You'd think a game based around black comedy, slapstick and a character's planet-sized ego would be Tear Jerker-free...you'd be wrong. The Deponia trilogy hides some pretty hard punches to the gut to those unaware.
As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy.
Welcome to Deponia
- When talking with Cletus about the reasons he hates Deponia, his whole monologue about it seems to indicate that Rufus holds some traumas since a long time ago, particularly related to his father.
- After Cletus managed to make Rufus look bad in front of Goal, she wants nothing to do with him, and looks at him angry and cruel. He has no choice but to remove her brain implant despite all the good times they had and even if it means manipulating her. Afterwards, Argus rubs it on his face that he can be a worse person than Cletus, and you can see Rufus's guilt as he ascends with Goal to Elysium. In the end, he tells her he's not Cletus, and she ends up as angry with him as before. The look of Rufus as Goal and Cletus go to Elysium without him sets the mood perfectly.
- The ending has Rufus fall into a pile of needles from a great height and afterwards you see him contemplating on all that happened with a sad look on his face.
Chaos on Deponia
- Rufus pleading to Lady Goal in the second game so she doesn't leave him alone. Where to begin? The Reveal that Elysium needs to destroy Deponia to survive, Goal's harsh words as she keeps recriminating Rufus for screwing up, her betrayal and the fact that she is going to leave him again...yup, this is depressing, alright.
- At the end of the second game, Rufus, once again, has the choice to lie to Goal about what happened with Cletus and go to Elysium with her, but once again, he can't bear lying to her, and he tells her the truth. She lets him go and Cletus then comes on to give him a Breaking Speech to make matters worse before making him fall from the top. Talk about pouring salt on the wound!
Goodbye Deponia
- Look at Rufus as Goal is supposedly killed. He's completely desperate.
- After that, the Hell/Trash compactor chapter is utterly morose in its tone. Rufus doesn't say anything other than grumbling. When he meets Hermes, you see he's lost all the will to live, all of his hope and all that mattered to him. His 'It's all my fault' lines demonstrate perfectly well his guilt has overriden him, and now he doesn't even want to live anymore.
- Just how bad of a mood he's in is showcased with obtaining the bat item. You can use it on almost any object in the chapter and while it won't do anything to most of them, you can tell by his expression as he thrashes things that he is genuinely bitter. Even the puzzles are affected: when he finds a locked door, instead of of finding some hilarious, roundabout way to open it as usual, he just bashes it open with the bat. It reaches its peak with The Reveal that he's a clone - a genetic prototype for the very Organon he's been dedicated to fighting throughout the trilogy. A Tear Jerker itself, this finally causes Rufus to completely lose it. He takes out the bat and the only way to proceed is to smash every interact-able object to pieces, despite Hermes' desperate pleas for him to stop. It's an utterly heartbreaking sequence to play through and to top it all off, the destruction of the cloning machine drives Hermes to suicide. And then you find Goal's lifeless body. Hidden by her hair, you can't even see her corpse's face as it falls limply to the ground. And to think this was such a cheery, goofy series up to this point...
- The fates of Goon and June. They fell in love and had a nice little life in the sewers. Then Rufus came along and gave them a nicer home outside the sewers. AND THEN, Rufus separated them, basically sold June to work as a grind monkey to a guy she hated and who lusted for her (the 'suit' she has to wear as a grind monkey leaves nothing to imagination), and forced Goon to work at the orders of a monstrous fast-food cook that (probably) devoured him. There's Black Comedy...and then there's something like this.
- The ending of the third game and trilogy. After all the efforts Rufus made, after all he endured, after all that happened between him and Goal, and all the changes he underwent for her...he ends up sacrificing himself so she can escape safely to Elysium. As Goal looks sadly towards Deponia, you realize, not only has she lost her father, but also, she SEEMS TO KNOW, the guy with her is NOT Rufus, and that he died for her. This is proven to be the case in Deponia Doomsday.
- Also from the end point of Goodbye Deponia. You knew from the moment you cloned Rufus that two of the clones were probably going to be killed off to tie up loose ends. But the death of one of the Rufii is surprisingly tragic, shot through the chest by his/their own foster father. The other Rufus tries to drag him to safety, and they get pretty far, but ultimately he dies from his injuries after making the surviving Rufus promise to save Goal and reach Elysium. You even have the option to say "I love you" to him as he dies. Call it narcissistic, but it's like seeing Rufus cry over a dead brother.
Deponia Doomsday
- Rufus tries to do a good thing for Toni by keeping her glasses safe. They keep getting broken even as he goes back in time and tries to trap the pink elephant that breaks them. After one failure too many, Toni breaks up with him in disgust.
- Goal when another Rufus and McChronicle appear in a time machine gets an idea. She steals the time machine, determined to save the Rufus from her history so that he never fell. Eventually, Doomsday Rufus returns and warns Goal that she can't save his past self. For one, them trying to change the past means that their adventures and impossible things would be meaningless and would cause time itself to collapse. For another, the Utopians are threatening to cut Goal's safety line and make her fall as well. Goal and Rufus's past self agree to let go at the same time, so this time it's her choice to live and stop trying to save him.
- Goal's fate in Deponia Doomsday and, by extension, the entire game series, is absolutely heartbreaking, particularly if you've come to like her. From the moment Cletus intruded into her life with the intent to get closer to the Prime Controller by marrying his daughter, it's been a nearly non-stop Trauma Conga Line, and she's done absolutely nothing to deserve all the pain, loss and heartbreak she is forced to endure. By the end of the game, each version of Goal doesn't get sort of ending to compensate for all this: Old Goal dies at the hands/claws of rampaging fewlocks while the protagonists escape, Young Goal is stuck in the age of the dinosaurs with two Rufuses and the Utopians and Future Goal is convinced to accept the loss of her love and watch him die again, then forced to begin the search for a new life after Elysium crashes back into Deponia, which may or may not have killed her only remaining family. If there is any character who can be called the main victim of the games' events, it is her.
- Rufus is another good candidate for that role. Let's recap: his whole life he's lived in a planet filled with garbage and pricks (in many occasions not much better than him) constantly bossing him around and shooting down his dreams of reaching for more. His adoptive father never wanted him and abanoned him to his luck, forcing him to live on his shadow since everyone else thought highly of him. And also tried to kill him. Any attempt he made to escape Deponia ended up in painful and humiliating failiures that only made him more and more hated by his fellows. In fact, any attempt he makes at helping others where he truly wants to do things right pretty much always blows up on his face one way or another. He meets a girl that he fell in love with, but it took him quite a few beatups from her, joining her split personalities, facing death again and again and going through all sorts of hell just so he could have something even remotely resembling a romantic relationship with her. And even then, he had to give her and his dream of reaching Elysium up not once, not twice, but three times at the end of each game (if we don't count the stuff in the fourth game)! Sure, he might be behind a lot of the bad stuff that happens in the games, and he's by no means a saint, but damn if Rufus isn't the unluckiest bastard to ever exist. And to add more and more to his bag, he's a scrapped project of soldier that was designed to never give up and was thus semi-destined to keep trying no matter how bad things were; got killed quite a few times; is pretty much universally hated by nearly everyone; and his final attempts at doing things right in the fourth game were All for Nothing, and you can see, he and Goal did deserve each other: both are the ultimate universal butt monkeys.
