Left 4 Dead/Tear Jerker

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Left 4 Dead of all games has a very particular gut-wrenching moment. In the third stage of the second campaign, the players must get to a church. Inside this church are walls that are just filled up with the names of people and pets, their birthdays, and the days they died with added memorial messages just to make the point hit home. Finding out that some children lost were as young as two years old or a seven-year-old Pomeranian is a very powerful sight that actually depressed this troper for hours.
    • Not only that, but throughout the game there are missing persons and missing animal signs. Valve is REALLY good at the whole "immersion" thing.
    • Also, after this troper's first play through, he started thinking about why the Witch was crying. Don't do it.
    • In the recently released the Passing campaign, it takes this trope to a more personal level. We already knew somebody from the original cast would die, but when you see Bill's corpse lying right next to the power generator, still clutching on to his signature M16, you just can't help but break a tear.
      • And on "The Sacrifice", listening to the last lines on the titular sacrifice for each character is heartbreaking. Especially a lot of the surviving characters' parting lines, many of which sound like they're about to break into tears. Especially the reaction of either Zoey or Bill if the the other sacrifices themselves.
    • In the second game's Last Man on Earth mutation, it's just you and the Special Infected. As if the pants-wetting Paranoia Fuel wasn't enough, your character continues to speak as if the other survivors are still around. One particurly depressing example is in the Dark Carnival campaign while playing as Nick: "You finally got your wish, Ellis. We're in an amusement park ride."
      • Well Ellis doesn't at least. He'll yell out for the other occasionally. "Hey that's not funny, where are you guys?"
      • Through the use of mods, this troper was able to play Last Man on Earth on the No Mercy Left 4 Dead 2 port as Bill. At the Sewers level, I heard something that sounded like someone whistling. After a few moments, I realized that Bill was whistling an old army tune alone. It really tore at this troper's heart.
        • * Computer/C:/Program Files/Steam/SteamApps/common/left 4 dead2/left4dead2_dlc3/sound/player/survivor/voice/namvet and then nervouswhistle01. God-fucking-damnit, Bill.
  • In "The Sacrifice" comic, it is revealed that in Zoey's first encounter with the Infected, her mother was infected and bit her father, who was then forced to shoot and kill her. Zoey and her father then say their tearful goodbyes before she shoots him before he can turn into a zombie. What really gets the tears flowing (for both Zoey and the reader) is that Zoey flashes back to this moment when she learns that the gene for carriers is passed down from the father, meaning that her father was never going to turn in the first place.
    • Some of the final lines after Bill leaves the bridge.:

Zoey: He's gone, Francis.
Francis: You don't know that! Bill's the toughest old buzzard I ever met, and he's down there and he needs us! We--
Zoey: Francis. He's gone. He did this for us. And if you go down there, he did it for nothing.
Francis: Goddammit.

    • Made even more meaningful that Francis and Bill were always the most hostile to each other, yet Francis is most determined that he's still alive.
  • Bill: Don't let her down, don't let her down....
    • To add to this, Louis' first encounter, which involves him being ambushed and being obviously terrified and depressed about the whole thing.
  • How about just the simple dialogue players say once their health is so low that the screen turns grey?

Zoey: "Oh God... I'm gonna die..."

  • Everyone's reactions to one of the party members dying, and you just watch, knowing that you could have saved them. Kind of moot when they just pop out of a closet a few minutes later, but it still tugs at you.
  • Ellis is normally extremely talkative and lighthearted about their predicament, but if Nick gets killed, a depressingly sad glitch may occur where Ellis doesn't talk at all until Nick is brought back, even while being ridden by a Jockey or pounced on by a Hunter.
  • A lot of the graffiti is this too, if you take the time to look at it. People apologizing to loved ones because they had to move on without them, people leaving mourning messages for lost friends or loved ones, messages to family members (one reveals someone telling a family member that they found Mom...she was crying in a ditch and killed their father when he tried to help her. She's one of them now.)
  • "Uh Ellis, you know I was just kidding about all that right?" The poor kid dying is bad enough, but Nick's responses to it are real tear-jerkers.
  • Okay, bit of WMG wit the way the survivors may be thinking but.. You'd probably think Ellis, Coach, Rochelle, Nick, Bill, Zoey, Francis, and Louis are all lucky to be immune right? Think again; these people may have seen their friends, co-workers, and family turn in front of them! Then, they have to uneasily group up with 3 other people who, at specific points in the story, don't know if they're immune! And even if the military doesn't shoot them when they escape, everything about humanity is gone and overrun with infected. They can never go back to their old lives! It's a miracle they don't shoot themselves so they don't have to deal with it all...
  • If any of your teammates are incapacitated when everyone else gets on the rescue vehicle, they will be left behind. As long as they're not dead, you'll get the sound of them screaming for your help playing over the cut scene of the rescue vehicle leaving, abandoning them to the zombie hordes. You will feel like an asshole.
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