Tear Jerker / Red Dead Redemption

Let's just get it out of the way up front: Red Dead Redemption might well be one of the saddest, most tragic entries of Rockstar Games.

Moments pages are Spoilers Off. You Have Been Warned.

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• "Dead Man's Gun" is a very, very sad song. Especially after you complete the prequel...
  • If you use the Cattleman Revolver to kill Ross as Jack. This is because it was John’s primary weapon of choice, and the canonical weapon he dies with. Suddenly, “Deadman’s Gun” takes a more depressing and haunting turn.
  • It also works with the High Power pistol, since it was originally a gift from Ross himself.
  • Another retroactive one: after killing Dutch, you return to Beecher's Hope and do a series of ranching missions. Everyone gets sick of them in a hurry, as it's just John talking with his wife and son while hunting wolves, wrangling cows and delivering supplies. Play those missions again after beating the game and listen to the dialogue. Ouch...
  • The game foreshadows it a lot... even if you don't know, you will feel unrested and unhappy with this new life.
• In the mission "And You Will Know The Truth...", as you ride with Ross and Fordham to Dutch's hideout, you quickly find that the US Army have set up a presence in the area and will be accompanying you. Okay, cool, we've got the Army with us, Dutch won't get away this time! But after playing through the game once (or if you had the ending spoiled for you), it's downright painful Foreshadowing.
  • This simple exchange, which holds so much more weight after the prequel.
    Dutch: I got a plan, John.
    John: You always got a plan, Dutch.
  • Dutch's death itself is a massive Tear Jerker. You first encounter Dutch expecting a monster, but instead discover a broken Tragic Villain who has crossed the Despair Event Horizon. His final words, his own twisted sort of apology to John about everything he’s done and everything that’s happened, followed by his suicide manages to be very poignant despite the horrible things he's done.
    Dutch: Our time is passed, John.
  • Dutch's appearance. In 1899 he was Sharp-Dressed Man, and in 1907 he - despite his Beard of Sorrow - still looks powerful enough to gain everybody's attention. Here? He wears cheap clothing and seems to be trying to pull off his 1899 look, only to fall flat thanks to his graying hair and famished appearance. As hard as he tries to relive his Glory Days, even he knows they're long gone.
• "Compass", as you return home.
• The simple piano piece in the song Exodus in America, which makes its reappearance in the credits.
• Losing one of your horses, if you've gotten used to it. Even moreso if it's the golden horse you get specially during one of the missions. Good news is you can quickly quit the game, or more easily, just have Marston get killed, and when he respawns the horse you got attached to will be back as well.
• Nastas' abrupt, pointless death. It doesn't help that he's one of the few decent characters in the game.
  • Even the men that kill him qualify as this, renegades who have lost everything, and have nothing left but blind, self-destructive, yet completely understandable rage. When MacDougal tries to warn them that rebellion will "end in disaster", their leader bitterly points out they already have suffered disaster. All they have now is revenge, and death.
  "Look at what you have done to us, look at us! We live like animals, scrambling in the dirt."
• The fact that you can wipe out all the bison. It's far from the saddest thing in the game, but it's kind of depressing gunning down a lone bison and realizing that you've killed them all and that bison, at least in the scope of the game, was the last of its kind.
• John Marston's death is sad enough as it is, then Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie plays during his funeral and... I'm sorry, I need a second...
• It's telling that out of all of the Stranger missions, the happiest one has you reunite a zoophile with his favorite horse. Almost all of them are grim and depressing, and when you do the "right" thing, you often end up making people's lives worse. Probably the saddest is the "California" mission. You meet a friendly man, Sam, traveling in the wilderness, looking for California. Marston does his best to help him on his way, but he keeps wandering. Marston keeps running into him, and he looks more and more haggard, eventually threatening Marston with a gun. Marston eventually finds his corpse being eaten by vultures. In his possession was a letter to his wife. He explains that ever since his ancestors left the Black Sea, his family has been travelers and explorers. He thought that California would bring him hope, but America is a land of broken dreams. He says that he loves his wife and leaving her was the stupidest thing he ever did.

  • And once you find his body, it's up to you to send that letter. If you don't, his family will never know what happened to him, or why he left them.

  • Especially sad doing the sidequests as Jack Marston. After killing Ross, Jack aimlessly wanders the country and occasionally helps these odd folks out to do something to give himself purpose. Despite all his efforts, they end up dead or failing in their goals. In his attempt to do a good act for people, it all falls apart.
  • At least there's the mission where you buy a house off a grumpy old man to give to a man wanting to build a wellstream. You can peacefully buy it with no blood spilled. Nobody gets hurt, and the guy who gave the mission seemed nice.
  • The Stranger Side-Quest, "American Appetites" is this mixed with Nightmare Fuel, and it's the first one you're given the option to do. You encounter a terrified woman who's son was kidnapped and pleads Marston to find him. The mission's waypoint leads you to the middle of some cactus plains quite far from civilisation. ...And all you find is a splatter of blood, a bone and a lone shoe. Gets even worse when you connect the title of the quest to the boy's fate. A horrifying and otherwise heart-rending way for a child to go... Granted, you can find the cannibal and kill him, but still...
    • Even worse however is that the mother presumably never learns of her son's fate and is left to worry in fear for the rest of her life.
• John's last heart-to-heart with his son. The player doesn't know it yet, but after watching it a second time...
• Offscreen Inertia: The game takes place over three years. Some of the "Stranger" side-missions are open from the beginning (almost) and can be finished at any time, even after the game is completed. This could mean that guy on the Mexican cliff has to work on his flying machine for a very long time... and that poor Jenny will be withering away alone in the desert forever.
• The first time you enter Mexico. Irish has failed you yet again, you're in completely strange land, riding a horse that isn't even yours, wandering the desolate wastes with barely any idea where you're going. And then "Far Away" starts playing. Rarely has a video game played up how hopeless your mission seems so very well.
• Read the newspaper in the game's epilogue (3 years later), and it's very easy to feel sad when you learn that Landon Ricketts passed away in his sleep.
  • 'course, it can double as a Heartwarming Moment that at least one Legend of the West got to pass away peacefully, unlike the one we'd been playing as for most of the game.
    • Ricketts is possibly the second gunslinger to have passed away peacefully due to natural causes, if you count Arthur Morgan's death by tuberculosis (possibly a natural cause) while watching the sunrise on a mountaintop in one of RDR2's High Honor endings as canon.
• John saying "I love you" to Abigail moments before his death.
• As if John's death isn't a tear-jerker enough, there's a brief moment when he sends Jack and Abigail off where he gazes sadly after them, a gaze alone that seem to acknowledge it's the last time he sees them...
• Drew MacFarlane admitting that in the 30 years he's been living on the frontier, he's buried more children than he's raised.
• Almost everything said by Jack after you take him over as the Player Character. Take on a random NPC quest? "Sure. Nothing better to do with my time." Save a kidnapped woman? "I got nothin' else to live for." Skin an animal? "Just like you showed me, Pa." Kill a sheriff? "This one's for you, Pa." Considering everything he's gone through, it's understandable that he'd cross the Despair Event Horizon at some point... but damn.
  Jack: I was gonna be a writer.
  • Furthermore, it means that John failed in his quest for redemption. His main goal, the one he fought desperately to achieve, was to raise his son a different man than he was, to give something good to this world after committing so many bad things in his life. The fact that Jack ends up a vengeful, cold-hearted gunslinger is heartbreaking.
  • There's a faint hope things will get better, however. As an Easter egg, you can find in Grand Theft Auto V on some bookshelves a book titled "Red Dead", written by a certain J. Marston. Assuming this is Jack and not John (Jack being the more likely author since he was the most book-smart member of the family), that means that at some point after the playable epilogue, Jack did manage to settle down and write at least one book that is still read 100 years later.
  • What’s worse is that with Jack becoming a gunslinger in the end, Arthur Morgan’s sacrifice was all for nothing. As he spent his last days attempting to get John and his family to go straight. Jack ultimately throws away what Arthur desperately fought so long and hard for, once he becomes a cold-hearted gunslinger. However, with John and his family living for another twelve years after the gang’s collapse, it wasn’t all in vain.
  • In a way, Micah Bell had won. His own death led to Edgar Ross finding John. His “social call” to Abigail and Jack, while indirect, was played fully by Ross only 4 years after his death.
• As funny as the NPC Link Huston is, it's really easy to get bummed out when you hear him plead desperately, "Don't hit me, mama! Don't hit me!" when he's been injured.
• Luisa's death. Sure, it was idiotic of her but watching one of the most decent people in the game die is still tragic. Worst part? It was all for nothing. She died trying to save a man who didn't give a crap about her and, after rising to power, becomes the same kind of person Luisa had been fighting to overthrow. Even worse than that, Reyes doesn't even remember her name, and without John to remind him, or any other witnesses to the act, her sacrifice will be completely forgotten.
• Finding and taking down Javier retroactively becomes this after playing the prequel. He only has a few minutes of screentime in this game, but in 2 he's much more prominent, and you see that Javier was actually a nice guy and John's friend, until the very end when sadly he could not let go of his loyalty to Dutch. There is now more context on why this was so hard for John, and just how much Javier had fallen apart.
  • It's made all the more tragic by the fact that Javier is the one to find and rescue John in the beginning of 2.
    Javier: I know that if the situation were reversed... he'd look for me.
  • Even worse is that should you decide to kill Javier, John will pick up his corpse after shooting him down and carry him to his cell for a moment, weeping Manly Tears of sorrow that he has to bring the corpse to Ross and carry it away by a car as proof in order to claim the bounty. After playing II, it now feels so unfortunate and sad that the man who had been saved by Dutch from starving to death and become a guitarist, who had rebuked Micah Bell for telling him to "fuck off back to Mexico", and who had taught Arthur to catch fish and saved John from a wolf attack, is now dead. Alas, Poor Villain, indeed.
  • Seeing Bill is now just as bad as Micah is now more depressing, as we see that Williamson was a decent person, but a deeply troubled veteran suffering PTSD, and almost always was the butt of everyone's joke.
• Uncle's death in "The Last Enemy That Shall Be Destroyed" can become quite a Player Punch if you played the game directly after playing the prequel.
• If you play this after the new one. It's quite sad to hear no mention of Arthur Morgan, since the character didn't yet exist. Though eagle-eyed players might notice that John does seem to carry a similar satchel to the one that Arthur gave to him. Otherwise, it can feel like John may of forgotten about him.. That or it's still a sour spot for him.
• Bill’s death, to an extent. Sure, he was an irredeemable, mass murdering hillbilly piece of shit when you see him, but once you play the prequel it’s heartbreaking to see that he and John were once good friends. The drunk conversation they have in RDR2 takes a more heartbreaking turn. Especially once you realize how their last conversation ends with extreme hostility before John puts a bullet in his head. What’s worse is that unlike with Javier if you kill him, John just leaves Bill’s body there. That’s right, Bill Williamson’s dead body is left to ROT on the side of an empty road with no burial. While Micah’s body was frozen and likely preserved when he was left behind, Bill’s body was likely eaten by vultures soon after. Truly a tragic end for a once good friend of John’s.
• A small one that happens when you play as Jack Marston in the last storyline mission. After he encounters Edgar Ross’s wife while searching for the former, she asks him if he is there visiting the lake with his family. If he’s not already traumatized from burying his mother only a few hours before at most, Jack is painfully reminded why he’s on this mission. To avenge his family.
• By 1914, Jack has a radically different appearance than before with shoulder length hair and a goatee. It’s undoubtedly clear that Jack wants to look like his father, except that his hair is longer than John’s was. At least in the first Red Dead Redemption... after Red Dead Redemption II released, it can be seen that John’s hair in his younger years was also shoulder length and the exact same style as Jack’s. This would imply that Jack was imitating his father’s 1899 appearance to fit the criteria of an “outlaw”. Jack really did want to be a gunslinger...
• After Jack guns down Ross in the last storyline mission, you’d expect him to celebrate or maybe say some spiteful words to the body of the man who killed his father, right? Wrong. Jack looks on in silence after killing Ross, then somberly looks down at his father’s gun which he used to kill the man. Silently, Jack realized that he destroyed any potential idealistic future he had by going against his parents’ wishes beyond the grave. Needless to say, he more or less was confused and broken rather than showing the anger and hatred toward Ross only a minute prior. Suffice to say that while Jack killed the man responsible for his family’s demise, he was too late to save any of them. Whereas, Ross goes down as a hero who ended the Van Der Linde gang and stripped John of all his victories he gained throughout the game. All that was left for Jack was to punish the guilty, after that, he aimlessly wanders around the country without a purpose or much reason to live.
• Jack doesn’t take revenge on Edgar Ross until Abigail dies in 1914 and he’s alone. This leaves a few depressing theories as to how he carried out his plan:
  • Jack told Abigail about his plans against Ross for killing John. Given her expanded character in the prequel, she would have most definitely disagreed with Jack.
  • Jack never told Abigail about his plans of revenge against Ross and hid them from her. Abigail would be confused as to why Jack doesn’t want to be a rancher anymore, in favor of a gunslinger. Given the secrecy, Jack and Abigail would have become even more distant which would add on to Abigail’s already severe depression.
  • Jack has severe depression in 1914, and his claims of having nothing to live for raises the question of other motives aside from revenge against Ross. Perhaps in Jack’s mindset he thought that if he kills Ross and avenges his family it’d make him feel better, if he dies, at least he will be with his family.
• Basically everything about Dutch after playing the Prequel. He's some kinda Empty Shell of the man we got to know in II. He lost his family, the man he and Hosea raised from childhood is now out to kill or capture him. And he clearly hasn't gotten better, mentally. He is now just another crazed enemy.
• Jack's bitter line "teach me and your just run away again or something" is now sadder when the prequel reveals John ran off for a whole year when Jack was really little. Jack's clearly still angry.
• "Who Are You to Judge?", the mission where you reunite a zoophile with his horse, has a tragic element to it. In the Tumbleweed cemetery, there is a tombstone of a woman named Grace Blankenship who died in 1907 and is survived by 'loving husband Jeb', making it possible that Jeb was so saddened and distraught at the death of his wife that he turned his love to his horse in an attempt to console his grief.

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