What's the point with that quite lackluster story in Endwalker?

[Conundrum]

What's with people's obsession on killing character? Is this western's culture or something? Why not just end them with a retirement instead of killing them??

Because you have to show that death is an actual potential outcome. Once that's taken off the table there are no real stakes to anything. Seriously, the second you realize the teary death conga line is going to end with them all coming back...the whole last part of the game falls flat "full of sound and fury...signifying nothing". It has nothing to do with stupid and condescending remarks about "Hollywood movies" and "western culture" or whatever nonsense.

It tends to be fanboys and weird shippers who never want characters to die.

EDIT: The endless fake deaths, and the complete lack of guts to kill any characters is making me care less and less about the story. I feel like everyone is walking around wearing god level plot armor. Squenix has completely lost their nerve in story telling. Introducing a character (like oh say a happy young couple and their baby) just so you can kill them off 5 minutes later is crap writing. I don't care about those characters. It's just a failed attempt at manipulation to avoid hurting a main characters.

[Lauront]

Because you have to show that death is an actual potential outcome. Once that's taken off the table there are no real stakes to anything. Seriously, the second you realize the teary death conga line is going to end with them all coming back...the whole last part of the game falls flat "full of sound and fury...signifying nothing". It has nothing to do with stupid and condescending remarks about "Hollywood movies" and "western culture" or whatever nonsense.

It tends to be fanboys and weird shippers who never want characters to die.

EDIT: The endless fake deaths, and the complete lack of guts to kill any characters is making me care less and less about the story. I feel like everyone is walking around wearing god level plot armor. Squenix has completely lost their nerve in story telling. Introducing a character (like oh say a happy young couple and their baby) just so you can kill them off 5 minutes later is crap writing. I don't care about those characters. It's just a failed attempt at manipulation to avoid hurting a main characters.

Yup, this is what it is, IMO. Fear of offending fanboys/shippers. On some level I understand it, because some of them in Japan can be quite mental in how they react when something happens to a character they've become overly attached to, all the way up to violent acts (e.g. arson), but part of it is also for financial reasons, i.e. they don't want to risk losing some customers. This "western culture" nonsense is just that - it's more of a choice in FF14 than it is anything to do with Japanese culture, because we can point to several animes and JRPGs where there is a lot more death, some of which are extremely popular.