Tear Jerker / Rule of Rose

• Brown's fate should bring tears to the eyes of any animal lover.
• The entire game has a very solemn and melancholic feel to it. Given that you're literally reliving Jennifer's childhood memories, this sort of tone is to be expected. As if it weren't bad enough that everyone except Brown and Wendy dislikes Jennifer, the narration repeatedly referring to her as a "poor, unlucky girl" really nails it in how pitiable the protagonist is.
• The good ending. You shouldn't be able to feel so sorry for the person responsible for almost everything bad that happened during the game.
• Gregory's entire character is one giant tear-jerker. He was just a single father who loved his son dearly. Read his journal and you can see just how much his life revolved around making Joshua happy. When the boy died of illness, Gregory was driven mad with grief. He couldn't cope with it, so he kidnapped a little girl and pretended she was his son. For a time, the little girl sympathized with him and played along, but she too abandoned him when a girl from a nearby orphanage rescued her. Gregory's sanity eroded so much after the second loss of "Joshua" that he would obey the order of anything resembling him. Unfortunately, a scornful little girl took advantage of this and turned Gregory into her own literal attack dog by dressing up as Joshua. Gregory would then be driven to massacre an entire orphanage full of children, the new fake "Joshua" included. When he saw the second "Joshua" again, Gregory had a moment of clarity and realized what he had done. He fell to his knees and begged for something, which turned out to be a gun. Upon receiving it, Gregory said one final apology to Joshua, then put himself out of his own misery.
• There is a scene that is very easily missed in the opening. Remember the moment where Diana, Meg and Eleanor are shown hammering the coffin? Well, right before that there is a moment showing them hammering a bag in the attic. By the end of the game we know that Wendy and the rest of the Aristocrats killed Brown. We're never told how they do this in the game itself and are lead to assume that, because of the cutscene that shows the imps sweeping a non-bagged Brown and the fact that Brown had previously been seen by both Jennifer and the player as a full-grown dog (that would have been hard to put in a bag while still living) up to that point in the game, Brown was put into the bag after his death. However, we are shown during the true ending that Brown was actually a puppy when the events took place, similar to how Jennifer was actually a young girl. That brief moment in the opening then gains some meaning. Under the orders of Wendy, Diana, Meg and Eleanor kidnapped a defenseless puppy, shoved it in a bag, took it to the attic, and beat it to death with hammers. The fact that three girls could be fooled into killing a puppy is both incredibly disturbing and utterly heart-wrenching at the same time.
  • Even IF you assume that Brown was just a doll, anyone who has ever been a child would know that a beloved doll getting broken is heartbreaking.
• If the player examines a window during the "Once Upon A Time..." chapter, Jennifer will bask in the sunlight streaming through it. The scene is a brief moment of happiness made all the more poignant by the hell she is walking through. Cue Tears of Joy.
  The nights were lonely and cold, but you'd always greet me in the morning... Only you greeted me warmly. Thank you so.
• Looking at the intro to see young!Jennifer and Wendy play Princess and Prince in the rose garden is this, once you know what a dark turn it took. At one point, they really liked each other and were at least a little bit happy. Then jealousy and misunderstanding lead to the most horrible outcome possible.