Are there games or moments that moved you...emotionally?

Can't really think of any except Ghost of Tsushima recently. The end to Act 2 and ending hit a bit hard.

I remember in Mass Effect 3 when Mordin is about to get blown up I was starting to get a bit sad but then he started singing the "I am a scientist Salarian" song and then he abruptly blows up and the animation is kind of goofy I ended up laughing instead. RIP to Mordin though, one of the best characters in the series.
 
The Witcher 3 got me good with Geralt and Yennefer's romance. That music that plays is incredible. I never felt moved by a game love story before, let alone in film.

Rescuing Sif in Dark Souls after learning their story always got me emotional, especially killing him in my second playthrough, the goodest boy.

Soma's ending got me good as well. I wont spoil anything openly, but I felt so badly
for the clones of myself left behind, and the people trapped in those machines.

TLOU for obvious reasons, fucking epic.

FF7 Aerith and the FF7 Cris Core prequel featuring Zack on the PSP. The end of the latter was really sad. I dont know why I didnt see it coming, I should have known.

It was a weird feeling playing a game in a world I loved, with a character who would mingle with/befriend Cloud, who was basically me, as I named him after me; gameception lol
 
Valkyria Chronicles - Sister gets shot

Metal Gear Solid 3 - Ending

Metal Gear Solid 4 - Final Boss Fight when the life bars fill up and MGS1 music starts playing

God of War 2018 - When you go to get the blades

TLOU & TLOU 2 - Lots of moments
 
Red Dead 2 really got me toward the end of the main protagonists story..
 
The end from "The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa"

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Battlefield 1 had some pensive moments in its stories.
Especially the Australian one.
 
Shenmue had me a few times, but the game benefits from having an amazing score.
 
I don't care if it's not really a "game", per se, What Remains of Edith Finch hollowed me out. It scooped out my insides.

But I recently played through Bioshock Infinite yet again, and I forgot what a masterpiece the story in that game was. I have been trying to get a friend to just play the damn thing, so I got it for him, and played part of the first level for him to watch hoping he would get sucked in. Sort of backfired because it sucked me in, and I reinstalled it when I got home. Fourth time through for me, and second time I've revisited it since my initial playthroughs when it came out. It may be only 8 years old, but it has aged better in eight years than just about any story from any medium I've ever known that was already universally acclaimed when it released. It's never been more relevant.

****SPOILERS BELOW****

I also have only gained a deeper appreciation for the careful mastery of the language. It's worthy of an American Lit class. It's actually upsetting how overlooked video games are by mainstream academia when you study this. Example from an in-game "voxophone" audio log:

"When you forced deep underground, well-- you see things from the bottom up. And down at the bottom of the city, I saw a fire burning. A fire's got heat aplenty, but it ain't got no mouth. Daisy...now, she got herself a mouth big enough for all the fires in Columbia."
- Daisy Fitzroy, February 12th, 1912

Like many works in popular fiction, emulating the upstairs/downstairs dynamic of late feudal British life, the city of Columbia's socioeconomic stratification is physically reflected in the city itself. Not only does the city, which perceives itself as morally superior to all others, float in the air, but the poorest working class residents imported to do menial labor live on the lowest levels of the city. This motif has deep roots in Sci-Fi and Fantasy owing to The Time Machine. Recently, Star Wars has also implemented it in Coruscant. The Matrix troped the metaphor with the irony of the city of Zion's dependence on the dumb machines powering the city from its bowels (while they fight the intelligent machines from outside). In Bioshock, the Vox Populi are a radical left-wing uprising. They protest their inequality with mass, violent destruction of the city itself, and murder of its privileged class. Ultimately, they prove as evil as their overlords. They embody a Communist revolution gone awry, but they remind me of another recent "populist" movement.

Nevertheless, Daisy remains a more sympathetic figure than Comstock, even though she eventually succumbs to become what she hates, and the Revolution to which they are most closely analogized in the story is the French Revolution, which although messy, is generally viewed sympathetically by us in the modern era. "Forced underground" specifically invokes the Underground Railroad, and thus slavery, which is what people like her signify in the game.

"And down at the bottom of the city, I saw a fire burning" conveys the physical stratification by height as I wrote in the paragraph above, but it also sets up the metaphor of fire. This is a complex metaphor. The fire represents the foundry of the city; the industrial belly which powers it like those machines in the Matrix. This is Fink's capitalist machine that devours its workers with its unrelenting assembly lines seen in the game. It invokes the imagery of the film Modern Times by Chaplin. And what do these assembly lines produce? Why arms! Weapons for profit.

Simultaneously, fire embodies the swelling rage of the disenfranchised, oppressed citizens of Columbia. Furthermore, to make this even more beautiful, this fiery rage growing within these oppressed workers is manifested in the barrels they surround like the homeless when you venture down to this lowest level. There is literal fires expressing the ideas. Magnificent.

Oh, we're not done. This complex metaphor is mirrored by another symbol in the city: the tower in which Elizabeth resides. Elizabeth is the innocent, idealistic girl who lives a life of luxury, but imprisoned within a gilded cage. The tower takes the form of the archangel of Columbia herself. Elizabeth lives at the top of the tower, like Rapunzel, or other kidnapped princesses in fairy tales where the girl is locked away at the top. Like so many feminist icons of literature from the past century, despite her education, and her status, she is not free. Yet, what is at the bottom of the tower? The Siphon. This is the machine that deprives her of her reality-warping power: that feeds on her to let Comstock control and wield that power himself. Here we see the parallel between the Siphon and Fink's industrial motor.

Back to the Voxophone. "A fire's got heat aplenty, but it ain't got no mouth." That's Daisy's way of saying rage has potential energy, but it doesn't change anything unless it is articulated. You have to tap it. You must convert it into motion-- into a movement. This is her uprising. Here we find an implied, unwritten play on words that is simply sublime. Fire "aint got no mouth", but what does fire have? A tongue. Flames are often described as tongues, and these tongues as "licking" whatever they touch: thereby burning this fuel. What do all these tongues need? A mouth. "Daisy's got herself a mouth big enough for all the fires of Columbia." Daisy foments her revolution with her speech using her literal mouth. She stokes every one of these separate flames into one massive conflagration of disobedience.

Thus, Daisy's tongue becomes a fire, the collective rage of the city, burning the city itself. Ironically, she becomes what she hates, and this is made explicit in a later voxophone when she says, "The thing people need to understand is that the antidote to fear is fear". She's the anti-FDR. Once again, this is woven into this sprawling, intricate, beautifully wrought metaphor. By becoming this huge mouth, wielding this city-sized tongue of fire, she has become a machine of consumption herself no different than the Siphon or Fink's factories.

Most people don't understand why I love video games. It's because they're ignorant. Get off Candy Crush. This is a goddamn masterpiece.
 
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