Quote Originally Posted by Cleretic View Post
Yeah, that's kinda the thing about calling a story 'bloodless' or 'lacking death'; there's a bunch of different, mostly arbitrary ways to declare that certain deaths 'don't count'. Hell, even I do it; I consider Dragon Age: Origins a pretty death-free game, because while it has a high bodycount barely any of them are characters that actually matter to anybody, it's basically just a throng of bodies to set the tone and setting. But yeah, that's why I mentioned that Endwalker's no slouch in terms of both named and unnamed NPC deaths; if one of those doesn't count to you, the other should.

And I think it should also be noted that FFXIII has perhaps the most egregious usage of 'fight against stated inevitable fact but winning because of Determination' in the entire series at the end. At least with FFXIV it gets conceptual with the help of a zone and concepts that really help it make that actually work, while XIII basically just goes 'no, they believed hard enough to get a good ending anyway'.

I consider XIII's sequels better than the original (in no small part because XIII-2's ending includes the characters trying to do the 'fight fate with conviction' thing and failing miserably, which is very funny), but I'm fully aware that to a lot of people, saying 'FFXIII's sequels were better' is a claim met with great skepticism, because anyone who can say it played multiple FFXIII games.
Yeah XIII had a divine intervention instance that ended up saving the group but screwing over everything else. You're going to tell me they all don't get to turn into monsters just because two of them somehow manage to do a thing they sort of failed to do last time all cause they gave a big enough F you to the rules that made an actual God feel the need to break the rules for them? My main gripe with XIII-2 is actually that death at the end. I mean you have one character that isn’t shown for most of the game to have an eye of Etro and then gets told they're the same as all Yuels. Has only one single eye and has only one vision and dies. Yet how many Yuels ended up having multiple visions? I call bull. I do wonder how the XV that was to be part of XIII's world would have fit. Even though I have watched some things that tried to explain how it fit I just don't get it after wtf Lighting Returns was. I would love to beat thar game but I'm not great at the combat and I feel the clock runs too quickly. If it was more as to how the one in Majora's Mask then I'd probably feel like I didn't need to use a guide can could figure out what to do on my own.