Tear Jerker / Path of Exile

• Some of Sin's dialogue in Act 9 is just depressing, and not for the usual reasons this game is depressing.
  • About Garukhan and Shakari (his wife and daughter, respectively):
  Sin: I weep for my poor Garukhan. Together we experienced the loftiest moments that this world could offer. [...] Like winds erode the sandstone, [she] has been warped by the same powers she enslaved. This is not my goddess that you shall slay. And if I continue to say it, I might very well come to believe it.
  Sin: It is not something I deign to speak of often, but this goddess, this creature, she was once the flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. [...] Now you see how I must suffer for the sake of humanity, to lay mine own daughter upon the sacrificial altar.
  • ...and what he says when the player defeats them:
    Sin: My love... You were too beautiful for this ugly world. I shall find you in the next.
    Sin: Daughter! Rest, my child. Be free from the torments of immortality.
  • And then, there's why Sin really created the Beast:
    Sin: In truth, it was for Garukhan that I sowed the Dark Ember within the depths of Highgate. When love cannot be slain it must be laid down to sleep.
    Sin: [Shakari] built an army out here in these sweltering lands and would have conquered the very sky had not the Beast soothed her into peaceful oblivion. A babe once more sleeping in her cradle.
    • And all of it was ultimately for naught when the Beast became too dangerous to leave alive, necessitating the death of itself, and by extension, the deaths of Shakari and Garukhan. And speaking of the Beast...
      Sin: It was never meant to transpire this way... My Beast was born to be a thing of beauty. A crowning jewel to rest upon humanity's head. I... I wanted to give your kind a chance for peace, a chance to play atop the great stage. No longer pawns to a pantheon of petty, slavering gods... It was only ever defending itself, the fault lies within the twisted hearts of those who would betray their own humanity. Not even I could anticipate the cataclysms my pet wrought on Wraeclast. Both Vaal and Eternal. Ruins in the pages of history. And the others... trailing back across the aeons. There is blood on my hands, exile, the innocent blood of millions, and try as I might, the stains just won't wash off.
• 20 years after the final boss is slain, corruption and decadence still reign supreme in Oriath. Everything the protagonists did, all their adventures, simply stalled the return of man's inhumanity to man, and did nothing to the spreading corruption in Wraeclast.
• The sequel begins with the hanging of seven outlaws under the law of an Obviously Evil dictator. In each reality, you can only save one.
• Following the fall of the Conquerors, Zana can't take it anymore and goes into self exile. For years she has tried to contain the power of the Atlas, trying desperately to warn others of the corruptive, mind warping power it possesses if exploited too much, but no one listened to her, and now five of her closest friends and companions are dead after having been twisted into monsters by the very power she desperately tried to stop. Its little wonder she can no longer handle being the steward of the Atlas after all the pain its caused her.
  • Fridge Horror sets in when you remember that Jun had an obvious crush on Zana. Imagine how she must feel over all this.