Tear Jerker / Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

• The cutscene at the Praha Train Station where it is rocked by a terrorist explosion. Adam hears a boy yelling "Please help me!" and finds him trying to lift a heavy block of concrete which his mother is trapped by. Adam uses his augmented strength to lift the block, and his arm is grabbed by the mother... and then is released as she dies. The little boy cries "Please Wake Up", while Adam is severely shaken. Keep in mind his contact had been pestering him about rights for Augs, with Adam stating he could only deal with enemies he could see. In grief, Adam snaps his sunglasses on as if to say It's Personal.
  • It gets worse. There is an apartment near the Palisade Station with a picture of the boy on the wall. The computer reveals that his mother faked their deaths to get away from her abusive husband. She tried getting her sister custody of her son if something happened to her, but legally she is still married and her husband has all the rights a parent has.
  • Particularly potent is the marvelously subtle shift in Adam's expression as he stands up after the mother dies. You can see the shift from horror to grief to defensive stoicism right before he deploys his sunglasses to protect himself from the horrors he's facing, all the while surrounded by intense flames and violence. In only a couple of seconds, you have the perfect summation of who and what Adam is, and the kind of world he has to struggle against.
• Jim Miller's personal life. Aria mentions that when Miller exited to the lift, he didn't say a word, and just rushed out of there. She states that this is very out of character for him, as he usually swaps a few friendly words with her whenever he comes and goes. Turns out that Miller is going through a messy divorce, is in a nasty custody battle over the kids, and lost his Palisade safe account for no logical reason. No wonder Miller wasn't too eager to discuss his personal life.
  • Additionally, you discover that one of his children has been diagnosed with a rare degenerative bone disease. As Miller is her legal parent, only he can give consent to give her a corrective operation. The problem is, said life-saving treatment involves the use of augments. Miller does not want her to experience the same sorts of prejudices he encounters every day in his line of work, but simultaneously knows that if he does not approve the treatment, he'll doom her to life as a cripple in immense physical pain.
  • Want more? Miller dies if you don't steal the orchid cure. That combined with the disease and/or augments results in a pretty poor future for the kid.
• When talking to Sarif you have to option to ask him about Megan and Pritchard but not Malik. This would imply that the canon version of events in Human Revolution has her dying during the Heng Sha ambush^note Though that just may be a result of no import save and Faridah was not plot critical.. Worse, when you speak to Sarif, you never call him by his first name. Adam's relationship with Megan never recovered, with her going off to work at a VersaLife facility in California. Pritchard stayed in Detroit, working for an IT company. Sadly, Sarif advises Adam to write Megan out of his life, as it's clear she has done so for the two of them.
  • However, an Easter Egg after you complete the Golem City mission reveals that Malik wrote a note and stuffed a model VTOL into Jensen's box of cereal, indicating that canonically she survived the events of the previous game.
  • Another Easter Egg shows that Pritchard sent Adam a package containing evidence he was able to dig up that seems to support the theory that the Illuminati were behind the Aug incident.
• An early side mission has Adam trying to deal with an ID forgery ring, only to find out the person making the fake IDs was forced to at gunpoint and meant well. Seems standard, up until she offers an additional step in helping two last people. Take her up on the offer, get the IDs to an augmented, off-kilter actress and a father that just wanted to keep up with his family despite being estranged from them ever since the Aug Incident happened. And then the Player Punch hits: right as you're trying to verify the IDs, you find out you can only verify one, meaning whoever you don't choose will inevitably be relocated to the hellhole of Golem City. And you have ten seconds to make the choice or both are screwed over.
  • Choosing the father, Edward, over the actress, Irenka, results in her being sent there. Check her new home at Golem City during your visit in the story and you'll find used condoms all over the place. Choosing Irenka isn't that great either as Edward forgives you but it's clear that he's too nice a man to live in the cut-throat world of Golem City.
  • Edward's story is also particularly horrifying as he keeps trying to contact his family but is in denial about the reason why they won't talk to him. During the Augment incident, he murdered his grandson. It's such a monstrous thing that he can't process it, especially since it's clear he normally has not a single violent bone in his body, and you can't help but think this happened to millions of people.
• Also in the early mission to deal with the ID forgery ring, the peaceful option entails meeting with a sympathetic Prague policewoman. The interaction is a genuinely sad, and touching moment, as the policewoman points out the rarity of an augmented person approaching a Prague cop and expecting something good to happen, and Jensen talking about how he used to be a cop, a long time ago. And the policewoman expressing her regrets over what her job has her do now, and admits she would not be a policewoman if she was given the chance to go back. It's an incredibly real and humanizing moment for the otherwise faceless, brutal, and unrelentingly racist, corrupt and totalitarian Prague police officers, and it shows early on that they may not all be racist, violent people who believe augs to be less than "normal" people, and may very well be people just doing their job the way they're told to do it, no matter how they feel about the cruelties they're committing or allowing to happen, with no choice in the matter.
  Policewoman: I envy you. I look forward to the day that I can say, "I used to be a cop. A long time ago." If I could do it again, I would be a fireman. No one looks at a fire and thinks: "Shit, does this one really deserve it?" You can just follow orders and feel good about it.
• Really, the entire premise of the game. Think about it: in Human Revolution it seemed like mankind was on the cusp of a golden age. Sure Augs were a controversial subject, but it rarely extended beyond debates. Then Hugh Darrow made the Augmented people try to kill the whole world. Now? The bright future that seemed to be within reach is gone. Sarif Industries has been bought out by Tai Yong Medical, LIMB is gone, Picus is now more explicitly anti-Aug than they were in the past to say nothing of what happened to Eliza, and cities that relied heavily on their Augmented citizens are either now totalitarian police states, like Prague, or left to waste away like Dubai. All of this in just two years. And anyone who's played the original Deus Ex knows that things are only going to get worse.
  • At one point in the game, Adam meets Alex inside of a bombed out LIMB clinic. The sight alone is more than enough to reinforce how badly things have changed.
• If you choose to head to Palisade Bank to recover the Intel on the Orchid Adam will find an audio file, it's a recording of a conversation between Megan Reed and Bob Page. Adam is clearly affected from hearing her voice, not to mention the implication that Megan is now willingly working for the Illuminati. You see Adam deploying his eye shades again, which by now we all know is Adam masking his distress.
  • Even worse, after "The Heist", you can go to the Church of the Machine God and speak to Nomad Stanek, father of the woman responsible for creating bombs like the one at Ruzicka. He immediately starts in on Adam, accusing him of letting his daughter die; Adam does refute him at first, but eventually, Nomad becomes so distraught that Adam has nothing else he can say, and looks down at the ground in silence. While the eye-shields do dampen some of his expression, they fail at hiding how utterly distraught Adam is by the events that have unfolded.
• All of Golem City. People are literally dying on the streets while being harassed (or sometimes killed) by cops. One player gut punch is you'll find a dead young man, with a pocket secretary near by. It's a conversation between him and his mother, and him apologizing to his mother for getting augmented and ending up in Golem City. His mother writes back, saying she still loves him and urging him to come home.
  • You can also overhear a conversation about how an unaugmented man quit his job to be with his girlfriend. It would be a Heartwarming Moment, except by the time he arrived, she'd already died.
  • You can enter into a room with four or five people murdered on the ground and their safe cracked open. There is a pocket secretary in the room telling a woman that she's pregnant, and musing on whether or not congratulations can be given to her and her family about the possibility of bringing a child into the hellhole that is Golem City. From the wording and the scene, it's heavily implied that when she told her husband his reaction was to take his gun from the safe and carry out a murder-suicide.
  • Tucked away in one corner of Golem City is an empty nursery. On the computer inside are several emails relating to the mortality rate of babies born in the complex. There's some back and forth about how higher than normal figures should be expected, given the conditions, but it stops as soon as the exact numbers are revealed: 4 in 10 children born in Golem City don't survive.
• The conclusion to the System Rift DLC crosses heartwarming and tearjerker. After successfully getting Pritchard's favor done, Jensen and Pritchard have their usual banter from Human Revolution... And then Pritchard tells Jensen the possibility of neither of them seeing each other again by going their separate ways. Not wanting to hear it, Jensen says, "Goodbye, Francis" turns off his monitor and then says "Take care of yourself".
• In A Criminal Past you meet the Fixer who is a Harmless Villain who is forced to assist in an Organ Theft and Prison Riot. Despite being clearly mentally ill and not remotely a threat to anyone, his medical knowledge is exploited by the more dangerous criminals around him. It's also made clear he does what he does solely out of fear he'll be beaten or killed if he doesn't, which is clearly an accurate assessment. Commentary on prison populations or not, it's sad he's ended up where he is. Still, you only really break your heart when you hear his fear is primarily because all of the murderous criminals who exploit him remind him of his father.
• In the opening section in Dubai, Jensen comes across several mummified corpses littering the halls of the hotel that was under construction by augmented workmen when Darrow's broadcast hit. It's horrifying, but also profoundly sad on multiple levels. On the face of it, the corpses you find are all augmented. People think so little of the augmented in this setting that even after two years, nobody bothered to collect the dead for proper service, instead leaving them to dry out or rot. In a wider sense, the setting is symbolic of what has happened to the world at large, with the dream of a future built by an augmented humanity dead and left to wither away.
• The "Mechanical Apartheid" trailer is both this and Nightmare Fuel, with the main focus being on a man and his wife, the latter having an augmented arm before viciously attacking the former during the Aug Incident. As the world goes to hell, their relationship is strained to the breaking point and they separate, with the wife apparently joining a terrorist group that carries out a large bombing. Afterwords, the two briefly reunite, only to be torn apart once again when the police raid their home. The last time they see each other is on opposite sides of a fence just before guards pull her away and take her off into a building, her final fate unknown.
  Husband: Where are you taking her? WHERE ARE YOU TAKING HER!?
• If you don't go the Bank Heist route, or choose not to use the Orchid cure if you did, Miller's death, if you talk to him right after the cutscene. Adam is clearly upset and keeps insistently calling him by his first name, "Jim", for the first time in the whole game. He both looks and sounds so utterly helpless, while Miller is trying to get out how much he admired Adam in the long run, before finally dying, prompting Adam to silently deploy his eye-shields again.