 90 hours into Persona 4 Golden, and saying goodbye to that group at the end genuinely felt like moving away from close friends. I sat through the entire credits sequence because I didn’t want to accept it was over.
Sometimes the emotional impact comes from completely unexpected places. Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons used its control scheme itself to tell an emotional story in ways that still give me chills thinking about it. Stardew Valley, which looks like a cute farming game, has some of the most thoughtful examinations of depression and small-town life I’ve ever seen. I’ve had more meaningful conversations sitting on a digital pier with pixel-art characters than I’ve had watching most Oscar-winning dramas.
What’s crazy is how games can sustain emotional states for hours at a time. A movie might make you sad for a scene before moving on. A game can wrap you in an atmosphere of melancholy or hope that lasts the entire experience. The constant rain and gothic architecture of Bloodborne create this persistent dread that gets into your bones. The warm, nostalgic summer setting of Firewatch surrounds you with bittersweet emotion for its entire runtime.
The games that affect me most tend to subvert expectations. God of War 2018 looked like another violent action game but turned into one of the most moving father-son stories I’ve experienced in any medium. Life is Strange seemed like a teen drama with a time-travel gimmick but became this devastating look at grief and impossible choices. When games catch you off guard like that, they slip past your defenses when you’re not expecting to be emotionally challenged.
There’s something vulnerable about admitting which games have made you cry. It reveals what matters to you, what touches you. For me, it’s usually moments of sacrifice, forgiveness, or unexpected connection. The ending of Red Dead Redemption 2 with its themes of redemption. The Witcher 3’s reunion between Geralt and Ciri after I thought she was lost forever. Smaller moments too – during the early pandemic when I couldn’t celebrate my birthday with real friends, my Animal Crossing villagers threw me a surprise party. I sat alone in my apartment, genuinely moved by these digital animals who “remembered” my birthday when everything else felt chaotic.
I’m not embarrassed by these emotional responses anymore. That twenty-year-old kid trying to hide his tears during Final Fantasy VII has become a forty-five-year-old man who’s comfortable admitting that games can make me cry, and that’s actually one of the things I value most about them. They prove this medium isn’t just about reflexes or competition – it’s about human experience made interactive.
Next time someone asks me why I spend so much time playing games, I might tell them about standing on that mountain in Journey with a stranger, or watching that sunrise with Arthur Morgan, or making impossible choices between characters I’d grown to love. Or I might just smile and say, “You’d have to play them to understand.” Some emotional experiences really are unique to gaming. Tears included.
Joe’s a history teacher who treats the console wars like actual history. A lifelong Sega devotee from Phoenix, he writes with passion, humor, and lingering heartbreak over the Dreamcast. Expect strong opinions, bad puns, and plenty of “blast processing.”
