Who wilst depart the mortal realm in 6.0?

[Cleretic]

No heroes will die, but there will be close calls that feel like they probably were deaths at some point in the writing process. I'm gonna say this time it's Alphinaud and/or Alisaie, because we might be going for a parallel to FFIV, whose twins also had what by all rights felt like a death scene until they anticlimactically got rescued off-screen.

As for the villains... Zenos is going to survive clashes a few times but bite the dust eventually. We also need to remember a theme that happened in two out of three previous expansions: A currently unknown secondary villain will appear dead but come back to die for real in a trial some time later. Right now we don't have a Nidhogg/Yotsuyu/Vauthry, but reasonably speaking we will have one at some point, and as such we need to remember that Nidhogg and Yotsuyu both had the exact same 'back from the dead' pacing. I'm guessing it's probably the Prime Minister of Sharlayan or something.

[Yuella]

Plot twist: none of the good guys will die

[Rosenstrauch]

Assuming that being a Trust does not guarantee a character's survival...

Urianger and Thancred are the most likely to bite it from some kind of heroic last stand or other kind of sacrifice. My money is more on Urianger than Thancred in this case, since the former is big on "do what needs to be done" kind of stuff and I don't see him getting the opportunity to regretfully sacrifice another of his friends. Meanwhile, Thancred had his big self-sacrifice moment, complete with the scene seemingly ending with his death, only to turn up fine moments later. So even if he throws himself into some impossible to survive moment, I don't expect him to actually die from it.

Y'shtola... at this point, I could imagine her pulling yet another Flow stunt, having everyone mope about because she's totally dead for realsies this time, only to have her Unflow herself and drop a fourth wall shattering line about her popularity like Axel from Kingdom Hearts 3.

The twins are safe. Ignoring the WoL for a moment, they are THE protagonists of FFXIV from 2.0 and onward. No amount of "b-but Palom Porom!"-ing from people who never played FFIV will change that. The player is more likely to "die" than they are.

Speaking of things that definitely won't happen because this is not FFIV, the game will briefly become FFIV as Yda pulls a Gaius and shows up alive, overshadowing her sister to the point of rolling her character back to mid-Stormblood. Then she'll sacrifice herself heroically (and turn up alive and bedridden in Little Solace with little explanation) and allow Lyse to have her character development back.

G'raha will be forced to use up all his royal blood magic to do something. The loss of his special eyes will be treated with all the gravitas of an actual death scene, and threads will pop up on Reddit for the remainder of the game's lifetime about how much the scene made them cry because it's Just. So. Sad. This won't actually stop the writers from using his royal blood as a plot device, by the way, since he's stored so much of it in those handy soul popsicles.

Estinien won't betray us. He's done it twice before, and that satisfied his quota as a Kain expy. He's also basically our liaison with whatever dragon-based societies are out there, so they're probably saving his death/near-death for a Meracydia expansion. If anything, I expect him to be the one who gets us to the moon the first time. Dragons can fly in space, after all.

Tataru will not only be alive, but I expect she'll be the leader for whatever group succeeds the Scions in the event that they disband.

Everyone else is fair game. Except Cid. Per tradition, we require him for at least one of the following: Endwalker Raid questline, Endwalker Alliance Raid questline, and Endwalker relic weapon questline.

[Tsiron]

Cid will be involved in Pandaemonium and blow himself up (and so young...) to seal the Underworld up as we escape

[Voidedge_Ragna]

Considering how they only killed of unimportant characters for 2 full expansions now ... they got some stuff to catch up on.
A adventuring story no matter how cool w/o risk becomes unbelievable and boring.

You cant tell us like 4-6 years ago that Yshtola is sucking on her own life force to keep up and not do anything with it.
You cant have Ryne be pierced by Hades for 0 consequence
You cant have Thancred go about 500% beyond his limit in that fight and have him been ok 5 min later after a fade out
You cant have Gosetsu and that lady drop into a river collapsed under a building and survive
You cant have Zenos be ok after DIEING no matter how weird your plot device is
You cant instantly bring back ghara with a random plot device after "killing" him, also lets not mention he was shot after innocence died.

Thats just the ones i remember right now ...

Should all of them have died? No ... but dear god if you save EVERYONE ... it becomes boring.
Cept for Ghara i hope he dies by falling down a flight of stairs, that character just needs to go in a non glorious way.

So yea i hope we get some deaths ... because its about time. SE is just worried if they kill Yshtola their creepy doll and other merch wont sell ...

[kaynide]

Y'shtola is the poster child for the game here in Japan. She's on the time cards, she's in the crossover games, she has a freaking 1,000 dollar doll. She's got plot armor thicker than superman's.

On who would probably have the most impact, in universe, it'd be Alphi. He's not my favorite character, but if we were actually the WoL, his story is arguably the most tied ours. He was on the cart at the beginning, he was the point man for a lot of plot development (and indeed he and Tataru were THE main recurring NPCs in HW).

I mean, as far as I can see he is the main character of this story. We're just the brute force.

..on who I actually see dying on us... Matoya, to give Y'shtola more development.

[Cleretic]

You cant tell us like 4-6 years ago that Yshtola is sucking on her own life force to keep up and not do anything with it.

While I generally agree that at this point they're straining disbelief with improbable survival (although I don't think they're ever gonna stop), this one's actually worth talking about because it's the one that's not actually universal across languages.

English is the only one that outright says 'Y'shtola is sapping her life force', the rest (including the original Japanese) are a lot vaguer in basically saying 'that's dangerous, I'm not sure it's a good idea'. Basically, treated less like the 'she's now on borrowed time' that the English script does, and more like how a worried mother might act when learning their kid is about to ride passenger on a motorcycle.

[tinythinker]

On who would probably have the most impact, in universe, it'd be Alphi. He's not my favorite character, but if we were actually the WoL, his story is arguably the most tied ours. He was on the cart at the beginning, he was the point man for a lot of plot development (and indeed he and Tataru were THE main recurring NPCs in HW).

I mean, as far as I can see he is the main character of this story. We're just the brute force.

His Grand Company of Eorzea dream is a reality, and the main threat to it now is the destruction of the star. Will he go out like grandpa and leave a heavy weight on his twin sister? It could possibly breech whatever has daddy's cheeks clinched so tight. So much pathos-laden regret to fill a series of cutscenes.

Assuming that being a Trust does not guarantee a character's survival...

Well, if you play with the Trust for Shadowbringers the game understandably uses what made sense for each phase of the story, so that early dungeons still feature a name in the dialogue text that a character no longer uses.

Even if characters retire or fade away into obscurity, wouldn't they be unavailable after that point for dungeons that come after any that?

Imagine if a favorite Trust member dies, though, and the only way to see them again outside of the storybook of cutscenes is to run old dungeons with the Trust.

[Rosenstrauch]

Well, if you play with the Trust for Shadowbringers the game understandably uses what made sense for each phase of the story, so that early dungeons still feature a name in the dialogue text that a character no longer uses.

Even if characters retire or fade away into obscurity, wouldn't they be unavailable after that point for dungeons that come after any that?

Yes. But one thing you've probably noticed is that the number of available characters never dips below 4. That's because we need a minimum of one character per slot: One Tank, One Healer, and Two DPS. This essentially means that unless we see a significant increase in the available trust NPCs, at least four of the Scions can't be permanently removed from the action.

This gets more extreme, however, if the developers expand trusts to include Story Trials. They have talked about wanting to do so in an older interview, so it's possible that Endwalker will launch with all three of its Story Trials being Trust compatible. Unless the number of available trust NPCs expanded considerably, this would not only mean that all 7 currently available Trusts would be guaranteed to survive until the end of Endwalker, but we'd even have to have an additional character join, and they would also have to be permanently available for the duration of the story.

[Lihtleita]

alphinauds dad, redeemed on his deathbed