I was catching up on the posts here on my phone last night in bed and early this morning so hopefully I don't miss anything I wanted to comment on.
1) Celes and Cid literally exchange 11 lines of dialogue before he mentions this. I'm not sure why it matters whether or not he says it right after she wakes up, or if it's revealed as part of a conversation with him when he's ill less than five minutes later. It's also difficult to say there's no evidence of their existence on the island. We don't know how long they were there, or whether that house was on the island from before the world ended. Presumably, they wouldn't have simply happened to have the tools with them to build it, so it's entirely possible that a single house is all that survived on that island and they wouldn't have been able to make any other permanent shelters or beds. This is a bit like saying because there are no bathrooms in FFVI no one ever takes a piss.Originally Posted by champagne supernova
2) You assume there were a large number of people there to begin with, or that simply having a large number of people would be enough to stave off depression. It also never says that they all decided to kill themselves at once. For starters, the island is very small, presumably with limited resources to keep a large number of people alive, and those resources were dying off even without being used. Second, these people had just watched the world end and were suddenly faced with dead loved ones, and little hope of ever escaping the island to anything better. In a survival situation, losing hope can quickly lead to depression and your will to go on quickly dwindling. Even in a group, these feelings of hopelessness can be contagious and spread quickly, especially after the first person makes that leap from the cliff. Make no mistake, in a situation like that, hope would fade fast and even with a community of a dozen or maybe even more people, coping with the harsh reality of survival in such a situation would be far from a cake walk. Some people in those situations will simply stop caring about going on and that is poison to the rest of the group when survival is at stake and there's little reason to believe things will get better.
3 & 4) He mentions it as soon as he starts to become ill. At this point it's possible he doesn't realize he's dying. He may have simply planned on recovering and making the trip with her. But you also need to keep in mind that we're talking about taking a raft out on the ocean in hopes of finding either the main land or some other form of rescue. To say that it's a simple matter of let's hop on and find your friends is to ignore the reality that you may never find land or rescue, end up worse off if you do, or even die of dehydration in a matter of days before you get to safety. Such an escape attempt isn't a simple decision if you're able to survive where you are. It's entirely possible that he may have written the letter shortly before Celes comes back to find him dead, knowing he didn't have long and may not last to tell her about the raft himself. It could be a simple matter of him not being ready to accept that he was dying until it was almost too late.
5) The assumption that she has to grieve according to a five stage process isn't necessarily realistic since as you said, everyone grieves differently. It also ignores the fact that Cid's death had been coming for a while, giving her time to process the inevitable before it happened, not to mention that taking care of him was likely the only reason she kept going. You're assuming her depression is the result of his death, but it's far more reasonable to assume that it started before that and taking care of him was the only thing that kept her from succumbing to it.
6) I've never seen or heard of anyone avoiding this scene on their first playthrough. In fact, it requires some pretty specific knowledge that you're not likely to have or notice on a first playthrough. I don't think I even found out you could save Cid until quite a few years after I first played through the game, and the first time I heard about it I didn't even believe it given the number of rumours that had formed around the game over the years. The scene is important, but I don't think being able to save him undermines it when many people will never even realize that they can save him. Certainly not on the first try anyway.
I don't think I've ever seen an FFVI fan claim this, and for the record, I'm perfectly willing to cop to any flaws the earlier games actually have, including Kefka's weak backstory. I'm pretty sure WK is more than willing to do the same as well, and we're probably two of the bigger FFVI and SNES era fans and defenders on the forum. But as Bob already covered, Kefka isn't a great villain because of his backstory. In fact, I'll outright state for your benefit that anyone who says he's great because of his backstory is either an idiot or thinking of a different villain. He's a great villain because he's entertaining, and really smurfing successful. Not many villains can claim to have wiped out an entire kingdom, and entire race of magical creatures and destroyed the world. Though I will admit that I do enjoy his reasons for doing it a bit. It wasn't just for power or some thirst for conquest. He did it because he wanted to, for no other reason than to do it. It's the same sort of reason that I like the Joker I suppose who Kefka seems to riff off of at least a little.
I have to disagree with this statement just about in it's entirety to be honest. First, I think the general concept of immersion in gaming in the sense that if we keep making things more real and up the detail and fidelity on everything that players will get lost in the game is a complete and utter lie. For starters, the player is never going to forget that they're a person playing a game. Nor do better graphics mean the player is better able to suspend disbelief. If that were the case then hand drawn animation in film and TV would be utterly pointless with the advent of computer animation, and companies like Pixar would be making Beowulf or The Polar Express, not The Incredibles, Cars, and Toy Story.
I'd say getting the player engrossed in the experience is a more accurate term for the sort of feeling and state of mind that most people are actually aiming for when they talk about immersion, but saying it's dependent on graphics is a joke. If it were dependent on our ability to create and consume more realistic experiences then gaming would have died and stayed dead in the 70's and 80's. In fact, some of the most immersive games (to use the common term) that I've played don't have great graphics by modern standards. Games like Half-Life, Deus Ex, Metal Gear Solid, the SNES FF games, Chrono Trigger, Mario 64, Mario World, Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, and more but I don't want to spend half of a post listing games.
What makes a game immersive isn't graphics and it never has been. They can certainly help to deliver an immersive experience but they aren't the make or break aspect. The things that the truly great games of any era have in common are that they offer the player a great deal to explore and reward them for doing so. That exploration can come in terms of searching every nook and cranny of a well developed cohesive world to learn more about it's history, people's and characters while still leaving the player feeling like there's always more to discover, or it could be as simple as offering an exploration of the gameplay systems. Super Mario Bros is an incredibly simple game. You start off with the ability to run and jump and in theory could beat the entire game using only those two movements, but the number of new and interesting challenges you'll be faced with overcoming with those two simple movements are too numerous to count and the satisfaction that comes with mastering those abilities is what leads to people getting engrossed in those games. And none of it has to do with the graphics.
FFXII is engrossing for me because it easily has one of the most vast and highly developed worlds I've ever seen in gaming, not to mention having a combat system which was detailed enough and challenging enough to make me feel as though I was accomplishing something when I beat a dungeon or a boss or a mark hunt. The fact that I liked it's art style helped greatly as well. FFXIII wasn't because while there was plenty of HD scenery to look at, the character, level and monster designs looked utterly boring to me, and there was nothing to do in these levels except fight. Nothing to explore, no history to learn about from the locals, no sense that there was always more out there aside from another corridor to slog through. And even worse was that I agree with WK completely about the combat in that game, and even agree with you in a lot of ways. A lot of player agency was removed by adding auto-battle and essentially requiring the player to switch between a handful of paradigms, and the only time's I really died were like WK said, when the game decided to cheese by hitting my party leader with an instant death attack I couldn't have seen coming the first time.
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