Break The Cutie / Visual Novels

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• Ace Attorney:
  • Phoenix himself gets this in Case 3-1 (a flashback to his college days) and during the time skip. The poor kid was deeply in love with his girlfriend Dahlia... only for her to turn out to be a manipulative sociopath who was using him as an Unwitting Pawn. He's managed to pick himself up by the present day... only to be manipulated into presenting forged evidence and getting disbarred, which breaks him for 7 years until he's able to catch the person who did it.
  • The reason Miles Edgeworth is so cold and brutal in court is because he suffered one of these moments in his childhood and never really recovered. He was trapped in an elevator with his father and a bailiff after an earthquake, and wildly threw the bailiff's gun in an attempt to save his father from the guy's panic. The gun went off before everyone fell unconscious due to oxygen deprivation, and Miles spent 15 years thinking that that shot killed his father, which wasn't helped by Manfred von Karma taking him in and reinforcing his trauma to mold him into an amoral prosecutor just like Manfred himself.
  • If you are an assistant in Ace Attorney, you're going to suffer some sort of tragedy.
    • Maya is introduced clutching her sister's dead body and getting framed for the murder, and while she manages to keep a cheerful attitude, she still gets tasered, framed for murder, kidnapped, almost murdered, locked into a freezing cave, framed again, and kidnapped again. And a good chunk of her trouble comes from her own aunt trying to get her killed for her position as Master of Kurain Village.
    • Ema starts with just a strained relationship for her older sister Lana, but later in her introductory case it's revealed she was nearly killed by Joe Darke as a child, and Damon Gant used the opportunity to frame her for murder so he could blackmail Lana. By the fourth game, she's failed the test to become a forensic scientist (her dream job), and is stuck as a grumpy detective, though she gets thrown a bone in the sixth game when she takes the test again and passes.
    • Pearl is a sweet little 8-year-old girl who just wants to be helpful and adores her cousin Maya. So of course she's got to take Maya's place while Maya's kidnapped and gets used as an Unwitting Pawn by her own mother in order to kill Maya.
    • Trucy's perky stage magician attitude hides that her mother died when she was young and her birth father abandoned her. And of course she later gets kidnapped herself for tradition's sake.
    • Rayfa, in the span of a few months, learns that a) her dad and mom were really her uncle and aunt, b) her aunt kidnapped Rayfa from said real parents (after trying to kill them), and is using her as a hostage against her mother and brother, c) her aunt is evil (her uncle was also evil, but to a lesser extent, and said aunt ended up killing him) and was purposefully manipulating Rayfa's entire worldview to support her usurping the throne, & d) her divinations have been used to convict innocent people, and the purpose of the lawyers she was taught to despise was to prevent that from happening. That's a lot of horrible revelations for one 14-year-old.
  • In 2-3, Moe the Clown invokes this with Regina Berry in a Cruel to Be Kind way, as her childlike naivete had caused serious unintentional harm to her friends and family in the circus, and he thought that seeing the end of the 2-3 case and learning how her innocent dismissal of Bat's coma resulted in Acro trying to murder her and killing her father instead would be necessary for her emotional maturity.
  • In 2-4, Adrian Andrews applies too, especially since you're the one who has to break her by exposing her co-dependency issues and suicide attempt just to stall for time.
  • From AAI2: Yumihiko Ichiyanagi: Ace Woobie. The poor kid might have a bit of a swelled head, but he most certainly didn't deserve his dad telling him that he was an idiot and the only reason he became a prosecutor was because his dad bribed people.
    • It also happened to Simon Keyes in the backstory. The poor kid had absolutely no one in his life save for Sirhan Dogan who didn't betray or exploit him in some way, and spent his teenage years hunted down as a witness to an international conspiracy. Honestly, it's no wonder he became a manipulative and untrusting bastard.
  • Nobody comes out of Dual Destinies sans trauma, but Simon, Athena, and Apollo get the worst of it. Apollo has to see his best friend die and suspects his friend Athena of the murder, Simon was broken 7 years previously by his mentor's murder and being on death row for a crime he didn't commit, but felt he had to take the fall for to protect Athena, and Athena is so badly traumatized by her past ( she saw her mother's murder) that she has black psyche-locks, indicating a secret someone is hiding from themselves. The devs have gone on the record to state that the markings on Simon's face are Exhausted Eyebags because he has nightmares and tear tracks because he cried so much in prison.
• Sky during the first chapter of Ascension (2013). She loses her father, Tahn, and is too despondent to even speak to her Heterosexual Life-Partner, Aida. Even though Sky admittedly disagreed with her father a lot and fought incessantly with him, his death had emotionally devastated her.
• Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc. The whole plot is about locking up 15 teenagers with special talents and different degrees of "cuteness" (from the nonexistent to the overflowing), pitting them against each other, telling them that the only way out is to commit murder, and seeing which one will break down first — and enough to start killing their companions without any mercy. The ones who get put through the grinder the most are Makoto Naegi (accused of the first murder, was framed for it and barely escaped, has to defend his companions and himself in trials, witnesses murders and executions), Kiyotaka Ishimaru (completely breaks down after his first real friend, Mondo Owada, becomes the second killer and is executed) and Aoi Asahina ( takes her friends's deaths increasingly and incredibly hard, loses her own best friend as well, and with some push she snaps hard enough to try getting herself and everyone else executed). Let's not even get started on all the crazy shit that happens in the sequel...
• All the girls in Doki Doki Literature Club! are broken in some way. Monika has an epiphany that she is a character in a visual novel, and an un-romanceable one to boot. This utterly destroys her, leading her to go so far as to get rid of the other girls in hopes of being able to contact the only real person she knows. To make matters worse, the way she goes about getting rid of the girls involves horrific Mind Rape via amplifying their negative character attributes — it's supposed to just make them unlikeable to the player, but she doesn't care that much when it goes horribly right. Sayori is targeted first, with her mildly-crippling depression intensified to the point that she hangs herself. With the game reset, Monika goes after Yuri by Gaslighting her and cranking up her obsessive tendencies, which drives Yuri insane (as well as madly in love with the player character and very hostile to the other members). This culminates in her stabbing herself to death when she confesses her deranged love for the player character. Meanwhile, Natsuki is forced to deal with all this, combined with (via Monika's manipulation) being constantly bullied and having an abusive father. Her end comes when she discovers Yuri's corpse despite doing everything she could to get her help, and then she gets outright deleted.
• Sakura from Fate/stay night, as revealed in the game's final route, Heaven's Feel. Poor kid spent years being carefully and brutally broken by the Matou family. Who got her raped, abused, and infected with horrible crest worms.
• The Fruit of Grisaia: Literally everyone in Mihama Academy went through something similar, to even try to summarize their backstories would take too long, a short list of what they went through would be something like this: Parental abandonment, negligence, abuse and death, numerous traumatizing incidents, not being able to socialize in school or being outright bullied, long periods of hospitalization for both mental and physical problems just to name a few.
• Hatoful Boyfriend: if you consider pigeons to be cute, (and why wouldn't you?) then the entire "Bad Boys Love" route is a big ol' break the cutie for pretty much every single character. Ryouta gets the worst of it.
• Little Busters!: Naturally, being a Key/Visual Arts game and so specialising in Earn Your Happy Ending, all of the heroines go through this in their routes. However, the most obvious is definitely Komari's, wherein she goes from a childish, sweet Wide-Eyed Idealist to a Heroic BSoD-ing creepy Stepford Smiler on the revelation that she had an older brother whom she loved who died when she was young and who she forgot about. She gets better in the end, thankfully.
• Lux-Pain has, well, everyone in the main cast. Atsuki, Natsuki and Hibiki were broken in their backstories. During the game, this happens to two of the female leads: Mika, who was targeted by a serial killer (twice) causing Officer Mako Ando to be fatally wounded, and her best friend sent to the hospital, Yayoi who is driven mad by a mind parasite causing her to be jealous of her sister. She also tried to consult with a bunch of people she met online who were suicidal, but they ended up killing themselves. A few other Cuties, both male and female, end up snapping, like Akira, Sayuri, Yui, Honoka, and the list goes on. Forget curing Silent, that entire town needs one big hug.
• Poor, poor Fin Euclase in Steam Prison is viciously and comprehensively broken over the course of the story. The kind, mild-mannered partner of the game's heroine Cyrus is transferred into the HOUNDS after Cyrus's exile, where Sachsen subjects him to severe and repeated physical and mental abuses purposefully intended to strip away his humanity and render him a hardened killer obedient to Sachsen's orders. Fin's sanity is left completely shattered by the experience, and by the time Cyrus meets him again he's a broken and violently unstable man.
• 18+ Romance Game Under the Moon offers love/hate story paths in which love interests become Fetishized Abusers, so this trope is the order of the day. Each boy employs his own strategy to crush the Love Martyr heroine's spirit, but Softspoken Sadist Seizh is cutie-breaker extraordinaire. The more deranged he becomes, the more blatantly he treats the poor girl like a plaything.
• The Zero Escape trilogy:
  • Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors has Clover and Akane/June. The former loses it when her brother Snake is (apparently) murdered, at which point she proceeds to go literally Ax-Crazy on everyone she can find, while the latter was broken by what happened in her own Nonary Game, to the point where she becomes willing to kidnap and manipulate innocent people in order to prevent it from happening.
  • Virtue's Last Reward gives us Clover again, this time when she finds her partner Alice with a knife in her chest, at which point she becomes determined to escape no matter who has to die in the process. We also have Luna, should you choose to Betray her in the final AB Game on her timeline. Zero Jr. even chews you out for it.
  • Zero Time Dilemma provides a truly terrifying example when Akane and Carlos discover Junpei's severed head in the Pantry, at which point she outright snaps and hacks Carlos to pieces with a chainsaw.

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