Cry For The Devil / Video Games

Cry for the Devil moments in Video Games.

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• In Aquaria, you spend the entire game witnessing the effects of the Creator's mad fury, and putting the remains of his creations out of their misery. Once you defeat him, you find out that he was a little boy whose entire family was killed, and "I should have died with them". He's spent hundreds of years trying to create someone who would love him like his mother did.
• Lampshaded in Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!, where Brick and Tina (who are listening to the story being told) hates how the story starts off by making Handsome Jack, the villain of Borderlands 2, a helpful and somewhat likeable character compared to the megalomaniac in the second game. Of course, that comes later.
  Brick: Man, this story's making Jack out to be a good guy. I hate it.
• Bug Fables: The Wasp King may be a horrible tyrant who brainwashes Yellowjackets, invades kingdoms, locks people in a dungeon to starve, and is implied to have tortured the rightful Queen of the Wasps, but beating him and reading his Bestiary entry in the postgame reveals his story was not a happy one. He was abandoned in a giant, empty house full of bizarre horrors as a baby (out of necessity for his safety), then after managing to make it outside and to the Wasp Kingdom, he lived life as a trash collector with no friends that nobody cared about. It's not presented as an end-all excuse to his actions, but it does show his character in a different light.
• Azala from Chrono Trigger, after her last stand, drags herself forward as sad music plays and she asks that the humans never forget that she and her kind fought bravely to the bitter end. She then refuses to be rescued, as it is their fate to die there. Then, her final words seal it as a Tear Jerker:
  Azala: The future... we... have no future...
• The City of Heroes arcs that explore the origins of Countess Crey and Vanessa DeVore portray both as starting out well-intentioned, but losing sight of that en route to becoming the villains they are now.
• Dark Chronicle gives one of these to its villains:
  • After Gaspard reveals his tragic backstory and decides he will no longer fight the heroes, his boss, Emperor Griffon forces him to attack them by turning him into a giant monster.
  • Sirus is slowly given a sympathetic angle as the player progresses through Moonflower Palace and sees how he was during his life.
• Vergil from Devil May Cry, particularly in the third game, Dante's Awakening, after Vergil falls into Hell.
  Lady: Are you crying?
  Dante: It's only the rain.
  Lady: The rain already stopped.
  Dante: Devils never cry.
  Lady: I see. Maybe somewhere out there even a devil may cry when he loses a loved one. Don't you think?
  Dante: Maybe.
  • While the above is more an example of Sympathy for the Devil, reading into the subtext of Vergil's lines can invoke this trope in very short order.
  • In Devil May Cry 5, we get some of V's backstory, as it's revealed he is dying and the incarnation of Vergil's cast off humanity. All he wanted was to be protected and loved. As he is a part of Vergil, that means this was the case with him as well. Vergil feeling abandoned by his family was what convinced him to abandon his humanity in the first place.
• You'd think the Disgaea series, with its demonic protagonists, would feature this, but actual demons are actually just slightly bad most of the time, and have just as little tolerance for "real" evil as regular people. The real example of this trope comes from a human, Smug Snake and Omnicidal Maniac Nemo from Disgaea 4. He seeks to end the entire human race, which will also destroy the Netherworld and Celestia, because they require the fear/awe produced by humans to survive. But Nemo goes from detestable to pitiable when you learn his backstory; he was a soldier in a pointless war who was injured and cared for by a nun named Artina, despite her being on the other side. Despite her Incorruptible Pure Pureness, she was executed by her own countrymen for aiding the enemy, leading Nemo to conclude that Humans Are Bastards, and that demons and angels are no better because they allowed humanity to slip this far. He is also unable to perceive that Artina has actually become an angel (and is begging him to stop), as losing his faith made her invisible and inaudible to him.
• Dragon Age:
  • The Archdemons. While we don't know much about the Old Gods and what their alignment was, since the Darkspawn are drawn to uncover them and infect them with the Taint, it's possible they're not so much evil as merely Brainwashed and Crazy. Furthermore it's a telling sign of the physical toll that the corruption takes, when you learn that Urthemiel, the Archdemon of the Fifth Blight, was once known as "The Dragon of Beauty".
  • In Dragon Age: Origins, you spend most of the game chasing after Loghain to make him pay for his crimes. When you beat him, you get the chance to execute him. Not only is he suddenly very honourable about it, but picking this choice will make his daughter, Queen Anora, object. Then Loghain kindly hushes her and tells her it's over. When she tells him she's not a child anymore, Loghain says: "Daughters never grow up, Anora. They remain six year olds with pigtails and skinned knees forever." Suddenly, he's transformed from Big Bad to loving father. If you use him for the DLC content after the main quest he has tons of these, especially in Return to Ostagar where he can present a decent argument for why he retreated.
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim gives us Ulfric Stormcloak. Whether he's actually a villain depends on your point of view (and on who you side with during the Civil War). But even if you go Imperial, it's hard not to feel for the man when his backstory consists largely of the universe kicking him in the teeth.
• In Fable II, we meet completely unrepentant bastard Reaver, whose unthinking and casually selfish evil surpasses Lord Lucian's Well-Intentioned Extremist. After the game, you have the option of finding out his backstory: his Moral Event Horizon of sacrificing the entire village of Oakvale was an accident, the unknown cost of a bargain to protect his life and youth. All of his Jerkass behavior and rampant human sacrifice afterward takes on a new light with the knowledge that his despair collapsed in on itself hundreds of years ago.
• In Fallout, the Master plans to conquer the world with his Super Mutant army, converting all viable humans into Super Mutants and prohibiting the rest of humanity from breeding, so that the Earth can be ruled by a superior version of humanity, uniting mankind and eliminating war and suffering. His genuine belief in this ideal makes it all the more heartbreaking when you inform him that all Super Mutants are sterile, causing him to break down and kill himself.

  The Master: But it cannot be. This would mean that all my work has been for nothing. Everything that I have tried to . . . a failure! It can't be. Be. Be. Be... I . . . don't think that I can continue. Continue? To have done the things I have done in the name of progress and healing. It was madness. I can see that now. Madness. Madness? There is no hope. Leave now... while you still have hope.

• Final Fantasy:
  • Sephiroth in Final Fantasy VII is not terribly sympathetic in the original game, even after learning a bit of his backstory. In the prequel, Crisis Core, however, the character's origins as a heroic member of SOLDIER are explored. He still comes off as aloof, but has a more human side, and maintains real friendships with Genesis and Angeal. The revelations about his true nature are detailed in more depth than in the original game, and though it doesn't excuse his later actions, it's hard not to feel sorry for him in those moments.
  • Ultimecia in Final Fantasy VIII is another one, though most english-speaking fans only know it if they played the original Dissidia. In that game, she has numerous lines that heavily imply she longs for the innocent and happy days of her childhood, and moreso, that this longing is the actual driving force behind everything she does (this is even the point of her final speech to Squall, and the final text speech you get if you don't beat her as Squall in Shade Impulse). This motivation was apparently present originally in FFVIII, but was removed in the english port. For some reason, the writers for Dissidia Duodecim thought this was an excellent idea, as the rewrites for the 13th cycle in that game remove absolutely every trace of this aspect of her character, leaving a single line to Terra as the only hint of this part of her personality.
  • Yunalesca of Final Fantasy X. She was the first summoner to defeat Sin - with her beloved husband sacrificing himself to facilitate it. Unfortunately the process killed her and she is forced to remain in Zanarkand as an unsent - where she greets other summoners looking to do the same. Although she helps continue this tradition of lies, she does so because she wishes to bring (false!) hope to the world. Her final words are lamenting that the people now have no hope. What makes this worse? Sin was controlled by her father.
  • Yotsuyu in Final Fantasy XIV, the acting viceroy of Doma, who was put in place by the Garlean empire. Though clearly Doman herself, she is sadistic and hateful and her only goal in life seems to be making every Doman as miserable as possible. Over the course of the story though, we learn that she had an almost comically horrible life. Her mother, the only one who ever treated her with kindness, died. Then her aunt and uncle took her in, but were abusive towards her day in and day out. They deliberately sabotaged any chance she had of joining the Garlean military while actively making sure their son was chosen. Then they married her off to a physically abusive drunk for money. When he died, they sold her into prostitution. The owner of the whorehouse could see that she didn't deserve to be there, but since her beauty attracted a lot of customers, he pimped her out anyway. At the end of the campaign in Doma, she loses her memory after Doma Castle collapses on her and Gosetsu, and because of this, Gosetsu starts treating her like a daughter, with actual kindness. However, her memories return and after a suicide attempt out of shame and manipulation by her foster brother, her hatred for Doma is reignited. But in the final battle with her, she really just feels that she has gone too far and caused too much suffering to be redeemed, so she throws herself into a battle with the Warrior of Light she knows she will lose. She is at least able to kill her foster brother as her last act before dying, having now killed all of the agents of her suffering.
  • Final Fantasy XV: Ardyn, the total psycho who literally darkens the entire world with a horde of demons, was driven insane two thousand years before the game begins for trying to do the right thing, and only got worse. He used to be a travelling healer, given a divine power by the gods to purge a demonic plague during an epidemic. When it turned out that the plague was infesting him through his powers, his own brother tried to murder him, accidentally killed his wife, and erased him from history after he disappeared. He was woken up after centuries, only to be hounded by assassins from Lucis, the country founded by the brother who stole everything from him. A mad scientist tried to be his friend, but mainly by egging on his worst traits and indulging in unethical sciences. Then he looked into the mind of a god he once worshipped and discovered how little they care about humanity in general, pushing him over the edge into becoming a supervillain. And after that, he devours the minds of his enemies - the narration states that the minds of other humans were what eroded what remained of his sanity, not the minds of the millions of demons he merged with. And the kicker? The reason why he succeeded in destroying the world was because Bahamut intentionally granted him healing powers to make him a supervillain in the first place, all to ensure continued worship of the gods through a scripted war between light and dark. His only two options are to accept his destiny and cease to exist or defy the gods one last time and wander in the void for all eternity.
• Fire Emblem:
  • In Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade, Nergal is presented as a Card-Carrying Villain, boasting that the pain of others does not affect him other than as a means for him to gain power, kidnapping children, and mocking Hector by offering to raise his deceased family member as a zombie. If the player has completed several obscure sidequests, more of Nergal's backstory is revealed. Nergal is the father of Nils and Ninian, and in ages past had fled with his family to escape a war, seemingly becoming lost in the process of trying to rescue their mother. To do this, he conducted increasingly dangerous experiments and crossed several ethical and moral lines to gain power, initially to protect his family and for knowledge's own sake, but, due dark magic gradually erasing his identity, he eventually forgot his motivation and his ties to his family, coming to value power for its own sake above all else. In the True Ending, Nergal's dying words reflect a brief recollection of his wife's name, but he brushes it aside in favor of trying to bring about the apocalypse with his last breath. In the Golden Ending, Nils does indeed find himself crying over Nergal, though no one, Nils included, is sure why.
  • In Fire Emblem Fates: Revelations Anankos the true Big Bad counts, as killing him is a Mercy Kill. While he's responsible for the war between Hoshido and Nohr, and the one responsible for the death of Corrin's mother (between other things)... He's an empty shell of his former self. He used to be a benevolent First dragon that helped humans until he began to be Driven to Madness due to the dragon degeneration, which led to him burning a forest and rejected by humans and in response he isolated himself... which only worsened his sanity and he ended up killing his only friend, the King of Valla. This broke him and caused his soul to split from his dragon body. His soul went on to father the Avatar and to try to limit his ever-growing power, but he failed and his soul was reabsorbed into the original body. When you find him, he's a crazed Sadist Omnicidal Maniac that wants to destroy the world, but he is still lamenting: “Why am I left to suffer? Why am I the one left to die? Why do humans flourish while I am buried here...ignored...forgotten? TELL ME WHY!”
  • Even worse is that he wanted to kill himself but he was unable to. He tried to limit his ever-growing power at all costs and still failed. This lyrics of End of All (which his soul wrote) sum up his suffering:
    "Sing with me a song of silence and blood"
    "The rain falls but can't wash away the mud"
    "Within my ancient heart dwells madness and pride"
    "Can no one hear my cry?"
• God of War: Kratos spends the course of three games murdering everything in Greek mythology on a quest for vengeance. He is presented as a violent, sadistic monster (though still not as bad as a lot of the more traditional Greek heroes), but he wasn't always this way. His desire for conquest led to him making a pact with the god Ares, offering his life in exchange for power. He and his army slaughtered thousands of innocents, and he grew more monstrous every day. But when Ares tricked him into murdering his own wife and child, Kratos realized the horror of what he had done, and tried to become The Atoner by serving the Gods of Olympus. The twist in all this is that Kratos is the player character. The experience of playing as him and seeing things from his point of view is the only thing that inspires sympathy from the audience; in any other situation, he'd be the villain.
• Guild Wars 2 set up the Elder Dragons as being abominations to be hated and killed without regret until the player confront a mortally wounded Kralkatorrik alongside Aurene, his granddaughter. Kralkatorrik reveals that the vision he saw of Aurene replacing him, which was assumed to have terrified the dragon, actually filled him with hope for a better future. Everything he has done up to this point, even killing Glint and temporarily killing Aurene, was to ensure that vision would come to be. He willingly offers his heart to Aurene and tells her that he hopes she'll never have to kill the things she loves. His last word as he dies is a longing "Mother".
• Many players of InFAMOUS felt this way about Kessler once they discovered he was Cole from an alternate future, doing everything in his power to ensure that, this time around, Cole will be able to fight "The Beast", the being that destroyed his world and life. Cole himself, however, is unmoved — he refuses to forgive Kessler for his heinous actions, even knowing why he acted the way he did and that he might even be justified in the long run.
  • The Beast himself! It's arguable if he even qualifies as evil when we learn who and what he actually is. He's just stuck in a situation where it's the Muggles or the Conduits, and he's a Conduit.
• Moric and Qualna in MARDEK chapters two and three, respectively. Qualna turns out to only want to peacefully resolve the conflict between Rohoph and the Governance Di Magi. Rohoph goes ahead and seals his soul anyway. And Moric...Oh boy.
• The Big Bad of the planet Noveria in Mass Effect is Lady Benezia, the Indoctrinated (brainwashed) Asari Matriarch who has been overheading the resurrection of the supposedly long extinct Rachni, exhibits an example of this trope if you bring Liara (her daughter) along for the fight, whose final words to that point will be of how proud she is of Liara.
  Benezia: Goodnight, Little Wing... I will see you with the dawn. (pause) No... light... they always said... there would be...
  • This continues on in Mass Effect 3 where Liara will remark that her favourite colour was yellow, and would always wear clothes in that colour. In the same conversation she will reminisce about how Benezia caught her digging for Prothean ruins in a local park, which resulted in Liara's first history book.
• The third installment of Monster Girl Quest has Lazarus, the leader of Ilias Kreuz. You see through his eyes a Flash Back that reveals he used to be a truly heroic man who took up the sword to protect people, what led him down his path to become a murderer, and it's ultimately revealed he still has a heroic heart and sacrifices himself to help save the city. What clinches it is that nobody else knows this; to Luka and everyone else, he was nothing more than an evil man who simply died lending a hand in the battle.
• Myst: Gehn doesn't get much back-story in Riven (aside from a journal entry mourning his dead wife), but read ''The Book of Ti'ana and you learn he lost his home world and almost his whole family - save only his mother, who was partly (albeit unintentionally) responsible for it. Then, at eighteen, he loses his young wife in childbirth. Everything he does is to try and restore his lost childhood.
  • Saavedro from Exile, though played straighter. He might be insane, but he has good reason to be.
• Nier: The Shades. and given how they aren't even really villains to begin with...
• Repeated in the sequel, NieR: Automata. Just like in the first game, the second 'cycle' through the story will provide you with more information about the 'villains', often making them seem far more sympathetic - Tragic Monsters in many cases. Even before then, several side-quests provides you with background data on the foes you just faces that makes you realize that destroying them hardly counted as heroics.
  • The best example may be one of the main bosses, Simone. The first time you face her, she's just a terrifying machine who looks like an oversized opera-singer, bedecked with Android corpses. Even the other machine lifeforms consider her a monster, calling her a 'broken machine' and thanking you for putting her down - apparently, she cannibalized other machines in order to build her body. Facing her on a second playthrough, however you realize that she was madly in love with Jean-Paul, the philosophical robot you probably met during a rather comical side-quest in your first run. Desperate to make him 'look her way', she sought to make herself 'beautiful' by any means necessary, gradually growing more and more monstrous as she went to greater and greater extremes in the hopes of catching his eye. In the end, she realized that he'd NEVER look her way, that his obsession with his own existentialistic musings prevented him from paying any attention to ANY of his many female fans... but by then, she'd already been ostracized from robot society for her actions. Her final thoughts were simply a cry for someone, anyone, to look her way...
• Ogre Battle: The bitter, nihilistic warlord Lans Tartare - it's revealed in the prequel/Gaiden Game The Knight of Lodis, where he is the main character Alphonse Loeher, that the entire reason he's that way is because he was forced to kill his best friend, watch his girlfriend die, then be branded a traitor by his home country before they eventually turned around and made him a high ranking knight.
• For most of Peret em Heru: For the Prisoners, Professor Tsuchida is an aggravating, self-serving Jerkass treating the tour group as his unwitting meat shields. However, he also shows signs of warming up to Ayuto, and after his Villainous Breakdown, reveals his motives: he lost his daughter in a terrorist attack one year ago, and blamed Dr. Kuroe for not saving her, as Kuroe wasn't licensed yet and didn't want to risk losing everything by attempting a risky surgery. Tsuchida believes Kuroe put his own ambitions ahead of saving Shizumi's life, and wanted to see him face judgment for his inaction. Following this revelation, Tsuchida pleads with Ayuto to be careful that he doesn't turn out like him, embittered by his losses and dying for it.
• Pokémon:
  • In Pokémon Platinum, you, at one point meet, an old man, who bemoans not intervening in his grandson's shattering, pressured life when he saw that the boy was falling apart from trying to live up to what his parents wanted. He doesn't mention the boy's name, but there's more than enough clues to point straight to who he's talking about: Cyrus. Made even more tragic by the fact that, by this point in the plot, Cyrus has already exiled himself to a parallel dimension and there's no way to tell his grandfather this or take him there or anything.
  • And therein lies the greater tragedy. For all the academic success, a great number of people can see the potential for good in Cyrus. The one person who needed to see this the most was the one conditioned into never seeing it at all. One of the brightest minds in Sinnoh instead dedicated himself to its unmaking...Cyrus' faith was in his parents seeing him as a point of pride, and the more you place your faith in one cause, the farther it has to fall.
  • In Pokémon Sun and Moon In the post-game, you can visit Guzma's childhood home. His mother tells the player he used to be a rising battle star, complete with trophies. His father says he tried to beat him, and Guzma fought him off. Golf clubs in the house are bent as evidence of this. This revelation contextualises why he latched onto Lusamine, who is definitely abusive to her own children. By the time he is trapped in Ultra Space, he is clearly terrified and way out of his depth.
    • Similarly, one might come to sympathise with Gladion very early in the game because of how he is treated by his supposed Skull team-mates.
• In Portal 2, GLaDOS, when you go through the game and find out that she used to just be a normal woman, devoted to her company and boss, until he chose her as the back-up AI host should he die before the project was completed. Listening to her desperately insist that "she doesn't want this" makes you feel bad for the woman she used to be, especially since she had no choice in becoming this way.
  • On that note, listen to the sad way PotatOS says "Goodbye, sir..." after hearing the last recorded message from Cave Johnson, knowing that he died shortly after.
• The ending to Resident Evil 4 plays peaceful music and shows slides of the residents of Pueblo living happy lives, working the fields, and playing guitar, reminding you that the ganados were once normal people who fell victim to Los Plagas. Then the music abruptly turns ominous and cuts to scenes of the cult arriving, the villagers being experimented on and becoming ganados, and even a woman carelessly standing next to her child or maybe even body of it (it may be even possible that she killed a child). It's remembered as the most terrifying part of the game, and that's saying a lot.
• Wendy at the end of Rule of Rose. It was all her fault, but she paid the ultimate price. Love Makes You Crazy.
  • There is also the Stray Dog, aka Gregory Wilson, a deluded serial killer who snapped after the death of his son, and keeps then abducting children, mistaking them for the dead boy, and killing them in a fit of rage when he realizes his mistake. He's a completely broken individual, and is at his sanest while contemplating suicide.
• Eddie Dombrowski in Silent Hill 2 is a somewhat mentally slow young man who got bullied his whole life and was even constantly told that he was a "fat, useless piece of shit". He eventually snaps by killing a bully's dog with a gun and then shooting the bully in the leg. Eddie's paranoia grows deeper as the game goes on until he thinks James is making fun him as well and tries to kill him. Despite Eddie's descent into becoming a murderer, many players sympathized with Eddie's history.
• Silent Hill 4: Walter Sullivan. Despite growing up to becoming a Serial Killer, he never experienced any true form of love since he was abandoned by his parents at birth, abused by his caretakers, and said caretakers were a part of the cult from the first game who told Walter lies about a summoning ritual that would bring his mother back (it was actually to summon the cult's god). Walter cries out for his mom before dying in the ending.
• Killing Jamie in Splinter Cell: Double Agent, due to his loyalty and genuine friendship with Sam. After your cover is blown, while you're sneaking up on him you'll hear him insisting that Sam isn't a traitor and pleading to B.J. to give him another chance. If you grab him and interrogate him, he'll insist that he knows Sam too well for him to be a traitor, and Sam coldly replies that he didn't know him at all. Sam kills him without a second thought, but to the audience it's a serious Tear Jerker. However, it is also an arguable question, knowing that Jamie is a terrorist, responsible for many bad things just like the rest of the organization.
  Jamie (Before being fatally stabbed): See? I knew you wouldn't do it... I knew you were on our side.
• In Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, Richter wants to kill Marta, yet Emil still sympathizes with him. It turns out that Richter wasn't always a "bad guy", but is against Ratatosk because of the murder of his friend Aster.
• Tekken could be said to have this with Kazuya. When you realize his cursed heritage and his backstory of how he came to have the Devil Gene in the first place Tossed off a cliff by his father Heihachi for being too kind hearted, when he was only 5, and being reborn by the Devil to extract revenge, you no longer see him as simply an evil man, but rather ruthless because of what fate thrust upon him. And depending on how you may or may not view it, his relationship with Jun, or even his respect for his grandfather, could point to a more sympathetic villain.
  • Kazuya's son Jin counts for this in Tekken 6 too. Considering the whole ordeal he has gone through, which is much more than Kazuya Grew up in a broken home, lost his mother when he was 15, trained vigorously for the next 4 years for revenge, sabotaged his life, was betrayed by Heihachi, became consumed with rage and anger, had several identity crises, and then once defeating Jinpachi was granted access to so much power and recognition he had been denied for his whole life of feeling powerless to stop everything he endured), it's honestly no surprise he became how he did.
• Trials of Mana does this with the Crimson Wizard, though it depends on whether you pick Angela or Duran as your main character. As the second to final boss, you defeat the Crimson Wizard, who then laments doing so much damage, claiming that, in his desperation to gain magic power, he sold his soul to the Dragon Lord. If Duran is your lead character, he feels sorry for the Crimson Wizard and it makes the player do so as well as the Crimson Wizard takes his own life. However, if Angela, who hates the Crimson Wizard, is your main character, you get a much different scene. The Crimson Wizard claims it wasn't his fault; but Angela refuses to forgive him as he brainwashed Valda, her mother, into neglecting her and then tried to make Valda kill Angela. Angela calls him a coward and while the Crimson Wizard still takes his own life, it is made to seem as if Angela wanted to deal the killing blow instead.
• Grasshopper's ending in Twisted Metal II gives this treatment to Calypso. Turns out Krista Sparks is his daughter who had died, and has since been rebuilt as a living mechanical bomb. Even though he knows she's seconds away from exploding AND that she's not technically even his daughter, he still holds and comforts her as she explodes since she's afraid it will hurt. He might be an evil son of a bitch, but it's hard not to cry for anyone who loved his daughter that much.
• The climax of the final episode of The Walking Dead: Season One reveals that the man who kidnapped Clementine, only known as The Stranger, is a soft-spoken father who only went off the deep end because your group (including you, if you chose to be complicit) stole his family's supplies out of their car back in episode two; his wife took their daughter and left him when they came back to find everything gone, and he found them both dead "a day later...in the road." He quickly becomes all too human, and after telling you his story, looks you dead in the eye and asks if he looks like a monster to you.

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