For me, it was Princess Rosalina’s backstory in Super Mario Galaxy.
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Brothers: A tale of two sons.
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.
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Near 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.
“To the moon” Nice little point and click adventure. I played it through one afternoon and was sad for the following two days.
Lots of moments in Honkai Impact 3.
There’s literally a YT channel that collects tears from streamers playing the game.
There’s a lot of context needed to understand why anyone would cry playing through HI3 though. I’ll give a high level summary here, but I highly encourage people to play it, even if it’s a gacha game. You can really ignore the gacha and just play the game for the main story. Do be warned that the story isn’t something suitable for kids — it can be quite a bit too heavy for them.
The theme of self-sacrifice is covered quite extensively, with the main character being the centrepiece of the theme. There’s also deep self-loathe, with an eventual self-acceptance, also from the MC. Mix that all in with some sense of duty.
There’s also a tragedy, but from the tragedy, a narrow path to hope was born. The people in the tragedy mostly hoped only for a simple life, or to live their lives atoning for their sins, but circumstances forced them to become warriors against a great, unstoppable force of destruction. As if to make things harder to swallow, their digital clones that survived into the future have to experience yet another tragedy that would eventually destroy all of them, and the player will see this through. Yet, in the second tragedy, these clones further sowed the seeds of hope for the future.
Chinese company or not, HoYo has pumped out a lot of very human stories that I think deserves attention and praise. Genshin Impact has also started to go down a similar path.