Tear Jerker / Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

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• Early in the game, when Edward meets the Assassins at Tulum and after saving the captives from the Templar mercenaries who invaded the island, James Kidd leads him back the temple and the center courtyard where the surviving assassins have piled the bodies of their brethren and are mourning. Considering that these deaths were consequences of Edward's own unthinking actions, which the player participated in, it qualifies as a Player Punch and a You Bastard! moment. It also makes Ah Tabai's forgiveness of Edward that much more remarkable and Edward's clinging after money that much harder to stomach.
  Edward: Money was my only aim.
  Ah Tabai: (sounding one step away from throttling Edward) Should I find comfort in that!? You murdered our brothers and sisters in Havana!
• Desmond's in-game audiotapes, recordings he did in the spare time he had in Assassin's Creed III is deeply sad, bringing forth the point that he was just a young regular guy whose life was sacrificed by things set into place centuries in the past. Also his reflection on his father, his friends and on the memories of his ancestors, especially Connor whose story he finds painful shows how he's matured. As well as his reflection that the past wasn't shaped by idiots, but intelligent men and women whose best efforts ultimately had little effect.
  • A document you can retrieve through hacking reveals that Desmond's friends in New York put up missing person posters after he was kidnapped. Not only did they care enough about him to do so, but they'd never see him again, or find out what happened to him.
  • One of the tapes has Desmond recounts a story of how he was expected to sneak up on his father (a cold, distant and distinctly not very friendly person); he waited hours before finally creeping into his room only for his father to notice him but pretend that he didn't and happily congratulate him. Desmond was furious with this lie but has later come to realize that he was rewarding his patience and, just maybe, his mentor just wanted to be his father for that brief moment.
• There's also what became of Desmond after the credits of Assassin's Creed III rolled. Instead of a proper burial or even a tearful send-off, Desmond's corpse is found by Abstergo researchers and autopsied on the spot. The man who in a sense saved the world was effectively reduced to a mere footnote by the Templars as Sample 17. It's as if Desmond was able to check out of life, but in the end could never leave.
• Edward's final words with Benjamin Hornigold. Out of all of Edward's "confession" scenes it's his most emotional, and for good reason, as Ben wasn't just any random Templar but a friend he respected, and whose betrayal clearly cut Edward deeply.
• The death of Blackbeard, Edward being so close by yet unable to help.
  In a world without gold, we might have been heroes!
  • Hell, the music makes it even worse. The sounds of the battle raging are completely muted, with this track being the only audible thing. It really hits that Kenway lost more than just an ally.
    Adéwalé: What of Thatch, Sir? Did he fall?
    (Edward is silent.)
    Adéwalé: Captain?
    Edward: (Quietly) He drinks damnation.
• Poor, poor Stede Bonnet. The kind trade merchant who helped you off the island eventually turned to piracy, but was perhaps one of the nicest ones out there, even garnering the name "The Gentleman Pirate" due to his former life as a merchant and often splitting plunder among his crew. He was eventually hanged, as in real life, but the game describes him as collapsing and sobbing for his life at the gallows, even noting that the onlookers actually pitied him and his tragic fate.
• While he may have been a complete Jerkass, there's something pitifully sad about seeing a mentally-broken Charles Vane wasting away in prison as he waits to be hanged. Similarly, it's rather saddening to see Jack Rackham's long-dead and rotting body displayed from a gibbet on the prison's perimeter, considering how strangely endearing he could be for all his flaws.
• After Mary Read dies, Edward takes Drowning My Sorrows to the extent that even the loading screen representation is groggily stumbling about with a bottle in hand. Then as part of his delusions, a phantom of Mary Read is outright calling him out, saying that he seemingly does everything out of spite and he should be building rather than destroying, and that he has to change course now before it's too late for him.
  • Edward's last words to Mary are especially heartwrenching.
    Edward: Damn it, you should have been the one to outlast me.
    Mary: I've done my part. Will you?
    Edward: If you came with me, I could. Mary?
    Mary: I'll be with you, Kenway. I will.
  • The song which accompanies the scene,"I'll Be With You" amplifies the overall sense of loss in the scene.
• Edward's long delayed Heel Realization is very moving because you get that he's really remorseful and understands the consequences of following his obsessions.
  Edward: For years I've been rushing around, taking whatever I fancied, not giving a tinker's curse for those I hurt. Yet here I am... with riches and reputation, feeling no wiser than when I left home. Yet when I turn around, and look at the course I've run... here's not a man or woman that I love left standing beside me.
• Related to this is the fact that after Black Bart's mutiny, Edward's time in prison, Adéwalé quits as your quartermaster. This loss is reinforced by the fact that in the endgame, Anne Bonny is still your quartermaster. The fact that it was Edward's, and the player's, own selfishness and bad behavior that played a role in Adewale joining the Assassins hits you hard, and you'll miss having your friend on the next raid. Even Edward joining the Assassins doesn't change that, and while they are amicable you sense that they aren't close anymore - it makes you feel just like Edward, in that you drove a good friend away.
• One of the hunts for a Templar has you teaming up with Assassin Rhona Dinsmore, who eventually helps you lure out Hilary Flint so you can kill him and take his key. However, Rhona is noticeably reluctant to do so — specifically, she plans to play distraction so that it's Edward who does the killing — and it turns out that, while on opposite sides, she and Flint were somewhat in love - and he dies in her arms.
• The flashback where Edward leaves for sea is the first scene where we get a glimpse of a more vulnerable side of him, as he quietly laments how this is the time where he truly needs his wife's faith and blessing. It's also sad because you can sense that Caroline still loves him and it hurts her to do this, but she doesn't want to be his enabler anymore. The fact that she dies and Edward Never Got to Say Goodbye is deeply sad in itself, more because Edward had finally changed and wanted to do right by her, only now it's far too late. Edward's expression when he gets the letter with the Wham Line (that his wife is dead and is survived by a daughter he knew nothing about) is filled with regret, realizing that he failed her.
  • Even worse? By the end, given how she goes out, presumably Caroline realized that she had failed him too. In fact, she ultimately failed worse than he did, because she gave up on him. Edward never did until he had something better, which he wanted to give to her, but because she failed totally, completely and utterly, she never lived to make it.
• At the end, when Edward sees his dead friends happily drinking and smiling at him. Especially since Anne sings The Parting Glass in the end scene. Especially the lines,

  "But Since it fell into my lot/That I should rise and you should not..."

  • What drives it home is the expression on the faces of each of them. No anger, no hate, no fear, no malice, no regret. Just warm, bittersweet smiles and nods—even a couple of knowing looks at one another, as if to say, "Everything will be all right." Pass the tissues, please.
  • Making it more bittersweet is that Edward even sees Vane, Rackham, and Ben. It's a testament to his character development that he's able to forgive them in death.
  • It’s not only sad because Edward is remembering the friends that he lost, but also because this scene symbolizes Edward leaving behind his life as a pirate to return home to his family. It was a difficult life, but it was also a thrilling adventure in which he grew as a person and formed relationships with people that he will fondly remember for the rest of his life. But now it’s over and he has to move on. It’s a very relatable scene because we’ve all had to start new chapters in our lives while saying goodbye to what we knew.
• The epilogue reeks of this for anyone who played Assassin's Creed III and especially those who read Forsaken. Despite the game ending happily with Edward and his children, in later years, Edward will die at the hands of Templars, his daughter will be sold off to slavery, and his son will become a Templar. This is Lampshaded in the game, as one of Desmond's conversations has him quoting Orson Welles:
  "If you want a happy ending, it depends of course, on where you stop your story."
• While in the Abstergo section you can find various recordings of prior Animus subjects allowing you to learn of all the pains that were had while developing it. One is an interview between A younger Warren Vidic and Aveline's descendent Subject One. While Subject One is trying to share the existential experience of living the memories of his ancestor Aveline, of being not only another gender but another race as well, all Vidic is interested in is the information, not the philosophical implications of walking through life in another's shoes, that Subject One is working through. Despite all the wonder's made possible by the Animus, it, and those made to use the machine, were only ever tools to Abstergo.