Tear Jerker / Dead Island

As a Tear Jerker page, all spoilers are unmarked as per wiki policy. You Have Been Warned!

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A hopeless fight for survival involving a vacationing family that's a Foregone Conclusion to its Downer Ending always ends in tragedy, and this is one of the most infamous instances of that.

Considering that the main attraction of the Tear Jerker elements of Dead Island is the reveal trailer, you know that this game isn't just killing zombies and exploring a Paupa New Guinea resort. It can make you shed a tear in other regards as well.

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Dead Island

• The reveal trailer. Holy crap. It opens with a shot of a dead little girl falling out a window, and the rest of the trailer depicts her parents' doomed fight to save her. And then the trailer ends with clips of the family's vacation video from before the zombie outbreak. The tone shifting from a happy family vacation to a hopeless fight for survival is very heartbreaking.
  • The music. Does not help. AT ALL. Giles Lamb's score is unforgiving, heartbreaking, and somber to the nth degree. Click on this if you wish to listen, but be warned, you will tear up.
  • Actually, it's even worse, she's not dead, she's zombified. She was caught trying to get into the hotel room, brought inside after a heroic effort from her father, and reanimated while her parents were desperately holding off the zombies, at which point she bit her father's major arteries out and fell out the window.
  • What makes it even more impactful is that the trailer is a mix of Back to Front and Anachronic Order. Half of it runs in reverse—beginning with the zombified little girl "falling" upwards through the air—and the other half runs forward, showing the living girl trying to escape the zombies and reach her parents. The two timelines cut back and forth until they finally intersect just as the little girl is desperately reaching out for her father's hand (as depicted above). And that moment shows the two drifting apart from each other, further hammering home the point that she was doomed from the very beginning.
  • The trailer also shows, once again, that putting peaceful music to a scene of utter horror/violence is a perfect mixture of horror and tragedy.
    • Case in point: Youtube has plenty of videos titled "Dead Island Theme Makes Everything Sad". Goes to show how when one hears the song, it immediately throws you into a saddening mood.
    • It becomes even sadder when you start playing the game, as there's an Easter Egg guaranteed to break your heart. When you first leave your hotel room, the game encourages you to go right. But if you go left instead, you come across a room with a gap in the door...that's right. It's THE family's room. The mother and father from the trailer are there! What makes it REALLY sad? IT'S THEIR BODIES, STILL HOLDING HANDS.
  • Not even Tobuscus who does his "Literal Trailers" could make this funny. In fact, just the opposite. Dear God, the trailer was bad enough, but having it bluntly described to you as you watched it? Dear god.
    • "Wave... goodbye..."
    • "I'm not crying, there's just something in both my eyes." It's the broken, shaky way he sings that lyric that makes it so heartbreaking and depressing. Especially 'I'm not crying'. He sounds like he's on the verge of breaking down and crying.
  • Geoff Ramsey could not bear to watch any further than the moment he sees the dead girl's corpse falling in reverse when he reacted to it.
• The E3 trailer includes a moment where a weeping woman aims a gun at a zombie and says "I love you Dad" then fades to black when we hear a shot ring out. The game provides the context for this. Jin's father was bit before you arrived to get him to modify the armored car, and he locks himself in the garage and orders Jin to leave with the survivors. Toward the end of the game, she returns to the garage and shoots him.
• The launch trailer isn't much better. Those, some of the moments of True Companions evoke tears as well.
• THAT. POSTER.
  • And one more sad trailer. Damn...
• This game was one of the only ones to make one feel sorry for the Zombies...or rather, what they used to be. Sometimes, when you hit one of the Zombies, it lets out a shout of pain. A completely human shout of pain. At first, one thinks nothing of it. Then it hits you...the human screams are supposed to remind you that these Zombies were once human like you. People who just came to the island to have a good time, or to get away from it all. And this shit happens to them.
  • The Suiciders actually ask for help in a very quiet, very somber voice. Then they explode.
• Many missions you do in and of themselves are pretty somber. One quest giver in the second act asks you to find his family and kill them, as he knows they have turned. Another involves a worried father asking you to distribute flyers with pictures of his family, not even realizing no one (living, at least) will see it in the zombie-infested streets. Yet another has you find some morphine for someone who then dies after you administer it to him, with your only consolation that he died without pain.
  • Fairly early on in the game, there's a man who asks you to take his wife to safety, as he's been bitten and knows he doesn't have much time left. You can also find a survivor who will ask you to find his family at the church and bring them his will, which is written in blood.
• There's also the guy near the beginning of the game which is sitting in a swimming pool filled with blood, and littered with the corpses of his family, who he had to kill.
  • What makes these NPCs especially sad is that you cannot interact with them at all. They just sit there going crazy, and you can't even escort them to safety.
    • What is even worse is that oftentimes, when you go back to the spot where you found them crying over a family member they just killed, a door is bashed in and there are bloody streak marks that show the person being carried away.
    • You cannot change or avoid much of this like you would be able to in some other games. The part at the beginning is right where you have to go to continue the game, and your character reacts the same horrified way they do upon first hearing the Infected.
• Roger Howard's eleventh tape recording, in which he details his rapidly depleting physical and mental health as a result of the virus taking effect. All whilst desperately clinging to memories of his wife and son. It becomes much worse when you find his final recording right next to his lifeless corpse.
• Jin's mental breakdown. She starts off as a very hopeful and compassionate girl, eager to help those around her. She gets gang raped by the guys at the police station. Soon after that, her entire personality changes. She stops caring, becomes visibly distressed, starts nervously rocking back and forth, and completely loses it when she's forced to remain with a group of inmates at the prison. Then she dies. Poor girl had it rough.
• Yerema's father sold her into slavery, where she was repeatedly beaten and raped. She ran away, and upon finally returning home, her dad sealed her away in a cave, before trying to murder her.

Dead Island Riptide

• Riptide follows tradition with its own sad debut trailer. At least no zombie children are involved.
• At the end, the survivors who stayed at their location on the island to wait to get rescued were last seen getting overrun by the zombies.
• The player characters get it even worse. Regardless of what happens they are well past fucked. If the infection does not take over then they have become a lot more aggressive and their attitudes put the other survivors offside, even if they do not become zombies (quite possibly Super Infected) their infection has begun to cause an Unstoppable Rage, that cannot be controlled. Everything they have seen and done would be something they would have to live with for the rest of their lives, which would never again be normal, at the very least they would be closely monitored, locked up, experimented on, or even killed because of the danger they pose. At this point, death would be a mercy.

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