Quote Originally Posted by Lyth View Post
Living Dead doesn't really make sense from a Final Fantasy lore perspective
Wrong.

The first Dark Knights to appear in the series are in FF3 as, "Mystic Knights." They wield Swords of Darkness that prevent monster "splitting" which is essentially monster cloning. That's all.
The next appearance is in FF4 where the main character is a Dark Knight. He can perform Dark Wave, which is what Flood of Darkness is based off of. His standard attacks deal minimum damage to Undead monsters, and it is implied that Blades of Darkness cannot hurt true evil(though mechanically Dark Wave can hurt them just fine) because a Blade of Darkness is of the same evil. This is part of his impetus to become a Paladin. So this is the first DRK lore in FF history, and it is implied that DRKs are on the same level as the Undead.

There are no DRKs in the series after this until FFXI. In FFXI DRK is unlocked by slaying 100 enemies with the Chaosbringer great sword. The Job's 2hr ability is Blood Weapon, an ability that makes all hits drain HP for 100% of the damage dealt. The job goes on to acquire the Drain and Aspir spell line as well as attribute absorption spell lines. Drain spells and hits within FF lore started in FFII, and were unique to undead monsters and the Blood Sword. Furthermore, within FFXI, DRK gains Arcana Killer as a trait, which is a trait intrinsic to Undead in the game as Undead <-> Arcana, both intimidate the other.

Within the DRK Artifact armor questline there is a DRK related blacksmith who stops the flow of his soul's time, in order to pass on his memories, by imprisoning it with darkness. That's a bit of a form of undeath, if you ask me.