"I was rejected by a girl, so I killed myself..."
— Ghost of a songwriter, Idol Hakkenden
Times where somebody is Driven to Suicide in Visual Novels.
- The Ace Attorney franchise:
- Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Quite a few people in backstories. Redd White in particular is apparently responsible for a large number of instances of this (as the driver, not the drivee).
- Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Justice For All: Played straight and subverted for different people. When "Prosecutor Miles Edgeworth chooses death", what he really means is that he's taking a sabbatical in Europe to re-evaluate his legal philosophy and doesn't see why Wright is getting so exercised about it. Played straight with Adrian Andrews's mentor Celeste Inpax. She hanged herself two years ago when Juan broke their engagement just because she had once dated his rival, Matt Engarde. And Adrian attempted suicide herself over Celeste's death, but she lived.
- Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Trials and Tribulations: Terry Fawles does it onscreen in the courtroom. His girlfriend Dahlia really messed him up. The same driver of suicide taunts Phoenix in 3-5 by drawing the conclusion that Maya accidentally killed her mother, then killed herself out of sheer guilt. Fortunately, she's proven wrong on both accounts a bit later.
- Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney: Not in any of Apollo's cases, but in the flashback segment of 4-4, the supposed murder victim, Magnifi Grammarye, committed suicide once he chose his successor, since he was already dying of cancer.
- Happens somewhat often in the Professor Layton vs. Ace Attorney crossover. The alleged murder victim Sir Newton Belduke poisoned himself due to the guilt of knowing the town's dark secret (that it's a highly unethical government experiment to convince the townspeople that magic and witches are real). Years before, his butler and adopted daughter Jean tried drowning herself after appearing to have accidentally killed her pet goat with magic. In addition, Espella is convinced that she's really the Great Witch who burned down the city 100 years ago, and tries to have herself executed in a witch trial. In reality, the fire was 12 years ago and her father faked the existence of witches to try to convince her that it wasn't her fault. When this is revealed, she tries to throw herself off the bell tower.
- Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc:
- Sakura Ogami commits suicide because Monokuma had forced her to work for him by holding her family's dojo hostage, mostly as an informant, but she was also supposed to kill someone if there hadn't been any murders in a while. She found a loophole in his terms, since he never specified that she had to kill someone else.
- Junko Enoshima, the Mastermind of the game, executes herself in order to achieve maximum pleasure—despair, that is.
- Doki Doki Literature Club!:
- Monika's tampering of the game files to make sure she's the only appealing choice for the player to date results in Sayori and Yuri committing suicide. She didn't intend them to do so, but she could care less once it happened, as she admits.
- Sayori hangs herself at the end of Act 1 due to her depression suddenly deepening severely at the same time as her love for the Player Character comes out and after Monika brings her out for a talk. It's implied that she's actually tampering Sayori's game files to make sure she rejects the player. Regardless of whether you friendzone or confess to her, she kills herself because both decisions cause her nothing but immense pain.
- Yuri does this by stabbing herself multiple times at the end of Act 2 after confessing her love to the Player Character, as Monika playing up her Nightmare Fetishist traits to the point of Sanity Slippage has ramped up her desire to Self-Harm out of sexual arousal to the extreme.
- Monika says she might have killed herself due to horrible feelings of derealisation, possibly by deleting her own character file, and once she ends up deleted and Only Mostly Dead in the end, she'll refuse to be brought back by deleting her file again if you restore it.
- Monika's tampering of the game files to make sure she's the only appealing choice for the player to date results in Sayori and Yuri committing suicide. She didn't intend them to do so, but she could care less once it happened, as she admits.
- Extra Case: My Girlfriend's Secrets: In the eighth ending, Sally slits her own throat to prevent her Split Personality from killing Marty.
- Archer, AKA Emiya Shirou of Fate/stay night, except as a spirit existing primarily outside of time he's actually incapable of death, so his suicide plan is killing Shirou so that he can't make the contract with the world and become Archer, hopefully canceling himself out of existence. Several characters, including himself, point out that this is very unlikely to work.
- Go For A Punch! Saki Sanobashi: As in the original 4chan post, the premise follows four schoolgirls who decide to kill themselves, though unlike the legend, here they went to the bathroom specifically to kill themselves for various reasons.
- Hana Watatanbe ultimately hangs herself after being unable to take being trapped in the room anymore.
- Sayuri Tanaka cuts herself in her thigh and bleeds to death so that she can stop being a financial burden on her poor family.
- Kimiko Hanazawa asks Saki to help drown her in the sink because she has lost all hope of making it big in sports after a Career-Ending Injury.
- Kyouko Shikabane seems to have bled herself to death like Sayuri, though all we have is an image.
- In Hatoful Boyfriend it is revealed that Nageki killed himself five years ago. The full version gives context, and it's rough.
- In the Visual Novel Heart de Roommate, the gang attempts to befriend a rather lonely schoolgirl with a past history of attempted suicide. This leads to one of the darkest scenes in the game, when during a conversation with the main character on the roof she accuses him of only being interested because he fancies her and offers to have sex with him if he'll leave her alone. When he refuses she proceeds to make another offer... sleep with her or she'll scream that he's a rapist and jump off the roof, something that seems quite plausible given her past history and self-destructive personality. She doesn't go through with it no matter what the player chooses, though accepting her offer leads to a rather bleak Nonstandard Game Over.
- Higurashi: When They Cry:
- Most people who reach the final stage of Hinamizawa Syndrome die by clawing out their own throats - including Keiichi in Onikakushi-hen, Tomitake in every arc except Matsuribayashi-hen, and attempted by Satoshi in the backstory, though he was stopped. Also, Natsumi does this in Someutsushi-hen.
- The ending of Meakashi-hen has Shion doing this. She falls from the window onto a lower roof and then chooses to roll off that roof onto the ground. It's an open question whether she would have survived had she not done that. The anime changed her death so that it wasn't a suicide; she accidentally fell straight down to the ground. The manga kept the original death.
- There are also several other deaths which appear to be Driven to Suicide, but turn out to be murder: Rika's mother in the backstory (seen to be murder in Matsuribayashi-hen) and Dr. Irie in Tatarigorshi-hen (seen to be murder in Minagoroshi-hen).
- After the events of Tatarigoroshi-hen, Keiichi is driven to suicide in what is implied to be a different manner, since he was stopped and sent to a mental institution. Hey, if you'd just managed to curse death upon your entire village successfully after being shoved off a bridge by your adopted sister, you might go a little nuts too. However, Keiichi simply had a God complex. He thought he was a God, due to everyone he said he wished dead, died. Coincidentally.
- Shion does the same thing as Keiichi in Tatarigoroshi-hen (and, implicitly, most other arcs with the exception of the "real" Tsumihoroboshi-hen, where everyone died in the school explosion, rather than the gas disaster), according to the victim roll. The only difference is that she isn't stopped. Not sure whether it's similar to what happened in Watanagashi-hen/Meakashi-hen, however. Although she wasn't implied to have had an episode of Hinamizawa Syndrome at the time, she could have easily been in the second wave of cases that Onisarashi-hen explores.
- Rena, in every world, minus the "good" world. However, it's an attempted suicide prior to the series. She attempted to slit either her neck or wrists (depending on the medium) after a depression, but was caught before she bled out. She gets better, usually.
- In Meakashi-hen Rika decides to stab herself repeatedly in the throat instead of allowing Shion to kill her. As Rika stabs herself, Shion laughs at the carnage, which has spawned a fount of Put the "Laughter" in "Slaughter" memes.
- Rika attempts suicide in Minagoroshi-hen as she doesn't want to see Satoko being abused by her uncle again. She doesn't go through with it because she knows that her suicide will only make Satoko's ordeal worse.
- Katawa Shoujo:
- It's all but stated that Rin Tezuka might end up doing this, since in her route she becomes more and more self destructive in her despair to get enough inspiration to create art, which does not mix well with how she cannot express herself unless it's through art itself. Also, that same route says that the husband of her sponsor, Sae Saionji, was a talented artist who also committed suicide, for exactly the same reason.
- Something that's kinda overlooked by fans during early playthroughs is that Shiina Mikado aka Misha also has suicidal tendencies. In Shizune's route, during a talk with Hisao, she tells him "Wouldn't it be better if I disappeared...?" In the beta to the game, Misha would have committed suicide in Shizune's arc. Act 3 is full of her acting increasingly depressed and reveals her self-loathing, only to end with her getting hit by a car and dying soon afterwards. Act 4 is all about her best friend Shizune shutting down in grief. The Bad End actually has her essentially kill herself. Shizune dies of dehydration after being hospitalized if you don't stay in the hospital. She removed her IV.
- One of the three Bad Ends to Hanako's beta arc has her jumping in front of train (in front of Hisao too) after undergoing a Trauma Conga Line. This is the closest thing to a Good End her arc has. To unlock the true Good End you need to have played her arc then play Lilly's arc, until a point comes where you can choose to unlock the true Hanako end.
- Setsumi from Narcissu since she's going to die from a terminal disease anyway, and she doesn't want to die at home or in the hospital.
- In Parascientific Escape: Gear Detective, Kyosuke's client and the true murderer, Tsukiko, attempts to kill themselves by setting a warehouse on fire and trapping themselves within it. In the Bad Ending, she's successful. In the Good Ending, Kyosuke talks her out of it.
- One of the bad endings in School Days has this too: Kotonoha Katsura, the Ojou of the story, throws herself off a building if Makoto (in the main player's shoes) goes with Sekai instead. And she actually dies in front of Sekai and Makoto (High-Pressure Blood and all), traumatising them so badly that Makoto not only breaks up with Sekai, but swears off romance forever.
- Mamiya Shinzo commits suicide out of guilt and possibly as atonement in several endings of The Shell, possibly after killing his son Shinji, who is the second serial killer.
- Shinrai: Broken Beyond Despair:
- Double subverted in Momoko's case. After the first power outage, she's found hanging from the ceiling in a guest room. The characters are initially unsure whether she committed suicide or was murdered, but as time goes on, and Hiro and Kotoba are later found dead, signs point to the latter. In the end, however, Raiko realizes that Momoko pretended to commit suicide, convincing Hiro and Kamen that it was all a prank, before killing Hiro and Kotoba and then hanging herself, all to frame Kamen for murder. Her ultimate goal was a Thanatos Gambit to take revenge on her boyfriend and best friend for betraying her, although it's possible that she also lost the will to live in the process of learning about said "betrayal" (which was a misunderstanding- while Hiro intended to cheat on her, Kamen turned him down and tried to warn Momoko).
- It's vaguely implied in the case of Raiko's older sister Reiko, who died suddenly four years before the start of the story. Raiko blames herself for her sister's death, believing that she caused it by jumping to conclusions and not hearing Reiko out.
- Spirit Hunter series:
- In Spirit Hunter: Death Mark, Hanayome (Seiko Hasegawa) and Red Riding Hood (S-ko) committed suicide after being victim to gang rape and torture respectively, resulting in them becoming ghosts.
- Spirit Hunter: NG:
- The eventual fate of the Screaming Author victims, who become insane from the constant screaming in their head and kill themselves to get away from it.
- If Akira soaks Killer Peach with cologne that belongs to one of her victims, she'll be so overcome with hatred that she slices herself into pieces, preferring to die than smell like the man that ruined her life.
- Intentionally done to the local priest, Minase, in Suika. And he deserves it too. First, he strangled his insane wife to death, which... might be overlookable since she was nuts. But then he comes across his daughter Itsuki, kills her with a shovel, and buries the two together. He puts his other daughter Sayo, unconscious and badly bleeding after Itsuki herself threw her down a flight of stairs, in the hospital and doesn't even recognize which of the twins she is. When Akira finds all this out, he confronts him and recommends suicide.
- Kohaku in Tsukihime in Hisui's route. In the True End she succeeds. The Good End Shiki saves her at the cost of some of his lifespan. Either way, she points out that she has nothing left to live for anymore and did not really want to do what she did.
- Zero Escape:
- A major plot point in Virtue's Last Reward is a Mind Virus that causes infected individuals to try to kill themselves. Everyone infected will try to commit suicide at one point or another.
- Zero Time Dilemma:
- If you decide that Carlos was the one who murdered Junpei he'll slit his own throat.
- At one point Diana is forced to shoot Sigma with a revolver half-filled with blanks, otherwise Phi will die. If Diana ends up killing Sigma she'll join him.
