What Final Fantasy 15 can learn from Game of Thrones

[Jiro]

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.

I disagree, and I also don't see why a grander story isn't something that should be aspired to. Regardless, I can understand why you can't form attachments to them, but countless fans do. Indeed, countless Final Fantasy fans do - the proliferation of Game of Thrones signatures that occurs every March/April at EoFF is a testament to that.

You can't create that same sense of tension without a comparable cast or unless a character death is heavily foreshadowed. Anybody could die is not what you think even when you consider crime shows where the main characters routinely get shot (at), so merely having the potential for death doesn't necessarily create the tension. It's not even easy to just craft that feeling without showing someone dead, as many people assume plot armour. You need to shake them up. The Game of Thrones TV show opens with dead bodies, shows Night's Watchmen being killed, and then executed. Death happens often and it happens fast and when it starts happening to main characters, people begin to panic. You can't do that same thing with a cast the size of Final Fantasy XV's. You would struggle to do it with a cast the size of Final Fantasy VI's.

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".

Shorty offered a great rebuttal to this point. It's not a black-and-white "kill every character or kill no character" situation as you are portraying. Likewise, if people come to expect death then the expectations will often be usurped because the characters will not die. Having experienced Game of Thrones with people who have not read the books, I have witnessed first hand what happens when people expect death. They are on the edge of their seats and far more engaged - about characters they have indeed formed attachments to regardless of that expectation - and the relief felt when it did not occur was palpable. Indeed, that tension caused by the expectation is precisely what I was talking about in my video. A story that makes people feel such emotions and involvement is a good one and is something to strive for.

To create the same sort of tension that Game of Thrones achieves, Final Fantasy XV will have to kill at least two major characters. One signifies that death is a thing. The second signifies that it might happen again. Then people might fear for the remaining characters, but given the cast is like 10 characters and some of those are villains, you risk not having a story if you kill off any more.

And of course, like I think everyone has said, it needs to be balanced and believable. They can't just die because you want to achieve a sense of "anybody could die" because that's pointless and ineffectual.

There were random changes in volume and I felt 14 minutes was probably too long, especially for only three points. Unless there were more; it felt a bit disconnected. The comparisons/summaries were nice both in terms of audio and visuals but it just felt like a roast left in the oven a little too long.