Spoiler-ful advice to SE's Writing Team for Future Content.

[Naunet]

I think the death toll of named characters for 4 years (earth time) of constant war with primals, garleans and dragons is actually at a reasonable level.

It would be nice if they didn't kill off all of their actually interesting characters, leaving us with only the bland ones...

SE also has a bad habit of engaging in the act of "only give X character lots of development right before you kill them".

I don't like that the main emotional currency video game writers lean on involves killing off characters. Whenever I start to care about a character in a game, especially this one, I have to curb my investment because they're probably going to die.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. This so much! It's cheap. And then of course SE actually fails to follow through on the ONE death that would have had legitimate build up and emotional impact (Sultana) because they... what, got scared? But I guess it's easy for them to create female characters to kill off whenever they please to fuel cheap emotional ends.

...if you guys think this game is bad for killing people, I could scarcely see you guys even survive reading Game of Thrones, much less watch it.

Killing a character should be something given serious thought. It should never be used simply to up emotional stakes. I despise Song of Ice & Fire/Game of Thrones because it uses that play far too much (among other reasons). Good writing does not have to depend on character death to stoke the flames of reader/viewer emotion. Instead, character death should be a carefully considered tool given proper respect and delivered with precision. When your readers spend more time guessing "Who is going to die next?" instead of getting invested in the story, then you have made a huge mistake.

[LineageRazor]

Killing a character should be something given serious thought. It should never be used simply to up emotional stakes. I despise Song of Ice & Fire/Game of Thrones because it uses that play far too much (among other reasons). Good writing does not have to depend on character death to stoke the flames of reader/viewer emotion. Instead, character death should be a carefully considered tool given proper respect and delivered with precision. When your readers spend more time guessing "Who is going to die next?" instead of getting invested in the story, then you have made a huge mistake.

I wouldn't say that Game of Thrones is "careless," exactly. It simply tends to deconstruct a lot of the tropes that we've gotten far too used to in fiction. The fact that a person is an important character, or has built up a lot of potential, is not enough to save them when an enemy has them dead-to-rights. Nor is a character entitled to a blaze of glory - many of them die senseless and ignoble deaths. We've gotten far too reliant on narrow escapes and last-minute rescues, and the fact that these things rarely happen when they "should" is one of the reasons folks get so surprised when they read the series. The death toll in Game of Thrones is interesting not because it is high, but in that so many of those deaths are completely unpredictable from the standpoint of a modern reader of fiction.

Does this game need to go a similar path in order to be narratively sound? No. However, the Final Fantasy fanbase has matured to the point where we really shouldn't be seeing things like a character sacrificing themselves with a bomb (FFIV's Cid) only to miraculously survive. Don't play games with our hearts!