The Beauty of Tears: Why (The Best) Video Games Make Me Cry
I will never forget the first time a video game made me cry in my adult life. The final act of The Last Guardian, a game notorious for its problems, yielded one of the single most cathartic moments in all of fiction for me. After dozens of hours of struggle, taming an AI animal companion, blindly exploring an ancient civilization by its own architectural logic, and avoiding Yoroi trying to imprison the young boy protagonist, I emerged victorious but heartbroken. Sobbing my way through three separate endings, if you want to call them that, I cemented the conviction that video game stories ripped me apart in a beautiful way – in the manner that other stories often never could.
Partially because of growing up in a culture riddled with toxic masculinity, and partially because of an infantilizing discussion around video games as a “waste of time,” video games took me longer to appreciate as an art form than others. Since reading books was rewarded and studying film in college was seen as an academic exercise in sophistication, I spent more time during my young adult years leaning into the sorts of stories that culturally rewarded me as “smart” or at least garnered me praise from authority figures like parents and professors. This isn’t to suggest that I never consumed media outside of this bubble, anime being an obvious counterexample, but the media I discussed with others was most commonly the sort that (I believed) attenuated social respect.
Though the closest father figures I had growing up spent time both surfing and sharing two-player video games with me, games were always communicated to me as a privilege in a way that books, for instance, never were. I’ll always remember the first time I was grounded for poor grades as a kid – my mom’s standard was all A’s and B’s, at the very least – coming home with a C, and then repeated C’s, led to being grounded. While I was grounded, I couldn’t see friends or play with electronics; instead, all I had was books and materials to write.
Later in my childhood came music, not just rewarded by the adults in my life as impressive skill, but socially repaid by feeling cool and popular in my high school friend groups. Being the “kid in a band” was cooler than being smart, so I naturally spent more social resources farming the positive feedback that I wanted. Again, this isn’t to say I abandoned games, but that I still didn’t yet believe that games were in fact as important as those other things so actively shaped by authority figures’ judgments. “Wow, that’s really impressive,” I would routinely hear from teachers and friends of my mother when I finished a book, but “what are you going to do with your life” was a more common refrain when I announced that I had just finished Dragon Ball Z Budokai.
There were certainly socially rewarded games like SSX Tricky, a game I used to play with my mother’s longtime boyfriend. There was also the yearly installment of NCAA football, an almost rite-of-passage forced upon me by my father, a high school history teacher and coach. For my father, learning how to coach football teams, or in this case, execute plays, was his way of functionally ridiculing me. It’s weird to discuss now, but I remember him beating the pulp out of me in the first half, let’s say 54-0, and then we’d switch controllers to see if he could come back and beat me by game’s end. Meanwhile, almost channeling Seligman’s and Maier’s dogs, I’d watch touchdown after touchdown as I “learned my lesson” for being careless, never once learning strategy and instead just being bullied by my own father as his ego reinflated.
I share these otherwise humbling anecdotes to discuss the weird ways in which gaming was reinforced in a pro-social sense, which, as you can see, is problematic to say the least. There are, of course, positive memories, too: the time I picked Jak & Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, the time I saved up birthday money to purchase my first game (Grand Theft Auto III, which was promptly confiscated by my father and never replaced), walking through a Tennessee Wal-Mart and picking out Pokemon Crystal as my first GameBoy Color game. What’s unique about each of these games for me is my ability to choose them and connect with them beyond mere aesthetic. While I had second-hand copies of Q-Bert, Bionic Commando, and the latest NCAA, of course, the first games that spoke to me were instead the ones I expressed agency in choosing for myself.
These cherished memories aside, it wasn’t until the latter half of my undergraduate degree in college that I stepped back and appreciated video games in the way that I do now.
I’ll never forget when a video game made me cry for the first time. I was never much of a crier growing up. Whether I chalk that lack of tears up to what I would later discover as my gender identity or neurodivergence, I cannot fully say, but something was repressed throughout my childhood. I distinctly remember watching with discomfort and confusion as my mother sobbed at movies that didn’t move me. I felt out of place when dissecting poetry in English class because the tone words that were supposed to connote emotion washed over me like the beach in low tide. Of course I felt things, whether reading the Harry Potter series and discovering community through MuggleCast or delaying plans for self-harm by delving back ancient episodes of Doctor Who and latching onto them for personal meaning. But when I finished The Last Guardian, for the first time, my life was never the same again.
It was the summer of 2017, and I was wrapping up the first full year of my Master’s degree. Every summer, my schedule would slow, allowing my childhood hobby of video games to resurface. I can’t say I finished many games during those college years, but somehow my longtime friend Josh loaned me his copy of The Last Guardian. Looking back, I feel strange describing my then-lack of knowledge of Team ICO and their now-famous games, Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. But then, not thinking of games as important art in the way that I now do, when Josh recommended a game like Persona 3, I didn’t ask questions – I played it.
Like many games that Josh recommended to me, The Last Guardian was something I chipped at in small bursts: on weekends, in twenty-minute sessions after a long night of classes, before work. For years, my default of playing single-player video games involved the use of walkthroughs – whether that’s a classic Prima strategy guide or an achievement-collecting write-up on Steam forums. The Last Guardian was no exception, for not only was it a dense game front-loaded by puzzles, but it hosts a notoriously fickle AI companion character known as Trico, the iconic chimeric creature you might recognize from the game’s cover.
One of the beautiful aspects of The Last Guardian is the relationship you develop with Trico, finicky as he may be. Even though The Last Guardian is a tough hang, as they say, one of those games that is a chore to replay – if you ever choose to again – the empathy the game creates between you, the playable “boy” character, and Trico, is lifelong. You will never forget what it feels like to meet Trico in his wounded and hostile state, what it feels like to heal his wounds, one spear at a time, and what it feels like when he finally follows you up an impossible architectural cliff, the very one you’ve been coaxing him up for half an hour.
It’s no wonder, then, that the ending of The Last Guardian devastated me. Animal lover or not, you bond with Trico in a manner that I have never seen in another game, before or since. And in order to get to the heart of this article, I have to exhaustively spoil the endings – something I usually don’t warn readers about. With The Last Guardian, at least, the endings are everything.
Say what you want about The Last Guardian and its recalcitrant AI companion. The endings to this game unfold in masterful succession. At first, you emerge from an impossibly uphill battle against the game’s Master of the Valley – a dark enemy that seems to have lore connections with Team ICO’s aforementioned titles. At last, Trico, stabbed nearly to death, screams into the void below, triumphant. You survey the golden horizon as it melts like butter on toast, ready to reward you for finally escaping the torments below. Trico flies off into that blissful sunset, battered but peaceful, at last.
Trico crashes into the village where the playable character, the boy, was kidnapped at the beginning of the story. While obviously cast as a threat at the story’s outset, Trico – defeated by injury and exhaustion – loses energy as soon as he recognizes the boy’s village. Parcel safely delivered, you can see how Trico is ready to sleep and recover for the next several weeks. But he doesn’t get that chance.
The villagers, ignorant of the past dozen hours you’ve spent bonding with him in the Valley, still view Trico as a threat, as a kidnapper. The boy, similarly exhausted by this impossible journey, can’t muster the energy to speak – let alone protest the shouting villagers who, pitchfork in hand, start encircling the terrified, agonized Trico. It’s one of the most heart-wrenching moments in all of fiction for me: the dire need to scream anything to protect Trico, knowing fully well that these people can never understand, and yet physically – as a player and as the boy himself – unable to do so. All you can do in this moment, as you horrifyingly watch another spear lodge itself into Trico’s shoulder as he retreats in panic, is shoo him away. The same command, the same button, you have used to communicate with this creature for the rest of the game suddenly becomes recontextualized: the only way to save Trico is to banish him, without a goodbye, forever.
There is nothing I could write that could overstate how devastating this second ending is. Credits aren’t intermittently rolling, it’s just raw brutality. You, the beast, and these all-too-human villagers who just want to defend their way of life. No one is to blame and yet the intensity with which I felt hatred for these people still burns inside of me, the almost maternal fierceness with which I still feel easily accessible in a way that so many memories from the rest of my life are not. I feel like I watched a stray dog get skinned alive for sport by a group of teenagers while I was chained to a fence, gagged, and that feeling just isn’t communicable when I try to point at other games that even attempt something similar.
The final ending to The Last Guardian is more gradual, offered in exchange for the game’s final credits. Slowly, and then almost all at once, the tone shifts from a pondering, soaring skyline that wants to recapture the magic of the past few-dozen hours of Trico’s heroic escape, stopping at last atop the dormant caldera that opens its mouth to the Valley below.
With a glance, we relive the entire journey – extraordinary as it was – and then, almost unexpectedly, the camera descends. So too does the music. Plunging into the mountain, the viewpoint wheels around from the epic plateau where the Master of the Valley was defeated, down into the echoing puzzle chambers where barrels helped us bond and Yoroi kept us hopping from toe to toe. Until, at last, the camera and the music coalesce, simultaneously descending and ascending into a dark, lonely cave, a direct call back – like a scar, finally healed, that still evokes twitching nerve endings as you relive the memory that left its forever-mark. Somehow, the camera keeps going; there are caves inside of caves in which to delve. A sole ray of light remains, piercing the pitch-black darkness where our journey began.
A pair of eyes open, the tapetum lucidum, reflecting hints of light back at the camera – back at us – until we realize that Trico, separated from the Boy, is no longer alone. Trico has found a mate – the very one we freed towards the end of the game. Even more beautiful, as the music smooths into silence, twinkling intermittently between sobbing gasps from me, the player, a smaller pair of eyes opens. All at once, my outstretched arm – ready to return the box of unused tissues to the table – yanks back, and tears flow harder than they ever have before. What was just the single most heartbreaking loss I have ever experienced in fiction becomes immediately the most joyful, most optimistic promise ever offered by a game – sequel or otherwise. Trico has not only found a mate, the pair of Tricos are raising a child – a final, new hope for this world.
The screen fades to black for one last time.
It has been nearly a decade since finishing The Last Guardian and I still cry every time I revisit these scenes. Nothing has ever come close. Frankly, I do not want a sequel; The Last Guardian offers the perfect ending.
I finished The Last Guardian desperate for community and catharsis. My core friends in college no longer played video games, at least not often, and the Reddit threads and news sites I turned to offered me nothing other than review scores. I yearned for a ten-thousand word diary entry that sobbed with me, that offered me a warm hug and the promise of community. At the time, I found nothing.
I recognize now, well over eight years into writing about games, that I simply didn’t know where to look. Outlets like Critical Distance were not yet on my radar, whereas GameSpot and its kin were. Mistakenly reducing games discourse to these market-driven outlets, I concluded that no one had felt the same way I did with The Last Guardian, so I started trauma-dumping to everyone I knew who cared about games – including Ben Vollmer. Because Ben and I worked together, I soon tapped into his idea for a website-community hybrid, where games and the lasting impact they left were celebrated in the way that a museum celebrates artworks that make a lasting cultural impact. Several conversations later, Epilogue Gaming was born.
I looked at my draft for The Last Guardian and soon realized that my single-spaced 40-page word-vomit was nowhere near publishable. I covered everything from personal experience, to game summary, to comparative analysis, to art history and how the games had been influenced, to wild speculations that attempted to link each Team ICO game together. Maybe there is a world where I could publish this, but that world was offline, confined to academia. Several years later, gender change and all, I unintentionally deleted this article when I nuked my deadname’s Google account. I think, given everything, I can live with this accident. I’m sure I could say it better now, anyway.
Anyone who knows the rest of the Epilogue story knows that I spent the next eight years writing, podcasting, streaming, and producing adjacent media about video games. The Last Guardian, and its mixtures of missing conversations, began a trajectory of caring about games again. In the immediate, “this made me cry” sense, but also in the “this game helped bring me together with people I wasn’t already close with” sense, The Last Guardian changed my life for the better. Singlehandedly, my experience with Trico and the Boy birthed a research obsession that still isn’t fully satisfied all these years later, it opened up new professional and personal doors in my life, and it rekindled a passion that brings me more meaning than things I always was taught to view as more “important,” like reading and self-development.
Over time, The Last Guardian became a thread in the tapestry of games that defines who I am. I’ll never forget when Michael Stevens of VSauce fame gave a TED Talk where he argued that saying you like something is an extension of trying to say that you are like this thing you are sharing – and throughout the years, my attempts at codifying a scholarly body of, essentially, video game literary analyses and a community around such conversations, is a way of saying that I want to be the type of person who can prove to the childhood version of my mother (and other significant adults) that video games were always worth the time I spent with them growing up.
Since the “are video games art?” conversations are the medium-equivalent of a bildungsroman critical analysis, you might say this project at Epilogue was my own personal coming-of-age with regard to my lifelong hobby. Consequently, my favorite video games are the ones that stick with me – which just so happen to be the ones that make me cry – the same ones that burn away a part of myself to give future growth a chance.
NieR: Automata and its predecessor, Replicant: recursive emotional interweaving where being engulfed in darkness makes the final rays of light feel sacred. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt: hundreds of hours – between the Netflix show, the eight Sapkowski books, and the prior two games – finally reached a definitive close. If Found…: my tipping point for coming out as transgender. The Yakuza (Like a Dragon) series: my playable soap operas. The Last Guardian: the game that broke down the dam to repressed emotions. These games tore apart the muscles of my heart, causing it to heal and grow stronger than it was before.
Despite toiling for the better part of a decade justifying a serious, academic dimension to my love for video games, I still catch myself feeling sheepish in moments when my partner arrives home to see me covered in tears at some recent games like 1000xRESIST. It’s practically a running gag in our household for her to lament, “you’re crying…at a video game…again?!” This happens with all fiction, whether it’s comfy Gilmore Girls marathons or a one-sitting manga like My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness. With video games in particular, however, my favorite stories – the best stories – leave me irreparably broken, just a little bit. And I think that’s beautiful.
Thank you for reading. Your Patreon support keeps our community entirely Ad free.
