Tear Jerker / Dragon Quest V

• Pankraz's death. He's killed by Ladja after being forced to fight his mooks to avoid your character being killed. On the other hand, when Mada sacrifices herself to try and stop Nimzo, and she and Pankraz go off...to wherever together, it is both this and a crowning moment of heartwarming. And awesome, due to Mada putting up with being Nimzo's pawn for over twenty years.
  • Related to that, there's a small easily missable gutpunch in one of the random responses you get to looking in a mirror when the hero is a teenager: "He tries to picture his dad's face by looking at his own reflection." The Hero can't even clearly remember what Pankraz looked like by the time he's sixteen.
• Saber's time being forced back into the wilderness after The Hero is forced into slavery. His time with his friend has made him very gentle when not on the battlefield, but due to being a monster known for usually being untameable (according to an old man in Faerie Lea), he has no way to take care of himself. Thus his only option is to take food from a village where his actions are assumed to an attempt to attack the villagers.
• Added for the remakes is Harry (after marrying Maria), wants to present his friend, the visiting Hero with a Martial organ, but he claims it's in a chest in his old bedroom. The Hero discovers it's not the case, but finds a message carved on the bottom of it. The message states how Harry's motivation to survive when the two were slaves was atoning for the fact that Pankraz died to protect the two of them and that he hopes that he is helping both father and son by making sure his own kingdom is kept at peace.
• The scene where the character is petrified and sees the kid get stolen away by a monster in his front yard...then the dad takes it out on the petrified character and knocks him on his face.
  • And the fact that the character is - possibly - watching the baby grow up into a small child, while he is unable to do the same for his own children. And even if he isn't aware of what's going on, it's not much easier on the player.
• Remember Maria's brother? The nice guy who deeply cared about his sister and helped you escape a life of slavery? Well, when you further advance through the game and head back to the temple where you were first started off in the second generation... You come across his skeleton inside the temple. If you examine his skeleton, you'll find a letter that he wrote to his "dear little sister Maria", telling her that his days are ending and his final wish is for her to be happy forever. Poor guy.
  Joshua: To my little sister Maria, I'm afraid my days are numbered. All I can hope now...my only hope...is that you alone will be happy.
• Just chatting with your hero's kids can bring the tears. Particularly with his daughter, who tends to act Wise Beyond Her Years whenever her father comes face to face with his own personal emotional gutpunches. Seeing her respond by trying to comfort him, almost acting like a surrogate mother despite being eight (and going without her own mother for so long) just makes it worse, somehow.

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