I don't feel death adds anything to a story, I won't deny it can if done right but I've never been of the belief that you need to kill off characters to tell an engaging or high stakes story, if you need that just to make things compelling or feel high stakes than I fell the story was pretty weak to begin with.

Final Fantasy X for example, the story in that is very high stakes, you're literally trying to reverse the whole way the world works and kill an other worldly being that isn't supposed to be killed, while everyone and their mother tries to stop you. The tension is high and you spend a large part of the back end of the game literally running from everyone and then having to run into the heart of the enemy territory before having to escape again and resume running.
The stakes are massive, the situation dire and your heroes aren't even sure what they're trying to do is possible and all of this is achived without a single main party member dying, not untill the literal closing act.
At no point during any of that did I feel like any of my parties deaths would have "enriched" the narrative, nor did I feel the stakes lacking and if only they'd kill someone so I could feel the weight of those stakes! .... no... I was more than capable of feeling that weight due to the story and it's delivery.


Death can be done and well but I've always felt it is the cheapest way to "raise the stakes" or "show the gravity of the situation." because especially in a long story you're sacrificing everything else just for a quick cheap emotional hit further cheapened when they're instantly replaced because in an ongoing narrative like 14 killing someone just means you need to rotate someone else in who's only there because you killed someone, and round and round we go, or you just run out of characters and to me that just feels cheap, I'd rather have long standing characters than that.