Subtle Emotional Moments In Video Games

When you think about emotional moments in video games, you probably think of Aeris getting stabbed in Final Fantasy VII.  Or maybe you’re not an old fogey like me, and you think of one of the many bittersweet endings in modern games, where the main character loses a loved one or has to make a tough choice.  While there are many great examples out there, the problem is that most of them are too easy.  Any writer can kill off a love interest halfway through the story.  It doesn’t take some great skill.  Anybody can throw a jump scare into a horror game, or end a game with a sadistic choice.

Today I’m looking at some of the more subtle moments.  Little emotional clues that are hard to capture with sprites and CGI models.  Times where programmers showed us how someone feels without hitting us over the head.  I’m the kind of person who gets hung up on weird little things, so here’s a few seemingly random examples of emotional moments that stuck with me.

Final Fantasy VI – What Am I?

FFVI (aka FFIII on the SNES) was full of moments that were much deeper than cutesy sprites should be able to convey.  Like when Locke tells Celes “That ribbon suits you” before the opera, and towards the end of the game Celes risks her life to save that same ribbon (at least that's my interpretation)… it says a lot about her feelings for Locke.  Or how about the part where Celes has to take care of the sick man after the cataclysm?  That entire sequence really showed how bleak the world had become. 

But the scene I want to talk about is much earlier in the game.  Terra, Edgar, and Locke are fleeing from their enemies on Chocobo-back.  Terra uses magic to stop their pursuers, which amazes her companions, since magic is all but extinct now.  As they continue to flee, Edgar mentions that no human is born with powers like hers, with emphasis on the word human.  And Terra’s Chocobo slows to a halt.  Edgars’s words trigger Terra’s introspection.  She doesn’t know who she really is, or how she got these powers.  Will she ever find a place where she really fits in?

It's a very little thing, but the way she slows down, along with the accompanying music, gives you a lot of insight about the state of her mind.  You forget that these are silly-looking sprites on the screen, because the actual characters are every bit as deep as those you would find in a novel.  It was one of the first times a video game really impressed me this way.

Life is Strange: Before the Storm Chapter 2 – After The Play

Performing Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” in LiS:BtS is one of my favorite video game moments.  However, the scene after it is where the game really shines.  As Rachel and Chloe are walking home, they are positively walking on air.   There is a certain kind of natural high you can experience after accomplishing something great, such as acting in a play, and somehow these programmers managed to capture the feeling perfectly.  I can’t even begin to explain the energy in the air, but I have experienced it myself, and I felt it again while playing this scene.  I haven’t even seen actual movies pull off this emotion this well.  Maybe it helps that, unlike a movie, here I actually got to be a part of performing the play.  I got to feel the same buzz as the characters because it was partly my own accomplishment.

It's a beautiful moment, a ray of hope at a time when Chloe’s life is in a downward spiral.

Life is Strange 2 Chapter 3 – She's Got The Look

This is a small one, and probably wasn’t as hard to program, but it’s one of those cases where little things mean a lot.  In the third chapter of LiS2, there’s a scene where a group of young adults are sitting around a campfire, just chatting, drinking, and smoking.  They talk about the kind of things you would expect to hear around a campfire, and the writers really nailed the campfire party vibe.  But that’s not what impressed me.  Not long into the scene, I noticed that this one young woman, Cassidy, was watching me. 

Now maybe I'm imagining things, but while most of the characters stare straight ahead or look at whoever is currently speaking, Cassidy seems to keep stealing glances at me.  And… that’s it.  Nothing big, but I immediately knew what it meant.  Interest.  As the others start going to bed, Cassidy potentially talks you into letting Finn your hair.  While she watches you get shorn, there's something in her eyes.  Again, something hard to capture in a video game.  But that look is worth a thousand words.

Again, I know it doesn’t sound like much, but it was enough that I knew they'd hook up eventually (which they do, assuming you say the right things).  Having been on both ends of that magnetic pull – where you’re in a crowd but only have eyes for one person – I have to say I’m surprised to see it work so well in a video game.

Those are the three best examples I can think of right now.  I’m sorry two of them were from the same series, but the LiS team is just really good at emotional moments. 

Huge dramatic moments are great and all, especially when they turn the world upside down and twist the plot in a whole new direction.  But it’s the subtle touches that bring the characters to life and make you care for them.  There’s a reason the death of Aeris had so much impact – you’d already spent half the game getting to know her.  And yet, personally, I felt more emotional attachment to the characters in FFVI than I did to Aeris.  Somehow FFVI managed to portray deeper emotions with 2D sprites than a lot of modern games do with motion captured facial expressions.  I’m not trying to put down the newer games, or to brag that my generation was better, I just want to point out sometimes having an excess of technology causes you to forget the little things.  Or at least, the ability to convey emotion has nothing to do with technology.

Or maybe I don’t really have a point, and just wanted to ramble about three of my favorite moments in video games.  Hey, it’s my blog, I’ll do what I want, so there!