Tear Jerker / Star Fox

Moments pages are Spoilers Off. You Have Been Warned.

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• The Star Fox 64 Menu Theme. A hauntingly ethereal, almost funerary track that evokes the vastness of space and tales of heroes long past. Anyone who grew up with the game will surely be grasping for the tissues.
• The Black Hole level of the original Star Fox. To be fair, there isn't much to the level as it only serves as a shortcut to 3 possible stages depending on which exit ring Fox flies through. However, there's one detail that Pepper brings up in the mission briefing: it's where Fox's father disappeared. Fox doesn't encounter him, and he's completely alone, much like in the Out of This Dimension stage. One wonders what Fox must have been feeling as he flew through the barren null space.
  • In a Freeze-Frame Bonus, you can actually see what looks like an Arwing lifelessly drifting through space◊ (it acts like a 1-Up if you collide with it), a hint early on in the series about James' fate...
• The Game Over in Star Fox 2 if you let Corneria fall. It shows Andross' fighters attacking Corneria City. But the most heartbreaking part is when the distress call goes out, with an unnamed woman saying "Emergency. Emergency. Incoming! enemy fighters. Coming f-". Then, an explosion cuts to the game over with some creepy music.
• The cutscene after you accomplish the final mission in Star Fox 64 after playing the HARD route. The final boss had been defeated, but the complex was exploding with Fox still inside... Then his father appears and leads him to safety before vanishing. To underscore it, if Peppy was not shot down in the battle with Star Wolf, when Fox is looking around trying to figure out where his dad went, Peppy asks Fox if there's a problem. Fox stammers, "N-nothing. Nothing's wrong." but with the original Japanese audio, you can tell Fox is fighting back tears. This scene also gets used in the ending of Star Fox Zero (this time regardless of how you get to Andross), and this time around, the English audio manages to make it clear that Fox is having a hard time holding himself together.
  • During the escape sequence, one of James' lines to Fox is "Never give up. Trust your instincts." After hearing Peppy say those words of encouragement throughout the entire game, it's put in a much more emotional light and everything becomes even sadder when you realize he's not just trying to encourage you to keep going even when the situation is looking dire for Fox, but is also echoing the words of his lost friend, someone who was probably his best friend in life before his life was snuffed out by a Venom fleet.
• In Star Fox Adventures: Krystal's salvation from her crystal confines and Fox catching her a split second from plunging to the bottom floor of the Krazoa Palace can be considered this.
• Star Fox: Assault, being Darker and Edgier than both 64 and Adventures, is loaded with these:
  • Peppy and Rob's Heroic Sacrifice. Although it's kinda tempered by the fact that they used an escape pod to survive, the moment by itself is a gut punch given how close Peppy was to Fox. Peppy was James McCloud's best friend, proudly taking Fox under his wing after James disappeared, and his death is presented like Fox losing his father again, as well as the last link he had to James.
    • The team's reactions to this are just as heartbreaking. Krystal and Slippy are pleading with Peppy to stop, while Falco reacts with shock. And at the end of it, Fox is barely holding it together, but composes himself long enough to rally his team; Krystal is solemn; Falco is distraught but brings himself back together; and Slippy is outright sobbing. We're then treated to the shot of the team flying through the entrance right before the shield goes back up, and one last shot of Peppy before the Great Fox explodes behind them. It really drives home the It's Personal nature of the final mission.
    • Of note is this heartbreaking exchange between the two:
      Fox: Peppy... you mustn't.
      Peppy: Yes. This is my duty. And now you must fulfill your duty as well, Fox.
  • General Pepper's fate during the Corneria stage in Assault. The guy spends the entire game doing his best to guide Star Fox so they can stop the aparoids. Sometime when they were off saving Sauria, Corneria is invaded and Pepper's forced to watch most of the planet's defenses be slaughtered. As he's in the middle of calling to Star Fox for help, he loses the connection and presumably is captured by the enemy. And at the end of the stage? We see that the aparoids have infected his flagship... while he's still inside. He spends the entire battle shouting for Star Fox to kill him so he won't be fully assimilated and forced to work for the aparoids. He survives, but still!
  • And then the Aparoid Queen uses the voices of the affected characters above to taunt Fox... and then uses James' voice. This exchange sums up the entire weight of the scene.
    Falco: Don't listen to her, Fox, you know your father's—
    Fox: I KNOW!
• Say what you will about it, but the ending melody to the nine endings of Star Fox Command is heart-bending and tear-worthy, especially considering that most of the endings are very bittersweet or outright depressing. The humble melody invokes a feeling that someone is saying good-bye for the last time, or that hope is fading... Or, if you get the "Good-bye Fox" ending where Fox and Krystal retire, marry, and have a baby, the tearjerking melody actually feels happy.
• Star Fox 64 3D has a theme the original didn't have (Credits Theme 2), and it makes you feel so good if you played the original first and then this version.
• Blink and you'll miss it, but in Star Fox 64, Falco's reaction ("I can't believe they did this...") to Zoness' pollution by Andross' experiments seems a bit more personal than the rest of the team. Considering how out-of-character it is for his usual cocky attitude, it makes you wonder if he knew what the planet was like before it was ruined...
  • When Slippy calls the place a dump, Falco just responds "I hear ya, Slippy" in the most resigned tone possible.
  • Add on Peppy's reaction, "THIS is Zoness?" as a result of an All There in the Manual piece of lore where Peppy and his wife Vivian (named in 64, not Command) had their honeymoon on Zoness.
  • On a similar note, on the first mission when you enter the ruined city of Corneria Falco simply mutters grimly "This is horrible".
• For most of 64, if Fox falls in battle, either Slippy, Peppy or Falco (the teammate who screams is randomized every time Fox dies) screams a Big "NO!". It's already bad enough seeing Fox's comrades call out in grief (especially Peppy, who would now have seen both James and his son pass on before himself, and Slippy, who's cry goes on for the longest and sounds the most realistic), but during the final sections of either Venom path, when Fox is taking on Andross alone, if he dies, you hear ''his'' screams instead. It's a pretty heartwrenching incentive to stay alive.
• This tribute message to Satoru Iwata in the credits of Zero:
  This game is dedicated to our wingman who fell in battle.
• In 64, if you time out the boss on Katina, it blows away the base. Instead of the usual victory fanfare, you hear the "mission failed" theme (as opposed to the standard "mission complete" fanfare) while Fox looks on forlornly in self-disappointment, because his failure just cost him the lives of countless Cornerian soldiers.

  Fox: Dang...
  Peppy: Don't get so down, Fox.

  • What adds to this is that it's very easy to think that one of Fox's old friends, might've died, and what doesn't help is that Bill explicitly tells Fox and crew to run before the base gets blown up. Granted, the warp route in Sector X shows that he managed to survive, but most would continue onto the regular stage path.
    Bill: Fox! Get out of here, now!

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