Tear Jerker / Dragon Quest Builders 2

• The death of Pastor Al at the hands of the Primate, right as he vows to become a builder and promises to do all he can to protect you from the Children of Hargon.
• Finding Gottfried's zombie in Skelkatraz.
• After you and Malroth finally escape Hargon's forces in Skelkatraz, you come back home to find Lulu waiting at the dock, sleeping on a hay bed. Why is she there? As the other villagers explain later, she has been waiting for you day and night, even sleeping at the dock ever since you left the island, refusing to move until you come back safe. No matter how many times you three argue, you're all the family she has left.
• Everything about the Moonbrooke chapter. Specifically:
  • The many soldiers who die. Even though they often are non-interactable NPCs, it still hurts. Made worse in that the game encourages you to bury them.
    • There's one particular, very subtle example of this: your first batch of bell recruits includes a blonde, ponytailed villager. For most of the first part of the chapter, she gets to work in the kitchen once you set it up, cooking the potatoes farmed up by you or the farmer NPC, helping you get some gratitude hearts from the kitchen and making sure folks stay fed in-universe. Eventually, she, like several other noncombatants, joins up to help defend the castle. Not long after, once you find Ra's Mirror in the Air Force camp and return to the castle... you find out that the spy in the castle killed her along with several other guards. Sad enough on its own, but the larger point comes from the fact that there's, well, knock-on effects. Until you beat the chapter and get townspeople in the castle again, nobody else takes up this girl's duties in the kitchen. The game never directly lingers on it, but after she dies hungry people in the kitchen, who don't know how to cook and won't interact with the cooking stations, will become a common sight (and you, yourself, won't be able to snag some free food either and will have to cook your food yourself). This one event, this one death, changed how the castle functions substantially and directly affects the player's experience... and you never even got to fully introduce yourself to her. It's quietly affecting and powerful in a way that very few deaths, in any medium, are.
      • It wasn't just her. The farmer who tended to the potatoes is also killed. And so the fields sit, unattended, unless the player harvests them.
  • Malroth's reaction to getting locked away. Especially since he sees it as a personal attack from the Builder.
  • Every time you try to go to the prison cell, an NPC will drag you away and forbid you to talk to Malroth. Hits even harder once Malroth is free and complaints that you never even visited him until you "needed him". Although it is slightly mitigated by the fact that the NPC guarding Malroth's cell makes it very clear that he is only doing so because of the King's orders, and that he personally disagrees with Malroth's imprisonment as much as you do.
  • Midenhall Castle is full of happy people who are at peace with their new religion... but if you walk around, you can see how everyone's delusional. The King thinks you're his son, the guards generously grant you access to a rich treasury that's full of empty treasure chests, the item shop clerk sells you a "Medicinal Herb" that's just Dry Grass, and the innkeeper gives you the usual dialogue about sleeping in his inn, but instead of a Fade to Black where you fall asleep, he just pauses for a few seconds and continues the dialogue as if you had slept and woke up. The last two are so desperate for normal that they won't even mention that you didn't give them any money (because you don't have any).
• What kicks Malroth past the Despair Event Horizon? Being tricked into first (seemingly) killing all the citizens of the Isle of Awakening and then finally the Builder. (Needless to say, under the cute Minecraft-y exterior, this game features a lot of killing.)
• And then in Malhalla:
  • N04H's death after helping you fight the shadow monsters in Malhalla. It hits particularly hard as you had been able to fix him every time he broke down before then. For extra punch, you're forced to hit him with your hammer to obtain his heart for The Buggy Buggy.
  • The death of Griswold. He protected you and your group from a monstrous arm, but got injured. Your group decides to not leave him behind and instead goes slow so he can keep up. Only for him to not make it out of the way of a second monstrous arm attack. It helps, though, that as a skeleton, he gets reborn almost immediately in a different part of Malhalla.
• The post-game has a different kind of tear-jerking: once Malroth gets his mojo back and makes the illusory world real with the Builder's help, this means that the King of Moonbrooke - the same man who dies in the opening of DQII - has been effectively resurrected. No, he's not quite the same man that the Princess of Moonbrooke knew, he's based more on Hargon's mental image of the man, but even as you go through the Moonbrooke chapter, he (re?)gains many of the memories the original man had of the 'real' world and of his own daughter; if nothing else, he'd definitely be "resurrected enough" to make the Princess faint from joy. And yet, the nature of the separation of the worlds following the illusory world's true creation means they will likely never meet, as much as the King of Moonbrooke would like to. This family just cannot catch a break.