I disagree with the first point almost entirely. George Martin has far more characters to kill, and is working with a far grander story. What's more, his insistence on killing characters to subvert tropes or just because he can has basically prevented me from forming any attachment to any of the characters in the series, because I'm just waiting for them to be killed off.

If Final Fantasy starts killing characters willy-nilly, it will have the same effect. People will come to expect it, and the deaths will lack any real meaning. What the series needs, is to handle character death well. That is NOT the same thing as "nobody is safe".

What's more, if there is a situation like you describe, where Noctis dies, you wouldn't "feel worried or tense". There is only tension in an element that can be changed. If Noctis is going to die, so what? Sure, it will shock you the first time it happens. After that, though, the scene will lose meaning. Because you just won't care about him. He's dead, and nothing you can do will change that.

Take a moment and ponder this:
Quote Originally Posted by Skyblade View Post
Video games are a different type of story, though. In plays, movies, or books, you aren't the character.

Combine this further with the fact that death is something to be avoided in video games. In most games, when you die, that's the end. You have to restart, or reload. The life of your avatar is your life in the game. When you die, it's because you did something wrong, you screwed up, and you have to go back to undo it.

Thus, when you die as a part of the story, it feels cheap. You went through everything, only to succumb to the same fate you've been busting your butt to avoid the entire game.

Even with forshadowing, it can make for an extremely cheap moment, and can ruin a good story. Death is a storytelling tool, and it has to be used right. Death has to serve the story, and the plot. And, in games, it has to serve the gameplay as well.

If you kill a character just for the sake of kililng a character, in any media, it feels cheap. When a character dies just to elicit a reaction from the audience, it is a temporary feeling, and rarely lasts, usually to be replaced with feelings of frustration and anger.

But if you kill a character to serve the story, that's when the feelings last. Take Aeris's death. It was done to create an impact on the player, yes. But they made it serve the story. The effect it had on the team and the story going forward from there is enormous. It impacted, heck, it even drove the story forward. That was character death well handled.

The problem with killing the main character is that you don't get this. When the main character dies, the story dies with them. Thus, the death can't really serve the story. You can't witness the impact of the character's death, and there is no way for it to serve an ongoing conflict. Heck, the conflicts are usually all resolved.

FFX also did this well. How? By killing the character early. Tidus knows he's going to die from the Fayth Scar on. They don't "foreshadow" his death, the game flat out tells you that he will die, and why. Why there is no possible way to win without losing his life. That is the point at which the inevitibility of his death hits. His impending death changes his actions, his resolve, and his feelings. His death has a strong and meaningful impact on the game from that point on. Because of this, not killing him at the end would have ruined all that, and made it seem just as much a cheap cop-out as killing the main charcter at the end usually is.

Chrono Trigger also did an excellent job, one of the best, in my opinion. First, they make it optional. As things should be, if you work hard enough, train your party enough, you can survive Lavos. This is frelling phenomenal game impact. It doesn't steal control from you and go "ha-ha, you're dead now", it lets you play through it, and makes your strength in the game actually meaningful. Sure, it's supposed to kill him, that's how the main story continues, but making it avoidable really increased the impact and decreased the "well, that was cheap" moment it would otherwise have.

Second, they continue the story beyond Crono's death. They let us see how the team reacts, how the story unfolds without him. Similar to what they did in FFVII where we see how Cloud's disappearance into the Lifestream impacts the team. It made the scene have a heck of an impact when you get to see how the party members react, and then the lengths they go to in order to get the character back.

Main character death can be handled well, but it is one of the hardest things to pull off in a videogame, and, even when pulled off well, should be rarely used. It is far too common, and far too poorly done these days.
That's specifically on main character death, but the points about interactivity is something that is extremely important. It's generally a bad idea to rob players of too much agency. Player interaction with the story is what makes a game a game. Don't take that away.

That's not to say that you should never kill characters. Nor should you keep characters alive to serve the gameplay when, by rights of the story, they should be dead *cough*SAZH*cough*. But don't go killing characters just to make a point to the players, or to subvert tropes. It won't have as lasting of an impact.




I also disagree with point number two. It's not really that jarring. In fact, I find it far more jarring when, in a game like Dragon Age, your character is coated in blood yet is welcomed into cities and towns, into shops, etcetera, with no eyebrows raised. It's a game. We don't see everything that happens. We don't see characters clean up. Just like we don't see them go to the restroom or sleep every day, or anything like that.




Ok, I'm giving up on even finishing this video. Again, back to player agency. There are few things more annoying or jarring than getting wounds that aren't there. Have you ever been in a boss fight where you completely steamroll the enemy, taking them down so efficiently that you barely notice you're touched? Or, heck, where you might actually take no damage at all? And have you ever then had it followed up by a cutscene where you're panting, out of breath, and acting like you've had a hard fight? It shatters the immersion. How would you recommend giving wounds to characters? By robbing control of players and inflicting injuries in cutscenes, further divorcing the player from the situation by removing their control? How would these change the characters when you're controlling them in combat? Is a character suddenly going to regain use of that leg or arm, and be fine in combat? Or will you be permanently crippling the party, either based on poor player performance, or just because you're wanting to tell your epic story?

And, as you yourself point out: You would take wounds from random encounters. My gosh, man. I've fought THOUSANDS of enemies, in each and every Final Fantasy game I've played. My gosh, I would look worse than the main character from Planescape Torment if I sustained lasting visible injuries each time I was hit.