This game is built to jerk tears from you. Watch any Let's Play of this game, and you can guarantee the player will be bawling by the end.
- The beginning is incredibly heartbreaking: During a great storm, Ori falls from the Spirit Tree as a glowing leaf. They then meets a chubby figure named Naru, who resembles a cross between No-Face and Totoro. She becomes their spirit mother, and they quickly bond. They build a bridge to find more fruitful trees. Then, when the Spirit Tree calls out to Ori, they fail to respond due to Naru hiding them away, the forest begins to wither and decay. After months of living in a cave to survive the approaching darkness, Naru surveys the dying forest, and sees a cluster of fruit on a high tree, but the branch breaks, preventing her from reaching it. Taking the last piece of fruit in the cave, Ori decides to set out and collect the fruit that Naru failed to reach. A torrent of happy memories between Ori and Naru takes place, and then Ori presents their fruit findings to Naru. But it is too late— Naru has starved to death. Ori is devastated, and leaves the cave to escape their grief. Not long after, they soon die from starvation and/or despair as well, but the Spirit Tree revives them with its remaining light. The game then commences.
- The story behind why the forest decayed away when Ori didn't come after the Spirit Tree called out to them. When Ori doesn't respond, the Spirit Tree keeps sending the light in hopes that they'd see it, with all the other light spirits just like Ori gathering around. And then Kuro arrives and starts attacking the area, all the light spirits desperately running from her in sheer panic as she tosses them away in a fit of rage. Then she turns her attention to Sein in the tree's husk, and proceeds to rip it out with all her might before whisking it away elsewhere, partly crushing it in her talons and then dropping it. The music accompanying this scene
shows how tragic this is, especially considering what drove Kuro to do it... - Kuro's backstory: She was an ordinary torikami with a new brood of babies. While out finding food for them, the Spirit Tree reaches out to lost Ori with a tsunami of spirit-light, and Kuro desperately tries to return to her nest to protect her young ones. She fails, and they burn alive - all save for one unhatched egg. Blinded with rage and grief, she separates Sein from the Spirit Tree and sets out to kill its last kodama. Everything she does is driven by the desire to protect Ku, her last child...
- Naru's backstory in the Definitive Edition. As a child, "when the Spirit Tree was but a sprout", according to Sein, she befriended and looked after the light spirits Eki and Sol. Due to her lightlessness, however, her father disapproved of their friendship and separated them, and the two spirits became lost and died in the Black Root Burrows. After her father's death, which echoes Naru's own death in the main game's prologue, she left the Lost Grove never to return. The sad music during the last scene doesn't help matters.
- Gumo realizing that his entire species is dead but him, frozen to death in their home. The way he places his hand on one of the frozen corpses... and then, what does he do with the last great relic of the Gumon, the Light Vessel? He uses it to bring Naru back from the dead.
- The entire ending is basically just one Tear Jerker after another. Ori being snatched out of the sky by Kuro so close to reaching their goal. Naru finding them, unconscious and seemingly dead, and holding them in her arms in an echo of the beginning. Kuro realizing she's not so different from the Spirit Tree, and that her egg, the one she spent the whole game trying to protect by hunting Ori, will be burned by the fire she started, and sacrificing herself to save Ku's egg and the forest. Up until the third-to-last shot, it's unclear whether Ori survived or not, but then they're shown watching the next generation of Spirits be born. And finally, the last shot shows that Naru has adopted Kuro's last egg, and the "family portrait" in her home, which included her and Ori in the beginning, now includes Sein, Gumo, and Kuro.
- After Kuro assaults Ori and Naru finds them lying on the floor, Naru is quick to run over to them and then slowly picks them up. She nuzzles Ori for a moment before she looks up to Kuro with an absolutely heartbroken look on her face, as if she were saying "Why would you hurt my child?". It's this that makes Kuro realize she was behaving like a monster in her desperate attempts to protect her own child, having hunted after someone else's child that did nothing wrong, also allowing her to see that her actions wound up doing the exact opposite of what she wanted.
