Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.
I am sorry, Marian.
There is more than just an amazing great adventure to take back Earth from the Raptures. There are several moments that are going to make you cry here.
- Marian's death, AKA a rather effective way to get the players attached to a character for all of 5 minutes before immediately ripping their hearts out. It works as the image of this page.
- Later on, there's a double whammy in Chapters 13 and 14. First, in Chapter 13, after a gruelling battle and sustaining heavy injuries, Counters manage to awaken Marian within Modernia, only for Chatterbox to intervene and turn her into a vegetable not even several minutes later, complete with (arguably an even bigger Tear Jerker) enraged and crying Anis stomping his head into the ground. And not too long later, cured and completely amnesiac Marian has to be sent off with the Pilgrims in Chapter 14 to protect her from the rest of the Ark trying to abduct her from Counters... all while she's crying and begging her team to let her stay with them, promising to be good, all in a fully animated CG to tear the player's heart out all over again. Poor girl just can't catch a break.
- Rapi's bittersweet farewell to Red Hood at the end of Chapter 26, which doubles as Heartwarming: Rapi can finally get everything off her chest to the one who, for a long time, was the single most important person in her life, and finally gets to send Red Hood off without any regrets on the latter's part, their conversation is almost happy in tone, and we get to see Rapi's single brightest smile seen so far in the story, but when contrasted by the fact that Red Hood is about to die for good, the melancholic BGM, and, when played with the JP dubbing, Yui Ishikawa's immaculate delivery where a sad smile can be quite literally heard in her timbre, the scene very much becomes this.Rapi: Bye. My friend, my mentor... my hero.
- At the end of OVER ZONE Part 1, Dorothy manages to nearly singlehandedly repel a sudden Rapture raid. Unfortunately, one manages to slip past her, and Pinne becomes corrupted while fighting it off herself. It takes everything she's got left to convince Dorothy to take the shot and Mercy Kill her... and when all's said and done, the pain of losing the only pillar of emotional support she had left is enough to completely break Dorothy. It's only by sheer luck that she doesn't shoot herself, try as she might, and the rest of the Goddess Squad shows up late enough that the only thing they can do is console her. On top of that, the way the survivors of Goddess Squad acknowledge Pinne as a Goddess of Victory in her own right, despite being a mass-production Nikke, retroactively make the gameplay/story-accurate factor of pulling Product 23 from a Pilgrim Mold into a tearjerker in its own right, with the drop table actively acknowledging her posthumous status as a member of Goddess Squad.
- OVER ZONE Part 2 takes it further, with Dorothy being so badly tilted by the events in Part 1 that she begins hallucinating Pinne still being by her side, something that the other members of Goddess Squad pick up on as they notice Dorothy reacting and even pinkie swearing with her hallucination of Pinne. The real sadness overflows into the event overworld map after you complete Chapter 10, where the other members of Goddess Squad disperse to become the Pilgrims of the present day - Dorothy will now be left alone in the Outpost except for the ghost of Pinne and the event NPC robots.
- Dorothy's skin 'Nostalgia' shows exactly how much the events of OVER ZONE tormented her, as her dress turns black and tattered, her expression becomes haunted and pale, and the Pinne plushie she hugs has its eyes glow red; in addition, the Burst animation for this skin has lightning-quick flashes of the major moments of OVER ZONE that she can never forget.
- Nya Nya Paradise can be summed up as one solemn look at the impermanence of life, especially so if you've ever had to work with abandoned animals as it touches upon many aspects of how they are treated.
- The Dazzling Cupid event is set up like your typical dating sim-style game but with an extra helping of Surprisingly Realistic Outcome, with Naga and Tia's friendship becoming increasingly strained and combative regardless of the Commander's futile attempts to keep them together. At the end, the Commander is only able to pick one of the two girls, after which you get a scene of the unchosen girl absolutely devastated and heartbroken. The Hard Mode ending resolves the event on a happy note, however, as the two girls decide to make up in the end and repair their friendship.
- The Red Ash event recounts the last time humanity ever saw the blue sky of the surface all while focusing on the relationship of each members of the Goddess Squad and especially Snow White and Red Hood. Early in the story, we learn that Red Hood is corrupted with an early version of the corruption and that her lifespan is drastically reduced. But despite that, she was still being her usual self while messing with Snow White (the youngest member and was The Baby of the Bunch) until one day where Red Hood decided to hand over her old cassette player to Snow White, who immediately see through her and to make it worse, Red Hood lied to her about not leaving the Goddess Squad until her final hour. Then one day, her corruption got the better of her and made her fall in pain on the floor]], this prompt Snow White to storm off the room by saying she had "forgotten something". Scarlet (on behalf of Red Hood) went to see and comfort about Red Hood's situation which made her return to the room but then, while alone, Scarlet laments the fact that despite her advice to Snow White, she herself is unable to follow through (note that Past!Scarlet was more of a blood knight and aloof than Present!Scarlet). At the end of the first part of Red Ash, after a Curbstomp Battle against Cinderella or Anachiro, they were forced to retreat. On their flying aircraft carrier, the morale is low and to make things even worse, Red Hood called it a day and decided to leave the Goddess Squad behind to die alone due to her corruption and of course, Snow White is the one who's the most affected by her choice due to the "promise" Red Hood made to her. What follow this, is a series of detailed CG that showcase the five stages of grief that poor Snow White is going through.( for the Japanese version
) ( for the English version at the 1:33:36 mark ) which is on part with the animated CG that Modernia got when the Commander (the Player) and Counters was forced to leave her to The Pilgrims.
