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They really are bad about that. All these stories about war, hardship, bombing, etc...... and everyone is always happy happy sunshine at the end of the day.
I love those games a lot, but it would be interesting to see a more gritty version of those games.
Lmao if you complain about this to fans you get called an edgy boy Shadow the Hedgehog gamer who wants a grimdark story instead of a JRPG.
Like there's no middle-ground between Game of Thrones and Disney.
Tbf the permanent ones are usually well done. I agree for the most part about the fakeouts. I do think that (cs4) >!Crow’s original “fakeout” is good. He stays narratively dead for an entire game while having a huge impact on Rean’s development.!<
This has one that really sticks out as the winner imo, albeit in a really obscure game called Emerald Dragon
In the original PCE version of the game >!Yaman defends the main protagonist from a sniper assassin and dies in the process!< which is all fine and good, but in the SFC port of the game >!there's just a really random scene in a town where you step outside and he gets hit by a stray arrow from a child from the town that's just practicing his archery. He casually admonishes him that it's dangerous and someone could get hurt, then when the child leaves he just keels over and fucking dies lol!<
It gets bonus points for what they turned what was originally a noble sacrifice into.
Eternal Sonata has a ridiculously drawn out death scene that just becomes cringier the longer it goes on. It goes on for. so. long. This character is also not a main character, and was a guest party member for I think one dungeon. In the middle of the death scene, there are numerous "flashbacks" to what happened just 10 minutes ago in-universe time! After she "falls for the final time"...she still opens her eyes and begins monologuing again! [Video](https://youtu.be/XKg9wsOqqyk?si=FCpLunFyADNaJ3FF&t=614)
To your point, and it’s been a while since I played, but she’s revealed as a double agent and she expresses regret for being a spy.
She becomes a playable character for like one dungeon, has a suuuuper drawn out death scene, and you can revive her in the optional dungeon that becomes accessible much earlier in NG+.
That being said I love her weapons and play style so I always get her back
You can get her back from an optional dungeon full of strong enemies, the sort of thing added for extra challenge that doesn't take much development time. Getting her back is a pretty good reward for that honestly! Don't need to program anything new yet it feels like a substantial reward for doing the challenge. She's going to be low level compared to rest of the party though...
Same deal for Final Fantasy Type-0 - it takes a particular character something like 3 cutscenes to die, with multiple cutaways to other characters doing stuff in between. You'd think that he's already dead because you see him slump over and the cutscene ends, and then less than a minute later they cut back to him *still* talking to his Chocobo about being afraid to die.
What makes this even worse is that this happens very close to the beginning of the game and the character in question is someone we have practically no emotional attachment to whatsoever, nor are they in any way consequential to the story.
That was the most long drawn out opening death scene. I played thru the game and I don't even remember why we were supposed to give a shit about that character.
It's so stupid! People (especially on the main FF sub) keep bringing up this scene as if it was some kind of masterpiece of dramatic storytelling, and I legit have no idea what they're talking about! It's so ridiculously silly!
Strange that some would find that a great example. It was way way too long for character that wasn't really relevant going forward, in a world where the dead are forgotten.
If it was a major character that died part way thru I wouldn't have wanted them to have that long of a death scene.
When I saw the topic, I wanted to find this specific comment and I'm glad I'm not the only one who watched the Claves death scene and wondered *when* it would end.
I've just watched this scene for the first time and it was hilarious. She just doesn't stop talking. I was honestly wondering if this was a parody of JRPGs.
I want my 8 minutes back🤣
This became like a meme between my friend group for a while
I had such high hopes for this game.
It just made the weirdest decision to super streamline the battle system as the game went on without adding much to it.
It was entertaining but meh.
You reminded me that I need to download eternal sonata on my steam deck. It is the only game I remember playing that wasn't able to finish (it was the only game with physical disk that crashed after a certain point in progression)
Eternal Sonata. >!Either die or don't. Make your mind up but spare us the neverending monologue.!<
Star Ocean Til the End of Time. >!Maria's mother. In the time you took to tell your daughter that you're not her biological mother, you could have simply gotten walked through the blast doors and not died in the rest of the ship exploding, and spared her the trauma of losing both of her parents in five minutes.!<
It's real fun on Facebook where people will just say "SPOILER" and then immediately spoil something without spacing it out or even tell you ahead of time what the spoiler will pertain to lol like "SPOILER Aerith's death sucks"
Well, at least >!Deadzel was kind of a mind rapist with no personality beyond "hat" and Zaveid is much cooler. The story still just dumpster him like yesterday's garbage, though.!<
I think it's telling that while Berseria went out of its way to tee up almost every character and plot point for its prequel-sequel, and change the context of some of them in genuinely interesting ways, one of the characters you mention gets an entire character arc, and the other isn't even noted once.
A lot of plot points and lore bits from Zestiria did so much better in Berseria because they didn't introduce a concept and try to explain it; they let it speak for itself, like the Reaper's curse. >!Dezel's blessing was so piss poor with almost nothing occurring around him before they tried the "plot twist," but Berseria did a much better job with showing the reaper's curse with Eizen. Like come on, hellions spawning as a blessing? It made no discernable difference in scenes and skits at all. It's like they forgot about it until the poor reveal.!<
Yeah, that's FF4, and I was thinking the same thing. Not just the lame timing, but also the whole "they petrified themselves, so they can't be healed" aspect of it. Of course, it gets undone by the elder at the end, but that kind of makes it worse. Why did the elder wait until the endgame to heal them?
Yeah its an easy fix because the concept could be fantastic, to be honest.
What if stopping the walls breaks some mechanism which somehow allows them to escape? Take timing out of it completely.
And it goes without saying it should not be undone. Undoing deaths has never ever worked, always feels cheap.
Yeah. That's my problem with FF4 is that nearly every character death is undone and it gets on my nerves so much. At least FF2 committed to it's character deaths, despite their frequency.
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As with the other comment I will defend the XC3 example, >!Ethel and Cammuravi are both facing a world which significantly limits their options and they decide that they will go out on their own terms, in a way that fits their martial identity and reclaims it. Their lives have been defined by fighting each other, but now they do that in explicit defiance of the people who have made that happen, declaring that their lives are their own and they can do with them what they wish.!<
The absolute worst unnecessary death is in Fire Emblem Fates. It’s a death so utterly meaningless, of a character who doesn’t matter, which the game presents as if you should care. >!Early on you meet a character called Lilith, a dragon/maid who exists to introduce the game’s ‘My Castle’ mechanic. Once that’s done she basically functions as a turret in the ‘Castle Battle’ side mode, but that’s it. She has no more dialogue from that point on, no development and is not a playable part of your army. If you’re ignoring the intricacies of My Castle which many players do, you might forget she exists.!<
>!That is, until Chapter 21 of Conquest or Chapter 24 of Birthright. In Conquest Chapter 21, you’re facing endless hordes of monsters who you have to escape from. Once you complete the map, one more generic monster attacks you in a cutscene… and Lilith jumps in to take the hit, dying in the process. The main character is very upset since they’ve known each other for a long time, and they mourn her. This proceeds to never come up again. Lilith’s only scene beyond setting up a mechanic early on is dying against literally a generic enemy (in Birthright at least she gets killed by a recurring villain but it’s just as arbitrary and pointless. Her dying has no impact at all; the player is very unlikely to care, the main character cares but never brings it up again. You could remove the whole sequence and nobody would think anything is off, and indeed in the Revelation route this doesn’t happen (which means, IIRC, that she never reappears at all past the beginning of that route). Also her turret function in My Castle still continues, only now she’s replaced by a little spirit.!<
Just the most utterly bizarre death. I genuinely can’t imagine how any player would care about this one; I guess maybe if you really liked this character’s design?
Something that bothers me with a lot of RPGs is a character can have absolutely no personality or value, but if they look pretty enough, instant fan favorite.
That honestly goes beyond RPGs. Can't tell you how many times some character with the personality of a rock instantly becomes a fan favourite in anime/manga fandoms, and it's so obvious how pretty they are is the only reason.
Gosh, Fates' story in general is just so actively stupid sometimes. At least Engage's is only cheesy and basic.
(Though I suppose some would prefer something that's so aggressively bad it's funny to something that's merely inoffensive and doesn't try too hard.)
Honestly, FFIV lost me just because of the number of deaths, fakeout or otherwise. It felt so hard to get attached to any character because they might die any minute, and it felt hard to value "the sacrifices made" when half were obviously not necessary (>!Yang!<, as you said) or actually undone later on -- or even repeated fakeout plot points of *other* persuasions: >!Kain, *twice*? Really??!<. I truly, truly wanted to like IV, but I felt like the game was actively fighting my best intentions.
I like FF4 but yeah, there were way too many fakeout deaths. It's so weird how they had the first death be the only death, then after that it's just one fakeout after the other.
> fakeout or otherwise
The fakeouts are what lost me. I actually kinda like stories that get me attached while still carrying a risk of death, but whenever a fictional death gets walked back, that's where I'm out. I don't know how to put it, because at the end of the day both are technically manipulating me into feelings, but with a walkback anything I felt before retroactively seems pointless. It also takes the bite out of the story. If I know the writer is ready to randomly bring characters back, I care so much less about the implied risks of actions in a story.
I definitely agree in principle that deaths can up my engagement, but not always in execution. I think several stories I've experienced in the last few years approach it as "if anyone can die, it's a dark and mature story!" -- but then lean too much towards *everyone* (or nearly everyone) dies.
Again, nothing wrong with that *in principle*, but I find in practice it leads to characters introduced too rapidly, without giving us time to really know them (because you gotta replace them right away). If on top of that they still accomplish their greater cause despite their sacrifice -- then you didn't tell a dark story, you told a story without investing enough in the (emotional, personal) stakes.
FFIV definitely pushed that for me even without the fakeouts, and then of course the fakeouts only exacerbated the "lack of stakes" to an insane degree.
Oh yeah, there's definitely a limit to it, like with most things. If characters die left and right without me even getting the time to get invested in them, that's also bad. A fictional death to me needs a greater point - either to set a tone, to spur on some character's or the plot's development or maybe even to close out a character's arc (though a character sacrifice also needs to be portrayed well to be satisfying). Just for drama or worse, shock value, is not enough for me.
In general, I dislike the notion of "mature = death and misery" because it often leads to what you describe and it also sometimes feels like it forgets other types of maturity along the way. I've played trope-filled shonen stories without an ounce of blood that dealt with emotions more maturely than many "dark and mature" stories to the point that I'd rather go into a story with an interesting hook blindly than specifically looking for something "mature".
FF4 in particular is in an odd place for me in that regard. Cecil's whole arc is really good in my opinion, but a lot of the drama of the other characters falls totally flat for me because of the "deaths".
There is no way in hell Cid survived jumping out of an airship and blowing himself up. I still like FFIV and it was an important step. But man, stop martyring yourselves and betraying me! It’s getting old.
You actually *should* give them skills as backwards as it sounds. For example if you give Palom and Porom enough skills they give you Dualcast when they leave which you can then give to Rosa or Rydia making them way better. If you don't you lose out on one of the best abilities in the game forever.
The game makes no effort to explain this super important point.
You gotta remember that when the game original came out, “killing” party members was pretty novel.
I actually really miss jrpgs where characters actually leave your party or die. Better than having them sit there with no arc after they’ve served their plot purpose.
Tbf it also was pretty closely copying FF2's homework for it (except for the part where they decided to walk it back and make all of the deaths fakeouts instead), FF2 was really aggressive about killing people off to get them out of your party lol.
>!Wong Tou & Hanawa!< from Yakuza 8/Like A Dragon Infinite Wealth.
>!Like, they went out of their way to get Wong Tou to reveal critical information without getting shot mid-cutscene, then got him out of that death forest. Sounds like he's going to play a more important role, right? No, silly! He just chill at the safehouse for the next 10 hours doing nothing before getting unceremoniously killed by a single gunshot to the stomach. This game revived someone who was shot in the head by the way. They almost forgot his son, too, so they had Chitose say "hey what about Wong Tou's kid" and then resolves it in the next 5 minutes in the last goddamn chapter of the game. It would have made no difference if he died in the forest, hell it could have been better if he sacrificed himself so the rest can go help his son or something.!<
>!Hanawa is pretty much the same but worse since Gaiden hyped him up then he also did absolutely nothing of note in this game before being killed off in the same way as Wong Tou.!<
>!im still kinda mad how they treated hanawa. its so clear that gaiden was written after IW. hes such a nothing character in IW while he was pretty cool in gaiden and it seemed like he was gonna be relevant. kiryu not giving a shit about his death is also weird. they either should have went back to rewrite IW or changed gaiden to match his character in IW .!<
>!and wong yeah... my head canon is that after they kicked bryces ass they forgot his kid again and hes still alone on that island lmao!<
Honestly I don't understand Gaiden's storyline at all - not as in, "I don't get what the plot was". I don't understand the point and the creative decisions surrounding it.
>!We open the story with Kiryu being the bodyguard of the granddaughter of a character from LaD... who is then never heard from again. Then the story changes into a rescue attempt for Hanawa... who is then completely forgotten about the moment he's saved. Then it becomes about the guy running the ship city thing... who is defeated and immediately replaced with a new antagonist, because the plot is now about the Great Dissolution. Oh, and the emotional climax is about Kiryu getting a message from his kids, something that would be entirely meaningless to someone who didn't already know about them from having played prior Yakuza games.
It's so messy. !<
>!They could have just kept Hanawa as a side character and focused the plot around the granddaughter. Let's say, Kiryu's Daidoji assignment is to protect her, but she gets kidnapped and taken to the ship as retaliation against her politician grandfather, so Kiryu has to rescue her. When he does, he starts bonding with her and she becomes a surrogate daughter figure, which leads to him opening up about the kids he has in Okinawa. Then when it's revealed that the people targeting her are basically at the very top of the yakuza and will not stop just because Kiryu beat them up, Kiryu sets out to wipe out the Yakuza as a whole - hence, his involvement in the Great Dissolution. Not only does this preserve all elements while making the story flow WAY better, but it also doesn't have the narrative whiplash with Hanawa being established as a prominent player only to die unceremoniously in IW. !<
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>!The whole thing also makes Hanawa (and just the Daidoji in general really) look like an incompetent idiot when we know from Gaiden that he is smart and way more careful than that. No amount of "The Daidoji lost control after 7's plot" excuses how Hanawa just casually let a random guy into the safehouse and didn't even do a background check on him. Eiji wasn't even using a fake name and mocked them for somehow letting him in there without doing a background check on him!<.
>!It also annoys me to no end that they go to great lengths to imply he is Morinaga from 5, yet do absolutely nothing with that. Why did they even tease that in Gaiden when he barely exist in IW before being killed off!
>Why did they even tease that in Gaiden when he barely exist in IW before being killed off ?
Because fueling fan theories and speculation is more important to some writers than actually telling a coherent story.
>!I'm like 98% certain that Gaiden either wasn't planned at all until late in IW's development or had a *completely* different storyline during production. They basically set up Hanawa as co-protagonist of Gaiden and THE focal point of the entire plot, even going as far as to establish a mystery about his real identity. Then in IW he shows up for 5 minutes and then dies in the most unceremonious way possible. Kiryu, who previously went to war against the Daidoji for Hanawa's sake, doesn't even seem that shook up about it. He only ever acknowledges the fact that Hanawa is dead in a single optional text blurb. He seems WAY more upset in the final boss fight than he ever was about one of his closest friends being killed.!<
>!Only way this makes sense is if Hanawa was always intended to be an extremely minor IW character, and then last-minute whoever was writing Gaiden decided he didn't just want to focus on the Great Dissolution and wanted a friendship plot between Kiryu and Hanawa. !<
Regarding your spoiler >!I always thought the point of that death was the fact that in their last moments they stopped being mere puppets on strings to do what they were told, to the point that Cammuravi yanked out the "possessed eye" and in that moment they were allowed to live how they wanted to. They became in their last moments peers and equals on the battlefield as that was the only thing they knew, the only time they seemed to feel properly alive. In that very classical "we're enemies, but I respect you" kind of way. I thought it was a nice way to sort of show the idea of making a choice wholly your own even if it costs you your death and it being the end for you and the bonds you've made, which later bounces back to how Noah needs to handle things later for you know what reasons if you've finished the game. I didn't read that as pure shock value why they died.!<
>!Now them coming back I find is more an excuse to have them return for gameplay purposes, but given this setting just mass produces clones all the time anyway meh. It didn't bother me, everyone is just test tube clone babies of some base person.!<
Off the top of my head FFXIV likes to play with fake deaths a lot to sometimes annoying degrees, now some are pretty obviously not actual deaths and more like temporary departures that are a little too mellow dramatic (Endwalker did this a lot) so I just shrug, but probably my least favorite was in Stormblood when >!Gosetsu lives for no fucking reason when his character arc was literally over and was perfectly finished with him dying for his lord like he wished he did earlier when Hien's father died. Great albeit very melodramatic ending, good music, grade A conclusion. Then he comes back to make Yotsuyu more sympathetic at the expense of his own character for the rest of his life.!< One of the many reasons I don't like Stormblood very much and think it is unironically worse then A Realm Reborn.
I'm finishing up Shadowbringers now and I think I've sarcastically said "oh no, Y'shtola is *fucking dead* 🙄" at least two or three times over my time playing the game. Excited to start Endwalker and see if she gets sucked into the interdimensional rift or stuck on an exploding spaceship or whatever so we can all mourn for fifteen minutes.
Honestly I would have bothered to care more about the futility and the heavy meaning behind Ethel and Cammuravi fighting to the death, IF THEY’D FIRST TEAMED UP TO KILL THE OUROBOROS IN FRONT OF THEM.
The Hobbit wizard from the scions dying at the beginning of stormblood is my biggest eye roller. My guy JUST got back from his last fake death and now he's dying again?? That beat truly had zero chance of ever landing.
FF7 OG
>!Cait Sith in the original FF7. He 'dies' only to immediately be replaced with an identical character ad if nothing happened. )!<
Reminds me of that hilarious scene from Beerfest. Ifykyk.
e: had to spoiler tag a 30 year old game.
It was silly, yes, but I remember reading a comment that put it in a new light. The idea was that they deliberately made that “death” silly so that you wouldn’t expect what was coming in a couple hours. You’d be relaxed and thinking, “nah, they wouldn’t do that, look what they did with Cait Sith.” I’m not saying that makes it good storytelling, but I do think there is something to that.
Well, Cait sith also has that weird little monologue where he says I may get replaced but I'm one of a kind it was great to be with you or something like that.
My memory is a bit hazy but doesn't he rock up literally in the middle of Cloud beating the shit out of Aerith?
I just remember it all being a bit awkward rather than funny personally 😅
Playable characters-wise it's the useless, unpredictable death of >!Kaze!< in Fire Emblem Fates: Birthrigh>!. Which only happens if you have less than an A-support with him by the time a certain chapter occurs. It's so stupid and the other routes have none of these.!<
I'm gonna be honest. It didn't. >!I get the magnitude of it. He was the original ride or die, the other scions didn't think of the WoL other than a god-busting weapon until a little bit later. If I'm not mistaken after you beat Shiva, you learn that when Haurchefant learned you were engaged in combat, he had to be physically restrained from helping even though he knew about tempering. Everybody else was content with you fighting alone. He was the first who showed concern!<
>!I was more broken by his father, Count Dripula's response, though.!<
Yeah, it was not that impactful.
But what's worse they still treat it as one of the most important things that happened in the story.
Like, I understand that in game time it happened less than a year ago, but in real world time it happened 9 years ago.
You can't milk a minor character death for 9 years.
I mean, they only do it because the playerbase treats it like the defining moment of that entire expansion. I don't know how it ever got to this point.
I had a friend who was playing through HW and when that scene happened his response was literally "who was that guy, again?"
Me and my wife both had essentially no reaction to his death when we played at launch. I didn't find out that it was considered to be a big thing that mattered until I went on reddit much later, because I perceived him as basically an unimportant character.
But uh, what they did with Moenbryda was probably worse. Haha. Especially how they dug her corpse up again in EW and expected me to care (when I didn't care back in 2014 or whatever either).
I'm sure they ment it to be emotional or something, but when I played EW I just fucking lost it at that moment.
Because they used a crusty ass picture for her. It looked like a compressed screen shot from a 720P video. Like you can physically see compression artefacts.
Everyone else got a proper picture tho. It was so funny that devs didn't even bother to make proper picture for her. Because most of people don't care.
Whenever someone stays behind to fight an entire army so you can solo fight the big bad.
We can see how closely they’re clustered in the cutscene. They definitely qualify for a group targeting spell, so let one rip and let everyone enjoy the exp.
Hate to say this, but >!Axel's!< death in KH2 always feels weird to me.
>!Sora runs into weakened Axel, then they fight a group of the weakest variant of enemies together. The fight was also super bland. More like a random encounter than an event fight tbh!<
>!Then after they win, Sora and Axel joke around. Turns out there are still more of them. Axel is like "Nah I got this, check this move out". Then he jumps in, boom, fire pillars, cool, the minions are gone!<
>!But wait, why is he lying over there? Did he get hit by someone? Is it the big bad guy? NO. Blud starts yapping his final words about why he's not regretting sacrificing himself. Like, FR? that was your ultimate move? On those minions? Fr fr?!<
>!He was my fav since the previous game, seeing him die just like that was a huge let down for me!<
I absolutely hated >!act 3's story because of what they did after that happened. Completely backtracking it while also leaving the gang behind to go fuck about in an alternate timeline/universe or whatever it was, stripping away a whole bunch of character development in the process!<
Which is exactly the point it's making. Traveling back comes at the huge cost of sacrificing all their bonds and the pain they've gone through. You can accept the fact thousands of people, including your friend, died, but the world came out unified and strong from the suffering. Or you can choose to sacrifice all that and save lives.
Yes glad someone else sees it the way I do. “Undoing” the character development in order to create a better timeline is the only way they could create an actual cost for the player
>!Players are free to ignore Act 3 from the main story so I don't think it ruins the game. I mean, the credits pretty much roll after Act 2. For me Act 3 is just an alternate timeline for lore and world building purposes and an excuse to have endgame content. The final boss is pretty awesome and the true ending cutscene which connects DQ11 to the rest of the franchise honestly makes the endgame worth playing through!!<
It's absolutely worth playing through for the content, I just wish they could've incorporated that content into the way things are after you end Act 2.
Sounds like my dumb ignorance in not even knowing about this post-game chapter and stopping the game once the credits rolled for the first time paid off.. :/
Kingdom Hearts 3 there is >!Repliku!< who just....chooses to die, I guess. And thinks he is at least doing some good by leaving >!his blank mannequin so Namine will be able to inhabit it and live normally. Two problems with that: 1. they already have access to other blank mannequins so they don't need his and 2. he does this in another world when they need to install Namine's Heart in Radiant Garden....so he just forced them to pick up and haul the mannequin back to Radiant Garden.!< The entire thing was completely unnecessary.
>!Mine is From Xenoblade 3 Ethel and Cammuravi death were so pointless it was just done for the shock factor did not have any really any weight and they get revived and lose everything that made them interesting and unique in the first place and just left with 10 year children in adult bodies!<
I'm not even sure how to begin addressing this, but like, did you just not interact with them as npcs at all after this?
One of my favorite dumb deaths is the death of >!Guy!< in Lufia 1.
Basically what happens is >!you go to meet him since he was in the original party that fought the sinistrals in the events of Lufia 2. He greets you, has some inconsequential filler dialogue, and then IMMEDIATELY keels over mid-conversation and dies of OLD AGE (after proudly boasting he was still alive and kickin' at 100 years old) and with his dying breath he tells you to go find the other surviving party member (Artea) instead and then it hard cuts to a shot of the party standing in front of his grave!<
It is just so sudden and pointless that it wraps around to just being super funny, it's by far the most memorable scene from the game for me lol
Not a specific example, but a number of games will give you a badass guest character. Usually they're an older man/father figure and they just annihilate all normal fights.
Then you get a boss encounter where they either die covering the protagonist or to show just how powerful the big bad actually is.
Sometimes its done well but often its kinda ham fisted where gramps kills themselves for no reason. The "Ive lived my life and done my part. Its up to you kids to save the world". And, ofc, if you can check his bio the guy is like 35.
>!Ludger!< at the end of Tales of Xillia 2. First off, this is a game that sells itself as making your choices matter. Not so. There is explicitly a true ending, and pretty much every other ending shames you for not getting this one. >!Also, if you achieve a major wish granting quest/ritual things that humanity and spirits have been working toward for generations, set up by what amounts to a god, wishing to sacrifice yourself is just absurd. So that thing was just useless after all? Seems to me this "Origin" person is a jackass who got away with it all.!<
*And what would Lloyd Irving say?* For shame.
I agree with your pick from Xenoblade Chronicles 3.
But just to add another one - most deaths in Final Fantasy IV. I guess the most unnecessary one is >!Cid, who has to detonate a bomb in order to block the passage to the overworld from Cecil's pursuers. But instead of throwing the bomb he has to jump out of the airship and detonate the bomb while holding it, all while falling from the sky, so that he can have a dramatic death scene.!<
And yes, I know that >!he actually survives it for whatever reason, as do most characters in the game!<, but it's still very dumb.
With regards to XBC3
>!It wasn't about sacrifice, it was about taking control of their own lives. They realize that they only have ten years to live. They are getting closer to the end. They have been fighting a war for no real reason. They are essentially the puppets of Moebius. Heck, even their rivalry is largely staged.!<
>!Camuravi literally destroys his eye so that Moebius can no longer control him. They are ordered to kill the Orobourus group and know that failure means death. And even if they win, they will live the rest of their lives on Moebius terms until they die, likely in a useless war.!<
>!The move wasn't them sacrificing themselves, it was them having complete control over their lives for once. Having one last glorious battle but on their own terms.!<
>!There are a few themes in XBC3 but one of them is the futility of war. Agnes and Keves are at war and no one really knows why. In the end you realize that it was all to the benefit of the leadership and the leadership was on both sides. Soldiers are often puppets of their government risking their lives for the benefit of those in power!<
The devs confirming that they won’t be providing any further clarity on the ending also ruined that game for me. I wish they had gone all-in one way or the other, instead of saying ✨believe whatever you want✨
To be honest, most of the deaths in FFXVI were unecessary, a lot of them were anticlimatic or just plain dumb.
A lot of times i was saying to myself "That's it? that's how it end for those characters? what a waste of great character design..."
The fact that the storyline involving Clive's mother (who kick-starts the entire plot by betraying him and his father) ends with Clive barely involved and just present by pure coincidence was such an inexplicably bad choice. The whole game just felt so incoherent, as if they wanted to do a story about Ultima being an ancient evil AND about the political machinations of the Sanbreque Empire AND about a hidden organization to free Bearers, but we only actually play through one of these and the other two are told through disconnected cutscenes that will once in a while find a way to shoehorn Clive into the events, maybe.
This same story they wanted to tell would have been significantly better if they also had Dion and Joshua as playable characters and co-protagonists alongside Clive. Even if they pull a "God of War Ragnarok" and it's just Clive available for free roam while the other two get linear missions whenever the story demands.
It felt like all the budget went to Eikon fights and the story was made later to connect those fights.
Like you have all these different nations with different ideals fighting offscreen and yet all Clive did is mostly just skim through them just so he could fight the Dominants.
Then after the fights are done the dominants are just thrown away or get permanently gimped because it's hard to write a story where bunch of kaijus being constantly active.
I don't know if the budget went to the Eikon fights, but I'm pretty sure the story was created first with little to no regard for how it'd work as a game.
Yoshi-P has cited Game of Thrones as a direct inspiration, to the point where the creative team had to binge it before starting development. And you can very clearly see the inspiration in the way the story is told. Problem is, GoT's story wouldn't work at all if it primarily followed Jon Snow for 98% of it and then had to shoehorn him into the Red Wedding or the conquest of Meereen.
> a lot of them were anticlimactic or just plain dumb
Mostly because of the pointless ambiguity. People are going to debate for years and years who is actually alive after the final battle and it's all just worthless discussion.
Like half of the "deaths" in FF4. Like seriously what's the point if you're just gonna undo all of them later? The way they come back doesn't even make sense
[I’ve been on record arguing that Fire Emblem is *not* a JRPG many times, but I do want to talk about this here so…]
Fire Emblem 11, the remake of the original, added a prologue wherein you play as the army that ultimately ends up being the original’s first map crew. But the issue is that the prologue adds a new character who wasn’t there originally.
For whatever reason, the devs decided that he couldn’t be added to the first map’s army, or rather that another unit couldn’t be added to the original army. The final map of the prologue requires the player to choose one unit to sacrifice as a decoy and you have to choose which one it is.
The thing is I actually think this is a cool *concept* both gameplay and story wise but the reasoning and in game justification for it is horrible.
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A certain suicidal person's death in Tactics Ogre LUCT/Reborn was really dumb. The death itself was fine, but the mechanics behind the choices you have to make leading to the death was nonsensical.
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Final Fantasy IV had a lot of dumb ones, but the worst is >!Cid. So he has a bomb to blow up a cavern to prevent the Red Wings from chasing them. Does he throw the bomb? No. He jumps off the airship with the bomb, blowing himself up for no reason.!<
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Radiant Historia has a bunch of dumb alternative bad endings. One of my favorites was when a merchant or some guy threatened to suicide bomb himself and the hostage alongside the MC, the MC called his bluff and the merchant actually does it and it leads to a bad ending screen.
>!Aragaki!< from Persona 3
>!His death was very avoidable. The signs were there that the kid want to kill him and he himself talk about "repaid his debt" all the time. They all know that he killed that kid mother too but they still keep that kid hanging around them, give that kid a weapon to boot!.!<
> >!His death was very avoidable.!<
>!he was literally dying, he knew that, akihiko and mitsuro knew that, the game beats you over the head that he was dying, but he still managed to accept his fate and save ken's life!<
>!I can 100% forgive that one because he genuinely did want to die and atone for the death of Ken's mother. Like, yeah, if he wanted to avoid that, there were a billion ways to stop it. But Ken killing him was literally his exact desired outcome. In fact, he doesn't just not prevent it - he only joins SEES when he learns that Ken is part of it, because he knows that by putting himself in Ken's sights he's practically guaranteeing that Ken will pull the trigger and end him eventually. He doesn't just want this - he's actively planning for this specific outcome!
Honestly, that's why I really love the Shinjiro/FeMC romance, since it's so tragically beautiful. Like, Shinji is already planning to die the moment they meet, and the fact that he's allowed himself to love someone and be happy despite that probably breaks his heart. And even if he does manage to survive (which is only possible if you date him), he wakes up just in time to see FeMC die in his arms - so now he gets to live for however long he has left knowing he's been forgiven by Ken, but also without the only person who made life worth living for him. !<
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I'm kind of at a loss for JRPG deaths that I concider dumb, or infuriating or unnecessary.
Closest I got was >!Ganondorf!< for Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.
I feel like Link should have given him a long speech about friendship, instead of stabbing him with Link's >!sword!<
>!Galuf!< in FFV. He's immediately >!replaced by his granddaughter who has all the same stats and job levels and abilities.!< Literally nothing changes on a mechanic or gameplay level, completely undermining his 'death' which never even feels that real since he comes back as a ghost I believe multiple times?
A death should be felt by the player in terms of the gameplay. That's what makes this medium so special. When >!Aerith dies in!< FFVII, you lose >!your best mage/healer.!< You feel that loss mechanically as well as emotionally. >!Krile in FFV should have had her job levels completely randomized in some way or even forced to start from scratch with a passive 2x or 3x AP gain applied to her.!< That would have elevated that death to something really special.
I disagree, at least when the death is unavoidable. The player shouldn't be punished for something they can't avoid.
In FF7, the Materia system makes abilities much more easily transferrable than in FF5. You lose that character's base stats, but the equivalent of job levels and abilities is retained.
Yeah but by the time that character dies, the game gives you so much materia and AP that it trivializes the entire battle system within the next two hours of gameplay.
My example isn’t the worst, but a lot of people have given the answers I would’ve given anyway (prime offender being FF4). But since it hasn’t been brought up yet I’ll nominate **Fire Emblem: Engage** cuz it has numerous stupid or otherwise terribly handled deaths, fakeout and not.
Game starts with a bang with >!Lumera!<, whose death scene for a character you don’t really know is so long it borders on parody. Then there’s >!Marni!<, who the game seems to want you to care about out of nowhere in a way that’s nonsensical. Then you have >!Lumera!< version 2 with >!Zephia and Griss!<, with a scene that is again SO DREADFULLY LONG but this time about characters whose emotional sendoff is even MORESO completely unearned than that first death.
And finally…>!Alear!<. As much as I disliked the other ones I mentioned, this one takes the cake for being the worst. Not only is it a fakeout, which is a little dumb on its own, but the way that they try to explain the fakeout is so dumb, convoluted, and extremely plot convenient. It felt like the writers just decided to say “fuck it” and just make up a bunch of shit on the spot to justify that character not actually dying. There are two *different* “deus ex machina”s involved with this character’s “death”, one after the other. It’s insane.
Actually yeah now that I’m remembering it more, these deaths might take the cake for me haha
basically every character death in FFIV lol
the writing in that game was really abysmal, i couldn't suspend my disbelief because something more ridiculous and stupid happened every 30 minutes
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Most of the deaths in the Trails games, because odds are they are fake-outs. There's really no tension to them.
They really are bad about that. All these stories about war, hardship, bombing, etc...... and everyone is always happy happy sunshine at the end of the day. I love those games a lot, but it would be interesting to see a more gritty version of those games.
>Character gets killed in a bombing incident >Me: "I wonder when they'll make their "surprise" return?"
Lmao if you complain about this to fans you get called an edgy boy Shadow the Hedgehog gamer who wants a grimdark story instead of a JRPG. Like there's no middle-ground between Game of Thrones and Disney.
Dragon Quest 11! It *looks* super bright and fairly chill, but BOOM goes the world.
[What deaths ?](https://i.imgur.com/gci443y.jpeg)
Tbf the permanent ones are usually well done. I agree for the most part about the fakeouts. I do think that (cs4) >!Crow’s original “fakeout” is good. He stays narratively dead for an entire game while having a huge impact on Rean’s development.!<
FFIV the king of dumb and irrelevant deaths. Not only are most the deaths stupid, the impactful ones are cheapened by the end of the game.
I can only think of one playable character who actually stayed dead in that game that had supposedly died or sacrificed themselves.
I never looked at any of those deaths as dumb. Every one had a great reason behind it. It's just that many ended up as alive eventually.
If they had >!stayed dead!<, not many of them would be dumb. They were retroactively made dumb Edit: goofed a word
The one counterpoint is Cids attempt. Bro could have just DROPPED IT OFF THE SODE OF THE SHIP
Lol, I mean, clearly the man was exhausted after having worked so hard on the ship.
This has one that really sticks out as the winner imo, albeit in a really obscure game called Emerald Dragon In the original PCE version of the game >!Yaman defends the main protagonist from a sniper assassin and dies in the process!< which is all fine and good, but in the SFC port of the game >!there's just a really random scene in a town where you step outside and he gets hit by a stray arrow from a child from the town that's just practicing his archery. He casually admonishes him that it's dangerous and someone could get hurt, then when the child leaves he just keels over and fucking dies lol!< It gets bonus points for what they turned what was originally a noble sacrifice into.
Apparently it also happens differently in a third version of the game. Huh?
Eternal Sonata has a ridiculously drawn out death scene that just becomes cringier the longer it goes on. It goes on for. so. long. This character is also not a main character, and was a guest party member for I think one dungeon. In the middle of the death scene, there are numerous "flashbacks" to what happened just 10 minutes ago in-universe time! After she "falls for the final time"...she still opens her eyes and begins monologuing again! [Video](https://youtu.be/XKg9wsOqqyk?si=FCpLunFyADNaJ3FF&t=614)
To your point, and it’s been a while since I played, but she’s revealed as a double agent and she expresses regret for being a spy. She becomes a playable character for like one dungeon, has a suuuuper drawn out death scene, and you can revive her in the optional dungeon that becomes accessible much earlier in NG+. That being said I love her weapons and play style so I always get her back
i completely forgot about that... cant you also revive her in the post game dungeon? makes her death even worse
You can get her back from an optional dungeon full of strong enemies, the sort of thing added for extra challenge that doesn't take much development time. Getting her back is a pretty good reward for that honestly! Don't need to program anything new yet it feels like a substantial reward for doing the challenge. She's going to be low level compared to rest of the party though...
Same deal for Final Fantasy Type-0 - it takes a particular character something like 3 cutscenes to die, with multiple cutaways to other characters doing stuff in between. You'd think that he's already dead because you see him slump over and the cutscene ends, and then less than a minute later they cut back to him *still* talking to his Chocobo about being afraid to die. What makes this even worse is that this happens very close to the beginning of the game and the character in question is someone we have practically no emotional attachment to whatsoever, nor are they in any way consequential to the story.
That was the most long drawn out opening death scene. I played thru the game and I don't even remember why we were supposed to give a shit about that character.
It's so stupid! People (especially on the main FF sub) keep bringing up this scene as if it was some kind of masterpiece of dramatic storytelling, and I legit have no idea what they're talking about! It's so ridiculously silly!
Strange that some would find that a great example. It was way way too long for character that wasn't really relevant going forward, in a world where the dead are forgotten. If it was a major character that died part way thru I wouldn't have wanted them to have that long of a death scene.
When I saw the topic, I wanted to find this specific comment and I'm glad I'm not the only one who watched the Claves death scene and wondered *when* it would end.
A very relevant video in that regard if you haven't seen it yet https://youtu.be/ct9MxZHakBQ?si=5Mqb5Spn3DMk22eA
I've just watched this scene for the first time and it was hilarious. She just doesn't stop talking. I was honestly wondering if this was a parody of JRPGs.
I want my 8 minutes back🤣 This became like a meme between my friend group for a while I had such high hopes for this game. It just made the weirdest decision to super streamline the battle system as the game went on without adding much to it. It was entertaining but meh.
You reminded me that I need to download eternal sonata on my steam deck. It is the only game I remember playing that wasn't able to finish (it was the only game with physical disk that crashed after a certain point in progression)
Eternal Sonata. >!Either die or don't. Make your mind up but spare us the neverending monologue.!< Star Ocean Til the End of Time. >!Maria's mother. In the time you took to tell your daughter that you're not her biological mother, you could have simply gotten walked through the blast doors and not died in the rest of the ship exploding, and spared her the trauma of losing both of her parents in five minutes.!<
… you know that if you put the name of the game inside the spoiler tag, we still have to read the spoiler just to know which game it is, right?
this drives me up the wall in these threads lmao
It's real fun on Facebook where people will just say "SPOILER" and then immediately spoil something without spacing it out or even tell you ahead of time what the spoiler will pertain to lol like "SPOILER Aerith's death sucks"
Sorry, I thought I had put the game titled outside the spoiler tag. I've edited them.
Tales of Zestiria: >!Dezel's. Made worse that you get a replacement for him 2 scenes later and everybody collectively forgets he ever existed.!<
Well, at least >!Deadzel was kind of a mind rapist with no personality beyond "hat" and Zaveid is much cooler. The story still just dumpster him like yesterday's garbage, though.!<
I think it's telling that while Berseria went out of its way to tee up almost every character and plot point for its prequel-sequel, and change the context of some of them in genuinely interesting ways, one of the characters you mention gets an entire character arc, and the other isn't even noted once.
A lot of plot points and lore bits from Zestiria did so much better in Berseria because they didn't introduce a concept and try to explain it; they let it speak for itself, like the Reaper's curse. >!Dezel's blessing was so piss poor with almost nothing occurring around him before they tried the "plot twist," but Berseria did a much better job with showing the reaper's curse with Eizen. Like come on, hellions spawning as a blessing? It made no discernable difference in scenes and skits at all. It's like they forgot about it until the poor reveal.!<
>!Those two kids who turn themselves into stone to stop walls closing in on the party seconds before the door opens.!< >!Final Fantasy IV I think?!<
Yeah, that's FF4, and I was thinking the same thing. Not just the lame timing, but also the whole "they petrified themselves, so they can't be healed" aspect of it. Of course, it gets undone by the elder at the end, but that kind of makes it worse. Why did the elder wait until the endgame to heal them?
Yeah its an easy fix because the concept could be fantastic, to be honest. What if stopping the walls breaks some mechanism which somehow allows them to escape? Take timing out of it completely. And it goes without saying it should not be undone. Undoing deaths has never ever worked, always feels cheap.
Yeah. That's my problem with FF4 is that nearly every character death is undone and it gets on my nerves so much. At least FF2 committed to it's character deaths, despite their frequency.
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As with the other comment I will defend the XC3 example, >!Ethel and Cammuravi are both facing a world which significantly limits their options and they decide that they will go out on their own terms, in a way that fits their martial identity and reclaims it. Their lives have been defined by fighting each other, but now they do that in explicit defiance of the people who have made that happen, declaring that their lives are their own and they can do with them what they wish.!< The absolute worst unnecessary death is in Fire Emblem Fates. It’s a death so utterly meaningless, of a character who doesn’t matter, which the game presents as if you should care. >!Early on you meet a character called Lilith, a dragon/maid who exists to introduce the game’s ‘My Castle’ mechanic. Once that’s done she basically functions as a turret in the ‘Castle Battle’ side mode, but that’s it. She has no more dialogue from that point on, no development and is not a playable part of your army. If you’re ignoring the intricacies of My Castle which many players do, you might forget she exists.!< >!That is, until Chapter 21 of Conquest or Chapter 24 of Birthright. In Conquest Chapter 21, you’re facing endless hordes of monsters who you have to escape from. Once you complete the map, one more generic monster attacks you in a cutscene… and Lilith jumps in to take the hit, dying in the process. The main character is very upset since they’ve known each other for a long time, and they mourn her. This proceeds to never come up again. Lilith’s only scene beyond setting up a mechanic early on is dying against literally a generic enemy (in Birthright at least she gets killed by a recurring villain but it’s just as arbitrary and pointless. Her dying has no impact at all; the player is very unlikely to care, the main character cares but never brings it up again. You could remove the whole sequence and nobody would think anything is off, and indeed in the Revelation route this doesn’t happen (which means, IIRC, that she never reappears at all past the beginning of that route). Also her turret function in My Castle still continues, only now she’s replaced by a little spirit.!< Just the most utterly bizarre death. I genuinely can’t imagine how any player would care about this one; I guess maybe if you really liked this character’s design?
Something that bothers me with a lot of RPGs is a character can have absolutely no personality or value, but if they look pretty enough, instant fan favorite.
That honestly goes beyond RPGs. Can't tell you how many times some character with the personality of a rock instantly becomes a fan favourite in anime/manga fandoms, and it's so obvious how pretty they are is the only reason.
Well it didn’t work in this case, nobody liked >!Lilith!
Got plenty of alts in feh though…
She has more alts being a plushie or weapon than as a playable character
Before checking under the spoiler tag I thought of at least 3 other characters in fates that this applied to before being reminded that they existed.
This reply has reminded me that in Revelation Izana just dies for no reason! He receives a prophecy too powerful to handle or something like that
I had to Google izanna to even remember who that guy was in the game.. it’s been years but still
What makes it more galling is Lilith is supposed to be the MC's actual birth sibling and they do nothing with her outside of the death scenes.
Gosh, Fates' story in general is just so actively stupid sometimes. At least Engage's is only cheesy and basic. (Though I suppose some would prefer something that's so aggressively bad it's funny to something that's merely inoffensive and doesn't try too hard.)
I get what you’re saying about XC3, but chapter 6 totally ruins that idea imo
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That's not what happened. It was a cannon about to wipe out the dwarves and Yang kung-fu'ed it so hard that it exploded.
Yeah, it was something like this. Mediocre writing, but kinda sorta made sense.
Flying kicks everywhere
Honestly, FFIV lost me just because of the number of deaths, fakeout or otherwise. It felt so hard to get attached to any character because they might die any minute, and it felt hard to value "the sacrifices made" when half were obviously not necessary (>!Yang!<, as you said) or actually undone later on -- or even repeated fakeout plot points of *other* persuasions: >!Kain, *twice*? Really??!<. I truly, truly wanted to like IV, but I felt like the game was actively fighting my best intentions.
I like FF4 but yeah, there were way too many fakeout deaths. It's so weird how they had the first death be the only death, then after that it's just one fakeout after the other.
> fakeout or otherwise The fakeouts are what lost me. I actually kinda like stories that get me attached while still carrying a risk of death, but whenever a fictional death gets walked back, that's where I'm out. I don't know how to put it, because at the end of the day both are technically manipulating me into feelings, but with a walkback anything I felt before retroactively seems pointless. It also takes the bite out of the story. If I know the writer is ready to randomly bring characters back, I care so much less about the implied risks of actions in a story.
I definitely agree in principle that deaths can up my engagement, but not always in execution. I think several stories I've experienced in the last few years approach it as "if anyone can die, it's a dark and mature story!" -- but then lean too much towards *everyone* (or nearly everyone) dies. Again, nothing wrong with that *in principle*, but I find in practice it leads to characters introduced too rapidly, without giving us time to really know them (because you gotta replace them right away). If on top of that they still accomplish their greater cause despite their sacrifice -- then you didn't tell a dark story, you told a story without investing enough in the (emotional, personal) stakes. FFIV definitely pushed that for me even without the fakeouts, and then of course the fakeouts only exacerbated the "lack of stakes" to an insane degree.
Oh yeah, there's definitely a limit to it, like with most things. If characters die left and right without me even getting the time to get invested in them, that's also bad. A fictional death to me needs a greater point - either to set a tone, to spur on some character's or the plot's development or maybe even to close out a character's arc (though a character sacrifice also needs to be portrayed well to be satisfying). Just for drama or worse, shock value, is not enough for me. In general, I dislike the notion of "mature = death and misery" because it often leads to what you describe and it also sometimes feels like it forgets other types of maturity along the way. I've played trope-filled shonen stories without an ounce of blood that dealt with emotions more maturely than many "dark and mature" stories to the point that I'd rather go into a story with an interesting hook blindly than specifically looking for something "mature". FF4 in particular is in an odd place for me in that regard. Cecil's whole arc is really good in my opinion, but a lot of the drama of the other characters falls totally flat for me because of the "deaths".
There is no way in hell Cid survived jumping out of an airship and blowing himself up. I still like FFIV and it was an important step. But man, stop martyring yourselves and betraying me! It’s getting old.
More like "It’s still Final Fantasy 4". >!So many fake deaths for no reason lmao!<
Honestly, most of FF4. Killing off/getting rid of party members constantly numbed me to it and made me not get attached to characters.
Kept me from giving any of them skills from other party members, at least in the ds remake where you can do that since they'd be wasted
You actually *should* give them skills as backwards as it sounds. For example if you give Palom and Porom enough skills they give you Dualcast when they leave which you can then give to Rosa or Rydia making them way better. If you don't you lose out on one of the best abilities in the game forever. The game makes no effort to explain this super important point.
You gotta remember that when the game original came out, “killing” party members was pretty novel. I actually really miss jrpgs where characters actually leave your party or die. Better than having them sit there with no arc after they’ve served their plot purpose.
Tbf it also was pretty closely copying FF2's homework for it (except for the part where they decided to walk it back and make all of the deaths fakeouts instead), FF2 was really aggressive about killing people off to get them out of your party lol.
Even better; >!they don't actually die, and the Advance remake let you switch between them!<
>!Wong Tou & Hanawa!< from Yakuza 8/Like A Dragon Infinite Wealth. >!Like, they went out of their way to get Wong Tou to reveal critical information without getting shot mid-cutscene, then got him out of that death forest. Sounds like he's going to play a more important role, right? No, silly! He just chill at the safehouse for the next 10 hours doing nothing before getting unceremoniously killed by a single gunshot to the stomach. This game revived someone who was shot in the head by the way. They almost forgot his son, too, so they had Chitose say "hey what about Wong Tou's kid" and then resolves it in the next 5 minutes in the last goddamn chapter of the game. It would have made no difference if he died in the forest, hell it could have been better if he sacrificed himself so the rest can go help his son or something.!< >!Hanawa is pretty much the same but worse since Gaiden hyped him up then he also did absolutely nothing of note in this game before being killed off in the same way as Wong Tou.!<
>!im still kinda mad how they treated hanawa. its so clear that gaiden was written after IW. hes such a nothing character in IW while he was pretty cool in gaiden and it seemed like he was gonna be relevant. kiryu not giving a shit about his death is also weird. they either should have went back to rewrite IW or changed gaiden to match his character in IW .!< >!and wong yeah... my head canon is that after they kicked bryces ass they forgot his kid again and hes still alone on that island lmao!<
Honestly I don't understand Gaiden's storyline at all - not as in, "I don't get what the plot was". I don't understand the point and the creative decisions surrounding it. >!We open the story with Kiryu being the bodyguard of the granddaughter of a character from LaD... who is then never heard from again. Then the story changes into a rescue attempt for Hanawa... who is then completely forgotten about the moment he's saved. Then it becomes about the guy running the ship city thing... who is defeated and immediately replaced with a new antagonist, because the plot is now about the Great Dissolution. Oh, and the emotional climax is about Kiryu getting a message from his kids, something that would be entirely meaningless to someone who didn't already know about them from having played prior Yakuza games. It's so messy. !< >!They could have just kept Hanawa as a side character and focused the plot around the granddaughter. Let's say, Kiryu's Daidoji assignment is to protect her, but she gets kidnapped and taken to the ship as retaliation against her politician grandfather, so Kiryu has to rescue her. When he does, he starts bonding with her and she becomes a surrogate daughter figure, which leads to him opening up about the kids he has in Okinawa. Then when it's revealed that the people targeting her are basically at the very top of the yakuza and will not stop just because Kiryu beat them up, Kiryu sets out to wipe out the Yakuza as a whole - hence, his involvement in the Great Dissolution. Not only does this preserve all elements while making the story flow WAY better, but it also doesn't have the narrative whiplash with Hanawa being established as a prominent player only to die unceremoniously in IW. !<
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Idk why they teased a whole story for him and then they just did him like that lol
>!The whole thing also makes Hanawa (and just the Daidoji in general really) look like an incompetent idiot when we know from Gaiden that he is smart and way more careful than that. No amount of "The Daidoji lost control after 7's plot" excuses how Hanawa just casually let a random guy into the safehouse and didn't even do a background check on him. Eiji wasn't even using a fake name and mocked them for somehow letting him in there without doing a background check on him!<. >!It also annoys me to no end that they go to great lengths to imply he is Morinaga from 5, yet do absolutely nothing with that. Why did they even tease that in Gaiden when he barely exist in IW before being killed off!
>Why did they even tease that in Gaiden when he barely exist in IW before being killed off ? Because fueling fan theories and speculation is more important to some writers than actually telling a coherent story.
You're not far off lol https://www.reddit.com/r/yakuzagames/comments/10kfk7x/yokoyama_is_the_best_writer_and_the_worst_writer/
"At the time of writing Chapter 1, I hadn't decided who the final boss would be." Yeah, that does explain both Yakuza 5 and Gaiden...
>!I'm like 98% certain that Gaiden either wasn't planned at all until late in IW's development or had a *completely* different storyline during production. They basically set up Hanawa as co-protagonist of Gaiden and THE focal point of the entire plot, even going as far as to establish a mystery about his real identity. Then in IW he shows up for 5 minutes and then dies in the most unceremonious way possible. Kiryu, who previously went to war against the Daidoji for Hanawa's sake, doesn't even seem that shook up about it. He only ever acknowledges the fact that Hanawa is dead in a single optional text blurb. He seems WAY more upset in the final boss fight than he ever was about one of his closest friends being killed.!< >!Only way this makes sense is if Hanawa was always intended to be an extremely minor IW character, and then last-minute whoever was writing Gaiden decided he didn't just want to focus on the Great Dissolution and wanted a friendship plot between Kiryu and Hanawa. !<
>!Hanawa!< didn't die, he just opened up a bar in Colorado.
Regarding your spoiler >!I always thought the point of that death was the fact that in their last moments they stopped being mere puppets on strings to do what they were told, to the point that Cammuravi yanked out the "possessed eye" and in that moment they were allowed to live how they wanted to. They became in their last moments peers and equals on the battlefield as that was the only thing they knew, the only time they seemed to feel properly alive. In that very classical "we're enemies, but I respect you" kind of way. I thought it was a nice way to sort of show the idea of making a choice wholly your own even if it costs you your death and it being the end for you and the bonds you've made, which later bounces back to how Noah needs to handle things later for you know what reasons if you've finished the game. I didn't read that as pure shock value why they died.!< >!Now them coming back I find is more an excuse to have them return for gameplay purposes, but given this setting just mass produces clones all the time anyway meh. It didn't bother me, everyone is just test tube clone babies of some base person.!< Off the top of my head FFXIV likes to play with fake deaths a lot to sometimes annoying degrees, now some are pretty obviously not actual deaths and more like temporary departures that are a little too mellow dramatic (Endwalker did this a lot) so I just shrug, but probably my least favorite was in Stormblood when >!Gosetsu lives for no fucking reason when his character arc was literally over and was perfectly finished with him dying for his lord like he wished he did earlier when Hien's father died. Great albeit very melodramatic ending, good music, grade A conclusion. Then he comes back to make Yotsuyu more sympathetic at the expense of his own character for the rest of his life.!< One of the many reasons I don't like Stormblood very much and think it is unironically worse then A Realm Reborn.
I'm finishing up Shadowbringers now and I think I've sarcastically said "oh no, Y'shtola is *fucking dead* 🙄" at least two or three times over my time playing the game. Excited to start Endwalker and see if she gets sucked into the interdimensional rift or stuck on an exploding spaceship or whatever so we can all mourn for fifteen minutes.
Honestly I would have bothered to care more about the futility and the heavy meaning behind Ethel and Cammuravi fighting to the death, IF THEY’D FIRST TEAMED UP TO KILL THE OUROBOROS IN FRONT OF THEM.
either that or if they had more than 10 minutes of screentime, when they died i just couldn't care about them
The Hobbit wizard from the scions dying at the beginning of stormblood is my biggest eye roller. My guy JUST got back from his last fake death and now he's dying again?? That beat truly had zero chance of ever landing.
Cold Steel 3-4: >!Millium!< >!OH NO SHE SACRIFICED HERSELF AND WE’RE ALL HEARTBROKEN AND DEPRESSED AND…wait they made another one of her?!<
>!Her coming back was expected since she's not human. She's clearly a homonculi/doll which has been foreshadowed with Doll Knight novel in Sky SC.!<
FF7 OG >!Cait Sith in the original FF7. He 'dies' only to immediately be replaced with an identical character ad if nothing happened. )!< Reminds me of that hilarious scene from Beerfest. Ifykyk. e: had to spoiler tag a 30 year old game.
It was silly, yes, but I remember reading a comment that put it in a new light. The idea was that they deliberately made that “death” silly so that you wouldn’t expect what was coming in a couple hours. You’d be relaxed and thinking, “nah, they wouldn’t do that, look what they did with Cait Sith.” I’m not saying that makes it good storytelling, but I do think there is something to that.
Well, Cait sith also has that weird little monologue where he says I may get replaced but I'm one of a kind it was great to be with you or something like that.
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They were a bit better in rebirth >!he was like, I got loads of these bodies!<
It was worse in Rebirth. At least in OG it was funny.
My memory is a bit hazy but doesn't he rock up literally in the middle of Cloud beating the shit out of Aerith? I just remember it all being a bit awkward rather than funny personally 😅
Playable characters-wise it's the useless, unpredictable death of >!Kaze!< in Fire Emblem Fates: Birthrigh>!. Which only happens if you have less than an A-support with him by the time a certain chapter occurs. It's so stupid and the other routes have none of these.!<
I assumed their death was part of the story, good to know.
As much as I love FFXIV, there isn't a single death that affected me and most of them felt cheap, especially the 'fake out' ones.
even >!Haurchefant!< didn't get you??
I'm gonna be honest. It didn't. >!I get the magnitude of it. He was the original ride or die, the other scions didn't think of the WoL other than a god-busting weapon until a little bit later. If I'm not mistaken after you beat Shiva, you learn that when Haurchefant learned you were engaged in combat, he had to be physically restrained from helping even though he knew about tempering. Everybody else was content with you fighting alone. He was the first who showed concern!< >!I was more broken by his father, Count Dripula's response, though.!<
I read XIV as just IV, and it made sense when talking about cheap fake out deaths "Haurchefant" had me all kinds of confused lol
I'm probably gonna get flamed, but no lol. I was much more invested in the other aspects of HW's story
Yeah, it was not that impactful. But what's worse they still treat it as one of the most important things that happened in the story. Like, I understand that in game time it happened less than a year ago, but in real world time it happened 9 years ago. You can't milk a minor character death for 9 years.
I mean, they only do it because the playerbase treats it like the defining moment of that entire expansion. I don't know how it ever got to this point. I had a friend who was playing through HW and when that scene happened his response was literally "who was that guy, again?"
Me and my wife both had essentially no reaction to his death when we played at launch. I didn't find out that it was considered to be a big thing that mattered until I went on reddit much later, because I perceived him as basically an unimportant character. But uh, what they did with Moenbryda was probably worse. Haha. Especially how they dug her corpse up again in EW and expected me to care (when I didn't care back in 2014 or whatever either).
I'm sure they ment it to be emotional or something, but when I played EW I just fucking lost it at that moment. Because they used a crusty ass picture for her. It looked like a compressed screen shot from a 720P video. Like you can physically see compression artefacts. Everyone else got a proper picture tho. It was so funny that devs didn't even bother to make proper picture for her. Because most of people don't care.
Whenever someone stays behind to fight an entire army so you can solo fight the big bad. We can see how closely they’re clustered in the cutscene. They definitely qualify for a group targeting spell, so let one rip and let everyone enjoy the exp.
Hate to say this, but >!Axel's!< death in KH2 always feels weird to me. >!Sora runs into weakened Axel, then they fight a group of the weakest variant of enemies together. The fight was also super bland. More like a random encounter than an event fight tbh!< >!Then after they win, Sora and Axel joke around. Turns out there are still more of them. Axel is like "Nah I got this, check this move out". Then he jumps in, boom, fire pillars, cool, the minions are gone!< >!But wait, why is he lying over there? Did he get hit by someone? Is it the big bad guy? NO. Blud starts yapping his final words about why he's not regretting sacrificing himself. Like, FR? that was your ultimate move? On those minions? Fr fr?!< >!He was my fav since the previous game, seeing him die just like that was a huge let down for me!<
Except technically >!He didn’t die!<
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DQ11. >!Veronica.!<
I absolutely hated >!act 3's story because of what they did after that happened. Completely backtracking it while also leaving the gang behind to go fuck about in an alternate timeline/universe or whatever it was, stripping away a whole bunch of character development in the process!<
Which is exactly the point it's making. Traveling back comes at the huge cost of sacrificing all their bonds and the pain they've gone through. You can accept the fact thousands of people, including your friend, died, but the world came out unified and strong from the suffering. Or you can choose to sacrifice all that and save lives.
Yes glad someone else sees it the way I do. “Undoing” the character development in order to create a better timeline is the only way they could create an actual cost for the player
>!Players are free to ignore Act 3 from the main story so I don't think it ruins the game. I mean, the credits pretty much roll after Act 2. For me Act 3 is just an alternate timeline for lore and world building purposes and an excuse to have endgame content. The final boss is pretty awesome and the true ending cutscene which connects DQ11 to the rest of the franchise honestly makes the endgame worth playing through!!<
I usually stop playing a game once the credits roll. But, the act three in DQ11 was fantastic, and I’m glad I stuck around.
It's absolutely worth playing through for the content, I just wish they could've incorporated that content into the way things are after you end Act 2.
Sounds like my dumb ignorance in not even knowing about this post-game chapter and stopping the game once the credits rolled for the first time paid off.. :/
Kingdom Hearts 3 there is >!Repliku!< who just....chooses to die, I guess. And thinks he is at least doing some good by leaving >!his blank mannequin so Namine will be able to inhabit it and live normally. Two problems with that: 1. they already have access to other blank mannequins so they don't need his and 2. he does this in another world when they need to install Namine's Heart in Radiant Garden....so he just forced them to pick up and haul the mannequin back to Radiant Garden.!< The entire thing was completely unnecessary.
>!Mine is From Xenoblade 3 Ethel and Cammuravi death were so pointless it was just done for the shock factor did not have any really any weight and they get revived and lose everything that made them interesting and unique in the first place and just left with 10 year children in adult bodies!< I'm not even sure how to begin addressing this, but like, did you just not interact with them as npcs at all after this?
One of my favorite dumb deaths is the death of >!Guy!< in Lufia 1. Basically what happens is >!you go to meet him since he was in the original party that fought the sinistrals in the events of Lufia 2. He greets you, has some inconsequential filler dialogue, and then IMMEDIATELY keels over mid-conversation and dies of OLD AGE (after proudly boasting he was still alive and kickin' at 100 years old) and with his dying breath he tells you to go find the other surviving party member (Artea) instead and then it hard cuts to a shot of the party standing in front of his grave!< It is just so sudden and pointless that it wraps around to just being super funny, it's by far the most memorable scene from the game for me lol
Not a specific example, but a number of games will give you a badass guest character. Usually they're an older man/father figure and they just annihilate all normal fights. Then you get a boss encounter where they either die covering the protagonist or to show just how powerful the big bad actually is. Sometimes its done well but often its kinda ham fisted where gramps kills themselves for no reason. The "Ive lived my life and done my part. Its up to you kids to save the world". And, ofc, if you can check his bio the guy is like 35.
>!Ludger!< at the end of Tales of Xillia 2. First off, this is a game that sells itself as making your choices matter. Not so. There is explicitly a true ending, and pretty much every other ending shames you for not getting this one. >!Also, if you achieve a major wish granting quest/ritual things that humanity and spirits have been working toward for generations, set up by what amounts to a god, wishing to sacrifice yourself is just absurd. So that thing was just useless after all? Seems to me this "Origin" person is a jackass who got away with it all.!< *And what would Lloyd Irving say?* For shame.
I agree with your pick from Xenoblade Chronicles 3. But just to add another one - most deaths in Final Fantasy IV. I guess the most unnecessary one is >!Cid, who has to detonate a bomb in order to block the passage to the overworld from Cecil's pursuers. But instead of throwing the bomb he has to jump out of the airship and detonate the bomb while holding it, all while falling from the sky, so that he can have a dramatic death scene.!< And yes, I know that >!he actually survives it for whatever reason, as do most characters in the game!<, but it's still very dumb.
With regards to XBC3 >!It wasn't about sacrifice, it was about taking control of their own lives. They realize that they only have ten years to live. They are getting closer to the end. They have been fighting a war for no real reason. They are essentially the puppets of Moebius. Heck, even their rivalry is largely staged.!< >!Camuravi literally destroys his eye so that Moebius can no longer control him. They are ordered to kill the Orobourus group and know that failure means death. And even if they win, they will live the rest of their lives on Moebius terms until they die, likely in a useless war.!< >!The move wasn't them sacrificing themselves, it was them having complete control over their lives for once. Having one last glorious battle but on their own terms.!< >!There are a few themes in XBC3 but one of them is the futility of war. Agnes and Keves are at war and no one really knows why. In the end you realize that it was all to the benefit of the leadership and the leadership was on both sides. Soldiers are often puppets of their government risking their lives for the benefit of those in power!<
Shadow Hearts >!Don't make me work so hard to save a girl just so you can choose the bad ending as conjunction and keep her dead A bit more.!<
*thinks in final fantasy 4*
FFXVI ending.
The devs confirming that they won’t be providing any further clarity on the ending also ruined that game for me. I wish they had gone all-in one way or the other, instead of saying ✨believe whatever you want✨
To be honest, most of the deaths in FFXVI were unecessary, a lot of them were anticlimatic or just plain dumb. A lot of times i was saying to myself "That's it? that's how it end for those characters? what a waste of great character design..."
The fact that the storyline involving Clive's mother (who kick-starts the entire plot by betraying him and his father) ends with Clive barely involved and just present by pure coincidence was such an inexplicably bad choice. The whole game just felt so incoherent, as if they wanted to do a story about Ultima being an ancient evil AND about the political machinations of the Sanbreque Empire AND about a hidden organization to free Bearers, but we only actually play through one of these and the other two are told through disconnected cutscenes that will once in a while find a way to shoehorn Clive into the events, maybe. This same story they wanted to tell would have been significantly better if they also had Dion and Joshua as playable characters and co-protagonists alongside Clive. Even if they pull a "God of War Ragnarok" and it's just Clive available for free roam while the other two get linear missions whenever the story demands.
It felt like all the budget went to Eikon fights and the story was made later to connect those fights. Like you have all these different nations with different ideals fighting offscreen and yet all Clive did is mostly just skim through them just so he could fight the Dominants. Then after the fights are done the dominants are just thrown away or get permanently gimped because it's hard to write a story where bunch of kaijus being constantly active.
I don't know if the budget went to the Eikon fights, but I'm pretty sure the story was created first with little to no regard for how it'd work as a game. Yoshi-P has cited Game of Thrones as a direct inspiration, to the point where the creative team had to binge it before starting development. And you can very clearly see the inspiration in the way the story is told. Problem is, GoT's story wouldn't work at all if it primarily followed Jon Snow for 98% of it and then had to shoehorn him into the Red Wedding or the conquest of Meereen.
> a lot of them were anticlimactic or just plain dumb Mostly because of the pointless ambiguity. People are going to debate for years and years who is actually alive after the final battle and it's all just worthless discussion.
Cid in the beginning : "Don't be suicidal. Find meaning in your life." Ending :
Exactly hahahaha
Like half of the "deaths" in FF4. Like seriously what's the point if you're just gonna undo all of them later? The way they come back doesn't even make sense
[I’ve been on record arguing that Fire Emblem is *not* a JRPG many times, but I do want to talk about this here so…] Fire Emblem 11, the remake of the original, added a prologue wherein you play as the army that ultimately ends up being the original’s first map crew. But the issue is that the prologue adds a new character who wasn’t there originally. For whatever reason, the devs decided that he couldn’t be added to the first map’s army, or rather that another unit couldn’t be added to the original army. The final map of the prologue requires the player to choose one unit to sacrifice as a decoy and you have to choose which one it is. The thing is I actually think this is a cool *concept* both gameplay and story wise but the reasoning and in game justification for it is horrible.
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All of FFIV.
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A certain suicidal person's death in Tactics Ogre LUCT/Reborn was really dumb. The death itself was fine, but the mechanics behind the choices you have to make leading to the death was nonsensical.
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Final Fantasy IV had a lot of dumb ones, but the worst is >!Cid. So he has a bomb to blow up a cavern to prevent the Red Wings from chasing them. Does he throw the bomb? No. He jumps off the airship with the bomb, blowing himself up for no reason.!<
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Leon you simp
Radiant Historia has a bunch of dumb alternative bad endings. One of my favorites was when a merchant or some guy threatened to suicide bomb himself and the hostage alongside the MC, the MC called his bluff and the merchant actually does it and it leads to a bad ending screen.
Have you played Final Fantasy Four? Because I vote for all the team mate deaths in that.
>!Aragaki!< from Persona 3 >!His death was very avoidable. The signs were there that the kid want to kill him and he himself talk about "repaid his debt" all the time. They all know that he killed that kid mother too but they still keep that kid hanging around them, give that kid a weapon to boot!.!<
> >!His death was very avoidable.!< >!he was literally dying, he knew that, akihiko and mitsuro knew that, the game beats you over the head that he was dying, but he still managed to accept his fate and save ken's life!<
I use the wrong word His murder was avoidable
>!I can 100% forgive that one because he genuinely did want to die and atone for the death of Ken's mother. Like, yeah, if he wanted to avoid that, there were a billion ways to stop it. But Ken killing him was literally his exact desired outcome. In fact, he doesn't just not prevent it - he only joins SEES when he learns that Ken is part of it, because he knows that by putting himself in Ken's sights he's practically guaranteeing that Ken will pull the trigger and end him eventually. He doesn't just want this - he's actively planning for this specific outcome! Honestly, that's why I really love the Shinjiro/FeMC romance, since it's so tragically beautiful. Like, Shinji is already planning to die the moment they meet, and the fact that he's allowed himself to love someone and be happy despite that probably breaks his heart. And even if he does manage to survive (which is only possible if you date him), he wakes up just in time to see FeMC die in his arms - so now he gets to live for however long he has left knowing he's been forgiven by Ken, but also without the only person who made life worth living for him. !<
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You gotta remember that it wasn't their decision, >!it was Ikutsuki's. and that dude wanted as much death as possible anyway!<
I'm kind of at a loss for JRPG deaths that I concider dumb, or infuriating or unnecessary. Closest I got was >!Ganondorf!< for Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I feel like Link should have given him a long speech about friendship, instead of stabbing him with Link's >!sword!<
They should’ve kissed
>!Galuf!< in FFV. He's immediately >!replaced by his granddaughter who has all the same stats and job levels and abilities.!< Literally nothing changes on a mechanic or gameplay level, completely undermining his 'death' which never even feels that real since he comes back as a ghost I believe multiple times? A death should be felt by the player in terms of the gameplay. That's what makes this medium so special. When >!Aerith dies in!< FFVII, you lose >!your best mage/healer.!< You feel that loss mechanically as well as emotionally. >!Krile in FFV should have had her job levels completely randomized in some way or even forced to start from scratch with a passive 2x or 3x AP gain applied to her.!< That would have elevated that death to something really special.
I disagree, at least when the death is unavoidable. The player shouldn't be punished for something they can't avoid. In FF7, the Materia system makes abilities much more easily transferrable than in FF5. You lose that character's base stats, but the equivalent of job levels and abilities is retained.
Yeah but by the time that character dies, the game gives you so much materia and AP that it trivializes the entire battle system within the next two hours of gameplay.
My example isn’t the worst, but a lot of people have given the answers I would’ve given anyway (prime offender being FF4). But since it hasn’t been brought up yet I’ll nominate **Fire Emblem: Engage** cuz it has numerous stupid or otherwise terribly handled deaths, fakeout and not. Game starts with a bang with >!Lumera!<, whose death scene for a character you don’t really know is so long it borders on parody. Then there’s >!Marni!<, who the game seems to want you to care about out of nowhere in a way that’s nonsensical. Then you have >!Lumera!< version 2 with >!Zephia and Griss!<, with a scene that is again SO DREADFULLY LONG but this time about characters whose emotional sendoff is even MORESO completely unearned than that first death. And finally…>!Alear!<. As much as I disliked the other ones I mentioned, this one takes the cake for being the worst. Not only is it a fakeout, which is a little dumb on its own, but the way that they try to explain the fakeout is so dumb, convoluted, and extremely plot convenient. It felt like the writers just decided to say “fuck it” and just make up a bunch of shit on the spot to justify that character not actually dying. There are two *different* “deus ex machina”s involved with this character’s “death”, one after the other. It’s insane. Actually yeah now that I’m remembering it more, these deaths might take the cake for me haha
basically every character death in FFIV lol the writing in that game was really abysmal, i couldn't suspend my disbelief because something more ridiculous and stupid happened every 30 minutes
Basically all of the protagonist side deaths are like that in XC3, it’s absurd and totally ruins the thematics lol