Heartbreaking Moments
Welcome to Jman at Magic Gate. I am Jman and today MagicGate is all about life’s heartbreaking moments found in video games. Life has its heartbreaking moments. Times where we a friend dies. Other times when a friend becomes a foe. Other times where all hope seems lost. As we ask does life imitate art or does art imitate life? I am calling video games art because of all the effort and the beauty involved in creating them. As far as the age old question at times both can be true. As deep as that topic can go we are going to look at those moments in video games that broke our hearts or at least my heart. If I miss one add it to the comments.
The Last of Us is a post apocalyptic zombie killing game. The Last of Us is played in third person mode and it is all about stealth not one of my favorite ways to play. Zombies on there own is heartbreaking with all the lives lost so quickly. The Last of Us has at minimum about four heart wrenching moments with separation where as soon as the player has recovered from one moment the player is hit again. In the interest of not spoiling I will describe the first moment. On the night of the zombie breakout the main character Joel whom the player has not started playing as yet instead the player is his daughter whose name I forgotten. During this chapter the player as the daughter, Joel, and his brother are all trying to escape a town to a less populated area. As the Escape gets closer the player switches to Joel an on duty twitchy officer fires a round near a zombie in Joel’s direction while Joel is holding his daughter. A stray bullet strikes the little girl and the game starts off with this intense heart breaker. And the moments only get worse from there.
Ratchet and Clank is an off planet adventure played in third person mode it is a variation of a platform game with a little bit of camera control issues. Ratchet is a Lombax an alien creature. Clank is a robot that was defective because it was not made to specified instructions he was then discarded from the space station factory which had built him. This is the original Ratchet and Clank for the PlayStation 2. I am a lot less concerned with spoilers here because it has been around for a long enough time. Ratchet finds and saves Clank. Clank fixes Ratchet spaceship when the ship is fixed a message hidden in Clank is freed to show the galaxy is in danger. Ratchet thinks the best way to solve this problem is to take it to his hero Captain Quark. Once they get close enough to talk to the Captain, the Captain reveals that he is the Villain of this story. Ratchet who is now showing how distraught he is. Clank is a robot and shows that he is not empathic. It was not bad enough that the best person to help turned out to be a coward, but this leads to a rift between these two friends. I personally relate more to Ratchet more. So watching him get hit twice like this hurts me. Thankfully this is not the end of the story it is the end of what I will talk about. This was a moment for me where two friends were at odds but with so many more Ratchet and Clank games we know they become good friends again.
Fallout 4 is an RPG (Role Playing Game), FPS (First Person Shooter). We have talked about the date on which Fallout took place October 23 2077. At the start of the game the player gets to choose if they would like to play as a male or a female. After this you walk around your house meet you child and set your characteristics. This is the day that the bombs fall and your character and their family are rushed to the fallout shelter where it is understood when it has been waited out they will release everyone. However the player is placed in a freezer along with everyone else that was brought to this fallout shelter. The spouse of the player is handed their child and frozen holding the child. The next thing the player sees is their spouses freezer being opened the child being ripped out of that person’s hands and then that person is shot the player is then refrozen and until the players freezer breaks. With no idea of how long the player has been frozen. Also realizing that the players spouse is dead and child is missing the player quickly realizes that all the other people that were frozen were also dead. The player is the only one alive in a fallout shelter as far as the player knows everyone outside of the fallout shelter is also dead. This is a gut wrenching moment of complete hopelessness where the player has no items and is unsure if anyone else in the world is even alive anyway. As the game progress from this point the player quickly finds other people who are alive and friendly to aid on the players journey some of these people will even offer to travel with the player.
Heartbreaking moments in video games are to make us feel like the characters are real. It does not matter if they are aliens, robots, or from the future these characters show real raw emotions that would cause even non-empaths to feel the pain too. These moments give me pause as I think about what would I do in this situation. Joel waited years before he could take any real action again after losing his daughter. Ratchet may not have liked Clank at that moment, but knew that there was a bigger threat to the galaxy at large. Even after losing everything home, family, and the prospects of the rest of the world still going on that journey is hard. For me the heartbreak of those games sticks around. As I already asked what heartbreaking moments are you still dealing with if I missed them. As always I look forward to your corrections……er……I mean your thoughts thank you for reading.
Jman At Magic Gate 