Fallout/Tear Jerker

The unique dialogue choices you get if your companions are there after you agree to go into the Project Purity chamber. This troper, sap that he is, went to tell Dogmeat he was a good boy one last time...and discovered a new line that read "I think it's time for us to say goodbye, old buddy. Take care of yourself, okay?" Honestly, I nearly bawled.
- Hehe...er, yes! Nearly! This troper is in complete agreement.
  - This troper shed some Manly Tears.
The first time this troper completed the original game, having saved most of the wasteland from various evils, having spent the entire time trying to make life better, your character returns to the vault only to be told that he has changed too much, that he is no longer capable of living in the vault was gutwrenching to this troper. All that effort to go home, where the Vault Dweller's family presumably was, only to be told that the very actions that saved the vault, would forever deny him entrance to it again. Talk about bittersweet.
- Upon returning to Vault 101 in 3, and rescuing its inhabitants from the new draconian Overseer only to be told that because I'd killed him I'd have to leave, never to return, by the character's childhood friend and possibly sweetheart was almost too much for this troper. He had to stop playing for a while.
  - Even if you convince him to give up peacefully, she still kicks you out. I swore at her. With tears in my eyes.
- This troper was BROKEN by something that was (sorta), my own fault: having Dogmeat killed.
  - Fear not, brave troper! One word: Puppies!
  - This troper is such a softie that he hates seeing friends die in RPGs, and none more that Dogmeat in 1. The first time I played through it and found out I couldn't just make him leave the party, I was so determined to see him live to the end that, in the Military Base alone, I used over 100 stimpacks on him and was bum-rushing minigun-wielding mutants so I could take the hits instead of my loyal and too-brave pooch. And he made it.
- "If anyone can hear this, this is Bob Anderstein. [My] family and I have taken refuge in a drainage chamber not too far from a radio relay tower outside of D.C. My boy is very sick, needs medical assistance. Please help if you can. We're listening for your response. 3950 kilohertz." This troper had to turn the game off for a while after this encounter...
- There's a certain house with a housebot that can be programmed to do several different things. If you make it read a poem to the family's children, you can follow it and witness it reading the story to two tiny skeletons. What makes it worse is that the poem is There Will Come Soft Rains, which is a lecture about how nothing in the world would miss the human race after it's gone. This is actually the title to a Ray Bradbury short story, which in turn was named after the real-life poem, by Sara Teasedale.
- Hell, almost the entirety of 3 is enough to make me sob. Specifically, the very sad background music that plays when you wander the wasteland; it almost makes you wish something will attack you so the confrontation score kicks in (or you could just use the radio). Even worse than that, though, is the bit with the player's father. Damn, just damn. You have to do so much just to see him again after you leave the vault, and on top of that, he dies soon afterward.
- This Troper doesn't have a good relationship with her (Real Life) father. So at first the scenes playing through the tutorial levels with James were only 'meh.' Then about thirty minutes after getting kicked out of the Vault, I realized that I had a recording of my father leaving the vault. I turned it on...and cracked. Liam Neeson, why the hell did you have to be such a good voice actor? The desperation in his voice saying "Goodbye...I love you!" feels so real, like a man desperately hoping his child will forgive him (although believing the child won't) for abandoning her. At that point I really did want to find him. Then after reaching Vault 112, I played straight through up until reaching the last part of the Jefferson Memorial...and had to stop. I knew what was going to happen. I knew that if I went through that door James would die. I couldn't do it. I knew I would burst into tears. I saved and could only come back to it after a few days so I could finish the quest with a more prepared steeled heart.
- During the last mission in 3, I couldn't remember the password for the console. As I began desperately searching my notes for some clue I found the message your dad left you and I realized I never listened to it. I played it while I got the pass code and put it in. When everything was fading out, I hear "Someday we can be together again."
- Liberty Prime's death. "I DIE...SO THAT DEMOCRACY...MAY...LIVE."
  - Made slightly better when you realize that the Brotherhood of Steel are working to rebuild him. It will take decades to do it, but someday Liberty Prime shall walk alongside humanity once again.
- The log entries of the nurse in Germantown. Even up to the very end, running out of medication and dying of acute radiation exposure, she and her colleagues still went out every day and did everything they could for their patients, even if all they could offer was whiskey and painkillers. Her last log details her dismay that she couldn't have been the last to die, as she knew there were still people out there that needed care. This troper found herself experiencing two very intense emotions at once: professional pride and heartache.
- Moira Brown in Megaton is normally an extremely cheery person, but for the first time I actually clicked on a few dialogues that I've never listened to when I didn't have some sort of MP3 playing. Her heartfelt explanation for why she wants you to help her create the Wasteland Survival Guide made me tear up, something that never happens:

Moira: Well, look around at the world we live in. It may be okay to you, but I've read about what it used to be like, and this isn't it. So we all need something that keeps us going, despite all the terrible things around us. For me, it's things like this book... did you ever try to put a broken piece of glass back together? Even if the pieces fit, you can't make it whole again the way it was. But if you're clever, you can still use the pieces to make other useful things. Maybe even something wonderful, like a mosaic. Well, the world broke just like glass. And everyone's trying to put it back together like it was, but it'll never come together the same way... the Wasteland Survival Guide isn't much towards that lofty goal, but its an important one. And that's why I need your help. <voice cracks a little> I don't think I can do it alone.

- - This troper was absolutely crushed when he heard 3 Dog completely bashing Moira's book and calling it the most useless piece of dangerous trash ever. Moira's dream was forever ruined, and I had no one to blame for it but myself and my own laziness. I immediately restarted the game and did her quest RIGHT, because the last truly good and innocent person in the Capital Wasteland deserved better.
- And then, in Fallout: New Vegas, you find it. Not only did it get published, but it's so good it permanently raises your Survival skill. A Crowning Moment of Heartwarming if there ever was one.
In 3, the wasteland towns and cities are filled with skeletons from when the bomb dropped, and sometimes you can see exactly what they were doing right when they died. Some were janitors chugging one last beer in a school hallway. Some had a gun in their hand and bloodstains by their head. But what really got this troper torn apart was in Minefield. There's a house with two skeletons lying in bed, cradling each other, with two syringes of Med-X are by the bed, so they wouldn't feel any pain.
- - In that same house is a second, smaller room next to the above, filled with darts and baseball gear. This troper was rummaging for lootable goods and thinking 'Damn, just junk' when she went into first-person to make sure she hadn't missed anything. Then she noticed the roller skates by the bed and it hit her: This was a kid's room. The skeletons next door were his parents. But there was no child-sized skeleton nearby, so one can only assume the child died before his parents, who buried him before taking their own lives. What happened to that child, and what must the parents have been going through?
  - Even worse: What if the kid were still in school? Notice how all the pre-war clocks seem frozen at late morning/early afternoon? The parents probably had a relative or a friend quickly drive to the school to pick the kid up so they could all die together. Obviously, the kid and the relative/friend didn't make it back home...
- In New Vegas, you come across a refuge camp with one locked door. There are plenty of random locked doors in the Mojave, easy XP, says I. The door opens to reveal a bathroom, with one adult skeleton lying on the floor, along with a .357 magnum. I had a sudden moment of realization. This was a man who killed himself. This was his final resting place. And I just disturbed his grave to get experience. It hit me how many of these random tragedies are spread all across the wastes, only there for those who take the time to stop and think about them. Game gets turned off, as I am in tears.
- Somewhere in the outskirts of the Capital Wasteland is a little area with empty Nuka-Cola bottles lined up in a row, BB ammo scattered about, and a smaller-than-adult skeleton with a BB gun and full Nuka-Colas lying beside it. A short distance away is the blackened earth of a bomb impact. This kid went out for some leisurely target-practice and probably never saw it coming.
Wandering through the dead and barren wasteland and having America The Beautiful come on the radio squashed this British troper like a bug.
- Similarly, standing on a bluff after Trouble on the Homefront, having lost both your father and the place you grew up in, and looking out over the blasted remains of America as Way Back Home plays was bitterly, bitterly ironic. The countryside Crosby's singing of doesn't exist anymore, and you've got no home to go back to.
In what is possible the biggest example in the series, convincing the master to kill himself. He realizes he's kidnapped and horrifically mutated hundreds of people for nothing, and his master dream of a peaceful wasteland will never happen.
I talked President Eden into destroying the Enclave at Raven Rock. My radio was off, and as I was fleeing the base and watching the security robots vaporize the Enclave soldiers, the background music turned into something that sounded like Taps played. I didn't bat an eyelash at anything else in the game, but this broke me. I kept wondering if those people under the armor were just Punch Clock Villains.
- One of the Enclave scientists at Adams Air Force Base has a holotape from her big brother telling her that he was being transferred over to the Satellite Relay Station. The player likely killed him and if the player got the holotape, you probably killed the last surviving member of that family.
Arkansas of Minefield, an old man still patrolling the settlement of his youth, which was wiped clean of life when slavers captured or murdered everyone save Arkansas, including his family. Now he's dedicated to killing anyone who tries to despoil the ghost-town that's left, and you can't even help him if you try; too many years in the Wasteland make him regard everyone as an enemy. He's just gonna keep his post on that tower until he dies, or someone kills him, or you sell him into slavery. It just seems so... heartbreakingly lonely.
- My God! I didn't think of that! Here I was, thinking that he was some random nutcase that decided to defend a ghost town for no reason...
Sort of Fridge Logic, but talking to people in Rivet City tells you that Trinnie, 'loose' alcoholic, came from Lamplight. After running the Big Trouble in Big Town quest and realizing just how unprepared Lamplighters are when they're forced to leave, it kind of makes you wonder if bright, mature Lucy or adorable little Bumble could wind up like Trinnie someday.
That poem recited by a Mr. Handy robot to a child skeleton about how the world would not care an ounce when humans are gone.