< The Woobie

The Woobie/Video Games

The cause of many Game Boys hugged in public.


Below is a list of video game characters that everyone wants to reach through the screen and give a hug.

  • Arc Rise Fantasia gives us the final boss of the game, the Designated Villain, Eesa. Unfortunately for the heroes, they either have a choice of letting most of mankind die off, or kill Eesa, who is only in the situation she is in because mankind wanted her to become God in the first place. The reason she even ended up as an antagonist is because the same humans who made her into a God later decided they no longer needed her and decided to kill her. While she survived their attempts to kill her, the aftermath is the world covered in hozone, and the only way Eesa can save mankind while keeping herself alive is to either reset the world(killing everything), or wipe out 90% of humans stuck on the ground. The party's solution in order to save humanity? Kill the God they created who is only doing everything in her power to save humanity while desperately trying to preserve her own life at the same time. The cutscene after beating her only hammered down the fact that she never wanted to be like this in the first place and that she wanted to live.
    • To a lesser, yet still significant extent, there's also Dynos. The Unfavourite in his family, his father woke him up instead of Cecille so he could take him to kill the Olquinian Diva. Being an extreme pacifist who couldn't even hurt a bug, he refused, so his Complete Monster of a father tries to kill him by taking away his Dragon Gem which the Divine Race needs to survive. When he couldn't take it from Dynos, he destroyed his own gem to transform into a dragon to kill Dynos who would have been killed by his own father was it no for Ms. Rafil the Diva who saved him. This experience left him especially bitter towards life and devoted himself to protecting the Olquinian Diva, who was soon assassinated. After that happens, Dynos became a Death Seeker trying to destroy all life in the world or die trying. Especially tragic once you remember Cecille describing Dynos as someone who couldn't even harm an insect when he was young.
  • Linear Cannon from Evolution Worlds. She stares out as just a very timid Cute Mute with healing powers who has to deal with the unwanted advances of Prince Eugene, but then Eugene realizes that she is the key to finding the legendary cyframe Evolutia, which his country wants in order to take over the world, and kidnaps her. He then finds out that SHE is Evolutia, refuses to let her go and intends to use her as a weapon of war. Bear in mind that Linear is implied to be so empathetic that she can actually FEEL the pain or distress of any nearby living thing, including PLANTS (and the desire to help said living thing is implied to be the origin of her healing powers). Eugene then almost kills Mag Launcher, who along with Battle Butler Gre Nade is basically the only family she has, right in front of her. This is only compounded by the way she cringes in fear whenever an enemy in the game attacks her. She also seems to have a depressing back story, having appeared in the Launcher's doorway in the heavy snow three years before the start of the game, and for a while spent most of her time terrified until Mag taught her to play the ocarina.
  • Pilika, from Suikoden II, is probably the biggest Woobie I have seen in a video game. She is just a cute 5 year old child, but has her parents murdered by Luca Blight, is almost killed by him (which turns her into a Cute Mute for a while), is separated from her caretaker and dear friend, Jowy for an extended period of time, and in the end after being reunited with Jowy, Jowy tells her "goodbye forever" as Highland falls and sends her to be cared for by Jillia.
  • Thomas from Suikoden III, especially in the Manga Adaptation. He goes to his father after his mother died at the hands of bandits, only to be outright ejected and shuttled off to a rundown castle so no one 'important' knows that he exists. And when he starts to turn the Castle into something profitable, his father and the councilmen decided that he's more trouble then he's worth - first being disowned, and then threatened with removal from his post and arrested. All because he's trying to be the nice guy.
    • The rest of Budehuc Castle's staff counts as well, given that they're all aware that nobody in the Zexen Confederacy gives a crap about them and has just been sending their cast-offs to run them deeper into the ground. About the only one who isn't resigned to this fate is Cecile, a young woman who inherited her late father's station and desperately wants to live up to his example.
    • Chris Lightfellow could also count, what with the beloved dead parents, and the fact that she's trying to be even a fraction as great of member of the military as her father was at the beginning while suddenly shouldering the leadership due to the recent deaths of the previous Generals. Then there's the whole "set up to be a sacrifice to fuel the war" part which leads to her killing The Scrappy. All around just a poor, pitiable soul who overcomes whatever is thrown at her.
    • Let's not forget Hugo. What looks like a simple errand for The Chief's Son, delivering a message to the Zexen capital about the cease-fire agreement, goes astray when the Council decides to treat him like crap just because they can, delaying him for several days before having a go-between just take the letter, denying him even an audience with them. Then they decide "Hey, the Chief's kid could make a good bargaining chip!" and try to kidnap him from the inn, setting off a Stern Chase. And when he finally makes it back home, it's to find Karaya in flames. His best friend goes into an Unstoppable Rage, charges one of the soldiers, and is promptly cut down right in front of him. And that's all just in his first chapter!
  • Suikoden IV: Snowe Vingerhut. An Upper Class Twit who actually wants to contribute to society, but isn't the natural-born leader his manipulative father leads him to believe. Thanks to said father Blackmailing the Commander of the Knights of Gaien, Snowe gets passed through the Academy without actually earning it, something he's completely oblivious to. Stuck in a position of command he isn't qualified for, he cracks under the pressure of his first real crisis and is never allowed to forget it. Instead, he struggles on desperately trying to prove he's capable of leading, compounding previous mistakes and unable to understand why he keeps getting blamed for everything. His development arc actually mirrors The Hero's, but while Lazlo is surrounded by loyal, supportive friends and allies, Snowe labors under his worsening reputation, with every move he makes just making things worse. And of course, he's generally considered to be The Scrappy.
  • Planescape: Torment:
    • Everyone to some extent: Deionarra and Dak'kon deserve special mention though.
    • The Paranoid Incarnation is an excellent example. Throughout the greater part of the game he appears as nothing more than a suspicious, raving and hostile individual who automatically reacts with murderous force to most situations, and sets traps for your character in response to you "stealing" his existence. It is only in the final portion of the game that you discover this persona is in fact a defense mechanism created when the Paranoid Incarnation, remembering nothing, is set upon by others seeking vengeance for the crimes of his "past self". Underneath he is in fact surprisingly sane, rational, scared, and has known nothing but fear and anguish.
    • Of all characters, Morte, the wise-cracking, insult-slinging talking skull. Spending God knows how along as part of the Pillar of Skulls as a result of tricking the Nameless One into losing his mortality, he's then found and taken out him. And not just him; the Practical Incarnation, the biggest monster of all of the Nameless One's incarnations. After that, he's bound by guilt to follow him through all his incarnations, good or evil, sane or insane. One flashback shows how bad it can get when Morte is nearly smashed to pieces by the Nameless One himself in a fit of anger, in very noticable pain.
  • The Metal Gear Solid series heavily revolves around the theme of how there's nothing glorious about war and how it destroys everyone who gets involved. So it's no surprise that almost every single character has suffered unbelievable amounts of suffering and loss. But the one who probably gets it the worst is clearly Otacon, one of the few characters who isn't even a soldier. His father killed himself because Otacon let himself get seduced by his stepmother. (That's statutory rape, boys and girls!) His dearly loved stepsister almost dies as well because of this, and he doesn't see her again for more than 10 years. When he finally finds two friends in Sniper Wolf and Solid Snake in Metal Gear Solid, Snake fatally kills Wolf in battle and can only stand by and watch as she bleeds to death. In Metal Gear Solid 2, he finally meets his stepsister again, but she gets fatally stabbed just meters she before gets to him, and again dies slowly in his arms. In Metal Gear Solid 4, he again falls in love with a woman, but Naomi turns out to be terminally ill and kept alive only by the technology they try to destroy. To make things easier for everyone else later, she injects herself with a drug that will shut down the nanomachines in her body while talking to Otacon over video phone, and again slowly dies while he can only watch. Those are three of the four most saddest moments in the entire series, and the saddest moments of each game he appears in. And in the end, his very close best friend Snake has only a few more months to live before he dies from unstoppable rapid aging. And he really doesn't take it well every time.
    • Wolf herself is also somewhat of a Woobie - she even confesses just before her senseless death that she's essentially spent her entire life waiting for someone to come and kill her.
    • Not to mention Raiden in the fourth game, who not only suffered head breaking unreasonable torment before the game even begins, but ends up suffering and bleeding in quite literally every single appearance he makes.
    • While he may not surpass Otacon in pure woobieness, Big Boss is by far the most tragic character in the series, Metal Gear Solid 3 and Metal Gear: Portable Ops essentially excuses to put the man through as much physical and emotional trauma as possible, the former containing one of series' greatest Tear Jerkers. With his Alas, Poor Villain moment in MGS4, Woobie status is confirmed.
    • Solid Snake himself is also a great example of this trope. He's been betrayed many times by people who he felt were good friends and by the time of Metal Gear Solid on the original Playstation, he's a jaded, cynical and unwilling soldier. When you see all the crap he goes through in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots it's nearly impossible not to shed tears.
    • And then there's The Boss, Big Boss' mentor. She is arguably the biggest Badass of the series but the lengths she goes through to protect the country that she loves is what makes her such a tragic figure. While it at first appears that she betrayed the United States, she was actually set-up to by her superiors and would go down in history in America as the greatest traitor since Benedict Arnold and one of the worst war criminals in Russian history and she would have to be killed by her student And she did it with that knowledge.
  • Latooni from the Super Robot Wars Original Generation was turned into a expert pilot by way of intense training that killed most of the participants including the rest of Latooni's entire group. She ends up finding three of her remaining school-mates, only to find they're on the other side of the war. She ends up nearly killing one, the other two were brainwashed to kill her, and one of them died in a Heroic Sacrifice. Her best friend was kidnapped, and also brainwashed into killing her. Even worse she's stuck in a love triangle with Ryusei Date, and Mai Kobayashi, and she's at a disadvantage because Mai has a Combination Attack, in a series where love interests always have a combination attack.
    • From what it looks like, the female protagonist of Super Robot Wars Z, Setsuko Ohara, is going on this direction. On the course of a single game, she gets... to see her chief and friend killed in front of her eyes and gets herself constantly tortured mentally and causes dimensional jumps here and there... which suggests that she may have not been born normally. What kind of tortures that she endured? Well there's being beaten up to the point that it's implied that she's been raped, see her friend come Back from the Dead, only for him to shoot her from the back and reveals himself to be her usual torturer, then there's also the said torturer going to the Alternate Universe and convince the AU version of her friend and chief to believe that she is evil.... To make matters worse, attempting to take revenge on Asakim by killing him would actually be treated into letting him win, because he is a Death Seeker and giving him death would be exactly submitting to defeat. Poor, poor Sexsuko...
    • They're all preceded by Tytti Noorbuck, actually. So when we first hear about her past, it's about Her parents being killed brutally in front of her, by Lubikka Hakinnen, followed with him gloating that he would take extra delights on seeing her shiver in fear and terror. Later on, Lubikka reappears and brainwashed her into attacking her lover Ricardo Silvera, which he managed to pull her out of the brainwashing stance... only for Lubikka to shoot him dead in front of her AGAIN, then Ricardo died just after Tytti officially returned his love, and from thereafter, she became fearful of striking a relationship with another man. And this is just the earlier version, let's see if OG (if she ever appears there) will crank this up to an eleven.
  • Oersted from Live a Live. Over the course of their chapter, in no particular order, he gets the princess, loses the princess (kidnapped), forms a Four Man Band, loses said Four Man Band (One dies, another fakes his death, and the last one is tortured to death), fights a demon, beats the demon, is called a demon because he was tricked into regicide, then learns that his best friend has actually betrayed him, which leads to the princess committing suicide because she thinks that only he bothered to come to the demon's lair to save her, not you! They are just the kind of person that you wish all of their troubles would go away, because they really did nothing to deserve any of them. Then they decide, rather understandably, that Humans Are the Real Monsters. Less understandably, he slaughters the entire kingdom, possibly more people than that, with the intention of destroying time and space. He sort of loses most, but not all, sympathy at that point.
  • Final Fantasy VI:
    • Terra is the closest thing the game has to a main character. Her first memories are being brainwashed by the empire to kill people. Feared by people both because she worked for the empire and because she knows magic, she questions her ability to feel love. She finds that she is half "esper" and that her people are being tortured to provide the empire with magic, at which point she goes crazy and flies into the sky as a flaming purple banshee.
      • She does, however, get to become the surrogate mother to a bunch of kids orphaned when the Big Bad got godlike powers, giving her some amount of happiness and purpose in her life.
    • Celes Chere can lose "Grandfather Cid" on the Solitary Island, which then precedes to attempt to kill herself, with Sparkling Stream of Tears. She struggles with her loneliness throughout the game. But she becomes sort of the main protagonist of the World of Ruin and helps Setzer in his "Woobie moment".
      • How did Locke and Cyan not make this entry? Everything involving Rachel and Cyan's family is just pain incarnate.
      • Shadow doesn't seem like a Woobie until you see his past via dreams while sleeping at the inn. He was forced to leave his partner to die after blowing a big steal. Plus, he's Relm's father, and he doesn't even get a happy end: he stays on Kefka's Tower as it is being destroyed.
        • Not quite. If you stay with him until the last few second then leave, he survives and though it's not explicitly stated, it's rather likely he gets at least a little bit of a happy ending.
  • Final Fantasy V has a more lighthearted nature, but that does not prevent it from having Woobies.
    • Gilgamesh is an unlikely Woobie, who despite being an enemy, becomes progressively more lovable and sensitive (as well as an Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain) as the story progresses, culminating in the complete respect and sympathy he demands after his Heel Face Turn Heroic Sacrifice to save his enemies.
  • Final Fantasy VII: Heck, most of the main characters could probably count:
    • Vincent Valentine. His case is mostly Wangst (especially in his own game), but... want a list anyway? Here you go, with a cherry on top. Let's start: he never got along with his father. We know that because said father tells Lucrecia, who accidentally killed him by experimenting too much, to apologize to his son for not being a good dad. Next, we have Vincent being employed as the girl's bodyguard. Well okay, the girl is hot, he falls in love with her. Then Vincent finds out that Lucrecia worked with and watched his father die. He's all "Whatever, I still love you", it seems like an unrequited feeling, but why is she flirting with him? Moving on: Lucrecia is in fact Hojo's assistant. Hojo is old, ugly, creepy and downright EVIL. So she sleeps with him. Vincent says that he doesn't care, as long as she's happy. Turns out, they needed a child to be conceived, to experiment on it. Remember Sephiroth? Yeah, this one. That's the child. Still being pregnant, Lucrecia falls ill and Vincent loves her too much to just watch. So he confronts both of them. Hojo kills him because he's 'noisy'. Lucrecia puts him in a tube and brings him back to life by making him the host of Chaos. And then she goes into a cave and seals herself in a Mako crystal, apologizing a lot. Vincent wakes up, discovers he's a bit different than before (no way?) and goes into rage mode. Then he closes himself in a coffin for 30 years (by the way, his body is now nearly indestructible and he never ages), saying that it's the punishment for his sin. Apparently, his sin was doing nothing, but watching the experiment. Then Cloud and co. wake him up in the basement of Shinra Manor and greet him with some great news - Lucrecia's child has become pretty homicidal and is about to destroy the world. And then, when the heroes finally kill Hojo in the game, he tells him to rest in peace. So? Want to hug him yet?
    • Cloud Strife. Lonely, alienated childhood, check. Told that he was too weak to join SOLDIER, which was his dream, check. Watched his mother killed, best friend almost killed, and childhood crush apparently mortally wounded, check. Used as a human guinea pig by Hojo, check. Is dragged across a continent by his best friend while Shinra chases them and can't do anything when they catch up and kill said best friend, check. Resulting in Trauma-Induced Amnesia, check. Manipulated into almost killing a potential love interest, twice, check. Same manipulation and a serious Mind Screw result in him giving the Big Bad the black materia, again twice, check. Watching Aerith die, check. Realizing he'd promised to be his living legacy and to never forget, and then having forgotten, check. Failing to find a cure for Geostigma and coming down with it himself, check...
    • Aeris. An adorable flower girl who just wants to be happy with her adopted mother, but, since she's the offspring of a forgotten race, is constantly being pursued by Shinra's top agents, is at one point captured by them and (almost) forced to 'mate' with a wolf-creature (albeit an awesome wolf creature, but still, furry and four-legged). Oh yes, and then she gets a sword stuck through her by Sephiroth.
    • Said awesome wolf creature, Red XIII aka Nanaki, had lots of shit happen to him too. His mom was dead, his father was Taken for Granite and he didn't know it for years, then was captured and used in experiments, and by the time we found him he was pretty much the Last of His Kind. And then we have the Tear Jerker of a scene in which he learns what his Disappeared Dad was not the Dirty Coward he always thought...
  • Final Fantasy IX:
    • Vivi. The way he trips and falls, how everyone is out to get him because they think he's a soulless monster when he's really just the woobiest thing on the surface of Gaia. Insecurity and adorableness all in one little package, complete with sad glowing eyes and a mispointed pointy hat. Comes to a head when he finds out that he's the prototype to a lesser version of an Artificial Human, and he doesn't know just how long he has to live. The ending heavily suggests that he had less than a year as of when he found out.
    • Princess Garnet, or Dagger, had her father die when she was young, her mom go bat-shit insane and try to take over the world, is hunted down when she tried to tell her "uncle" about her mother's genocidal tenancies, had her magic ripped out of her by two freaky clown guys, is sentenced to death by her mom after she is seen as having no more use, had the stolen magic used by her mom to kill countless innocent people, and then watches her pathetic mom die at her feet. This is all before she finds out that she wasn't the queens real daughter and her real mother had also died getting her to safety. Eventually this gets too much for her, she has a nervous breakdown and goes mute.
    • Also Freya, who loses everything she has during the first half of the game. Everything. Come to think of it, FF9 is a very woobie-heavy game.
    • Surprised no one mentioned Zidane. He spends the majority of his life trying to find a place where he belongs, being that he had dreams about Terra and all. When he doesn't find it, he returns to his adopted father Baku. Just like Tidus, Zidane is welcomed back with a punch from Baku. When he finds out he is not from Gaia and realizes he was created to be Garland's puppet, he has a breakdown rejecting his friends and all. The whole game for him, he's basically a Stepford Smiler.
  • I'm surprised it took me this long to find something for Final Fantasy IV.
    • First, we have Rydia. Your introduction to her is amidst the destruction of her village, crying over her dying mother, whom You inadvertently killed. Then, after losing consciousness, she is taken to a desert town, and watches Cecil, who was unintentionally responsible for this, fight off the guards that are after her. THEN, she travels to Fabul, witnesses several people injured in the attack. En route to Baron by ship, she's swallowed by the Leviathan and taken to the Feymarch, where she is forced to live for years (to her) without any of the supporting figures that she knew. And FINALLY, upon returning she has to watch as some of her friends slowly go off to their apparent deaths, as well as atrocities such as what becomes of Edge's parents. And keep in mind, most of this starts when she's barely SIX!
    • Let's not leave Edward out of the picture. First off, The fandom hates him for sucking in fights. Never mind the fact that he just had his entire castle nuked, nearly everyone, including his parents, killed, and his lover dies in his arms after protecting him from the soldiers. To rub salt in the wound, this was implied to be mere DAYS before they hoped to marry. And on top of this, the guy isn't even given time to grieve before he agrees to help Cecil acquire a sand-pearl to help Rosa. Finally, he's confronted by the spirit of his lover, watches her move on, telling him to have courage. Subsequently he's horribly injured in the Leviathan Shipwreck, and washes ashore near Troia. When the party finds him, he saves them from the Dark Elf with the whisperweed, which leads his would-be Father-In-Law Tellah to finally accept him. And then Tellah dies fighting Golbez. Seriously, Edward eat. sleeps, breathes, wears, and practically IS this trope.
  • Final Fantasy X:
    • Yuna. Having her father leave her when she was little to perform a Heroic Sacrifice for all of Spira, becoming a summoner herself, enduring the same trip her father made, being labeled a traitor of the god she was worshiping, having kill off all of her beloved Aeons, and worst of all, saying goodbye to the one man she loved, who was actually a dream of the Fayth. Someone give the poor girl a hug.
    • Ahem... Tidus. He grew up verbally abused by his father, when all he wanted was love and acceptance. When Jecht disappeared one day (when he crossed over into Spira), his mother died soon afterward, presumably of a broken heart. And despite hiding it all quite well, it's still easy to tell that he's deeply affected by this. And then we see Tidus' misfortune in Spira, and this goes way beyond his semi-Butt Monkey status because he's "new" to how things work there. Crucial pieces of information are witheld from Tidus, and the one that hits him the hardest is that Yuna, his love interest, will have to die if the Final Summoning necessary to defeat Sin is to succeed. He also discovers that Sin, said Eldritch Abomination that's been haunting Spira for many eons, is his father. It gets better from here. Then Tidus learns that he and his entire world are nothing more than the product of the Fayth's dreams, and if they were to wake up, Tidus would cease to exist. They tell him that they chose him to Take a Third Option in defeating Sin and ending the Vicious Cycle without the Final Aeon. And Tidus goes through with it, with only the ever-slightest navel gazing.
    • Jecht doesn't fare much better either. Later on in the game, he begin to see great strides of Character Development for this man. It's shown that Jecht, in his own way, genuinely loved Tidus, but could never properly express those feelings, so he tries to shape Tidus into a better and stronger man than he in his own way. This is further compounded when Jecht realizes that he'll never be able to return home. And as such, he decides to be Braska's Final Aeon, seeing it as a chance to finally be of some worth somewhere. Only this ends up backfiring, as due to the continuation of a 1000-year status quo, Yu Yuvon possesses Jecht and slowly reshaped him into the next Sin. It was all for naught! So, over the course of several years, Jecht was trapped in an And I Must Scream situation of almost unparalleled magnitude. It was only by luck that he and Auron were able to orchestrate the majority of the game's events, and even this plan was simply constructed so that Jecht could be felled by his own son.
    • And then we have Auron. At first, he comes off as an aloof, stoic mentor. Then comes the Backstory. He started out as an ostracized monk and decides to go on the pilgrimage with Braska and Jecht because he had no other purpose in his life. One of his best friends from this time is later introduced as a corrupt Yevonite, and while he is killed, Auron is visibly angered by this. When the three are told by Yunalesca that the Final Aeon requires the sacrifice of both the summoner and one of his guardians, Auron relents, but fails to convince Braska and Jecht. It then turns out that this is all a lie, as the Final Aeon that kills Sin becomes Sin. Enraged, Auron attempts to avenge his fallen friends, and Yunalesca mortally wounds him. But Auron, being a Determinator, instead reforms as an unsent, and in a heartbreaking display of resolve, kick-starts a good majority of the game's plot by crossing over to Dream Zanarkand and watching over Tidus, hoping to guide the next generation to finally end this terrible spiral of destruction. Auron's unexpected Not So Stoic moment, where he lashes out in an emotional frenzy at Zanarkand's projection of a younger him trying to get Braska and Jecht to not go through with the Final Summoning just shows how profoundly this event affected him, and his attempts to ultimately atone for it.
  • Final Fantasy XII: Oh Larsa, you poor, poor thing. First, he gives a pretty trinket to a girl he seems to have a crush on, which turns out to be nethicite, which could have possessed or killed her. Then, his brother kills his father, and becomes a bloodthirsty dictator in search of power. This means Larsa to help kill his own brother for the greater good. Near the end of the story, while the other character are looking towards the sky in hopeful poses, Larsa is inside in the dark crying over Gabranth's nearly-dead body.
    • Whether or not Larsa remembers it is debatable, but Vayne also killed their two brothers as well.
  • Final Fantasy XIII: The entire main cast.
    • Vanille. Tear Jerker Woobie. An exceedingly sweet girl who failed to be courageous when it mattered most. Results in pain, suffering, and fear for her friends and pretty much the world. Feeling her guilt, she carries a death wish for most of the whole game. And she's the cheeriest character of the cast.
    • Serah. Damsel in Distress Woobie. A quintessential cutie who just wants to get married and be happy for the rest of her life. But her older sister Lightning hates the fiance (Snow). She gets cursed into becoming one of her people's mortal enemies, and eventually her curse turns her into a Waterford decoration.
    • Hope. Annoying Woobie. Mother dies in chapter 1. Wants revenge on the person responsible, who is really a nice guy and only wants to help the boy. Come on, the kid's also only fourteen.
    • Lightning. Lightweight Woobie. She's a vulnerable woman beneath all that soldier training. Younger sister Serah involuntarily becomes the enemy she's sworn to kill. Feels guilty at not having spent more time with said sister.
      • This is upped in the sequel, where Lightning is trapped in a realm beyond everyone else's reach, leaving everyone to believe she is dead. The latest DLC reveals that during this time, Lightning finds out that her sister will die due to her seeress powers. On top of this, she is bluntly told she is the one responsible, and there's not a damn thing she can do to stop it.
      • Lightning's battle catchphrases (when she is obtained as a Monster Ally really drive this home, with her saying things like "Promise me you'll keep going" and "I hope I did my part" in an emotionless voice.
    • Snow. Unlikely Woobie. A compassionate, upbeat guy. Then his girlfriend Serah becomes an enemy of the state against her will. Future sister-in-law hates him. Can't save fiance from turning to crystal. Feels horrible that he's inadvertently responsible for Hope's mother dying.
    • Sazh. Heavyweight Woobie. A kind and often humorous man whose son gets frozen in crystal. Finds out that the one responsible is the adorable Vanille whom he has grown quite fond of. She in turn feels so awful about it that she just stands there forlornly waiting for him to pull the trigger on her. Very nearly ends up shooting himself shortly afterward.
  • Final Fantasy Tactics is loaded with woobies, the woobiest of whom is probably Ovelia. Unwitting substitute for a dead princess, confined to a convent for most of her life, then kidnapped, betrayed, betrayed again, continuously used in the political tug-of-war, and eventually killed by her own lover on her birthday...
  • Final Fantasy Tactics Advance also contains one very legit Woobie. In the end, Marche, Mewt, and Ritz decide to get over their real-world problems instead of going into a fantasy world where they're a stronger person naturally, have red hair, and have a mother. Even though that wasn't Mewt's true mother... However, Doned's wish for Ivalice was simply to be able to walk again - he has to go back to being a wheelchair bound Ill Boy. Even if he gains friends in the hospital, come on, anyone can understand his wish...
  • In Vagrant Story, we have Samantha of the Crimson Blades. Though technically an antagonist, she appears to be a sympathetic character who dreams of gaining immortality with her lover, Guildernstern. However, Guildenstern eventually stabs her as a sacrifice for his own 'cause'. His final words to her are "I love you, Samantha. As God is my witness." to which she responds ""I...too, once thought so..." before falling off the Grand Cathedral's rooftop.
  • Kingdom Hearts:
  • Lucas from Mother 3. Lucas begins the game rather quiet and shy, which already scores him a few Woobie points. We are immediately introduced to his loving family, who live in a happy, idyllic Arcadia called Tazmily, and it's clear that he is very close with all of them. The villainous Pig King, however, has other plans for all of them. His Pigmask army strikes fear into the hearts of the villagers by setting the forest on fire and reassembling the wildlife into ghastly Chimeras, one of which kills Lucas' mother. Lucas' twin brother, Claus, tries to avenge his mother's death, but disappears and actually dies, and is brought back by the Pigmasks as a soulless slave, and their father nearly goes insane with grief. During the three-year gap between chapters 3 and 4, Lucas pays frequent visits to his mother's grave, while his father fruitlessly searches for Claus and the Pigmask army continuously threatens' the villagers' way of life. It is later revealed that the Pigmask army is trying to destroy the world by unleashing the power of an ancient dragon, but stopping them by unleashing it first may destroy it as well. Finally, after learning that everything he knows about Tazmily is a lie, Lucas must face his twin brother Claus in single combat. After one of the most heart-wrenching "I know you're in there somewhere" fights ever done, Claus commits suicide to stop the Pig King's influence over him and dies in Lucas' arms. Somebody please give this poor kid a hug.
  • Saavedro, from Myst III: Exile. Seriously - two evil guys who are your friend's sons nearly destroy your home world and you follow them only to get knocked out, tied up, and tortured by said evil sons and stranded on a world you know nothing about for twenty years while thinking your family - no, your entire world - is dead? Serious Woobie fuel. At least this editor thinks so.
    • The Relyimah in Myst: The Book of D'ni. Even the bitter psycho Ymur.
      • There's a reason he's bitter and a psycho.
    • Atrus has had to trap his father and his sons, has been partly (and inadvertently) responsible for the deaths of billions of people (admittedly an evil world, but the slaves died in droves too), has outlived the sons, and (due to the Mayfly-December Romance) has outlived his wife. He has abandoned at least one home because of the bad memories.
    • The various peoples under Gehn's thumb.
  • The eponymous character of Kana: Little Sister.
  • Luigi of Mario fame has become a woobie to a big portion of the fanbase, and some take it to ridiculous extremes by making the comical abuse he suffers in the games out to be irreparably soul-damaging. Bowser's become something of a woobie in recent years, too.
    • Luigi was left off of the original version of Mario Party 9's box art. Why? Because Nintendo forgot about him. Basically the equivalent of parents forgetting their child at the park, that's pretty woobie-material, especially considering that even after he's been added he's literally the smallest thing on the box.
    • Vivian from Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is abused constantly by Beldam. The pain stops when she joins Mario.
  • MOMO from Xenosaga deserves a mention. She started out the first game kidnapped and had to be rescued. The desire for her rescue only came from the fact that she was a Robot Girl with valuable data. Later on in the game, she is kidnapped by the insane Albedo and mind raped in about 1000 different ways. In the second game, it is revealed that MOMO was originally built simply as a replacement for a mad scientist's daughter. Meanwhile, people throughout the games have been calling her creator, whom she refers to as "Daddy", insane and responsible for unleashing the cosmic horror. The wife of said mad scientist only looks at MOMO as a painful reminder that her daughter is dead. Early on, she is hacked by her mind rapist for her valuable data. Things don't end well there. She's finally cut a little slack at the end when her "mommy" decides to start viewing MOMO as her own person and not as a replacement. She even lets MOMO move in with her. And in the third game, an encounter with her father in a rather heartwarming scene reveals that he was never the lunatic that people made him out to be.
    • Shion Uzuki. Episode 3. Full stop. To list, She was basically the trigger of the apocalypse, watched both of her parent be brutally murdered by monsters, and watched the prototype KOS-MOS go berserk and kill her boyfriend. This is just the flashbacks for BEFORE THE CANONICAL START OF THE SERIES. It gets worse in the actual plot of Episode 3, where its revealed she's slowly dying,her dead boyfriend manipulates her, and in the end she loses KOS-MOS and her brother, Jin after BEATING the final boss. At least MOMO gets a somewhat happy ending. There's also an official flash series that seems to have her lose someone again. At least Allen loves her...
  • Melia in Xenoblade Chronicles. Four of her trusted friends die trying to protect her, she becomes the target of an assassination plot made by her stepmother, her father is killed, and to top that all off, the majority of her people end up being transformed into mindless Telethia by the Big Bad, including her half brother, who she is then forced to fight against. She takes all of it surprisingly well, though.
  • How come Siren isn't here yet? Harumi just makes you want to hug her on sight, and then there's Tomoko...
  • Colette from Tales of Symphonia. She's a decidedly cute and kind girl raised to be a Sacrificial Lamb. She even gets a title for that one (Ill-fated Girl). Said "raising" meant dehumanizing her to the point where she actually did believe that she wasn't human, and would willingly carry out her duty, knowing full well that it results in her death. Also, everyone in her hometown—save for a few select people (all of which being playable characters in the game (namely, Lloyd(Who happens to be her Love Interest), Genis, and Raine)) were taking part in said dehumanization (including her family). She's got everyone who's a potential enemy in the game wanting her head on a platter. (Well not literally. The main bad guys want to make her dead... without killing her.) Now add in the the fact that she's a primary target of the rage of not one, but two whole worlds of people... On top of that, she gets this funky disease that turns her into a crystal.
    • Bonus points if she's the Unlucky Childhood Friend during the playthrough.
    • Her woobification works to a degree. Some fans just want to give her a big hug, like Lloyd, the object of her affection, does in one of the scenes in which she's going through her first Painful Transformation; others want to kill her dead.
    • And then there's Presea, especially whenever something reminds her of her lost time, such as meeting neighbors she used to babysit as adults while she's still physically a child.
    • Sheena is quite the woobie as well. She was found in the Gaoracchia Forest when she was an infant, and while the chief of Mizuho took her in, some still consider her an outsider. Because of her hereditary ability to summon, she's made to try and make a pact with the Summon Spirit of Lightning, Volt, when she's just a kid, which backfires so horribly that Volt goes berserk and kills several people in her village, including and puts the chief of the village (who's also her grandfather) in a coma. In the end, she's become the outcast of her village and ends up with serious self-esteem problems. After joining the party, she eventually succeeds in making a pact with Volt, but her familiar/one of her oldest friends ends up sacrificing her life to save her. Oh and another one of her friends? His parents were also killed during Volt's initial rampage, and he's secretly held a grudge against Sheena ever since, to the point where he even joins Cruxis to get a chance to get back at her.
    • It's safe to say that almost every party member in the game is a woobie. Whether it's Genis and Raine having to constantly deal with racial persecution, with Genis having only one friend in his entire life who's his own age, and he turns out to be the Big Bad, and Raine revealing that two of her biggest quirks, her fear of water and her obsession with ancient ruins, stems from her very messed up childhood. Not to mention that she eventually runs into her mother again, who's gone insane and treats a doll as Raine, even rejecting the REAL Raine. Or Zelos' own messed up childhood with his own mother getting killed by an attack aimed at him and her dying words being that she wished he'd never been born; and the fact that his carefree, laissez-faire attitude about life is actually because he's absolutely miserable and just doesn't care anymore. Even the Big Bad himself is very sympathetic once you get to know him more.
    • And in the sequel, Emil could qualify as a woobie. But really, his parents are dead because they were assumed to be killed by Lloyd, his uncle and aunt hate him and he's hated by the entire city of Luin because he doesn't worship the grounds of Lloyd.
  • With the exception of Mohs, every single recurring character in Tales of the Abyss is a Woobie to some extent. And hell, since the game tries to give Mohs an Alas, Poor Villain send-off, you could probably argue he's a Woobie too.
    • Most God Generals would count, but the one that stands out the most would be Arietta the Wild. First, her family got killed during the Hod War, and she's left to be raised by the Ligers. Then she got handpicked as a Fon Master Guardian for Ion, but quickly lost her position to Anise, not knowing that the Ion she loved is a replica, not to mention Anise continuously teasing her as "Gloomietta". Then, her mother got killed. And later, just when it looked like she may pull a Heel Face Turn, Anise lets Ion get killed, which revokes just about everything Arietta thought about changing sides. Then, she challenged Anise for a final duel and... she's not even told about the truth about Ion, leaving her to die miserably and not realizing the reality.
    • What about Dist? His 'best friend' Jade alternately abused and ignored him before leaving him entirely for Peony. Said best friend also killed one of the few people who was genuinely kind to them, then resurrected her as a bloodthirsty Axe-Crazy monster that tried to kill both of them. Dist spends the whole game trying to get Jade's attention and is either teased, ignored, or raped in a hotel room, and when he realizes that Jade's never going to like him he commits suicide. And if you do a certain sidequest it turns out he somehow survived, only to be attacked and nearly killed by the Ax Crazy replica monster of the teacher he loved.
    • As said, the whole God Generals are all a squad of Woobies at heart, but Arietta definitely topped Dist (and the rest) out. After all, Dist even SURVIVED that attack from that Ax Crazy replica monster of the teacher he loved. Yeah, he spent the rest of his life in jail probably, but the fact that he ends up as the only surviving God General must be like an automatic pat on the back!
  • Hilda Rhambling from Tales of Rebirth. Born in a world of Fantastic Racism as a Half means she gets the butt end of bullying and prejudice from both Huma and Gajuma. Later, Tohma of the Four Stars arrived and killed her Huma father and took her away from her mother, and she was raised as a Tyke Bomb, while Tohma supplied her with a fictional backstory of her being abandoned by her parents. When she failed him, Tohma proceeds to break her in the most painful way possible: reveal that she is a Half, and tell her there is no place for her in the world. Later, she joins Veigue's party, and found a Gajuma woman named Naira, who happens to be her blood mother, and she flat out rejects her, making her angry and believe she was discarded. Until Tohma arrived again and tried to kill her, only for Naira to cover her and die for it. And then, after she dies, another person delivered her a letter that pretty much sums up how much she loved her, leaving Hilda in anguish that she could never apologize to her mother or even call her mother, at all... Sometimes, a Cool Big Sis like her does need a pat in the back...
  • Karol from Tales of Vesperia. He's an unlucky coward whose crush hates his guts and eventually fires him from their guild. He's such a coward, he was fired from every guild in the book. His hero, Don Whitehorse, commits suicide. Everyone except the main characters seem to hate his guts. Even Troy Baker, Yuri's voice actor, says he's annoying. He needs some more love, people!
  • F.E.A.R.'s Man Behind the Man (well, 'Girl Behind The Man in this case) is Alma, who spends most of her time making your comrades' flesh boil off or sending flaming killer ghosts after you in your dream sequences, so sympathy for her might not seem all that forthcoming...until you learn just what Armacham Technology Corporation did to her.
    • She started off broken, born a powerful telepath who was sensitive to the negative emotions of people, which ended up with her constantly suffering from hallucinations and nightmares. Then, she was brought into an Armacham program to create psychic super soldiers. After spending years locked inside a tiny cell and studied by ATC, she was put into a coma and artificially impregnated with children based on her own DNA. When they reached maturity, labor was induced, and the children were forcibly taken away from Alma while she was still screaming for them. Eventually, after the project went south, the plug was pulled on Alma's life support, and she was locked up underground and left to die. The best part about all of this? The project lead who masterminded it all was her own father.
    • The Woobification hits truly epic levels with the final hallucination, where intermixed with pained sobbing and images of brutal, explosive, and bloody violence, Alma is trying to hug the Point Man, her only surviving son... and the Point Man is forced to shoot her repeatedly or die. Damn, man. Just... damn.
    • Project Origin manages to take an already powerful Woobie and cranks the woobification past eleven. At one point, there's a hallucination showing Harlan Wade ordering a pair of massive, fully-armored ATC soldiers to haul her to the Vault, and she's shown being violently dragged away, sobbing and clutching a teddy bear.
      • And that place where they were dragging her away from? Her Happy Place, which so happens to be a withered old tree and swing set that's sandwiched in the corner of a muddy concrete ditch that seems to be part of the facility's sewage system.
      • There's also a scene in Wade Elementary right after the blood-soaked locker hallway with the ghosts where Alma attacks Beckett, and he fights her off. Immediately afterward, Alma is standing in front of him, and staring at him with this horrible mixture of sadness and fear. She starts curling up into a ball on the floor, and whispers "You don't want me?" in this pained and saddened whisper that just breaks the heart to hear.
      • The second game is testament to her status as the woobie because she is still considered one even after she rapes Beckett, which would normally be considered a Moral Event Horizon. This is because all the trauma she's gone through has left her so utterly broken that she is incapable of normal behavior. She doesn't understand why Beckett is rejecting her when it's her actions that cause him to see her as a threat.
    • And, uh, Michael Beckett is going to need a lot of therapy after the end of Project Origin. You can't even give this man a hug because, chances are, he won't respond well to being touched for awhile.
      • F.3.A.R shows Beckett as being quite insane. As in, "DON'T TOUCH HER! I'LL RIP OUT YOUR GUS AND WEAR THEM AS A HAIR-NET IF YOU DO!" insane. Poor guy. Then it gets amplified even further when the Point Man and Fettel reach him, as Fettel takes control of Beckett to rip his memories out of his body, a process which causes Beckett immense physical agony and eventually causes his whole body to explode. Fettel's commentary while this is happening doesn't help, as he notes that "This man is an empty shell" and "All he wants is to forget."
  • Another Type Moon example: Kohaku. Hisui, also, to a lesser extent; in fact, the "lesser" is partly Kohaku's doing, given that she begged Makihisa Tohno to leave her sister alone and Synchronize (or rather, rape) her exclusively). In fact, depending on the route and the player, this might qualify for any of the five heroines (and Satsuki)...but Kohaku most of all.
    • Satsuki is the Chew Toy. Len and Nanako however are legitimate examples. The biggest woobie in Tsukihime is however the real SHIKI. This will not make the slightest bit of sense until you've beaten every route of course.
  • Wally, the little ginger pirate wannabe from the Monkey Island series. He actually had a scene where he is stranded on a raft and his monocle falls in the water, he then falls in trying to retrieve it; this was taken out because the developers felt so sorry for him.
  • Sasha Nein from Psychonauts is a popular target of Woobification among fangirls, primarily due to the fact that he lost his mother when he was a baby, and his only exposure to her, via reading his father's memories, was rather... squicky. He's also emotionless. Some fans then assume lifelong, unhealing trauma, and run with it from there.
    • It's not that he's emotionless. He's just not very emotional. He clearly has affection for Milla, a borderline hatred for tackiness, and is obviously angry as hell when he encounters the Big Bad near the end of the game. Which may only enhance his appeal to fangirls...
    • How could you put Sasha without also mentioning Milla? The entire family of orphans she took care of died in a fire. By listening to her nightmares, you can tell she blames herself for not being there to save them.
    • Or Coach Oleander, whose father, a butcher, seemed to show him no love and even took his favorite pet bunny and butchered it in front of him.
    • Or Ford Cruller, who lost his sanity in a psychic battle and can't remain whole outside of his underground lair until the end of the game.
    • The asylum inmates - the three whose headspaces you enter after getting inside the main asylum, anyway.
      • Fred used to be an orderly who tried to cheer up a withdrawn patient by challenging him to his favorite board game... and, much to his frustration, lost repeatedly. Which was upsetting, yeah, but nothing serious. Until he was suddenly "possessed" by his ancestor, Napoleon Bonaparte, trying to whip him into shape for being a loser, knowing perfectly well that he'd developed a Split Personality and was at war with himself but unable to do anything about it. And when Dr. Loboto "takes over" the asylum, he gets the inmate who'd literally beat him at his own game mocking him from a distance, watching him argue with himself.
      • Gloria was the daughter of an actress trying to groom her little girl into a star, sending her away to a brutally strict and abusive boarding school thanks to her bastard of a boyfriend. Said bastard of a boyfriend also deliberately prevented the many letters she wrote to her daughter from reaching her, way to give Gloria intense feelings of abandonment. When she grew up, Gloria did become a famous actress, outshining her mother, and had a happy, thriving career up until learning that her mother committed suicide and going schizophrenic.
      • Edgar was a nice and respected guy in high school and star of the wrestling team with a wonderful girlfriend with whom he was madly in love. When she dumped him for a male cheerleader, he completely lost his focus and screwed up in the middle of an important match and lost his team the state semifinals, causing all his former friends to turn on him, the reason he turned into more of an obvious Sensitive Guy, avoiding everyone and taking up painting but finding himself unable to do anything but obsessive-compulsively paint bullfights, thanks to a metaphor for his own life coming from his nickname on the team being the Bull. Evidently he also developed mood control issues, that or he already had them.
  • Marona of Phantom Brave. Her parents are dead, she lives alone and the whole town fears and hates her for her ability to summon ghosts, even while hiring her to protect them from monsters. She maintains a sunny disposition in public, but when alone in her bedroom at night she cries her eyes out.
    • Carona, an Alternate Universe version of Marona has it even worse. While Marona at least has Ash to protect her from the worst of it and give her a shoulder to cry on Carona never had that. She is utterly alone, forced to become an Oxide just to survive and forced to become a slave to a genocidal arms dealer to stop him from destroying her world.
    • Ill Girl Castille's family have spent thier entire life savings on her expensive treatments. Now both her parents and brother are forced to spend the entire day working to make ends meet. Because of this she is forced to spend her entire time stuck in an empty house with hardly any kind of contact with the outside world.
  • While quite a few characters from Animamundi: Dark Alchemist end up with surprising and sympathetic development that gives them a touch of Woobieness, poor St. Germant fits the trope right down to the E. Despite being completely kind and sincere (and let's stop beating around this shonen-ai bush: cute) - or perhaps because of such - he's arguably the most tormented soul of the entire game, subjected to such horrors as being coerced, tortured, drugged, molested, dominated, and brainwashed by the disturbingly-psychotic Big Bad as a means of getting back at the protagonist.
  • Most characters in the Harvest Moon series are too happy (or at least content) to qualify as Woobies. The exceptions include:
    • Cliff (Back To Nature, Mineral Town): Broke, jobless, and his beloved sister died while he was traveling. Reacts so strongly to any kindness, you wonder about the stuff he doesn't tell you about.
    • Griffin (DS version): If you marry Muffy, once she starts obliviously gushing to Griffin (your rival for her), you'll want to break up with her just to apologize for it.
    • Muffy (DS Cute): Perpetually loveless, and always breaking up with men, you'll often find her turning to you for comfort whenever her love life fails her. If you pursue her Love Interest, Griffin, and marry him yourself, she'll never find a permanent love interest. She'll be jumping dates forevermore...
      • She's even worse in the "Wonderful Life" series.
    • Flora/Carter (DS/Cute:) While they're two different characters, they go hand in hand because they're a rival couple. Lots of guys were excited that Flora was finally marriageable in DS, and so pursued her. What's so bad about that? What becomes of Carter, that's so bad about that. Not only is he obviously heartbroken when you and Flora break the happy news to him, but now he's all alone up there in that drafty old tent in the mountains with naught but some old statues for company. Doing the reverse in the Cute version is just as bad. Now Flora's heartbroken and alone, and even has a brief panic about loosing her job. She gets to keep it, but one gets the impression she's not enjoying it as much now that the Professor is off-limits.
    • Mist (Rune Factory): If Hannelore owned a farm in a fantasy medieval world...
    • Celia (A Wonderful Life/Special Edition): She's usually a Pollyanna, but she's engaged to someone she doesn't know, and she is in love with you from the moment she meets you. Try getting her last heart event, where she confesses to you, and say no. Or cheat on her, and not marry her.
    • Keria (DS/Cute): Unable to speak and trapped hundreds of feet down underground for hundreds of years, due to the Witch Princess.
    • Leia(DS/Cute): She's a mermaid, far from home, inside a tank, too kind to leave the person who saved her. Just try to befriend her, and then not befriend/marry her.
    • Lumina (AWL/SE): A stressed, Lonely Rich Kid who doesn't want to disappoint her grandmother. She meets you, and eventually thinks of you as her big brother. She falls in love with you, but you could not marry her until Special Edition. Just try and watch her cry, and run away, when you become married, without feeling horrible.
    • Nami (AWL/SE): At first she's just a distant Kuudere Walking the Earth. Then as you become closer to her, you learn that her father is a jobless alcoholic who leeched off of her income whenever she had a job, and she's traveling the world in a desperate attempt to avoid going back to that, even while running out of money. At one point, her cold shell cracks and you actually see her cry.
    • The two girls that you didn't marry in AWL both get the woobiness cranked up even further. Celia gets forced into an Arranged Marriage she didn't want and becomes a bitter man-hater, trying desperately to smile and failing. Muffy spends the rest of her life as a single waitress, and you can find her crying on the beach at night over losing her chance at having a family, the one thing she wanted most in life. Nami runs out of money and has to go back to live with her parents, and when she comes back later she spends all her time Drowning Her Sorrows at the bar. AWL is, without a doubt, the darkest Harvest Moon game to date.
  • The main character's sister, Theresa, from Fable. Over the course of her life, she gets horrible prophetic nightmares, is tortured and has her eyes cut out around age 8, is abused by the bandits who rescue her while being used for her foretellings, and is pursed, captured, and almost killed by the antagonist. On top of all that, evil characters can choose to kill her in cold blood while she stands there telling you that it is your choice whether or not to do so. Ouch.
    • The second game gives us Sparrow, a Broken Bird who begins as a young orphan living on the streets with his sister Rose. After making a wish they are taken to Lucian's castle, where he kills Rose and tries to kill Sparrow, who is saved by a gypsy who had set up Rose's death in order to give Sparrow a need for revenge. Later, Sparrow is forced to work in Lucian's Spire for over two years as the people there try to Break the Cutie. A banshee might torture Sparrow over Rose's death, then near the end after Lucian kill's Sparrow's dog and tries once again to kill Sparrow, ends up a kid again in paradise with Rose, who finally was able to provide the perfect life for her sibling. In order to defeat Lucian Sparrow must abandon this life, and a traumatic Rose. God. Damn. Someone give the kid a hug.
    • While one would not think him so, Ben Finn from the third game definitely gets a Woobie-esque moment where you all just want to give him a big hug. This moment? After you're done with the masqerade party, you have to go meet Ben at the castle, because your brother has an announcement/demonstration (which in Fable 3, is short for "Public execution, come and watch. we've got popcorn!" Once you meet up with him, you find that the person being executed is none other than Major Swift, Ben's friend, mentor, and the man who probably saved him from a life of crime. Just before Major Swift is shot, it cuts away to Ben, who's expression as the gun is fired is absolutely heart-shattering. If you did not want to give him the worlds biggest hug, you are NOT. HUMAN.
  • Abe from Oddworld: Abe's Oddyssey. Completely defenceless, luckless little guy. Munch from the following game too, though not so much Stranger. It helps that Oddworld Inhabitants are a big fan of Ugly Cute.
    • Stranger's had it pretty bad himself. A Proud Warrior Race Guy whose species is being hunted to extinction who requires a surgery performed by a Vykker, the series' resident Mad Doctor, to turn him into a true bipedal animal just to survive amongst society. Upon his reveal he is hunted down by the Clakkerz who formerly paid him to save them from criminals.
  • If Flora from Professor Layton and the Curious Village doesn't count, she should. Both her parents died when she was young, and she was raised by an ill-tempered robotic duplicate of her late mother, which disturbed her for obvious reasons. Her father died soon afterwards, and she lived alone in a tower for years as part of her dad's ridiculously elaborate plot to find a good man to adopt her when he passed. All her friends were robots, and she knew it. Whether they have actual feelings is debatable. In the end, despite growing up a rich girl and thus being accustomed to it, she had to refuse her darn huge inheritance because if she were to lay a hand on it, the robots and the entire city would shut down. Her Happily Ever After was choosing to go off to live with the title character. The day she met him. Less serious, though, is that the writers were apparently aware that her disguise (a shawl and glasses) was obvious, and her profile states that she thinks she's incognito, but all the villagers recognize her at a glance. That detail makes her more hilariously and adorably pitiful instead.
    • Unfortunately, she becomes a Creator's Pet in the sequels, undergoing no character development besides actually solving a few puzzles. This troper didn't want to hug her, but instead see her become less of a stereotypical female princess character.
      • While she does get little character development in the sequels, Flora only gets to take a grand total of one plot-important puzzle, she gets kidnapped and left behind in a barn for most of the game in The Diabolical Box, Layton actively tries to leave her behind in her first appearance in Unwound Future, and it's implied that she's got major issues with being left alone. She does act like a "stereotypical girl" sometimes, but she's still fairly easy to feel sorry for.
    • Anton from the sequel, Professor Layton And The Diabolical Box, is played more straight. As we find out, he gets hit with the emotionally devastating equivalent of Only the Author Can Save Them Now. His brother leaves, meaning that he has no choice but to stay in his town to become Duke, even if he doesn't want to. He falls in love with a member of a rival family, causing his father to go cold toward him. His father's mining causes the town to be saturated with hallucination gas. His lover flees the town, to keep their unborn child safe; the child he doesn't even know exists, making him think she has betrayed him. He constructs an elaborate device and sends it out into the world in an attempt to communicate with his lover; he thinks that she chooses not to respond, although after fifty years she does from her deathbed, but the response doesn't reach him until the events of the endgame when she has already passed on. The device, the titular Diabolical Box, also ends up causing the deaths of a number of innocent people. The hallucination gas makes him think he is cursed to be eternally young. Quite frankly, this troper finds it amazing he held on to any sanity at all. Thankfully, he gets a Happily Ever After as he meets the granddaughter he didn't know he had and becomes a loving granddad, sees the hallucination gas finally stopped, and is reunited and reconciles with his estranged brother. If you can play through the last act without without at least misting up you have no soul.
    • Clive in Unwound Future takes the cake.
    • Arianna from Last Specter. Let's see... her parents are dead, everyone hates her family, she's dying, everyone thinks she's a witch because of her brother's attempts to protect her, and she doesn't even get her inheritance because Jakes changed her father's will. It Gets Better over the course of the game, but she still has to deal with Loosha's death and Luke, her only real friend, leaving town forever.
  • You've gotta feel sorry for Mega Man X. Not only is he the progenitor of all Reploids (and therefore Mavericks), he's also the one best equipped to hunt them down and kill them, and thus feels duty-bound to do so even though he hates violence. Fate hasn't been kind to Zero either, but he's a Jerkass, so it's not so bad.
    • Zero has a Jerkass Facade because of the things that made him a Woobie in the first place. Come on, having your love interest fight you out of revenge (and having to kill her in the end), and fighting in over 200 years for a peaceful world (arguably longer than X, though he spent half that in stasis), and when that peace actually comes, Zero couldn't even see it, seeing as he's dead...
    • WHAT AM I FIGHTING FOR??!! That is all.
      • Let's not forget that Zero is the originator of the maverick virus. The existence of X and Zero allowed the continuation of Wily and Lights feud for centuries. If they'd never have existed, Wilys evil would have died with him. Light, Wily, X and Zero are literally the four most important individuals in the world, and all but Wily feel responsible.
    • And as it's been mentioned X feels duty-bound to do what he's doing. Until he used his body to reinforce the Dark Elf seal and Copy X was made, Neo-Arcadia was a place of Peace for Reploids and Humans to live together, and he ruled it. For all those years he was able to stop forcing himself to be a Technical Pacifist and ruled as a peaceful leader. People complain that he was Emo in X7, but that is the end result of an Actual Pacifist forcing themselves to be a Technical Pacifist.
      • And when Zero sealed himself it's implied that he did not let himself have a break, that he would not let himself retired like he did in X7, and it hit him hard, to the point he started to adopt part of Zero's own Jerkass Facade and Blood Knight tendency, no longer caring about the enemies he fought. To see X, the one of two Mega Man that had a mental Age high enough to understand what peace truly was and what was needed to achieve it, go so against his belief is just...lip quivering inducing.
    • Although she wasn't hit as harder as X or Zero above, Ciel would also qualify. In two separate occasions, she thought that she was doing the right thing, but it only ended up giving rise to worse problems. The first one would be for creating Copy-X, and we all know how that turned out. The second time was successfully researching an energy source that she believes would put an end to the war, only for it to be a catalyst to a new conflict. Mind you, this is a person who longs for peace as much as X, and she is very young at the series' start, and also human. And, then there's the fact that, at series' end, she is waiting faithfully for Zero to come back, when it was completely impossible.
    • And then there's Elpizo. Lets see, sentenced to assassination for accidentally stumbling on some secret files? Check. forced to flee for his life from the city he grew up in? Check. Being appointed leader of the Resistance, but lacking the willpower and patience needed to effectively run it? Check. Getting more then half the Resistance slaughtered in a disastrous attack on the local fascist government and being wracked with guilt over the debacle? Oh god, double check. Is it any wonder he snapped?
  • Myris from Odin Sphere. I dare you to watch her cry with a straight face.
    • Gwendolyn too. Fighting battle after dangerous battle just to win the affection of your father is one thing, but then having that same dad marry you off to a sworn and hated enemy and brainwash you into loving him is just unfair. To say nothing that she watches her sister die right at the start of the game.
    • Pretty much all the protagonists (except maybe Cornelius) and Ingway fall into this. Love is not kind to you in the world of Erion, regardless.
      • Except maybe Cornelius? Are you kidding? His father doesn't believe him when sees him in Pooka form and sends guards after him, and all of the crap that happens to him was just because he dared to love a fallen Princess. It's "all the protagonists period".
  • Phantasy Star Universe has a class of enemies in the free mission Bladed Legacy. They are young beast women who sort of act like Magical Girls. They are known as 'Wikko' and they sound very cute. It's too bad that you have to fight them and kill them.
  • Every character in Silent Hill 2.
    • James: Went mad because he killed his terminally ill wife after their relationship collapsed due to her becoming more and more cynical as she got sicker, and was forced to watch a clone of her die. REPEATEDLY.
    • Eddie: Bullied and tormented his entire life until it finally drove him utterly psychotic. ** Angela: Physically and sexually abused by her father, told she deserved it by her mother and finally forced to kill her father to protect herself, destroying her sanity.
    • Laura: Spends her whole time searching for Mary, not knowing until the end that she's dead. ** Maria: Brought into existence solely so that she can die over and over to punish James for his sins.
  • Heather from Silent Hill 3 and Alex from Homecoming.
      • Let's elaborate on Alex: emotionally neglected by both his parents growing up, because they'd chosen him for a required ritual sacrifice. Enlisted to make something of himself, promptly wounded in battle and totally alone in the VA hospital. Comes home to find his brother missing, monsters overrunning his hometown on account of how his parents didn't sacrifice him for the ritual, and has to watch both his parents brutally killed, even asked by his mother to just shoot her and spare her the death trap. Oh, and not only did he actually accidentally kill his brother years ago, but the guilt made him snap and he's spent the intervening time in an asylum, not the military. Maybe.
  • Harry from the first Silent Hill. Was happily married to a wonderful wife, but said wife becomes terminally ill. They didn't have children of their own, but find an abandoned infant girl on a trip and raise her as their own, naming her "Cheryl". Harry's wife eventually dies, leaving Cheryl as the one good thing left in his life. And then Cheryl goes missing during their trip to Silent Hill, Harry goes to hell and back (literally) desperately searching for her. He runs into the crazy antique dealer Dahlia who's really just using him to reunite both halves of her "daughter", Alessa (Cheryl is half of Alessa that escaped when Alessa was burned), and Cybil the police officer, who's actually a decent person, but gets possessed by a demon and you either kill her or save her, though the ending where only Harry escapes alive seems to be the canon ending. And Lisa....just...Lisa. Lisa always provides helpful info on where Harry should go, but no matter what you do she cannot be saved. She is already dead and she is the same as the demon nurses you've been fighting. And even if you get the "Good" ending, it's a bittersweet one, as Harry realizes that the girl he's fought like hell to save is gone, as she is returned to Alessa and they become whole, their existence only serving to birth a destructive dark god, which Harry defeats. A dying Alessa points him the way out and leaves behind a gift of thanks--her reincarnation in the form of a baby (who will become Heather in the third game) but still has the god sealed within her). To hammer the point home, Harry, after so many years, is murdered in the third game. Damn.
    • Probably Alessa, too, although she falls somewhere between this and another trope.
  • Same for Walter from Silent Hill 4. He's much further into the second part of the Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds title than Alessa, but still... Long story short, his parents ditched him in their apartment room almost as soon as he was born, he was taken in by the Order and placed in their Orphanage of Fear, where he regularly suffered heavy psychological trauma, convinced that his parents' apartment room was his real mother, tried constantly to get in to see "her" but couldn't as "she" had a new tenant, was told by Dahlia of a ritual that would "awaken" her that would laterturn out to be for summoning a demon, and spends years on a killing spree to carry it out until he learns the hard way at the end of Silent Hill 4. Completing the final boss fight comes across as a relief, and if you really feel for him while you're playing even though he's been spending the entire second half hunting you, you might even crack a sad little smile in light of the story that Henry finds not long before. If you remember it at the time, it suggests he dies happy.
  • Cheryl in Shattered Memories. Has to experience her parents' divorce at the age of 7, her father dies shortly after in a car accident. Spends the next eighteen years in denial and hating her mother for it. Becomes a psychiatric case and creates a delusional reality of her father as a heroic figure coming to save her from all her pain.
  • Travis from Origins. During his early childhood, his mother, Helen tried to kill both him and herself because she had mental delusions and claimed that beings from a mirror world told her that her son was a devil. She got committed to Cedar Grove Sanitarium after this. Travis, who missed his mother went to the Sanitarium to visit her, but his father, Richard took him home. Both Richard and a doctor agreed that it would be best to tell Travis she was dead. The two moved to Riverside Motel after this. Richard, who was in a state of depression, continued to send letters to his wife. Eventually he hanged himself in room 500 while Travis was playing at an arcade. When Travis found his father's corpse, he stood there talking to it until they were found by the cleaners the next morning. He was haunted by nightmares of his past at the time of the game.
  • Oh my goodness, the Ace Attorney series. First, there's Miles Edgeworth who thought he killed his father when he was eight and has had nightmares about it every single night for 15 years. The incident also caused a paralyzing and debilitating fear of earthquakes. At best, his phobia paralyzes him as he curls into a small ball shaking on the floor. There are times that he has even passed out. His phobia is so severe that even airplane turbulence can trigger it. He will likely have this phobia for the rest of his life. Then there's Detective Gumshoe, a lovable kind-hearted character who is constantly getting his salary cut and often whipped by Franziska for simple mistakes, some of which are not even his fault. There's also Maya Fey, who was accused of murder twice, once for the death of her own sister, and she was almost killed by her own aunt for her position as heir to the head of her family's clan and the only family she has left is her young cousin, who is herself a bit of a woobie as well. Not to forget Adrian Andrews, Ron DeLite, Vera Misham, and still others.
    • Players may feel particularly sorry for Adrian Andrews because they had to personally pin the crime on her to prolong a trial, and later make a Sadistic Choice between her life or Maya's. Nice work to make the player feel like becoming The Atoner.
    • Let us not forget Franziska, who - it is implied - has become this sealed-off whip-wielding Ice Queen due entirely to her father and his (likely rather soul-killing, given his personality) demand for perfection, as well as some kind of complex re:Edgeworth and a fear that she'll never be as worthy in her father's eyes as her adopted brother. There's a reason why fics dealing with her tend to play on this angle.
    • Vera Misham seems to be the biggest Woobie of all of them. A life indoors, completely cut-off from society, unknowingly forged paintings, nearly killed from one of her habits, extremely shy, etc.
    • Will Powers, a lovable, gentle children's entertainer who just happens to have a very intimidating look about him and has to wear a mask in all of his roles because of it. Framed for murder of a guy who had intended to frame him for a different murder. The circumstances of said murder cause the show he stars in to be cancelled.
    • Lauren Paups, desperately in love with a rich boy who didn't care about her at all and tried to not only pin her father's murder on her, but to actually make her believe herself to be the killer. And speaking of her father, she had no idea who he was before he was already dead.
    • Acro in the much-hated Case 2-3: a former acrobat and Friend to All Living Things orphaned at a young age and adopted by the circus owner, now confined to a wheelchair and unable to leave his room by himself after a stupid prank by the girl his brother was in love went wrong, leaving him crippled and his brother in a permanent coma, and the girl blissfully unaware that she could possibly have done anything wrong. And to make things worse, when he tried to get revenge on her for effectively killing his brother, he accidentally murdered his beloved adoptive father instead.
      • On that note, how about Diego Armando/Godot? Yes, yes, I know he's a real jerk to Phoenix and his plan of dealing with Morgan Fey's plan to kill Maya was stupid and self-centered and he personally killed Misty. But come on! He gets poisoned by a murderous bitch, the woman he loves is murdered while he's in a six-year coma, and he has to constantly go through agonizing medical treatments just to stay alive! Deep down, he's hiding so much despair, guilt, and self-loathing that it's amazing he can even show up to court. Maybe he's a better example of Jerkass Woobie, but if his story doesn't make your heart wrench...
    • The entire Fey clan is a big ball of misery and suffering. Especially Maya and Pearl.
      • And Betrayal, don't forget Betrayal.
    • And no list would be complete without mentioning Maggey Byrde. As she states in each appearance, she's been experiencing a string of bad luck since she was six months old, when she fell off the balcony of her ninth-story apartment. In-series, she's been (wrongfully) accused of (at least) three murders, been on trial for said murders twice (three times if you count one retrial), and even convicted of one (though that one eventually was overturned). In addition, she's lost her job three times, each time as a direct or indirect result of a murder accusation. And that's just part of the bad luck we get to see for ourselves.
    • Yumihiko Ichiyanagi, thanks to his dad Bansai.
      • Said father actually changed his kid's grades so he could give his child the illusion he was a genius, while withholding the truth from him. Then he proceeds to berate him in court later. Sure, Yumihiko snaps out of it thanks to Edgeworth, but you feel a serious satisfaction knowing Bansai won't be bullying his son again.
        • Also, at one point in the final case, Bansai actually leaves the witness stand and suggests "going home" with his son to "play". At those words, Yumihiko starts trembling.
    • Souta Sarushiro had a terrible father too. In fact, that's probably why he did what he did. He just couldn't stand up to his father's expectations.
    • Phoenix Wright himself counts. Everyone, literally, EVERYONE takes advantage of him at the end of each game by making him pay for expensive meals, cameras, and the like. Not to mention he loses his job in Apollo Justice and mentions that Trucy is his "light". Someone give this man a hug.
      • That's not even half of it. First, Phoenix believed for many years that he fell madly in love with a manipulative bitch and serial killer who, after tricking him into helping her escape being convicted for killing the boyfriend of his beloved mentor and the woman who saved his life, tried to kill him and ended up killing someone else trying to warn him about her. Then, shortly after he becomes a lawyer, his friend and mentor is murdered, and the actual murderer tries to frame HIM for it. Then comes a series of trials where he is continually bullied and disrespected by EVERYONE, and not to mention put in severe danger and huge dilemmas numerous times, because he is pretty much the only one who can help his clients. He constantly puts his career, reputation, and sometimes his own life on the line for the sake of those who have nobody on their side, and doesn't get shit in return. His second-to-last trial reveals that the girl he fell in love with was the twin sister, yet completely different person, of the aforementioned monster. Though he still clearly cares for her, it seems he can't be with her, at least partially because she is put in jail for being an after-the-fact accomplice to murder. THEN, after after winning that case and surpassing his mentor (and thus her spirit leaving him), he loses his job, reputation, and (maybe) friends because he fell into a trap set by another monster who decided to destroy his life just because the client hired Phoenix over the asshole, and because said client was also a jackass who wouldn't give Phoenix the damn evidence that would have cleared him immediately. Phoenix spends the next seven years as a hobo, playing poker and caring for the abandoned daughter of that jackass client, before he FINALLY makes everything right. How he is still able to be a good, determined, and unbreakable man, let alone SANE, after all this crap is nothing short of a MIRACLE! He needs A LOT of hugging!
      • It gets better! He was in a mock class trial as a child for stealing Edgeworth's lunch money which even the TEACHER thought he did it. When he thought everyone had abandoned him, Edgeworth uttered his classic line and defended him with Larry helping out. Larry, however, was the real culprit and didn't pay Edgeworth back until about 10 years later. Good going, Larry. In Apollo Justice, he's also injured several times because he hasn't already been a Butt Monkey enough, has he?
  • So many from the Valkyrie Profile Series:
    • In the first game, many of the Einherjar. Understandable, since you only meet them when they're dying.
      • The biggest, though, is someone who survives the game. Celia is the last survivor of a mercenary group that was like a family to each other, and most of whom end up as your Einherjar. Her biggest scene is when she goes to confront the one other survivor, who she believes killed his lover. The whole scene is set up as if it's her recruitment scene, only for you to get that other survivor instead, and the last you see of poor Celia is her just utterly breaking down in despair as the very last connection to her happier times is taken away from her.
      • Yumei was considered one of the bigger Tear Jerker moments. [[spoiler:She was half mermaid, despised by her mother's people and was all alone after her mother died. So she decided to look for her father. Along the way she falls in love with a boy naemd Fuyuki, and they exchange a talk about what they'd wish about if they found the Lapis Lazuli, a gem that grants wishes. When they reach land. Yumei finds out that not only is her father dead but he's had many other families. This is her Despair Event Horizon, and she finally runs away to commit suicide, but Fuyuki sees her mermaid form before she leaves and says goodbye to him, her tear forming a Lapis Lazuli. Fuyuki picks it up and says,

I wish that Yumei could be with her parents!" This unfortunately has the result of killing her.]]

    • Second Game: The Einherjar again, though that's mainly in their character bios. More obvious is Alicia, a princess that was disowned for something that was not her fault and later had to watch her father being executed. Minutes later, her kingdom is destroyed, and she learns her mother committed suicide.
    • Spin-off: Aside from the main character (who lost his father and his sister, while his mother went insane. Later he kills his best friend by accident), there are some, but probably the woobiest is Darius: Given up for adoption, came back to his 'real' family and was not accepted, and later either kills himself and/or his only best friend.
      • Don't forget Rosea and Lieselotte. Initially students of the palace Archmage with promising futures, they were both banished when the Archmage was mysteriously murdered one night (with evidence that cast suspicion on the both of them) and left to wonder the land. It was the third student of the Archmage who had killed him and framed the others. Since both girls only know that she herself is innocent, they believed the other responsible and too much of a coward to own up to it, thus driving the former friends to hate each other. No matter which of the three paths you take, at least one of the girls will die, and by the hand of the other one. And if you take the "A" path, they kill each other.
      • Liesel, however, is far less sympathetic than Rosea and is really more of a Jerkass Woobie. she does reform in the "B" path.
      • Rosea perhaps ends out the worst - in Path C, she murders Lieselotte out of anger, but then proceeds to have a My God, What Have I Done?. Depending on who you recruited and if they're alive (Darius or Earnest and Natalia) she is surrounded by the most broken and least sympathetic characters of the game (Especially if you recruited the Bloody Twins) with the exception of Duwain. She is then forced to fight Lenneth Valkyrie and then is forced into a brutal war, wandering from town to town in a demon-infested world where Anyone Can Die. The player can do even worse things to her, such as Pluming Duwain right in front of her and then forcing her to fight him in the final boss. If she's not sent to Nifelheim in aiding in attacking Lenneth, then perhaps the best thing you can do to her is plume her, so that she can live on as an Einherjar. And she's one of the nicest characters in the game, beware the nice one aside
  • Polka from Eternal Sonata. Because of the myth that her fatal illness is contagious, most members of society treat her like a leper. People don't even bother to thank her when she uses her magic to heal injured people because being able to use magic is possible only if you're going to die soon. In spite of it all, Polka is still a good person who wants, more than anything else in the world, to simply help everyone she can while she still has the time.
  • You know Grave is gonna have it hard when he's the lead character...and he's also "dead". He's lost pretty much everyone he ever knew and loved, as well as almost all of his emotions and memories, and was forced to kill the man who was once his closest friend. The one bright spot left in his "life" is Mika, the daughter of the woman Grave (when he was Brandon) loved but could never be with, and said daughter risks her own health and uses her own blood in Grave's necessary transfusions to avoid degeneration of his body. And the time he spends with Mika is always short—since he's already dead there's next to no chance of him "living" a normal life with her. Sure he's known as "The Killer Without A Soul"....this troper still wants to hug him. The anime series really makes you just feel sorry for the dual-wielding zombie killing machine.
  • The lack of dialogue makes this highly reliant on Alternate Character Interpretation, but in Yume Nikki, Madotsuki's dreams (which make the entirety of the game) are filled with nightmares that may or may not be indicative of a past involving isolation, gender identity disorder, neglectful or possibly abusive parents, and possibly rape. Any of which may help explain why she refuses to leave her room when awake.
    • Within the dreams themselves, there's Masada, who plays the piano on a spaceship, and generally seems to be very lonely in space, and is completely harmless to the player, and is easily one of the least threatening looking characters in the game. He will also run from you if you equip the knife. Whilst many characters do run from you if you equip the knife, Masada is easily the most obvious in this behavior, and looks terrified when doing so, thus often being assumed to be the only one who does so.
  • Akinari Kamiki from Persona 3 AKA the Dying Young Man social link. Suffering from a terminal illness, poor Akinari just has the strength to wait for you at the bench by the shrine every Sunday. He is so jaded from living in a world where he is destined to die that he suffers from depression, and uses reading and writing as an outlet. He writes a story about a bird and an alligator that starts out happy, then gets sadder and sadder. It has a happy ending as he finishes it just before dying, grateful that the main character was there to support him, and with a renewed feeling of hope in the world.
    • And among the main characters, there's Mitsuru, the ostensible Tall, Dark and Bishoujo leader of SEES. At first she seems to border on an Emotionless Girl, but once you learn about her tragic childhood, her underlying vulnerability and concern for everyone else, and as her current woes continue to pile up, she becomes more and more of a woobie character. Just try not to wish you could hug her whenever she strikes her sideways glancing, clutching one elbow and about to cry pose. Oh, and her dad was killed in front of her and there was nothing she could do to prevent it (she was being crucified that time)
      • Plus there's an offhand comment about her being "forced" into the whole situation with the Shadows and SEES, which doesn't help matters.
    • Fuuka and Ken as well. Fuuka is small, sickly, and frequently bullied. Her low self-esteem and obsession with pleasing people are implied to be the result of emotional abuse by her parents. Ken's mother was killed when Shinjiro lost control of his persona. Ken then dedicated his life to killing Shinjiro, with the intention to commit suicide afterwards. Junpei, who grew up with an alcoholic abusive father, falls in love with a girl who is one of the villains and later dies. Akihiko, an orphan who lost his sister in a fire years ago, causing him to become obsessed with power, thinking that he could protect anyone if he were strong enough. Then his best friend dies.
    • Most of SEES are woobies. Then the PSP remake comes out, and the female route woobifies the last guy you'd expect to be a woobie. Shinjiro Aragaki. While he puts strong front, he's a sentimental and tender guy who worries for others like a distant brother, and is willing to give up his life to fix his mistakes. In the social link he warms up to the heroine (whom he's hinted to have fallen for), and entrust her with protecting SEES. Now that's sweet and all but maxing it out leads to a not so happy conclusion. He goes in a coma, the SEES treat as if he died and move on, and when he does wake up, the girl he loves dies to become a seal. And he's dying too.He also has the distant sideways glance, and when you examine it closely, you realize he's crying. Ouch.
    • Ryoji Mochizuki. Befriends SEES and is a happy-go-lucky Handsome Lech. Then we discover he was brought into existence solely to bring about The Fall on the world that he has come to love thanks to being sealed inside of the Main Character. This forces him to fight his friends (and, in the case of the female protagonist, the girl he loves) in a battle he knows they can't win.
  • Ai Ebihara from Persona 4 goes through a remarkable transformation from Rich Bitch into this should you develop her Social Link far enough. At one point, she asks you to ask her secret crush who he likes; when he identifies your party's tomboyish Genki Girl as the object of his affections, Ai has a breakdown and tries to jump from the rooftop. Calm her down and you'll learn that her haughty attitude is the product of crushing self-esteem issues. She used to be a Gonk until her family came into some money: they moved out into the country and she reinvented herself, but her new attitude only managed to alienate people.
    • After getting through a large percentage of the game this editor just wanted to give Naoto a BIG HUG. Every play through I always make her the Main character's lover.
    • Hello? Naoki is this game's true woobie. As the brother of the first victim, Saki, as if his sister's death was not enough, his neighbors now shower him with unwanted pity, his friends are too sorry for him now to be as close to him, and people in general just treat him differently. Towards the end off the social link, Naoki even considers dropping out of school. It makes it worth maxing out the social link when he thanks the protagonist for hearing him out, and taking the time to hang out with him.
    • Really, a good percentage of the S.Links are good Woobie material. Hisano Kuroda, for example, feels guilty over her husband's death, because before he passed on, he got a crippling disease that afflicted him with amnesia. Thus, he forgot about Hisano every day despite her efforts to take care of him, and she felt the man she loved died the day he got that disease. The pain would make Hisano wish he would die sooner, and her wish was granted, turning her into the depressed and ashamed old woman who calls herself Death.
    • Yumi Ozawa, one of the two possible Sun Links. Her story starts out relatively light, then hits a Drama Bomb when her Disappeared Dad comes back into her life via hospitalization. As her mother drops everything to care for the man who abandoned them for another woman, Yumi is left to pull their household together and cope with her massive amounts of resentment at having to seemingly sacrifice everything for somebody who never seemed to give them a second thought before now. Then she winds up somewhat reconciling with him while he's on his deathbed, as he asks her to live up to her name and 'bear fruit' before passing away.
    • Yosuke is essentially Junpei with a bit more likability and Wobbie material. a guy who is bored with life in a small town. He is often picked on by other girls and is always on the Disproportionate Retribution side of Chie's rage as a result (from physical violence to humiliation). On a more serious side, he often viewed himself as inferior to the main character (Something Junpei never got a chance to voice to Minato in his lack of Social Links) and is the one most heavily hit by the murders as Saki's death gets to him the most when he finds Namatame and Adachi.
    • Hell, how about Namatame? His life was destroyed, his lover was murdered, and the murderer deceived him into thinking he could save the next victims when he was actually putting their lives at risk, framed for the murders he desperately wanted to prevent. When he learns the truth, he is utterly horrified and remorseful.
    • NANAKO DOJIMA. Her mother died when she was very little, and her father has slowly grown more and more distant. She's forced to be very independant, and is very, very lonely. Later, she gets a "big bro" in the form of the protagonist, but as her SL progresses, you find out just how freakin' upset she is when she runs away from home at age seven, and then her father doesn't come to comfort her!! Things are finally looking up at the end of the SL, but then she gets kidnapped, becomes incredibly sick, and DIES. She only comes back if you don't kill Nametame, but she's ill for the rest of the game. The fact that she's The Cutie does not help.
    • Naoto Shirogane's a gifted and famous detective brought in to help solve the murders in Inaba. The problem? Nobody on the force will take Naoto seriously, seeing Naoto as Just a Kid and getting in their way, something that Naoto is very much aware of and frustrated by to the point of desperation. And then there's the gender identity issues she's working through.
  • And Persona 3 and Persona 4 are both a flower-filled meadow in comparison to some of the stuff the Persona 2 cast goes through. That in itself is a pretty sad statement, but given the nature of Atlus's Mega Ten games... The biggest Woobie label goes to Tatsuya and Maya. That's right, the main characters. Why? Play through Innocent Sin, then play through Eternal Punishment [1] But that's not even going into some of the crap the other characters go through.
    • Maya is even getting a comfort-hug on the cover art of Eternal Punishment (by her Persona), and is crying on the manual cover.
    • Also in Eternal Punishment, you get to meet the very same Tatsuya from Innocent Sin and as the game progresses, you learn the shit he went through in the IS timeline. At one point, Maya, being the protagonist, had the option to just shut him up by giving him a Cooldown Hug because it's THAT bad. And it was aww-inducing.
  • And did you think the first game are all happy and sunny? Think... again...
    • Maki Sonomura/Mary. A bedridden girl forced to stay in the hospital near damn everytime with her mother constantly at work, which caused her to hate her mom. Then she's unwittingly used as an experiment which creates another world with herself being split to three, her ideal self joining you and seemingly are honky-dory and cheerful... and when she learns the truth, she's utterly broken and nearly lost her ideals.
    • Kei Nanjou/Nate Trinity is the snotty pragmatic guy who even suggests most of the sadistic choices. But when it comes to it, he's a shining example of Lonely Rich Kid with his butler Yamaoka/Alfred as his constant companion (and embarrasses the hell out of him). Said butler get killed VERY EARLY in the game and Nanjou witnessed his last moments tearfully, made one last promise to be the best there is and made him truly lonely. He's still a snotty jerk in the rest of the game, but a snotty jerk we can feel sorry for, and we know him being snotty and always aiming for the top is the promise he made for his only most treasured person.
  • Name anyone in BlazBlue who's not a Complete Monster and you probably can count most of them as somewhat of a Woobie. Let's see:
    • Ragna the Bloodedge: Getting his beloved sister snatched away, his arm chopped off by a ghost while his little brother only watched in glee, his home burnt down and gotting turned into a half-vampire in a span of one frigging day? Oh, how about when you realize he's destined to destroy the world, get destroyed and repeat the event over and over and over? And at the end of the 2nd game, how about the big reveal that it's his beloved sister who's the Big Bad?
    • Jin Kisaragi: Getting ignored by his big brother? Getting adopted to a family that alienized him and made him an outcast despite his excellent prowess? Is destined to kill his beloved brother so much it drove him crazy? His 'girlfriend' turning evil even though they used to be on good terms previously? Well, he's more of a Jerkass Woobie, though... But still a Woobie.
    • Noel Vermillion: Hoo boy. Let's start with how she's ridiculed for having nearly non-existent breasts. Then, she gets picked on a lot by her superior Jin, because he doesn't like her face... Then she realized that she's a clone of Ragna's sister, thus her memories wasn't hers. As if things couldn't get worse, her best friend Tsubaki gets assigned to kill her, and while she was reluctant at first, she ends up really aiming to kill her due to jealousy. Worse of all? She got Mind Raped by the resident Complete Monster and turned into a weapon of mass-destruction that wants to destroy the world...
    • Rachel Alucard: While she does act like a stuck-up bitch, it was quite depressing that she is forced to watch countless of depressing time loops, unable to do anything directly but to observe, encouraging several people to do the job for her. And when they get out of the loop, there's your Complete Monster trying the damndest to stop her from achieving her goal to set things straight, no matter what...
    • Taokaka: Suffers from Clone Degeneration and, in her Continnum Shift ending in Story Mode, she can't hold her own against Hazama, and it looks like she's not going to survive the fight, at which time she breaks from her usual demeanor and laments that all she wanted to do was protect the village and her friends.
    • Iron Tager: Man died during the war of Ikaruga, got rebuilt as a cyborg by a cranky cat lady (Kokonoe) and must swear loyalty to her and put up with her crazy antics. He also had to watch his friend (Arakune) go crazy, and his other friend (Litchi) go off to save him, but he can't do anything as a friend since he's too duty-bound on his master. When eventually Litchi is forced to take the side of Kokonoe's enemy to save Arakune, Tager is going to have a lot of guilt fighting his friend off.
    • Litchi Faye-Ling: Failed to prevent his friend to become a monster all thanks to experiment, and saw nobody even trying to help him to the point of having to corrupt herself with the thing that turned him into a monster to find a cure, only to find out that she couldn't make progress. In the most needed time, her only source of help just plain refused to help her, and the only option she had was the Complete Monster Troll offering her the cure, an offer she knew have very low chance success, and is Forced Into Evil against her will just so she doesn't turn into a monster and kill everybody... all while the corruption is slowly eating her further... On top of that, if beyond-fourth-wall is to be counted... well, everyone else sees her as a stupid, selfish, no-good bitch. Geez!
    • Arakune: Normally a decent man with inferiority complex... which led him to seek the impossible... and driven mad with it, turned into something really freaky thanks to some tinkering from the resident Complete Monster, and worse of all, he wanted to warn his lover to stop pursuing her and he couldn't get his point straight. Then It Got Worse... he got subdued by your resident Complete Monster Mad Scientist... whom he once thought to be a target to surpass!
    • Bang Shishigami: Had to watch his homeland burn, his master killed and spending his time as an eternal Butt Monkey or The Chew Toy, never to be taken seriously. There's also the fact that he just cannot succeed in earning Litchi's love despite his well-meaning, and will probably be very crushed if he ever realized that she made a Face Heel Turn.
    • Carl Clover: Being the son of the worst father of the universe will do that for ya. Is forced to live as a vigilante at such a young age since his father killed his sister and turned her into Carl's 'imperfect' doll (and his mom too) and became devoid of emotions at that time. While he did find some 'consolation' in form of Litchi, the fact that she made a Face Heel Turn would be a heavy blow for Carl's mentality, since she's the closest he can get for a living sister-figure. And who did that? His father. Again.
    • Tsubaki Yayoi: Starts with getting assigned to assassinate her best friend Noel and her beloved 'brother' Jin. It just got worse when she was told that Noel took everything from her, from her sight, as well as being relegated into a job she hated, since her previous position in life, being Jin's secretary and being on the frontline, got taken by Noel... all while going completely blind.
    • Lambda-11: How would YOU feel if you had your emotions taken away from you and you are now an Empty Shell? Not only that, but no matter what happens to you in your story, you die. These things are also some of the BETTER experiences in Lambda's life. Yeah... It isn't easy being a Murakumo unit, is it?
    • No it is not. See Nu, the emotionless robot girl who was doomed to guard the gate to cauldron in CT. When she meets Ragna, she gains the irratic emotions of a clingy love stricken girl with yandere tendencies, and is one half of the Black Beast, while Ragna is the other half. She wants to love him, but her programming wants to become the Black Beast by fusing with him and becoming complete. After she dies, her parts are used by Kokonoe to rebuild Lambda-11. Oh and there are still more woobies to come.
  • And do we have to mention her too? Oichi in her Sengoku Basara incarnation is the personification of Woobiedom. She is the little sister of Oda Nobunaga, here being a completely demonic Evil Overlord who cares nothing about her and whenever possible, uses her to his own advantage. Marrying justice loving Azai Nagamasa doesn't get her condition better (unless it's his story you're playing) as in her story, he covers her from a shot from Nobunaga, killing him, all in front of her, then Nobunaga forces her to fight his battles, killing his enemies and not even listening to her begging to stop, eventually resulting her falling to her dark powers and enters a murderous rampage on Nobunaga and his allies, and when that's over, she regained her sanity a few moments before the burning temple where she's at fell on and killed her. And in the anime? It's just 5 episodes, and then she gets to see Nagamasa getting riddled on bullets to death thanks to a plot by Mitsuhide right in front of her eyes. Ouch, ouch, and ouch.
    • It's not exactly better for her in the third game, where she's a Humanoid Abomination that's barely aware of her surroundings and is treated with fear and contempt by almost every other character save for a few. While she does get a Throw the Dog a Bone moment if she ends up following Ieyasu (who decides to be her caretaker), the storyline where she ends up becoming Yoshitsugu's attack dog is not all that different from the above. The path where she defeats her brother and drags him to hell could be seen as better in that it's the ending where they both find some sort of peace.
  • Sakura of Fate/stay night. She also happens to turn into a more vindictive state out of insecurity and jealousy of her sister. There are several other somewhat less drastic cases like Ilya as well. Even Archer is of the more destructive variant when you realize his backstory, motives and identity.
  • Alex Roivas from Eternal Darkness. She spends the entire game thrown into a battle she never expected and reliving the nightmarish horrors of her ancestors, up to and including her grandfather's brutal murder. And this was after losing her parents in a car accident, a fact Pious uses against her during select bouts of insanity.
    • And she doesn't even hold a candle to some of the other decent, normal people thrust into a living nightmare by the Ancients. What about Ellia, who only wanted some excitement in her life and ended up killed for it, not allowed to just die but instead turned into a defenseless brand of undead by the fact that only about ten minutes ago she'd been forced to place an enchanted artifact, one of the necessary items to prevent a future apocalypse, until someone else found her a millennium later and she was finally able to pass it on? Or better yet Anthony, whose only goal was to serve his king and got a vital chance to do that after getting cursed by a scroll he was meant to deliver to him and fighting to warn him about treachery only to find out that he wouldn't be allowed to do so unless he took the most drawn-out, inconvenient route possible, gradually turning into a zombie as he went, and after completing that, finding out that he was too late and that the king was already dead? And even that wasn't the end of it. After failing his only goal, his curse kept him undead for hundreds of years to come, locked all alone in one small, disused room to dwell on that until Paul finally comes along to put him out of his misery. Brr.
      • Alex & Ellia still succeeded in their missions, & Anthony's soul eventually found rest once Paul performed rites on him. In fact, with one exception, all of the characters succeed, die, or both. That one exception is the biggest (literally) woobie in the game, Max Roivas, who is attacked by the possessed servants of the cursed mansion he just inherited from his father who died fighting the Darkness. Max is forced to kill all of his servants after discovering the ancient city full of monsters beneath his home, not knowing how many of them were actually possessed (some weren't). After trying to get help in attacking the monsters and the discovery of the murdered servants, he is thrown into an asylum for his trouble, where he spends the rest of his life having to wallow in his madness and in the sorrow of his own failure.
  • Schiele from Romancing SaGa Living among humans for centuries and witnessing their deaths, also having to hear her accounts of the ignorance of said humans; also being the bearer of one Cosmic Keystone makes her Blessed with Suck since the Big Bad wants it. Said Cosmic Keystone is also a Restraining Bolt to keep her dark magic sealed away, also after she loses that Restraining Bolt she asks you to kill her to prevent her powers from being used for evil purposes. If that does not qualify as Woobie-class material than what does?
  • The Touhou Project has several woobies among its ranks:
    • Hong Meiling's popularity is mainly due to how badly she's treated by the main cast, especially Sakuya. On top of that, people keep calling her China.
    • Cirno is a bit cocky in the earlier games, but is often mistreated and ridiculed, partly because she's a fairy. A particular example occurs in Unthinkable Natural Law, in which Cirno is significantly less cocky and more intelligent than in previous games. While looking for the Daidarabotchi, Cirno asks Marisa is she's seen anything, and Marisa tells her she's seen what she's looking for, but won't tell her because she's a fairy. This results in a fight between the two, which Cirno wins. Afterward, Cirno rightfully demands Marisa tell her where the Daidarabotchi, to which Marisa purposefully misleads her into a boiler that nearly gets her killed.
    • Reisen Inaba's woobie-ness is often played for comedy in fanon. In canon, she's also subject to lots of Punishment Time by Eirin, and constantly gets pranked by Tewi.
    • Kogasa Tatara is an unwanted umbrella who can't even use her powers to surprise people properly, and is often subject to bullying by Sanae.
    • In their own way, the Aki Sisters are also woobies in a few ways - to wit, they don't have as much faith as they used to have in the old days, so their powers are diminished; due to their comparatively smaller fanbase in proportion to the more popular characters, they're often forgotten; and then there's S Complex, which plays up Shizuha's woobieness to a heart-breaking degree.
    • And then there's the poor girl who Yuyuko Saigyouji was when she was alive, whose powers over death were too much for her to take, and were enough to drive her to suicide.
    • Alice Margatroid is a very lonely girl with no one but her dolls to keep her company (not that it bothers her that much). Little wonder she's often paired with Marisa.
      • Being with Marisa is probably worse, though.
    • From the PC-98 Era you have Kana Anaberal, a poltergeist created from the mind of an insane human and was forgotten by her creator.
    • Byakuren Hijiri used to be a Youkai exterminator, but grew to love her quarry as much as the humans she was protecting, so she started covertly helping them hide away safely instead of killing them. She ended up imprisoned in Makai for more than a millenium for her troubles. Oh yeah, and her little brother died too.
    • Fujiwara no Mokou certainly counts. Her father was humiliated by Kaguya, and she wound up stealing the Hourai Elixir (and in the process, murdering someone who'd previously saved her life) and became completely incapable of dying. She's unable to exact her desired revenge because her rival is also immortal, and basically the only friend she's ever really had is a mortal half-beast... and she still gets picked on by the main characters in the Extra stage.
    • And of course, there is the Absolute Grand Champion of Touhou Woobies, Flandre Scarlet, a little girl with immense destructive powers she can't control in the slightest, so her older sister Remilia, whom Flandre loves with all her heart, locks her in the basement. For five hundred years (and counting). Expectedly, she not only still has the mind of a child but her grip on reality has been completely shattered, only wanting to play but barely even recognising that those she plays with tend to break rather easily. And she doesn't even get to do that, as no-one aside from Remilia wants anything to do with her, with even Marisa, who has fought gods and demons with irreverence, avoiding her entirely. She is the ultimate Woobie, as any attempt by anyone to give her a hug will most probably result in their death.
  • Frog/Glenn from Chrono Trigger has been through a lot, with the transformation to a frog and all, yet he handles it with as much chivalry and honor as he can. Somebody give him a hug.
    • Not to mention Robo. Beaten up by his "brothers", forced to kill his brainwashed girlfriend, committing final genocide on his "species"...

Robo: All of the operations of this dome have been shut down for good. None of these machines will... will ever be reactivated.

  • Saria from Ocarina of Time tends to get the woobie treatment quite handily from the fandom, what with being an Unlucky Childhood Friend who "really liked" Link but couldn't grow up along with him due to being a Kokiri, as well as having to spend the seven years that Link spent in the Sacred Realm having to deal with a Jerkass who hated his guts and blamed him for what happened to the Great Deku Tree. And that's not even mentioning the fan speculation that she, along with the other five Sages, died in the process of trying to deal with the evil that had taken hold of the temples.
    • It's possible the sheer popularity and fangirl following that Byrne gets in Spirit Tracks is down to this trope - he's easily the game's resident badass, but after getting betrayed by Malladus and Cole, his subsequent Heel Face Turn, spending the rest of the game injured, and his eventual sacrifice to save Zelda, he's well on the way to being considered an all-out woobie.
    • Zelda in Twilight Princess, for various reasons.
      • Let's not forget about Midna. She's gets turned into an imp, thrown from her rightful place as ruler by a crazed ex-servant, nearly killed by said ex-servant early in the game, feels personally responsible for much of what happened to Hyrule, then gets transformed into a rather nasty-looking critter by the Fused Shadows multiple times (something that looked remarkably unpleasant, what with getting tossed into walls and whatnot when she puts them on) suffers a Disney Death near the endgame AND tearfully departs from the realm of light forever, breaking the Mirror of Twilight behind her while clearly still being rather attached to Link, so that Hyrule will never suffer for any potential wrongdoing her people may commit again.
    • Lulu - along with the Deku Kid, one half of the personified proof that the worst part of the already in-many-ways unsettling Majora's Mask is everything they don't actually tell you.
    • Heck even Link can qualify at times. OoT/MM most definitely. To wit, as a kid he witnessed his mentor figure die and sets off on adventure to save Hyrule. It's all fun and games until he has to go into a Time Skip and find that Hyrule is under control of Ganon. Saves the day but thanks to Zelda, gets sent back in time to live as a kid again but thanks to what he's seen, how could he? Majora's Mask sends him through a mental torture session all for trying to find a friend he lost. And if he IS the Hero's Spirit in Twilight Princess...
      • Wind Waker. Link is about twelve. The game starts with his little sister getting kidnapped and just gets worse from there. And at the end, he doesn't even get to stay with the sister he worked so hard to rescue! He leaves to find a new land. Fuck you, King Daphnes.
      • And also when you think about what he's actually doing. Most of the time, he's got the burden of saving the whole world by himself. Once you start to think about that... it's a lonely job! You have to feel sorry for him!
        • Link is sisteen. Stated ingame.
  • Prince Tolten from Lost Odyssey.
    • Everyone from Lost Odyssey.
  • April Ryan from The Longest Journey. She grew up in a broken home, ran away as soon as she legally could, and is accepted to a prestigious art school... only to find out that she's one of a select few people who can open gates between the two worlds, and must now save the world. By becoming the Guardian of the Balance for a thousand years or so. The quest takes her across both worlds, where she accidentally sinks a ship, traps an evil alchemist in a calculator, loses both of her mentors, watches her best friend get shot, is betrayed several times, and generally moves Heaven and Earth (both of them) to make things right... Only to then find out that she's not really the Guardian after all, and basically went through all that for someone else. It's no wonder she's so messed up in the sequel.
  • Nina from Breath of Fire Dragon Quarter. Whereas Nina is usually a princess in the Breath of Fire games, in this one she is a genetically altered orphan, designed to act as an air filtration unit (The poisoned air, of course, remains in her body), who had her tongue cut out. Dragon Quarter is not a happy game.
  • Trauma Center is essentially a medical drama, so characters of this type are to be expected to an extent, but Emilio Juarez is the biggest Woobie of them all - he was orphaned as a child, then kidnapped and used as a lab rat by a bio-terrorist organization developing Body Horrors until Derek came to said organization's base and surgically wiping out the ones that he was basically being used as a living habitat for when he was fourteen. Three years later, probably in a delicate physical state after all that to begin with, he gets sick from the aftermath of his Body Horror infection and needs two more surgeries, one of which is an organ transplant. And, wouldn't you know it, while he's convalescing in the hospital for what looks like finally the last time, cue another mass outbreak of parasites in which he, of course, gets infected, and dies - because he insisted that Derek operate on his nurse before him. Oh, and did I mention that he's really rather adorable, in a waif-y sort of way?
  • Dana Mercer from Prototype. She is the only major character who is not evil or twisted (Ragland might count too). In her first scene, some Blackwatch asshole is about to blow her brains out. Alex saves her by punching through the guy's head right next to her. Things don't get any better for her. She finds out her brother has become a viral monster, she later finds out he eats people, and then she gets kidnapped by a Leader Hunter and taken to Elizabeth Greene, who does God knows what to her that renders her comatose (possibly Infected?). It gets even worse after The Reveal that the real Alex Mercer is dead and that he was the one who unleashed the Blacklight Virus in the first place. Not only is her brother actually dead, but the fact that he released the Virus knowing his sister was still in the city means that he didn't really care about her. At least the Blacklight Virus itself cares a great deal about her.
  • Several from Chibi-Robo!. Welcome to the Island of Misfit Toys.
    • Sophie is a Chew Toy, literally (for Tao, the family dog) and figuratively, whose subplot revolves around her obsession with Drake Redcrest. Long story short, it never goes anywhere beyond her passing out apparently dead from sheer joy at simply (and accidentally) giving him one of the love letters she writes.
    • Mort might be the biggest Woobie of the game. He's a perpetually melancholy mummy action figure who is in love with a princess doll. The object of his affections, sadly, scares easily, and so he's afraid of introducing himself to her on account of his grotesque appearance, and the flowers he picks to anonymously offer her wilt as soon as he touches them. Seeing him watching Drake appearing out of nowhere to try to woo her at sudden moments is enough to make the player wish for a Paragon interrupt - though there's a delightfully happy ending for him once his subplot is followed through on.
    • Sunshine the teddy bear has a very Does This Remind You of Anything? addiction to flower nectar and massive, uncontrollable withdrawal fits that turn him from perfectly cuddly to a Killer Rabbit.
    • The pleasantly bubbleheaded, lives-to-dance Funky Phil averts this. His admirer Dinah and not exactly acknowledged son Freaky Phil... not so much. To say the least, something always seems to come up to disturb the former's peace of mind, usually related to Phil, and as for the latter, he's the odd one out of his siblings, seems to be a little stupid, is somewhat implied to start off as not much of a dancer, and accidentally "kills" his father, and his body language after Dinah finds him dead and asks the kids what happened suggests that he knows it was his fault. Though he's eventually revealed to be fine, in a rather hilarious fashion.
    • Giga-Robo and the aliens... don't get me started.
  • Aeka of Yume Miru Kusuri is the least popular girl at her school. The Alpha Bitch and her friends torment her constantly, humiliating her and attacking her with tasers. Her classmates refuse to get involved, the teacher ignores everything, and the main character's love for her is the only thing keeping her from committing suicide.
  • Aribeth de Tylmarande in Neverwinter Nights after the end of the first chapter, as her faith in her ideals and her trust in almost everyone is shaken or destroyed by Fenthick's execution. Possibly even more so in Hordes of the Underdark, after being executed for trying to pursue justice, and then being imprisoned as an icicle after attempting to lead a revolt against the archdevil in charge of the level of hell she was trapped in.
    • In the realm of fan-created modules, Alexandra de Velan of the Bastard of Kosigan series. Her lover was exiled, and she entered into a relationship with another man afterwards who had her beated until she miscarried once he discovered she was pregnant. Also an example of Beware the Nice Ones.
    • The player character in A Dance With Rogues, also known as "How much more screwed up can this girl's life get?"
    • Evanine and Persey of Tales of Arterra, the first a princess whose family was killed and who was forced onto the run by a stereotypical evil uncle, the second a succubus sold to a mortal who used her as the star attraction in a brothel and possessed of little or no concept of self-worth.
      • Persey's owner prior to that was even worse, an archmage who fell madly in "love" with her at first sight. He would alternate between madly worshipping her as the most precious thing in the world, and beating her severely for making him feel that way. The best thing he ever did to her was selling her to the aforementioned brothel owner, so she could get away from him finally.
    • Robin in Sanctum of the Archmage is something of an Iron Woobie, who has had to watch his/her entire family destroyed and his/her country taken over and oppressed, and who states more than once that if he/she lets go of his/her anger he/she won't have the strength to carry on. Also the player character, whose entire town was destroyed by demons in the prologue and whose surrogate father figure was killed by demons at the start of the opening chapter.
  • Knights of the Old Republic has Carth Onasi, who watched his wife and son die in an orbital bombardment ordered by a man who he had once counted a friend, and who he could have stopped earlier if he had believed that his old commander would actually turn traitor.
    • Actually, Carth's son Dustil is alive, but it gets worse because Dustil not only hates Carth and blames him for his mother's death, but he has joined the freaking Sith (you know, the people who actually killed his mother) and blindly defends them! You can help Carth and Dustil reconcile, but still...
    • Bastila becomes one during the endgame, after her shell is completely stripped away.
  • Mass Effect has a couple of potential woobies, or at least, as close as you can get to a woobie in Mass Effect:
    • Shepard, depending on his/her background, could have watched his/her parents die in a slaver raid, been an orphan raised on the streets, and/or the sole survivor of his/her previous squad. And the side-quests related to them are suitably traumatic. This doesn't list all the less then desirable outcomes of quests. Sheperd can also lose his/her love interest to an atomic bomb, although it's technically his/her fault. S/he's also treated as if she's nuts or lying by his/her superiors and in the second game, no matter how noble his/her intentions are, they AND some of his/her closet friends want nothing to do with him/her after s/he was forced to reluctantly work for a terrorist organization for the greater good.
      • Recently Shepard was forced to make a decision that destroyed an entire solar system and killed over 300,000 batarians. Even though s/he really had no choice, Admiral Hackett (who still shows support) tells him/her that s/he will have to face murder charges back on Earth to attempt to appease the batarians.
      • The third game ups Shepard's woobie factor a thousand fold. When others are not dying\killing themselves in front of him\her, or condemning him\her for what s\he's done, they're trying to tell Shepard everything will be alright. At the end, when the Alliance still calls on Shepard, s\he is just so tired, beaten, bruised, and probably bleeding to death and this is before having to make the ultimate choice and sacrifice to determine the fate of the galaxy.
    • Ashley Williams is constantly screwed by the higher ups because her Grandfather was the Commander at the Shanxi defeat. She also sees her entire unit slaughtered by the Geth. She can also die in an atomic explosion as a result of a decision by her potential love interest, or be saved only to be dumped for an asari.
    • Kaidan Alenko. Due to his biotic potential, men in suits show up at at his door after school and take him to Jump Zero (near Pluto) to have his Training from Hell. He accidentally kills his turian instructor (who pulled a knife on him), which in turn makes his then love interest terrified of him. He also has the L2 biotic implant, which gives him severe migraines, and it can potentially give him the crazy, and the game regularly reminds us that L2s and biotics in general are mistreated. And to cap it all, he too can become at one with the atom thanks to Shepard. Oddly, despite this, he's one of the more level headed squad members.
    • The sequel really ups Tali's woobie factor. She finds her father dead at the same time she finds out he was doing illegal experiments on Geth, making him a war criminal against the quarians. And unless you do some fast talking during her trial, she potentially could be exiled forever from the one home she's ever known. Not to mention that, if you pursue her romance path, several conversation options imply that she's had feelings for Shepard since the events of Mass Effect 1 two years ago. With all this, is it any surprise that one of the Paragon interrupts is to give her a comforting hug and let her cry in your arms? (Very nice of BioWare to put this in, considering that is exactly what a person would want to do when confronted with a Woobie. Now you finally have the option to do it in-game.)
      • Some consider the entire Quarian race as Woobies, considering the treatment they get and their involuntary vagrancy.
        • Quarian woobieness is subverted to some extent by their treatment of the Geth, explained by Legion. The actions of the Admiralty subvert it further and Tali loses a little of her own during her confrontation with Legion, depending on the outcome. Ironically, Legion gains a certain amount of woobieness because of seeming feelings of hero-worship for Shepard.

Legion: "There was a hole."

    • Jack in the sequel proves to be this in her personal mission, where you two return to the facility where she was experimented on. The mission ends with her reminiscing about the items in her cell, each a reminder of the hell she went through.
    • Where the hell is Thane? I mean, yes he's a Badass, but he's dying of an incurable disease, had his wife killed by thugs trying to get back at him, and his son hates him as a result. You can fix the last part, but still.
    • Liara. Let's see - she was born as a result of two asari mating, a major social no-no to her species and therefore ostracised and exposed to racism. She is very shy and asocial and became an archaeologist, spending half of her life alone on dig sites. She was always distant from her mother, even before Benezia joined up with Saren, and it's possible for Liara to witness her mother die as herself, after the revelation that she had been brainwashed through indoctrination, with her mother comforting Liara during her period of lucidity. In the second game, when reuniting with her, she seems to have gone through a major Break the Cutie event and has an almost obsessive vendetta against the Shadow Broker. However, if she is a love interest from the first game and through the comic series "Redemption", it is revealed that she was the one who recovered Shepard's body from the Shadow Broker, who was going to sell the corpse to the Collectors, and gave it to Cerberus so they could rebuild him/her. Liara discards her new ruthless personality, revealing it to be nothing more than a facade, to explain that she was scared Shepard would hate her for this, knowing that Cerebus would use Shepard for their own uses, but she couldn't bear to let Shepard go. The lengths she went to in order to help the man/woman she loves, cares about and misses are quite touching.
    • What about Garrus? In the sequel, his entire freelance squad on Omega is slaughtered by one of their own members, he spends a long time besieged by the mercenaries and criminals he fights with what very well may be the rotting corpses of his friends tied down under sheets, he's brutally wounded by a missile that Shepard takes down, and apparently has nightmares about his squad. Even the yeoman Kelly says she'd just like to hold him and say everything's alright.
      • Don't forget the Shadow Broker's files on him. His mother is dying, and his sister thinks he's a bum because she has no idea what he's really been up to all this time. The silver lining is that he's at least taken some steps toward that on his own, albeit with some help from Mordin...
    • Aw hell, just go read the cast page, it'll be quicker. I don't know what the original poster was on: 'close as you can get to a woobie'? It's more accurate to describe a few (rare) characters as being 'as close as you can get to well-adjusted'.
    • About 90% of these characters, such as Shepard, Garrus, etc. could also be listed under Iron Woobie, as their Woobieness does not make them any less Badass.
    • Even minor, secondary characters get this. Take the nameless tank-bred krogan on Korlus. He's been alive for seven days. All he knows is how to fight, and his entire life consists of one thing: stand where you meet him, kill anyone who attacks him, and wait. That's it. He talks like a child and expresses his thoughts with complete innocence, but he's devoted entirely to the "purpose" he's been given - which was given to him by an insane krogan warlord who has discarded him as a failure. He refuses to move, instead just standing there until he either starves or the Blue Suns kill him. And the worst part is that you never get to see the poor guy's face, probably because if you did it would make the scene even more heartrending.
    • Minor character Talitha is composed of pure elemental Woobie. She was kidnapped at the age of six in the same raid that killed Shepard's parents (after witnessing her parents being incinerated), and then spent the last 13 years as a slave. To top it all off, she's one of the few Woobies in video games you actually get to comfort - do the "I Remember Me" assignment right, and you end up holding her, telling her that everything will be all right as a sedative takes effect. And you aren't lying.
      • If you helped her in the first game, Talitha sends you a message in the sequel, thanking you for helping her and telling you that she's undergoing proper treatment.
    • The volus you meet on Noveria that suffers from Survivor Guilt - the second game doesn't make it any better, as his letter mentions that "maybe I was the one who died instead, while saving her."
    • Remarkably, the Collector General at the end of the second game comes across as one, as Harbinger releases his mental control and the bug-alien looks around with an air of quiet resignation as the base explodes around him.
    • Vigil, the Prothean VI. After hearing its story, it feels good to know that by meeting you and passing on information about the Reapers, the sacrifice it had to make (turning off the remaining Protheans' cryogenic pods, in order to conserve power so the head scientists pods could stay active as long as possible, as per contingency plans set up by the Protheans themselves) was not in vain.
    • Protheans in general, although all the pre-Protheans also qualify.
    • David Archer in the Overlord DLC for Mass Effect 2. He was born with autism and forcefully turned into a machine by his own brother and driven insane from it.
  • Reese Worthington of Backyard Sports. Tortured just for being a massive nerd.
  • In Baten Kaitos, it's only the power of love that stops Kalas from becoming a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds. I mean, yikes, murdered little brother and grandfather, I'd have snapped too. Also Lyude, especially at the Phantom Goldoba, where all his past insecurities come back to break him down HARD. And then, to an extent, there's Xelha. She carries the ocean inside her, so when the group finally saves the world, she has to release that ocean back into the world. As in, she must sacrifice herself. She gets better, but still...that must be a huge burden for a 17-year-old young woman.
  • The schoolteacher Westin Phipps assigns you to torture in City of Heroes.
  • Mir from Ar tonelico. She was kept in solitary, stripped of her emotions, and forced to create Song Magic for use in battle-- and when she created a song that was just to express her love of and hope for humans, since the synapses that they stripped to make her emotionless grew back, the song was trashed and she was discarded as a failed project.
    • Quite frankly, almost all the girls from the Ar Tonelico series have MAJOR issues. There's a reason their suppressed consciousness reacts hostilely (aka, trying to kill) to any signs of attachment or affection. Ar Tonelico 3, however, gives Finnel special mention. The voice acting for her level 9 Dive is just....potent enough to punch a whole through the heart.
  • In the Quest for Glory series of games, theres Julanar in the second game, a woman who, because she wanted to be a healer, a profession forbidden to women, was exploited and captured and abused by brigands, who she escaped from by running through the desert and pleading to a djinn for help, who did so by turning her into a tree. The hero can help her remember her humanity, but it is said that she will not be able to turn back into a human until someone comes along who can love her enough, and that someone is not you. Although later in the series this subplot becomes a Crowning Moment of Heartwarming, as after telling someone about her in the third game, you later meet him again in the fifth game, alongside the restored Julanar, who is now his wife.
    • And in the fourth game you learn what happened to Erana, the powerful mage and Friend to All Living Things whose work you have seen throughout the series. She ended up attempting to seal an Eldritch Abomination by trapping herself with it, damning herself to eternal suffering. The hero dreams about her pain if he rests near her staff in the town or in her garden at night. In the fifth game, you can choose to bring her back from the land of the dead.
    • Also in the fourth game is Tanya, a little vampire girl who just misses her parents and doesn't seem to realize why she can't come back to them as "they would be afraid of her now."
  • Left 4 Dead: The Witch just wants a hug... Or she's just a wangsty psychopath who tears peoples' faces off.
  • Most of the splicers in BioShock (series), particularly Rosebud, whose daughter was taken away to become a Little Sister; Pigskin, who is deathly afraid of what will happen to him if Mr. Ryan isn't pleased; and Toasty, who is loved by no one.
    • Eleanor Lamb in the sequel. An innocent girl raised to become the socialist Messiah by her mother Sofia Lamb, the first cutscene witnesses her seeing mummy forcing Delta, her Big Daddy to shoot himself at around the age of eight. Subject to multiple Plasmid experiments since she's immune to the side-effects of splicing. To say Sofia cares little about her as a person is something of an understatement as she's later smothered in order to mess with Delta.
  • Samus Aran is a 6'3" (in armor) trigger happy bounty hunter who defines Badass. Why might she be on the list? Her parents were killed when she was 3, with her dad dying in a Heroic Sacrifice and her mom being eaten by Ridley, and was adopted by the bird-like Chozo only for them to be possibly wiped out. To make matters worse, the guy who killed her mother, Ridley, just won't die, and attacks another colony she is on, forcing her to relive the murder of her mother. When she mentally and emotionally shuts down and begs for death, you want to hug her. More than normal, that is.
    • Perhaps this is more an instance of a literal Iron Woobie.
    • Let's not forget about Metroid Prime 3, where Samus quickly strikes up a kinship with three fellow bounty hunters only for them to go missing by the time she's out in the field, having been overloaded with Phazon and controlled by Dark Samus, forcing Samus to Mercy Kill all three of them as Dark Samus escapes (all the while mocking Sammy's pain with an Evil Laugh). Or the baby Metroid that formed a bond with Samus in Super, designating Samus as its mother and then sacrificing itself to save Samus at the climax of the game, inducing a Mama Bear Tranquil Fury asskicking of Mother Brain from Samus. Or, her losing both Malkovich brothers by the time Other M comes to a close, her only keepsake of Adam being his helmet (which Samus thrusts herself headfirst into danger to recover and clings to desperately) and a CPU copy of his brainwaves. In fact, if you do some analysis on the events of Super, Other M (regardless of your feelings on the matter), and Fusion, it's not hard to view Samus as a Knight in Sour Armor afflicted with PTSD who is trying to recover from a string of Heroic BSODs and is this close to becoming a Death Seeker.
  • And in second place in the Action Girl compartment we have Aya Brea. Just watch her crumble in the trailer for The 3rd Birthday, and join the Give-poor-Aya-a-break-already-she-has-experienced-her-share-of-Eldrich-Abominations movement.
    • To be fair, Aya is pretty strong to cope up with her woobie-ness. But then, we have Eve. Created as a clone of Aya and kept in a facility at a very young age to control mitochondria creatures against her will. Check. And in The 3rd Birthday, poor Eve witnessed Aya got killed in the middle of her supposedly happy wedding, wished only to save her, but instead put her soul into Aya's body and resulting the birth of two kinds of Eldritch Abomination. Check. Lost her memories because of the incident and manipulated by the Big Bad with it. Check. People who help her during the game had to die because one of the Abominations habituating in their bodies. Check. Finally by help with Time Travel she is forced to kill Aya to prevent all the incident from happening. And most of the gameplay you are forced to hear her wail or cry, or seeing her looking confused and lonely. Girl needs a terrible big hug.
  • Klonoa. So very much. A sweet, innocent young boy, he gets dragged into a desperate struggle to save the world through no fault of his own, is hunted relentlessly by the villains. watches his grandfather die in his arms after having his house blown up by The Dragon (the original "Phantomile" voice acting makes Klonoa sound really traumatized), discovers that he is a "dream traveler" destined to drift from world to world, being forced to save them from evil and losing any friends or other loved ones he encounters every single time. It isn't even so much the game itself so much as the extremely depressing Fridge Logic when you realize that he is doomed to a life of eternal suffering and loneliness, and is powerless to do anything about it.
  • Cubone is pretty much the Woobie Pokémon. When a Cubone is born, the mother dies, and a Cubone then takes her skull and wears it. (Okay that's creepy at the same time, but still.) Cubone never shows its face to anyone, cries any time there's a moon at night, and the skull is stained with its tears. Poor little guy.
  • Heavy Rain. Oh man, where do you start? Half the cast deserves to get a hug after the crap they put up with in this game:
    • Ethan Mars. Goddamn, this game puts the poor guy through the wringer. The idyllic life portrayed in the prologue is shattered when his son, Jason, is hit by a car. Then, depending on the decisions you make, Ethan can either be run over by a truck, caught by the police (during which he has to escape), get into a car accident, break two ribs and have his ex-wife accuse him of being the Origami Killer. This is aside from all the character's mandatory plot missions, which include crawling through glass, jumping through electrical transformers, running from the law and cutting off his own finger. Is it any wonder that the ultra-happy endings for his character involve him reunited with his family (and, if you save Madison, a better wife)?
    • Madison Paige. It really says something about a character when her first scene (albeit a dream sequence) has her getting attacked and murdered by four knife-wielding assailants...and it only goes downhill from there, as (depending on the choices you make) you'll become a part of a fugitive's escape plan, get caught by a doctor who plans on using you for practice surgery, and are forced to strip at gunpoint in order to beat up a pimp. If you (and not Ethan) survive, you'll find out that Madison's delusions have gotten worse, and it's only a matter of time before she goes insane...
    • Lauren, the mother who decides to help PI Shelby. If she doesn't die after being knocked unconscious and thrown into the lake with Shelby in a sinking car, she'll eventually learn that Shelby was the Origami Killer, and either spits on his grave or shoots him dead in the street after he thinks he's gotten away scot-free.
    • Norman Jayden may have it easy compared to Ethan, but still, he's the cast Chew Toy - he's a stessed-out profiler stuck working to get to the bottom of a case in time to save a kid's life on a force that doesn't respect him and has him partnered with Lieutenant Carter Blake under mutual hatred, and very regularly ends up getting the crap beaten out of him or put in life-threatening situations by the leads he finds to he point that he lampshades it at Blue Lagoon if you stop to read his thoughts. If Ethan gets arrested, Norman can take a chance to give Blake what he's been begging for, which is responded to with Blake holding him at gunpoint. On top of all of that, all the while he's developing an addiction to the ARI glasses he uses almost every chapter though they're also slowly killing him, and uses triptocaine, potentially not much better, to relieve their side effects. It'd be nice to say his life could be made any easier, but he doesn't have a single happy ending.
  • Everyone in the Fatal Frame series.
    • Yes, even the hostile ghosts. One notable example is Chitose Tachibana from the second game. After one of her brothers is killed as a sacrifice, she watches the remaining brother fall into depression. Then the Darkness comes, and she's alone, terrified, and screaming for her brothers to help her. She spends most of the game running away from you and hiding in closets and the like, and when you finally catch up to her, she whimpers and sobs in terror throughout the ensuing fight. Poor girl...
  • Several characters from .hack series.
    • Elk from R1 games. His only friend, Mia, turns out to be one of the Eight Phases of Morganna, forcing him to fight against her. You can bring her back to the game in the Bonus Dungeon, but she gets destroyed anyway along with the rest of The World during the disaster before R2. When Elk, now known as Endrance, thinks he is finally reunited with her in form of a cat, said cat turns out to be AIDA, and he has to watch her disintegrates as you defeat him. Ouch.
    • Atoli from R2, whose entire life has her gets kicked by (almost) everyone, including her own parents. And then Volume 2 happens...
    • Bo, also from R2. Being an Ill Boy in real life, it frustrates his parents to the point his mother wished that his stillborn twin sister Sakura was the one who lived instead. This leads him to create alternate personality based on his sister, Saku. The kid has his life rough.
    • Angela of Altena from Seiken Densetsu III. Yeah she acts like a brat but you also realize that she was neglected by her mother for years and most of those were because Koren was controlling her mother Valda. Plus the beginning of the game Her own mother tries to kill her in order to obtain more power, though that was also because Koren was controlling her. Plus right after that she wakes up in a house and almost cries when she sees a loving mother with her daughter. Someone give this woman a hug!
  • Fire Emblem has at least one Woobie per game.
    • The Dark Dragon and The Sword of Light/Monshou no Nazo/Shadow Dragon: Chiki, Kashim, Maria, Nina, Yumina, Yubello.
    • Seisen no Keifu: Azel, Midayle, Tinny. Tiltyu after the events between the first and second halves.
    • Fuuin no Tsurugi: Wolt, Lugh, Rei, Sophia, Fa and post-game!Idoun
    • Rekka no Ken has a LOT: Lucius, Nino, Erk, Ninian, Nils, Eliwood, Florina, Guy, Kishuna.
    • The Sacred Stones: Myrrh, Artur, Neimi, Amelia.
      • You forgot Selena Fluorspar, a general madly in love with the unholy reincarnation of her emperor when your party faces her she only follows orders because even though she knows he's different ((Myrrh even goes to her to explain it and Selena lets her go despite her probably making a good hostage which any of the other head generals would've done)) she's still loyal to him. When your main character tries to talk her down and get her to surrender she blatently refuses, being so loyal to her emporer that even though she know he's not himself she fights for him anyways. All due to the fact that her village was starving and hungry and was considering theft in order to survive before the emporer sent supplies to the village as aide.
    • Path of Radiance: Soren, Ilyana, Mist, Elincia, Reyson
    • Radiant Dawn: Pelleas
  • Kaori Yae of Tokimeki Memorial 2, very much so. The girl is so deeply hurt, depressed and completely closed to others after the cruel Break the Cutie moment she endured before the protagonist meets her, it's incredible that her parents haven't took her to a psychiatrist already. Seeing her gradually coming back to her former self through patient affection and care from the protagonist, thus turning her into a walking factory of Crowning Moments Of Heartwarming (and conversely, a powerful source of Player Punch if you fail to put her out of her Heroic BSOD), is what made her, with good reason, the absolute Ensemble Darkhorse of this game.
  • Think that Kaori Yae had it bad? That's nothing compared to the crap endured by Sophia Robelingue, the gentle and sweet heroine of Mitsumete Knight, one of the Spiritual Successors of the Tokimeki Memorial series. Let's see :
  • Alyx Vance of Half-Life 2 has had it rough. When she was about three, aliens invaded Earth and killed her mother. She's spent all her life in the Resistance, fighting an Orwellian regime. In Half-Life 2, she has had her father captured, almost freed him only for a traitor to grab him, then get captured again when she tries to free him again. She is forced to reenter the Citadel to delay its impending explosion, had a train derail on her and dump her into a zombie-infested underground complex, then had to fight through a war-torn city to reach a train station. Then she is mortally wounded, revived and used to deliver a cryptic message to her father, then forced to watch him die horribly. Depending on events in Episode Three, that last one might have been a case of Break the Cutie.
    • And of course, she is clearly smitten with Gordon Freeman, who won't talk to her.
      • Hey it's not his fault.
    • The fact that Alyx Vance is still a functioning human being after all this is a wonder.
    • This song increases Gordon Freeman's Woobieness hundredfold.
    • Awwww, come on, Gordon's a Woobie! Look at him, the poor guy. He's just going to work like any other theoretical physicist when his entire workplace explodes, all of his coworkers die, and he's forced to battle his way up to the surface, where he has to face down trained soldiers, finally teleporting to another world so he can kill more stuff. And at the end of the day, does this hardworking scientist get a break? Nooo, he gets put into stasis for, like, twenty years, and then rewoken purely to defeat a new regime. He meets a girl that I insist he falls in love with and can't even tell her, has to fight for a resistance that he was never part of and has no reason to actually help, and basically finds out in the end he was just being manipulated by a mysterious entity that won't even reveal what on earth is going on. Oh, and after he escapes the mysterious entity's control, he still isn't his own man, because now the Vortigaunts control him. For someone with the last name "free man", he spends most of it under someone else's control. The poor guy's life completely sucks.
  • Warcraft's Jaina Proudmoore deserves a mention here. From her first appearance in Warcraft 3 her life has been a litany of tragic events, starting with the corruption of her former lover Arthas into evil, then the destruction of her home, and then finally, after learning that the Horde had reformed from its former monstrous incarnation, being forced to fight against her own warmongering father to preserve peace. And her other old friend, Prince Kael'thas, then turns up as leader of the Blood Elves. Despite her heroism at the Battle Of Mount Hyjal, helping to literally save the world, the Alliance continues to treat her as a junior partner and increasingly ignores her pleas for peace and diplomacy with the Horde. As a result, the detente she had fought for is in shambles, and she can only watch as hotheads on both sides reignite a pointless, genocidal war.
    • Unfortunately for her status as The Woobie, the fandom in general seems almost universally convinced that she's now shacking up with Thrall. Joke or no, it's hard to take her woobie-ism seriously as a result.
      • If she was before, Thrall's recent change of heart (and marriage as of Patch 4.2) to Aggralan pretty much puts Jaina back up there in Woobieness, anyway.
      • Hey, when you've been through what she has, you need a teddy bear. Hers just happens to be big, green, and capable of shaking a fortress down to its foundations.
      • In Dalaran, you can fish a golden coin she tossed into the wishing fountain with the tragic line: "Arthas, my love, please come back to me."
      • She spends the entirety of Wrath of the Lich King alternately trying to stop Varian Wrynn from going to war with the Horde and trying to stop Arthas from continuing down his dark path. And then at the end it turns out Arthas has remembered her all this time.
        • Speaking of whom, if you've ever read the novel Lord of the Clans, Thrall himself would've counted, if he hadn't, in the process, risen to become the abovementioned big green fort-wrecker and titular Lord of the Clans. His relationship with Jaina has a lot to do with her resemblance to the one other human who was ever nice to him, and what happened to her.
          • And just to show that Blizzard seems to love screwing Jaina, here's the news: That teddy bear of hers is going to get married to another orc. She did attend his wedding and there are some tears rolling from her eyes. Well, there goes her teddy bear leaving her alone...
            • But Wait! There's More!. So Blizzard announced a new expansion pack and the next thing that was announced was... Theramore destroyed. By the Horde under Garrosh. Way to make Jaina even more miserable than she already is, Blizzard! Hope you don't make her snap already...
    • Another female Woobie is Sylvanas Windrunner, the Banshee Queen. A heroic High Elven general, she led the futile defense of the elven kingdom of Quel'thalas. Despite great skill and heroism her forces were overwhelmed by the undead, and Sylvanas herself was tortured, defiled, and raised as a banshee, forced to massacre her own countrymen and innocent people. Despite having later won freedom for herself and a small remnant of undead rebels, she remains, at heart, deeply unhappy, loathing the monster she has become.
    • Illidan also deserves a mention here. Essentially, his entire story derives from being unable to shake off the magic addiction of his people, which has driven him to betray his people multiple times, get imprisoned for ten thousand years, blind himself, consume an evil artifact, strike a bargain with a demon, flee from his home into the blasted world of Outland to escape from the consequences of that bargain, and, most importantly, lose the love of his life forever. You, as the player, hunt him down in the very last place he's managed to make his own and corner him long enough for the person who's hunted him all these millennia to find and kill him. Canonically, he's insane and totally beyond redemption, but is it any wonder he's one of the most Woobified characters in the entire series?
    • Several quests in the game involve other Woobie characters. The tortoise Tooga, in the Tanaris desert, is one example. Sent out by his wife Torta to get dinner, he gets lost, and needs you to lead him home, while he says pathetic things like "I'm thirsty" and "Torta must be so worried!" When you do get him back to his wife, she simply scolds him for being late and sends him to catch dinner again.
    • The Darkspear Trolls up until now deserve a mention as a whole. Their entire tribal history is essentially a list of places they used to live and who drove them out until they were relegated to sleeping on Orgrimmar's couch. Come Cataclysm, however, they're officially done taking this crap.
    • Just about every sympathetic Broken character; and Farseer Nobundo—due, in no small part, to his sheer indomitability—in particular.
      • And for that matter, much of the Draenei race as a whole, whom the Broken devolved from. Pursued across the universe for centuries and hunted down to near-extinction by the Burning Legion and its minions, simply for daring to reject the temptation of its corrupting power.
    • The Oracles in Sholazar Basin are a race of simple fish-like creatures (think nicer Murlocs) who revere nature and only want to collect "shinies" to give the great gods, and are constantly attacked by the more aggressive Frenzyheart Tribe who are encroaching on their land and the Scourge, which wants to destroy all life. One particular quest sends you to an Oracle village that has been overtaken by the Scourge to try to rescue any survivors. The Oracles are dragged around attached to chains by these mindless zombie creatures and will give the most heart-wrenching dialogue when you talk to them:

Please take...my shinies. All done...
We not do anything...to them...I no understand.
Use my shinies...make weather good again...make undead things go away.
We gave shinies to shrine...we not greedy...why this happen?
I do something bad? I sorry...

    • Garona Halforcen's whole life just plain sucks. She was born as an experiment by the orc leader Gul'dan to cross an orc with a draenei, implying her draenei mother was raped, and as a half-blood, was always an outcast in orc society. Gul'dan then magically aged and brainwashed her, telling her that she was half-human, and using her as a spy against the humans. Amongst the humans, she found a trusted confidant and lover with Medivh, only to be crushed when it turned out he was demonically possessed by Sargeras, and brought the orcs to Azeroth. She was manipulated by the Shadow Council to kill King Llane Wrynn, tortured by Ogrim Doomhammer to get the location of the Shadow Council, all the while pregnant to a son with Medivh, Med'an. Meanwhile, an ogre mage, Cho'gall figured out Gul'dan's brainwashing, and used it to take control of Garona, and tried to asassinate King Varian Wrynn, Prince Anduin Wrynn, and Warchief Thrall. Leaving Med'an with her draenei uncle, she is currently in hiding, waiting for a chance to kill Cho'gall.
  • Zevran and Alistair from Dragon Age: Origins. Especially if you're a female PC and is in a relationship with Alistair, and you choose to not take up Morrigan's offer and sacrifice yourself. That eulogy is just.... "You will be missed. More than I can possibly say."
    • Alistair can give it back to the main character in a specific scenario. If you pursued a romance with Alistair and took him to the top of Fort Drakon without completing the Dark Ritual, Alistair sacrifices himself to kill the Archdemon, regardless of the player's intention to make the sacrifice herself instead.
    • How about Cullen? When the Demons invaded the Circle Tower, he was captured and horrifically tortured to the point that when you find him, he's become half mad and extremely paranoid of Mages, believing that all of them, not just Apostates, are responsible for the world's troubles. As if that weren't enough, the epilogue reveals that he eventually becomes a deranged serial killer. Ouch.
    • The Warden his/herself.
      • A Human Noble's entire family except their brother (but including their nephew and sister-in-law) is betrayed and slaughtered by a corrupt noble.
        • If you decided to sleep with either a human male or a female elf, they will die before your eyes in the raid. The female elf has a daughter waiting for her in the alienage. She's a standard NPC who will comment that she is waiting for mother and how her mother promised she would bring back a present from Highever. Not being able to properly talk to her can be hearbreaking. Who knows how long she waited there?
      • A City Elf is living in a downtrodden ghetto when they or their bride is kidnapped for a Bann's rape party on their wedding day and in fighting to save themself/the bride have spurred the nobles to order a "purge" on their neighborhood,
      • The Dalish Elf loses their best friend while exploring and aren't allowed to look for him, being told it's hopeless as they were found horribly sick, and are drafted into the Wardens whether they like it or not to cure them (though they do find that friend eventually - he's a darkspawn who gives the Warden an Anguished Declaration of Love if it's a female before they have to kill him themselves)
      • The Casteless Dwarf's family is so low in the social heirarchy they're below the ladder with their sister forced to be essentially a prostitute and themself a Punch Clock Villain for a mob boss to support themselves
      • A Dwarf Noble ends up with nothing after their older brother ends up dead and their younger brother has them exiled for it]].
      • The Mage has it the easiest, and their life story is no walk in the park: he or she was taken away from his/her family as a kid (never to see them again), upon graduating from apprenticehood is lied to and betrayed by his/her best friend and left behind to certain death or Tranquility by said friend after everything falls apart. Once they leave, their home is destroyed and almost everyone they know killed or turned into an abomination.
    • Someone posted a comment on the character sheet page that summed it up:

"In case you haven't caught on yet, everyone here seems to be some mix of the Fetish Fuel Station Attendent and The Woobie"

  • Definitely Fenris from Dragon Age II. Though technically most of the terrible things which happen to him (such as being branded with lyrium tattoos and losing all his childhood memories) are restricted to his past and he does have a really shitty attitude at the best of times, you really have to feel sorry for him. But things get nasty when you find out that he has a sister- a mage- who's trying to get apprenticed to Fenris's former master, and who sells out Fenris to said former master. And just to make things worse apparently Fenris volunteered for the branding to free his mother and sister from slavery... and the reason why his sister is trying to become an apprentice magister is because the freedom they got was just as bad as the slavery. Talk about serious family issues.
    • Just Fenris? Dude, have you seen the party? There's the main character, Hawke, who is forced to flee his home to one of the most despicable cities in the world and loses almost his entire family over the course of the storyline; Merrill, the adorable, scatterbrained Elvish blood-mage who is demonized by her own clan for her experiments and bullied viciously by Fenris and Anders; Aveline, the hard-as-nails guardswoman who's forced to perform a mercy-kill on her own husband; Anders, the renegade mage who's driven mad by the corrupted spirit possessing him... in fact, the only people who manage to keep relatively light-hearted are Varric and Isabella, and they spend most of the game playing Team Dad and Cool Big Sis to the others.
      • Even Isabela's past is rather depressing and Varric ends up betrayed by his own brother and left in the Deep Roads to die, either forced to mercy-kill him later or spending years trying to nurse him back to sanity (probably in vain). There's also Sebastian... Pretty much everyone the man could call family by the end of the game has been murdered.
  • Despite what he is, Giygas is this when you think about it, due to his nature as a Tragic Monster, as shown in MOTHER 1.
    • More specifically, fanon is that he was forced to fight against humankind against his will (that part might be considered Draco in Leather Pants material, Your Mileage May Vary). In canon, he had to fight Ninten, who in different circumstances, he would probably consider a son. Ultimately, he went insane from thinking about the family he used to have, and became the Giygas we know from EarthBound.
  • I guarantee you will not look at a chicken Mc Nugget the same way again. Also a Tear Jerker.
  • Katawa Shoujo has quite a few examples. Hanako is the most noticeable, but most of the main cast gets Woobie moments at one point or another.
    • Hisao Nakai, the protagonist. The game begins with him about to receive a Love Confession from the girl he's always liked, only to suffer a heart attack. He's hospitalized for four months, and after six weeks, his old friends and his love interest stop visiting. At the end, he ends up in an unfamiliar school, and his disability leaves him at risk of a heart attack if he overexerts himself or even has any strong impacts to the chest.
    • Emi Ibarazaki lost her legs below the knee in a car accident as well as her father. Even though she has regained her ability to walk with prosthetics, she still suffers nightmares, and it's implied that part of the reason she runs is to banish them from her mind. Despite seeming outgoing and cheerful, she lets very few people close to her, for fear of losing them.
    • Hanako Ikezawa. Between the horrible burn scars, the dead parents, and the crippling social anxiety, you can't help but want to hug the poor girl. Even though she runs away in a panic when you first try to talk to her. Maybe because of that, actually. Surprisingly, her route deconstructs this. Her woobieness is initially why Hisao wants to become closer to her. Hanako is well aware of this and she does not like it.
    • Lilly Satou was left behind in Scotland with her sister Akira by their parents, and her relative maturity for her age is a result of having to become more independent as a result of Akira's shortcomings as a single parent (Akira admits that it's unreasonable to expect a 19-year-old to raise a blind girl alone). Late in Lilly's route, their parents order the sisters to come to Scotland permanently, leaving behind their boyfriends in Japan, and causing no small amount of heartache.
    • Rin Tezuka suffers from difficulties making herself understood in social interactions and art, causing her a great deal of pain. She also struggles with what it means to be an artist, and fears that she will change herself to someone she is not in order to succeed.
    • Shizune Hakamichi grew up with an abusive father who belittles her, has no respect for her accomplishments and refuses to learn sign language to speak with her. Despite her wishes to make people happy, she often comes off as overbearing and bossy, partly due to her Spirited Competitor personality and partly because of communication problems caused by her deafness.
    • Even Misha turns out to be one. [[spoiler:She is in love with Shizune and confessed to her; she was rejected, but Shizune continued to seek her out for friendship, which only caused her pain. Things got worse when Hisao started becoming closer to Shizune,
  • The Companion Cube from Portal. Poor little cube, it was more than happy to help you and be an unquestioning friend through good and bad. It saved your life, had little hearts and was then forced into an incinerator. /tears
    • It is revealed in Portal 2 that the companion cube survived the incineration and is given back to Chell after GLaDOS lets her go.
    • WHEATLEY. In the post-credits scene he apologizes for the things he's done, in abject remorse and depression, and it's blatantly evident that he's really sorry and truly feels remorse. The worst part? He will likely never get to properly apologize to Chell, because he's in SPACE. Valve cruelly makes this scene the default menu background. When next you start the game, all you see is Wheatley aimlessly floating along, dejectedly flitting his photoreceptor around. D'aww, Wheatley, you need a hug? C'mere...
    • Doug Rattmann. The man has dealt with being trapped in the facility, constantly evading the watchful eye of GLaDOS, and yet, the whole time, he manages to leave behind hints for Chell. He may have sacrificed his life for Chell, being shot by a sentry turret in the Lab Rat comic. But according to the drawings on the walls in Portal 2, he may still be alive. The only friend he has is the Weighted Companion Cube. He is alone.
    • "I'm different."
    • The frankencubes in 2, which are made from two turrets and a cube, are creepy, but you can't help but feel bad for them.
  • It has been recently revealed that the overmind from StarCraft was created specifically so that it would have an uncontrollable urge to defeat and absorb the protoss so that the next generation xel'naga would come into existence. When it looked into the future and saw that the new xel'naga would absorb all of creation it realized it had been created so that it could not avoid this fate so it rebelled the only way it could, by creating kerrigan. Unfortunately it didn't last long enough to explain this to kerrigan so now SHE wants to kill everything as well. Mental slavery followed by dying believing your one chance at redemption had failed? Thats just not fair.
  • The Kid. I mean, come on. He's only 15 years old, and he has to fight his way through spikes, fruit, giant monsters, and all manner of deathtraps in order to become the Guy. It takes a monster not to feel bad for the dozens of times he explodes into little bitty pieces.
  • Ted Smith from Dead Rising 2. He's an overweight animal trainer with an obvious mental disability, who has been mocked by people so often that he now considers his only friend to be a Bengal tiger named Snowflake. And you're forced to hug him with a pair of Knife Gloves, because he intends to feed you to Snowflake as "fresh meat". And to top it off, his death scene is a real Tear Jerker.
  • Arcade Gannon from Fallout: New Vegas. Virtually every ending, including many of the "good" ones, still end with him either being hunted down or killed. He is also one of the few characters that is primarily motivated by a desire to help people.
    • Boone as well. He was one of the snipers at the 'battle' of Bitter Springs, and is tormented by regret for his actions. He also saw his pregnant wife get sold into Caesar's Legion as a slave, and sniped her to save her the torture of slavery.
    • Also Veronica. She fell in love with another girl at a young age, but the other girl's family didn't approve and persecuted her for it. She also got thrown out of the Brotherhood's bunker for disagreeing with the code of conduct, and can only stand by and watch as the Brotherhood slowly tears itself apart.
    • Lily as well. A loving grandmother before becoming a Nightkin, she treats The Courier as her own, despite the fact that the first thing you tell her is that you are not Jimmmy. Being a Nightkin, she also has schizophrenia that manifests itself in "Leo", a voice in her head that represents her Ax Crazy side as well as trying desparately to hold onto the last memories of her grandchildren.
    • Your Mileage May Vary, but this troper considers The X-13 Stealth Suit from Old World Blues a woobie because of some of her lines. See "Will you love me if I help you hide?"
    • Muggy from Old World Blues. Oh, poor Muggy. Muggy is a miniature Securitron robot Dr O built just to channel his envy and hate for Robert House. Muggy is small, ineffectual and has no weapons, in comparison to the imposing standard Securitrons. He is programmed with a singular, all-consuming obsession with coffee mugs, and he's aware of this, too. He's in constant anguish over how he can't stop thinking about mugs. To make it even worse, the Think Tank later put their brains in floating robot contraptions that never drink coffee, meaning no more mugs for him. The other appliances mock him for his uselessness, and the biostation essentially raped him once. I tend to gather all mugs and plates I can find just so he can have a brief moment of happiness. He eventually gets his happy ending in the epilogue.
  • Jennifer from Rule of Rose fully earns the title of "poor, unlucky girl" that the narration pushes on her. By the time the game begins, she has survived everybody she knows twice over! And she's not even out of her teens yet. Many other cast members also apply, most notably Clara, but the Aristocrats all probably fit in the category of Jerkass Woobie in one way or another, as well.
  • Shin Megami Tensei has several of these:
    • Shin Megami Tensei I has your protagonist, who has his mom eaten, his friends (depending on route) die off or backstab him, the world literally ends despite his best efforts, and regardless of ending, the only compensation he really gets is walking off into the sunset with the heroine, which doesn't negate all the crap he went through.
      • It gets worse in the Neutral path. Both of his alignment friends end up hating his guts and resorting to trying to kill him (resulting in him having to kill him), both factions turn against him for daring to believe in balance, and by the end of the game he has exactly two active allies left: the heroine and an old man.
    • Shin Megami Tensei II's protagonist isn't much better off, as he literally discovers his whole life was a lie, his friends (at least some of them) will betray him or do a Heroic Sacrifice for him, and this is a game where YHVH himself hates your protagonist, and its implied that one day, he's going to screw you over royally for killing him. Again, walking off into the sunset with the Heroine doesn't make up for a lot of this, especially in the Neutral ending. Also, speaking of the Heroine, even walking off with her is creepy given she's your love interest, and in a Mind Screw way, your mother.
    • Astaroth from both games is also a woobie. YHVH himself turned him from Ishtar (a beautiful woman) into Astaroth (a fugly guy), and even though Astaroth winds up working for Lucifer (who is actually not nearly as much of an asshole as YHVH), he's still depressed, as all he wants is to be his original self again. Thankfully, the protagonist can finally give this poor bastard a break in the second game.
  • The titular character in Iji, though it can veer into Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds at times...
  • How has Toroko from Cave Story not been mentioned yet? When the game starts, she's being aggressively harassed by the leader of the village for not turning over her only friend to basically be sacrificed, and Sue really seems to only be interested in just getting off the island anyway, and it only gets worse from there.
  • Emil in Nie R. His entire life is nothing but a long string of horrible events, but he still tries to remain cheerfully and innocently optimistic through the entire thing. You want nothing more than to just reach through the TV screen and give the poor kid a hug.
    • Everyone in Nie R is need of a big hug. Even the Shades. Especially the Shades.
  • Dragon Quest series, even though is swarmed with Heroic Mime issue, have some:
    • Dragon Quest IV has Maya and Meena, a twin who wanders around finding their former master for the sake of Roaring Rampage of Revenge, and fails messibly at the end of their chapter with their friend doing a Heroic Sacrifice so they can survive the battle with the boss.
    • Dragon Quest V has full of these with almost every playable cast.
    • Dragon Quest VIII has Princess Media, who's turned into a horse for the entire game, even if not, she's supposed to marry a Prince Charmless whom before the game event she has never known or seen.
      • David, one of the Living MacGuffin, is abused as a lowing servent, and is killed off by a dog possessed by Big Bad.
      • Angelo is a mild example. Orphaned at a young age, he ends up at Maella Abbey. The first boy he meets (his half-brother Marcello) is friendly towards him... until he discovers Angelo's true identity afterward and antagonizes him because of the harsh treatment their father put Marcello and his mother through. Thus, Angelo grows up as a gambling womanizer. And then he gets to be treated to the sight of Dhoulmagus killing his father figure Francisco. Yeah... not cool. Even so, Angelo rises up to become a decent man in his own right, even going as far as to save his half-brother from falling to his death after his attempt to use Rhapthrone's power for himself, an act that results in Marcello simply spitting in his face (figuratively, not literally).
      • Even the Godbird Empyrea and her child are turned into these. A demonic griffon named Gemon kidnaps Empyrea's egg (at the behest of Complete Monster Rhapthrone), forcing the party to hound him. In retaliation, he destroys the egg, killing Empyrea's child before he was even born, and driving Empyrea into a hefty state of grief and anguish. In spite of this, spirit of the Godbird's son implores to his mother that he should help out the heroes regardless of what happened.
  • Believe it or not, Mortal Kombat, the series where it's your goal to see how many ways you can viciously maim, dismember, and mutilate your foe, is not without characters that are in need of a big hug.
  • Alice: Madness Returns makes the title character out to be one a lot more than the original American McGee's Alice did. To wit - when she was 8 years old, her house was burnt down, killing her entire family,after witnessing her older sister being raped. She then spent a decade nearly comatose in an insane asylum undergoing 'treatments' that would be considered both illegal and inhumane by today's standards. By the time the game starts she has been out of the asylum for a year and seems to have a pretty decent life, although she is still haunted by flashbacks and hallucinations, but then her quest for the truth reveals that her 'therapist' was the one responsible for the fire (and everything else that happened that night), and that he's been trying to erase her memories so she can't call the cops on his ass, and then sell her as a prostitute, as does with his other 'patients'. And that's not even going into what happens to her in Wonderland... And in the end, she just goes fully insane and can no longer tell reality from her delusions, in what is the biggest Bittersweet Ending of forever.
    • Well, if it's any consolation at all, she did push that Complete Monster calling himself her therapist right in front of a speeding train and killed him. All things considered, that was probably as much justice as she was ever going to get.
  • Fear Effect. Rain is very much this. Why? Her father is the first emperor of China, made immortal and forever rooted to one spot like a statue. Her mother is a scientist who engaged in experiments that transformed her into a literal monster and eventually an Eldritch Abomination. Her twin sister Mist is trying to help her father get out of his statue pose. Unfortunately, Mist's method of achieving this involves merging herself and Rain to their mother, and pretty much destroy the entire world. Rain ran away from this, and ended up with amnesia, as well as memories, dreams and nightmares that made no sense to her. Rain ends up having to kill off both her mother and twin sister. Hana is an Iron Woobie and Glas is a Stoic Woobie.
  • Assassin's Creed II has an interesting antagonist example in Dante Moro. The loyal bodyguard of Silvio Barbarigo, who one day decided that he wanted Dante's wife for his own. Barbarigo's goons attacked him, stabbing him three times in the chest and once in the head, but Dante survived. Unfortunately, he suffered brain damage, allowing Barbarigo to convince him to sign divorce papers and continue to use the poor guy as Dumb Muscle. Making it even more tragic, there's a letter from his wife in which she says that she still loves him and hopes that one day he'll recover enough for them to be together again—which you find on Dante's body after you've killed him.
  • Although it's not obvious at first, Ethan, the quiet, axe-wielding amnesiac from Last Scenario, is badly in need of a hug. When he first joins the party, he says he doesn't remember much beyond the fact that he used to work for the Rosehart Kingdom, but was betrayed and imprisoned. This means many of the people he's fighting used to be his friends, but it's a bit worse than that. He used to be the head of a prestigious special-ops group, but he started to suspect that his superior, Castor, was hiding important information from them, and began to investigate on his own. An ambitious internal affairs officer, Helio, found out, and reported Ethan- as punishment, he was locked up as a test subject in Helio's laboratory and spent the next three years buried alive and semiconscious in a magical substance called biorite, which was responsible for his memory loss. Even early on, he worries that maybe since the things he remembers most clearly are the ones he wanted to remember, the ones he forgot were things he wanted to forget; when a few things start coming back to him, you find out he was right. Fourteen years ago, his entire hometown was razed by the Imperial army, leaving him and his older brother as the only survivors. He wound up killing a soldier in a panic to protect his brother, and only avoided being killed himself by the timely intervention of Zawu. His older brother? Castor, the guy who had him sealed in a pile of rocks for three years, and the Big Bad of the game. Naturally, he remembers this just as Castor has started going into a full-scale mental and emotional breakdown which he was indirectly complicit in. And the man he killed when he was fourteen? His name was Wolfram, and his father and best friend are in the party. Ethan's guilt-stricken and awkward attempts to tell Randolph are simultaneously heartbreaking and adorable. All in all, his life kind of sucks. A lot.
  • Fiona Belli from Haunting Ground. Not only did one of the stalkers kill her parents, but he kidnapped her as well, and is trying to impregnate her in order to be reborn with her Azoth. She is also pursued by a hulking man with the mind of a child who thinks she is a doll and just wants to play with her, a homunculus maid who wants to cut her Azoth out of her in order to become "complete", and an old man who helps her at first, but then turns out to be the Big Bad, and is also trying to take her Azoth. The only companion she has is a white German Shepherd that is also a Woobie itself due to the excessive amounts of literal Kick the Dog moments.
  • Hephaestus in God of War III. Created Pandora, an Artificial Human, to serve as the key to opening Pandora's Box, and get roundly mocked by his fellow gods when he comes to love her as a father would love his daughter. When Kratos opens the box for the first time, Zeus punishes Hephaestus by cursing him with an ugly form, and sealing him away in a tiny cave in the underworld. The cave includes a portal so that his wife, Aphrodite, can visit him at any time, but she prefers cheating on him and 'entertaining' herself with slave girls to his company. When he learns that Kratos intends to sacrifice Pandora so that the box can be opened a second time, he tries to use a Uriah Gambit to save his daughter's life, which backfires horribly when Kratos kills him by impaling him on his own anvil. His final words are a desperate, sorrowful plea for Kratos to spare the life of his daughter.
  • Rosenkreuzstilette has quite a few Woobie characters as well.
    • Spiritia Rosenberg, The Heroine of the first game, is going around beating up her friends asking them to cease their part in RKS's rebellion and listen to her, and they usually don't listen until she defeats them (although some of them still refuse to listen to reason, even after their defeat, until a certain cute blond-haired girl in pink-and-white elegant clothing shows her true colors, of course). How do you feel for her that she ends up having to fight those she respects, including the now-undead Sir Raimund Seyfarth, and eventually learns that Iris was USING EVERYBODY for her own amusement? And then we have the part where Iris herself reveals that Tia's the other reincarnation of Rosenkreuz, the "Blade of Rosenkreuz", born with his ability to tap into the strength of others'. Tomato in the Mirror much?
    • The resident Butt Monkey (until she Took a Level in Badass in Freudenstachel, of course), Zorne Sepperin, is a moody young girl with a short temper who will not put up with anybody who messes with "Father". She has quite a tough life, seeing how she ended up in a situation that Graf Sepperin saved her from, and she has trouble understanding the meaning of restraint and ends up getting humiliated both physically and emotionally a lot. And what's more, she refuses to get along with Iris, who later makes her suffer by killing her adoptive father whom she yearns for to someday accept her as his real daughter. And in Tearis, she refuses to forgive her for killing him and vows to eliminate her.
    • Grolla Seyfarth becomes this in her own Darker and Edgier side-game, Grollschwert. When Iris humiliates her and makes her look like a traitor to all of RKS, Grolla has to put up with beating up her colleagues just to get them out of her way. Then she fights her undead grandfather in order to master Grollschwert, and after that, she, both infuriated and deeply hurt, declares that she will make Graf Sepperin pay for disrupting his peaceful slumber with his life.
    • According to her profile, Sichte Meister often frets about her troubled childhood that she had in the past, which leads to having trouble having faith in those older than her. Also, she becomes worried about Grolla when she leaves upon her telling her to lower her guard when she demands answers from Iris. The reason Grolla left was out of knowledge that if she lowered her weapon, she would breathe no more.
    • Liebea Palesch. Oh, poor Liebea. Her brother Karl was imprisoned by Iris because He Knows Too Much, and worse yet, Graf Sepperin told her that the Empire had taken him captive and that there was no hope to pray for his safe return. Liebea refused to take part in his rebellion because she was against it, but the Count managed to avoid her becoming an obstacle by imprisoning her at the top of the research tower, where it is said that she breaks down and starts crying like mad when people ask her what happened and ask her about Karl, and say things to make her get upset.
    • As for Schwer-Muta Casasola Merkle: Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds much? Before being placed in RKS's care, she ACTUALLY had to put up with subsiding in a barren, bestial environment, a trauma of her upbringing that burdens her to today, making her suspicious of everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, that she meets. She feels that her only friend is her pet squid Zeppy. When confronted, Schwer will declare either that the bonds that tie people together are nothing but an illusion or that everyone should just fall apart before fighting to kill whoever breaks their word.
    • And last but not least...believe it or not, IRIS HERSELF, who becomes reduced from a Complete Monster that she was in the first game to a Jerkass Woobie in Tearis. After having lost the final battle to Tia, Iris finds herself under Tia's care, laying in bed thinking that Tia probably hates her for everything she had done in the game and wondering by whose hands she may die. When Zorne and Freu start fighting, Iris, knowing of said battle, desperately asks Tia to end her life to truly end the chaos. Naturally, of course, Tia refuses, because she believes that killing Iris anyway may just make things worse than things already did by her hands in the game.
  • The Girl of Asura's Wrath fits this trope to a t. Upon first meeting her all she is trying to do is protect the small infant, who may or may not be a relation. She is forced to watch helplessly as Asura defends her from Gohma and the armies of the gods. When he loses his arms in the fight against Augus she desperately tries to stop Asura from continuing fighting, only for the player to be forced to perform a quicktime event to shove her away and run off to battle. She tries to follow but is unable to keep up. Later, she re encounters Asura and attempts to help him again but ultimately dies under Olga's orbital bombardment. Asura, upon recovering, sees her corpse and flies into such a rage that his roar of fury destroys ships in orbit!!!The player is then treated to a wonderful sequence of fuckmurdering the people who caused it.
    • Asura himself is one of these. Underneath all of that rage is an unbearable pain that the world around him just won't let cease. What happens in Episode 12 is the greatest example: it was not only rage that drove Asura into his Berserker form, but absolute despair, to the extent that rage was all he had left. You can hear it in his screams of anguish. It really motivates the player to stop Asura's pain as soon as possible by completing the game...only to find that God himself won't let Asura's pain end...
  • There are those who find Shirou from Fate Stay Night a woobie, though it's a little odd. In the present, his life seems mostly normal but as a child he was the sole survivor of the battlefield that destroyed a large section of Fuyuki. His parents were killed and he saw hundreds of people die in front of him before being saved by Kiritsugu. In the present, this has left scars on him that even he is only marginally aware of that drive his entire life leading him to have a rather casual attitude towards death and having no sense of self preservation at all. Whether or not this is truly pitiful is a matter of opinion: The manner in which he deals with his life is much more proactive than the standard woobie.
    • And there's Saber. She gives up any chance of a normal life, and spends 12 years fighting constant wars on the front lines and ruling Britain flawlessly. She doesn't develop a personality because she decides Kings shouldn't be swayed by them. And then she's betrayed by everyone and left to die alone by her own kingdom for being too good a ruler. AND THEN she becomes a Servant to erase herself from existence because she doesn't think she did well enough. Girl really could use a hug.
    • Sakura, who is probably the most woobie of them all, is separated from her family and adopted by a family of former Magi against her will, and is "trained" to become the successor by being sent into a room full of worms every night implant themselves inside her every night since she's five years old. Her adoptive brother, who's not quite right in the head himself, physically, mentally, and sexually abuses her every day. This all comes back to haunt the cast in the route she is Heroine in, Heaven's Feel. Lets just say that karma is a bitch...
Back to The Woobie
  1. ↑ Especially for Tatsuya, he saw Maya killed moments before his victory against Nyarlathotep, and then Philemon said the only one way possible to reverse it is to sacrifice his memories with Eikichi, Lisa, Jun, and every other people he met in his journey to create a new world. As Eternal Punishment shows, Tatsuya ended up too scared to accept being left alone. To hammer it home, one of the ways to show how suffering he is was that... he has the option to punch Philemon in the face for involving him with the latter's Xanatos Speed Chess with Nyarlathotep, as in saying "Why the hell did you put me through all this shit for your... speed chess!?"
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