The Preciousness of Limited Life
Wilhelm: "The preciousness of limited life, the beauty of death, you're intoxicated by that narcissism."
This was a topic I happened upon on another forum when discussing a guy's last playthrough of FFIX.
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But [Necron] doesn't come out of nowhere thematically because the desire to live despite knowing the fragility of life and the inevitability of death is hammered into your skull about eight hundred times throughout FF9.
To which someone replied:
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Heck, that's a recurring theme in all of Final Fantasy.
Xande is made mortal by his master, so he drowns the world, stopping time so he'll never die. (I could be wrong about this, but I don't think he intentionally released the Cloud of Darkness, it's just that his actions screwed up the balance of light and dark and it had that effect)
Zemus resents the other Lunarians' decision to coexist with the Earth people and thinks they should wipe them out and take over Earth, and when struck down his hatred manifests itself as Zeromus.
Exdeath wants to use the Void to rule the world, but loses control of it, gets devoured and spat back out as Neo Exdeath, whose purpose is to destroy all life and then itself.
Kefka wants to eradicate all life because everybody's going to die and it's meaningless anyway.
And I thought "hey...they're onto something!"
Ultimecia is doing what she's doing because she's scared of dying and wants to avoid that.(At least, about two lines in the entire game hint at this being her motivation. FFVIII's writing, what else can you expect?)
FFX of course has its Spiral of Death and Seymour and Yunalesca giving you big speeches about how sad and pointless life is and we just have to distract ourselves from this fact through lies.
X-2 has Shuyin who wants to nuke the world because life sucks.
FFXIII has the fal'Cie who all just want to hurry up and die and Lightning has a whole big 'SHUT UP'" moment to Orphan about this very fact and how the heroes are better than fal'Cie because they never gave up on life.
And then XIII-2 has Caius, who has also given up on life and wants only for him and Yeul to "die."
XII kinda has it but it's a bit less blatant. The fact humans die relatively fast is brought up a couple times to contrast with the Occuria but I never really felt like it was a central message like in the other games.
