Love Hurts / Video Games

---

• Breath of Fire IV:
  • This is essentially what fuels the Hex Cannon/Carronade. The closer the sacrifice is to the intended target, the stronger the hex will be. This is what breaks Fou-lu and causes him to go kill them all near the end.
  • Cray spends much of the game searching for Princess Elina, Nina's sister and his love interest. When they find her, Elina has been turned into an artificial Endless, in order to exploit her love as an limitless fuel for the Carronade. Cray ends her suffering with the Dragon Slayer.
• In Brütal Legend, a female voice cites a sad poem about a girl whose heart is broken and is compelled to drown in the Sea of Black Tears. It's actually talking about The Ophelia of the cast, who is named, well...Ophelia.
• Disco Elysium: The Detective is haunted by his love for his ex-girlfriend who he still isn't over almost six years later, to the extent that anything even tangentially related causes immense discomfort and causes the skills to immediately pipe in and try to make him let go. In the last area of the game you unlock an (optional) dream where Harry confronts his memories of her in the form of Dolores Dei, and no matter what you do you're not able to 'win' the encounter or let go. Dolores states that Harry kept having the same dream three times a week, and that the massive memory-shattering alcohol bender he went on prior to the game's start only temporarily managed to suppress them.
  Oh yes. This is real darkness. It's not death, or war, or child molestation. Real darkness has love for a face. The first death is in the heart.
• Dragon Age loves this trope.
  • In Origins, you have Morrigan who turns out to have had a secret agenda the whole game and leaves — while possibly pregnant with your child — despite having genuinely fallen in love with you. Alistair will also break up with you if he becomes King and you're not a human noble, unless you become his mistress (at the cost of hardening him). He will also sacrifice himself to save you if you refused to do Morrigan's ritual. Leliana and the Warden will separate somewhere between the end of Origins and Inquisition. On top of all this, the Warden themselves can die at the end of game depending on your choices.
    • In Witch Hunt, after you find Morrigan, you can convince her to let you go through the Eluvian with her, getting your happy ending after all.
  • In Dragon Age II, Anders will manipulate you into helping him blow up the Chantry at the end of the game. Hawke can choose to stay with him and go on the run, but some players consider it a unforgivable betrayal. You can really take this trope to the extreme if you choose to kill him. All the other romance options except for Merrill will also break up with you at one point, but will return to you later.
    • Hawke can possibly die during their cameo in Inqusition, which inevitably leaves behind their love interest.
  • In Inquisition, Blackwall reveals that he is a wanted murderer pretending to be a Grey Warden. You can forgive him but he'll eventually leave on a Redemption Quest. Dorian will return to Tevinter without you in his quest to change his homeland and Cassandra will (sort of) break it off if she becomes Divine. The real doozy is Solas, who breaks up with you and leaves for mysterious reasons. In The Stinger you find out he's an ancient elven god who was the catalyst for the entire plot of the game. You finally see him two years later only for him to tell you his plan to destroy the world. You can tell him that you'll change his mind, but he still takes your arm and leaves, despite still loving you.
• Fallen London. Common parlance in the game is to never, ever fall in love. Particularly, it's important to never, ever ask the Bazaar for help in situations involving love. Results tend towards horrific transformations, resulting in the Cantigaster and the current state of most of the Empress's children. Horrible things happen when beings that just don't get how humans work get involved to try and make a love story more interesting.
• Fatal Frame:
  • Kirie from the first game. She was supposed to harbor no emotional attachment to anyone prior to her Virgin Sacrifice, but the arrival of a guest, whom she met and quickly fell in love with, caused a conflict between her duty as a priestess meant for Human Sacrifice and her desire to be with her lover. The murder of her lover, which she found out soon after, did nothing to diminish said conflict, resulting in a failed ritual that ruined the Himuro mansion.
  • Ouse from the fifth game as well. She fell in love with Kunihiko Asou the moment they met and realized his feelings towards her via her sixth sense, which made his departure from Mt. Hikami all the more painful for her. She tells Yuuri about such feelings in one of Yuuri's endings:
    Ouse: Those words were too powerful for me. They were... a curse.
• Final Fantasy
  • Final Fantasy IV has Kain and his unrequited love for Rosa. All Love Is Unrequited hurts by itself, but then you factor in how he lost her to his best friend Cecil, and it gets really painful, especially since he clearly wants them to be happy, but is still full of jealousy and sorrow.
  • Final Fantasy VI has this with Locke and Rachel, where Rachel accidentally loses her memory and her parents blame Locke for the whole mess, he blames himself because Rachel in her memory stricken form tells Locke to leave because her parents are yelling at Locke, afterwards, he learned that at the time of the village's demise, she regained her memory, and called for him... Then, he asked a doctor to preserve her body, while he searches for a way to save her, while still blaming himself for everything... Damn....
  • In Final Fantasy IX, Sir Fratley, the love of Freya's life leaves on a journey of epic training. When she doesn't hear of him for some time, she embarks on the world to find him. During the events of the game, she eventually runs into him but he is suffering from amnesia and doesn't remember her. Ouch.
    • It's even on her quote in the game's manual. Quite a Player Punch when you find out what it means:
      Despair. To be forgotten is worse than death.
    • In the game's ending, his memory never returns, but he falls in love with Freya again, anyway.
  • Hope with Lightning in the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy. It's most noticeable in Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII and its epilogue novel Reminiscence -Tracer of Memories-, where it's stated that Hope's been carrying a torch for Lightning for the past 500 or so years, which puts a lot of his actions in Final Fantasy XIII-2 in a whole new light. The worst part is Bhunivelze using his feelings for Lightning to kidnap, torture him for 169 years, and possess him.
• Galaxy Angel: Played up especially in Milfie's route during Eternal Lovers. At first, due to Tact being too busy to spend time with her, and several Not What It Looks Like incidents involving Lushati, Milfie starts getting jealous and hurting, fearing that Tact may not be interested in her anymore, to the point of having a fight with each other right before her Emblem Frame goes out of control and the HALO System ends up erasing her memories of their relationship. Shatoyan explains that, with all that was happening, her happy memories with Tact were becoming painful to her, and she wanted the pain to go away, so basically the HALO system "solved" the problem by erasing the source of that pain: her love for Tact.
• ''Guenevere: Lance's love for his best friend and liege's wife causes him no end of torment.
• Played straight and exaggerated in King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella. Edgar, Lolotte's homely adopted-by-kidnapping "son" develops a fondness for Rosella, and pulls a Heel–Face Turn to free her from a prison. Rosella escapes, takes Cupid's love arrows and shoots Lolotte. The evil fairy is so overcome with sheer pain she shrieks "It HURTS!" before falling over dead. Edgar is rewarded for his heroism by Genesta returning him to what's later revealed to be his true form, and he asks Rosella to stay with him. Rosella has to refuse his offer and get back to Daventry, presumably leaving him alone and somewhat heartbroken. At least, until the seventh game...
• Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne
  • Brought up in Max's narration in a cutscene, just before his love interest is gunned down by the Big Bad because she refused to kill him. Depending on the difficulty you play on she gets better.
    This is love. When someone drags you from the wreckage when you have given in, ready to just lie there and die. This is love. When someone, no matter what the cost, shows you there is hope, a choice, that you can put down your gun. This is love. Love hurts.
  • Max's first line in the game says it all: "They were all dead. Love kills."
• Mega Man X4 has finally included the option of playing as Ascended Extra and major fan-favorite Zero, along with his own story. The bad part? In Zero's story, he has to fight and kill Iris, his own girlfriend, who wants to seek revenge on Zero for killing her brother. The narm that came with the game's horrible voice acting ruined one of the truly heartwrenching moments in the series. (The original Japanese voice acting did a much better job in powering the said Tear Jerker moment.)
  • She doesn't even want to kill him, instead attacking him because she can't forgive him for killing her brother, but can't bring herself to move on from his death. Essentially, the poor girl is so shattered that she's choosing Suicide by Cop, and it breaks Zero as well as herself.
• Metal Gear. There is maybe one successful romance in this series that does not put the characters and gamer through hell first. Meryl and Snake don't make it. Meryl winds up in a successful romance with Johnny, the series Butt-Monkey. Raiden and Rose have so many issues that they deserve their own trope. They make it, which is more than most can claim, but they go through hell first. The Boss and The Sorrow were damned before the series started, with The Boss being forced to shoot her own lover. And he let her. Naked Snake and EVA failed. Fanon aside, EVA doesn't get Snake, even though she loves him and bore his sons (against his will). And Otacon? He might as well put a bullet in the head of every woman he shows affection for and save time. Ground Zeroes adds Chico and Paz. Chico, who is in love with Paz, attempts to rescue her, only to be captured and tortured physically, emotionally, and psychologically. Once it finally looks like they might make it out alive, Paz reveals that she has a second bomb inside of her and sacrifices herself to save the MSF survivors, dying right before Chico's eyes. Yes, this game is very cynical, whatever gave you that idea?
  • Is it any wonder Kojima averted this in Zone of the Enders? There, only one "pair" ends badly (in this world, at least).
  • Kojima played this straight again in Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, damning Gabriel and Marie right before the beginning of the story.
• Neverwinter Nights: The unjustified execution of her fiancee led Aribeth de Tylmarande to insanity and an eventual Face–Heel Turn. The picture in the slideshow between Chapters 1 and 2 with her crouched under the tree crying her eyes out sums this trope up very effectively.
• Neverwinter Nights 2 has this for just about every relationship in the original campaign. Males who romanced Elanee learn she was killed saving them from a falling boulder. Females who romanced Casavir are told he was buried beneath tons of rock while helping everyone else escape. Females who did Bishop's semi-romance are betrayed, then later have to watch him die on the Wall of the Faithless. Guys who liked Shandra arrive just in time to watch her be killed by her grandfather. The only romance/potential romance that doesn't end in hurt is Neeshka's.
• Odin Sphere: The plot is full of this. Only a few characters actually get happy endings, assuming you didn't muck it up and get the bad ending, in which case it turns into "Everybody Dies" Ending.
  • The plot isn't just full of it. The plot exists because of it. The only things that don't seem to be linked to love is a war over control of a MacGuffin, and that was originally caused by this.
• Persona:
  • It's something of a recurring theme in this series that the characters representing the Magician arcana have rather poor love lives:
    • Persona's Yuka Ayase actually manages to invert this trope for the most part, being a well-known heartbreaker among her school, who actually does manage to find a husband by the events of the second game. That said, she does have a crush on the protagonist that, unfortunately for her, never pans out.
    • Both Magician arcana representatives in Persona 3 suffer from this. Junpei Iori is initially shown to have rather poor luck when it comes to getting girls, and when he finally does find a girl who likes him back, Chidori, it turns out she's actually a member of Strega and is just using him. Luckily for Junpei, his feeling for Chidori eventually become mutual and the two genuinely fall in love... and then Chidori sacrifices herself to save Junpei and dies declaring her love for him (on the bright side, if certain conditions are met in FES or Portable, Chidori will be brought Back from the Dead, albeit with amnesia). Meanwhile, Kenji Tomochika has a crush on his teacher, and seems to genuinely believe they're dating. Not only does he learn that he's wrong, but his teacher is also rather creeped out by this belief.
    • Yosuke Hanamura from Persona 4 has a crush on Saki, a girl who works part-time at Junes. Not only does she get murdered very early on in the game, but dialogue in the TV World reveals that she's secretly hated Yosuke all this time (though whether or not this hatred is genuine or simply her Shadow exaggerating whatever resentment she may have had towards Yosuke is unknown).
    • Morgana from Persona 5 is very upfront about his attraction to Ann, yet she's somehow completely oblivious to it, much to his chagrin. This gets even worse if the player decides to romance Ann, with Morgana giving a very defeated sigh of sadness when she comes over for Valentine's Day. Royal also introduces another character in the form of Takuto Maruki^note Rather than represent a card from the standard Tarot Card deck, Maruki represents the Councillor arcana, the Magician's equivalent found in the El Gran Tarot Esoterico, who is revealed in the latter half of his Confidant to have had a girlfriend, but got dumped for being spineless. Except that's not entirely the case. In truth, Maruki's girlfriend, Rumi, fell into a catatonic depression after witnessing the murder of her parents. When Maruki awakened to his Persona, he used its power to rid Rumi of the memory, but at the cost of her memories of Maruki as well. While Maruki is heartbroken over this, it's ultimately what leads him to begin his study on cognitive psience in a mission to create a world where everyone can be happy.
  • While not to the same extent as the Magician representatives, those who represent the Star arcana also tend to have rather unfortunate love lives. Persona 2: Eternal Punishment's Ulala Serizawa has a history of poor relationships with bad boyfriends, with a particular heartbreak from a con artist acting as the instigator for her decision to Take a Level in Badass. Persona 3's Akihiko Sanada^note While his Persona is a part of the Emperor arcana, Akihiko acts as the representative of the Star Social Link in Portable's female protagonist route is Oblivious to Love, and his lack of social skills means any actual attempt at romance usually ends in disaster for him. Persona 4's Teddie's constant flirting results in any attempt at romance on his part being rejected because of how annoying he is. And Persona 5's Hifumi Togo is outright forbidden from dating by her mother until she becomes popular enough.
  • Natsumi Yoshino, the school nurse from Persona, had recently broken up with her boyfriend by the time of the game's events. She's so heartbroken by the event that her dream world has her relieving the moments building up to the breakup.
  • Persona 2:
    • This trope seems to be something of a problem for the protagonist of Innocent Sin, Tatsuya Suou. He spent most of his life trying to avoid forming relationships with others, and when he finally does, they get torn away from him at the end of the game. In fact, it's because of this that the plot of Eternal Punishment happens in the first place. Tatsuya was supposed to forget his memories of the events of Innocent Sin, but couldn't let go and creates a Temporal Paradox because of it, allowing the Big Bad to repeat the events of Innocent Sin. In the end, Tatsuya gives up those memories and Maya (assuming the player pursued her as Tatsuya's Love Interest) can't be with him for fear of Tatsuya regaining his memories and dooming the world.
    • Izanami, one of the Eleven Holders of the Trapezohedrons from Eternal Punishment's Tatsuya's Scenario from the PSP remake, no longer feels hatred toward Izanagi for what happened between them, but is still saddened by the fact that the two will never be able to be together again.
  • Persona 3:
    • Yukari Takeba believes this. After seeing how the loss of her father negatively effected her mother, she chose to swear off romance entirely. It's only when she falls in love with the protagonist that she grows out of this belief. Sadly, she falls back into it when the protagonist dies at the end of the game, with her Character Development in The Answer being based around her learning to move on from his death.
    • In the female protagonist route of Portable, this is the case with Ryoji Mochizuki's relationship with the protagonist. He genuinely loves her, but as the Nyx Avatar, recognizes that they can never truly be together, something that brings him a large amount of pain.
    • Chidori Yoshino openly admits that attachments are the one thing she's afraid of losing, which plays a part in her decision to sacrifice herself to save Junpei, deciding that she's rather die than lose the one person she truly loves. Luckily for her and Junpei, if certain conditions are met in FES or Portable, Chidori will be brought Back from the Dead, albeit with amnesia.
  • Persona 4:
    • Even if you don't pursue them as Love Interests, advancing their Social Links far enough will result in Yukiko Amagi, Ai Ebihara^note If the player avoids the False Lovers route, Yumi Ozawa, and Ayane Matsunaga falling in love with Yu regardless of the player's choices, resulting in them becoming utterly heartbroken if you decide to just be friends with them, though they do get over it reasonably quickly.
    • None of the girls on the Investigation Team that the player is dating will take it particularly well if the player decides to not spend Valentine's Day with them.
    • This trope is a major part of Hisano Kuroda's Social Link. She absolutely loved her husband, which she feels is the source of her pain after he forgot about their love due to suffering from some form of dementia. It's only after seeing the letter she wrote to her husband, which she sees as the source of her love, that she finally changes her perspective.
  • Similar to Yukiko, Ai, Yumi, and Ayane from the previous game, Haru Okumura from Persona 5 will fall in love with Joker no matter what, and becomes explicitly heartbroken if the player takes the friendship route with her.
• Deionarra from Planescape: Torment. She loves The Nameless One, so utterly and completely, that she's unable to pass on and finally die, and has had to watch as her lover returns time and time again, having forgotten who he is and who she is. Many of his incarnations recoil from her or fear her. Worse yet, the incarnation of The Nameless One she fell in love with never loved her in the first place, and was only using her to obtain an eternal Spirit Advisor for his future plans... And Deionarra knows this. She loves him anyway.
• The Pretentious Game series plays this painfully straight. The blue square suffers Unrequited Love for the bright pink square. The light pink square loves her husband, the gray square, only to get cheated on, and when she divorces him and gets into a relationship with the blue square, he gets killed by her drunken ex-husband. As for the gray square? He feels massive amounts of guilt for cheating on the light pink square, with whom it's implied that he was genuinely in love, and turns to alcohol to deal with his feelings.
• The Princess Remedy series: Each game has its Cardiovascular Love-esque Heart Symbol enemies. The first game, Princess Remedy In a World of Hurt has them be a manifestation of heartbreak, giving them their name that's All There in the Script, "Heartbreaks". Princess Remedy In A Heap Of Trouble has a similar enemy, who are weaker, and they're affecting Frallan as well, but in this case, she ate too much chocolate. Although, that might be Post-Stress Overeating of her Comfort Food, and Trademark Favorite Food, of chocolate, due to a breakup.
• In Puyo Puyo~n, Suketoudara has a crush on Serilly and is excited to go on a date with her. However, Serilly does not feel the same way about Suketoudara and assures Arle that the two are "just friends". Suketoudara doesn't take this kindly and pulls Arle into a Puyo battle over it, despite her having very little to do with the situation apart from teasing Serilly about the date.
• Each antagonist in Rule of Rose has a different motivation for hurting people, but the worst antagonists are motivated by love. The Big Bad's entire plan is "Hurt Jennifer so much that she will become a broken, mindless shell and never hurt (read: reject) me again", and her Dragon's love for his dead son drives him murderously insane. Fortunately, The Hero is motivated by everything good about love, so it all sort of balances out.
• Oichi in Sengoku Basara is this in spades. Thanks to her love with Nagamasa and her care about her brother, who happens to be Obviously Evil, she's in for tons and tons of tragedy, starting from seeing her lover die in front of her, then delusionally thinking that Nagamasa wants everyone dead, then she kills off all her family and then gets herself killed.
  • The fourth game introduces Shibata Katsuie, whose unrequited love for Oichi is why he's such a downer, though he shows tinges of Entitled to Have You as well. In one of Oichi's story routes, he goes so far as to kills Nagamasa, which simply drives Oichi into a murderous rage.
• Bentley in Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time. He thinks he's found his true love in Penelope, but she is actually a sociopath who never loved him, and was only using him to become rich and Take Over the World. The revelations of him being used, his love being unrequited, and her being abusive caused Bentley to tuck into his shell in despair. He recovers with the help of Murray's drawing of them, Sly, and Carmelita, and concludes that the love from his family is more important.
• In Super Robot Wars Alpha Gaiden, resident badass Samurai Sanger Zonvolt gets this. The woman he deeply cared for (not to the point of open romance, but deep, deep loyalty and affection) was turned into a monster he and the Preventers had to kill, and the poor bastard not only gets to watch her die, but his only comfort in the end of the game is cry over her grave. Alpha 2 gives him a Roaring Rampage of Revenge when Kukuru tries to off Sophia Nate (woman he cares for). He's a little better off in the OG Timeline, only now it's Wodan Ymir who gets screwed, which (long story) is the same thing.
• Good God, Utawarerumono with Hakuowlo and... well, everyone. Eruruu is apparently physically unable to confess until her contract with him is dissolved. He doesn't pick up on Karulau's rather blatant overtures. Touka just weirds him out. Which is understandable. Ulthury can't be in a relationship with anyone apparently and most certainly not the divinity of her religion. Oh, and the ill girl kind of gets what she wanted except it was mostly out of pity/platonic love, and she died after giving birth anyway. For the hurting part on his side, losing Mutsumi hurt so much that his identity split into two godlike beings that cause chaos, wars and destruction every couple years. There's an implication at the end that Hakuowlo comes back, and he did essentially admit he loves Eruruw. Oh, and Camyu probably didn't love him so she's okay.

---