Tear Jerker / Another Eden

Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

Main Story

The Cat Beyond Time and Space

Ogre Wars

Return of Goddess of Time Part I

Return of Goddess of Time Part II

• While infiltrating the Prison Ship Gulfagin, Kikyo is finally able to find her long-missing father Rindo... only to find out that his Cyborg body had long since ceased to function. To make it worse, as he sics his own mechanical army to the party, Delamair proceeds to rub the salt on the wound by gloating that it is Kikyo's fault for being so stubborn to search for his father that the party got into the situation. Thankfully, Rindo soon awakened and used the last of his strength as the Hyperspeed Demon to protect his daughter and get the party out of trouble, but for Kikyo to find her father only to bid him farewell... dang.

Return of Goddess of Time Part III

• The ending of "Return of Goddess of Time". So much. The world may be saved once again, but poor Aldo and Feinne have to watch Eden and Professor Madoka leaving once again due to the circumstances surrounding Eden. Even Professor Madoka's reassurance that they will meet again doesn't make it any easier to watch.

Side Stories

Mythos

• Virtually the entirety of the final chapter of Song of Sword and Wings of Lost Paradise:
  • Since the beginning, the Western Mythos has been building up to the mystery of Clarte and Melina's shared past, and the tragedy of what happened is directly proportional to the hype.
    • As an illustration of how much of an outcast both were: Clarte was a Flawed Prototype who'd spent his entire life waiting to die before Melina, the only person who saw him as a living being, rescued him, while Melina herself was a Replacement Goldfish for Emperor Schnaud's dead daughter. This culminates in Emperor Schnaud eventually realizing the truth and becoming disgusted at Melina, at which point he orders/compels Clarte to kill her and then himself. The utter dehumanization and lack of regard for their lives is horrifying to watch, and yet it's only a preview of Emperor Schnaud's Moral Event Horizon.
    • Emperor Schnaud himself ends up strangling Melina to death. It's the way that he barely even acknowledges the deed and then casually orders Clarte to kill himself once more that causes Clarte to snap, turning back time to save Melina despite knowing the consequences. He then erases Melina's memories — of himself included — so that she doesn't have to live with the trauma and sends her away to the blue planet, before he finally collapses and turns into Uranus Menas, erasing all human life on the moon. Whether or not you consider Clarte's actions forgivable, it's not hard at all to understand what drove him to this point.
      Clarte: I won't ask for forgiveness. May you all be at peace.
  • The end of the Mythos sees Clarte sacrifice himself to protect the world from Teyul Menas. Even in his last moments, Clarte uses what little he has left to revive Noah, and he then makes his last request: that Melina use the Stifling Song to convert his essence into blessings so that the Western continent can finally be saved, at the cost of forcing Melina to essentially kill him herself.
• The Apex of Logic and Cardinal Scales:
  • At the very end, despite Isuka's desire to bring her time layer's Curio back from his current terrorism, the Twilight/playable Curio decides that the Dawn Curio is beyond helping and simply kills him in front of Isuka.
  • The Mythos introduces four EPS series superweapons which are particularly challenging — and perhaps downright frustrating — to defeat to upgrade Curio's personal weapon. Try reading the research logs after defeating each of them, though, and it will certainly leave bitter taste in mouth upon learning how they came to be. Special mention goes to the EPS-245 Quadoxin, who was once nothing but a sickly elderly man that eventually turned into the abomination he is now after receiving the experimental treatment for his illness using nanomachines. Worse, he underwent the clinical trial in the first place by the urging of his son who is a researcher at KMS, who genuinely believed his father can get cured so he and his daughter can see the elderly man again. The few words he uttered at the start of his battle? "Let me die."

Episodes

• In "The Time Mine and the Dreamers", Sylvia eventually succumbs to her illness and passes away, leaving a grieving Terry and a clueless daughter. It's especially hard since you've spent a long series of subquests to develop the mining village and get accustomed to its residents.
• Episode IDA Part 2 centers around Mayu, an ill girl who has fallen into such despair that she dreams of being important, able to fly, second to a girl who will always protect her. Her regular self's portraits just look so miserable.
• "Wanderer in the Binding Night" keeps up the Apocrypha's heart wrenching moments. In the first part alone, Nona has to erase herself from the memories of her adoptive mother and the citizens of Cochlea to save them. After all the trials she went through to even get to Cochlea, she can't even have a happy reunion with the people she loved.

Apocrypha

• Wanderer In The Vortex loves to deliver its gutpunches, but Chapter 5 in particular takes the cake.
  • Aldo, Nona, and Mariel are desperately trying to save Marie and the kids she's taking care of from a cruel fate. While experimenting in order to obtain a safe food source, they plant a seed that ends up growing up into a plant monster, which ends up fusing with the children. The children undergo total Loss of Identity, unable to remember Marie even though she's able to perfectly recognize them. They proceed to abandon her, and then the sympathetic Phantom Marie befriended passes as well, leaving her all alone. Aldo and Nona lament that they weren't able to find a satisfying solution to break the time loop.
  • Compared to the previous "bad endings" of the Apocrypha, which mostly amounted to a quick "you failed, try again", Chapter 5's is shockingly substantial and depressing. While Mariel chews Marie out for loving the children for the "wrong" reasons, she comes to regret being so harsh when she didn't take into account that, as horrific as Marie's actions are, Marie has been dealt a miserable hand all her life and Mariel is essentially criticizing her for not behaving saintly. On Marie's end, she deconstructs the very premise of the Apocrypha, pointing out that from the perspective of an NPC, it's actually terrifying to have a bunch of strangers swoop in and try to help her behind her back, and to know that these people see her as someone who needs "saving". Combined with the above default ending, it can certainly leave the player feeling despondent about everything they've done.
  • While exploring the clock tower, you can find the journal of Ivan, the Phantom in question. After countless loops of trying and failing to help Marie and the children, it becomes clear in his later entries that it's driving him mad.

Sidequests

Character Quests

• Myrus' second character quest starts out upbeat with her willingly tagging along with a pair of father and son to hunt a certain treasure in Rucyana Sands. Then it is revealed that the treasure requires human sacrifice to be unearthed. When the father demands his son to kill Myrus to unearth the treasure (due to being a beast), his son calls him out and refuses... and promptly gets killed by his own father for his trouble. Then the father soon gets killed by the cursed being guarding the treasure, and in the end Myrus is forced to re-seal the treasure to prevent another victim from falling. At the end of said quest, she lashes out and asks Aldo on why humans are so greedy and willing to go through such lengths before promptly apologizing, and proceeds to pray for the deceased son (who sought the treasure only because he wanted to build a hospital to help people out) that he can still follow his dreams even in the other side. Seeing the perpetually cheerful Myrus breaking down is heartrending, to say the least.
• Melissa's second character quest sees her get damaged in battle and restored to health by a stray Synth called Eddie. Eddie was one of the frontliners in the Synth War - Galliard's trusted right-hand man, in fact -, who has decided to turn pacifistic after seeing the futility of war. After he crosses swords with his former comrades and Melissa helps him out of his bind, he offers to let Melissa use his hideout whenever she needs to recuperate. Melissa, ever bound to her anti-Synth directive, pays off his kindness by coldly eliminating him.
• Elga's Another Style quest explores the identity of herself that she had forgotten, and it is rather heart-wrenching.
  • In the "Ogre Wars" storyline, it is mentioned that the Thunder King's son Prince Alfaldo was killed by the Ogres, with the Hell Ogre and the Death Ogre's bragging indicated that he was killed and eaten by them. If that's not bad enough, then going through this quest and piecing the bits together makes it worse: not only his remains were turned into food, they were served to his own lover Princess Elgirag - who at this point is revealed to be Elga's true identity. Needless to say, as soon as she remembers this, Elga goes into a fiery rage and attacks the illusion of the two ogres. Is it any wonder why Elga is so repulsed at the thought and sight of eating meat?
  • Doubles as heartwarming moment, as she is rampaging from the rage and about to lose herself, the cat that had been following Elga throughout the quest suddenly appeared and gave her a ring, which is revealed to be a gift that Prince Alfaldo had given to her in the past. This allows the spirit of Prince Alfaldo to appear before her, and after Elga voicing her regrets and says that she cannot look him in the eye, Prince Alfaldo reassures her that she has nothing to worry for since he is always by her side and she has Aldo who looks after her in the present, and that he will always love her. This allows Elga to regain her sense of self and finds closure regarding "the hole in her heart" that she confided to Aldo in her previous quests.
• For someone who is feared as an inquisitor who never fails to get people to confess to their sins, Rosetta's story is rather tragic:
  • In her character quests and the Mythos alike, it is established that Rosetta is an inquisitor so ruthless that she accused her own parents of heresy when she was a child, which led to their execution. However, her third quest reveals the whole truth behind those events: her parents weren't executed, they were exiled instead. They came home when they could to see her again, but Rosetta couldn't remember them as several years had passed at that point. They decided not to reveal themselves to her so as to not interfere with her inquisitor training, but they still visited her on her birthdays to see her and give her gifts. Unfortunately they died from a plague by the time she had grown up. The quest ends with Rosetta finally getting closure over them, and breaking down in real tears over how she couldn't tell them how much she loved them while they were still alive.
  • Her AS quest reveals that after she lost her parents, Rosetta was taken in by a seminary member and his daughter, who became her adoptive sister of sorts. However, her sister later fell into demonic cult in a desperate attempt to save their father who was ill at the time, and Rosetta was set up to bust her in her inquisitor trial, thus breaking their family apart. This is why she is also a priest while also being an inquisitor - as she is partially living for her sister who once wished to become a priest.
• Dunarith's Another Style quest has him and Aldo going face-to-face with a strong wandering spirit who turned out to be ultimately responsible for his sister Reliath's transformation into evil spirit. After said spirit cursed Aldo, Dunarith eventually lost control of his beast form and went on a rampage under his sister's influence and seemingly fatally injured Aldo in the process while the latter tried to stop him. His breakdown when he came to his senses upon realizing that he apparently got the blood of his Only Friend in his hands is painful to watch, and even after the conclusion of said quest, he still doesn't forgive himself for it.
• Nonold's second quest has him translate the dying words of a cat to its owner. The love shared between the latter two can hit hard, especially for pet owners who can relate to it.
• While Violet Lancer's entire story is depressing on its own — as an immortal embittered by constantly outliving everyone she meets, even compared to Antiquity's Toova — her second quest is particularly sad. She and Aldo meet an escaped test subject from KMS who, after a series of failed experiments, is now dying young. Though at first he envies Violet Lancer's immortality, he accepts that she considers it to be A Fate Worse Than Death, and asks if they can help with his dying wish to see the ocean. They take him to the Last Island... at which point it's revealed that he didn't even last long enough to see his wish fulfilled; he died shortly after asking it of Aldo and Violet Lancer, and Violet Lancer used her necromancy to briefly bring him back. Despite clearly still wanting to live, he finds peace in being able to die by the ocean and asks Violet Lancer not to forget him, which she accepts despite her grief.

Other Sidequests

• Once you collect the Jyomondo Key in the Funeral Cavern, you can interact with several dogu guarding locked doors across Antiquity Garulea. Eight of them pose riddles that unlock boss fights, and are implied to unlock the missing memories of the Dogu Master in Gadaro. Once you've defeated all eight and solved a final riddle, the truth is unveiled: Two of the bosses you've fought were the Dogu Master's first creations, who sacrificed themselves to stop six other rampaging monsters, and got sealed along with them. The Dogu Master was dead all along, his lingering spirit seeking to be reunited with the dogu's cores.
• One of the sidequests in Pador has Aldo being asked by one of the villagers to slay a monster in Demon's Den that supposedly injured his friend and killed said friend's wife, as well as terrorizing the villagers with its constant howling, with said friend is apparently so shocked by his wife's death and is very intent on taking revenge on said monster. As you go through the quest, it is revealed that said friend's wife turns out to be still alive... except that her injuries had sped up the spreading of the titan's curse in her body and she had been permanently turned into ogre, and is the true source of the howling the villagers heard. Despite everything, her husband decided to stay with his now-transformed wife in permanent isolation after he made a final painting of how she was once, and asked Aldo to give said painting to the villager who requested his assistance previously, and to tell him that he died while slaying the monster. In the end, the man saw through it, but decided to respect his friend's decision anyway. This is one of the rare instances in the game when a short sidequest ends in a bittersweet, if not Downer Ending.

Others

• In an unusually tragic example of Welcome to Corneria trope, if the player goes around to explore in the final chapter of "Song of Sword and Wings of Lost Paradise" Mythos, the player can interact with an apparition of one the Lunar Ghost City citizens near the entrance while the record of the moon civilization's final days is playing. Said citizen was practicing to welcome travelers to the city from afar, and mused that he was hoping that they will eventually get visitors from the "blue planet" one day so he could say what he had been practicing to them. Given that everyone including him is long dead by the time the party arrives, though, it is suffice to say that he never got around to say it while he was alive.