About Death [Early MSQ Spoilers]

[Titor]

I will just get to the tl;dr version of my question at the top here.
Why is it that when some things die, they vanish in a puff of aether, whereas others' corpses remain around?


Not including the WoL's 'deaths' (which are echo visions, or something, but not the point of this thread), throughout the world it seems like there is two versions of death. Some things disappear and immediately return to the lifestream, whereas others seem to hang around for some time.

During the MSQ, there are a few quests where we have to gather or bury bodies. But also in the MSQ, there are deaths where the individual just simply vanishes. Why the difference? Why did none of our early fallen scion/fallen sylphs vanish? We had to manually gather their corpses. There is also that goobbue corpse that did not immediately vanish, unlike its goobbue brethren we slay seem to do.

Is there some meaningful difference why some stay around and others disappear, or is it just for plot convenience/sentimentality?

[Jamillion]

<.<
>.>
>;3
PS3 limitations

[Enkidoh]

Simple - gameplay and story segregation. The game's graphic engine simply cannot be expected to render every dead enemy in the game, which as you're travelling across the land slaying monsters that bodycount would start to pile up - which hypothetically if the game could display every dead enemy you've ever killed or seen killed on screen the land would be one big boneyard piled high in corpses! So, they do the next best thing, and show the enemy disappearing in a puff of smoke upon death and just then handwave it away and forget about it - every FF game to date has done this as well so the game is well and truly in keeping with tradition.

Also it should be noted that a lot of the enemies you fight are not even truly living creatures at all but merely aetheric constructs so it makes perfect sense they would disappear into aether and leave no corpse. So basically, don't think about it too much.

[WhiteArchmage]

BIG HONKING SPOILERS INCOMING

The parts in the MSQ where the dead body turn into aether (which, I can only remember Moenbryda and Lousioux) there is a lore reason for why they vanish: Moen used her own aether to slay Nabriales and, as such, all the aether that made up her body was "used up" and there was nothing let for his body. While Lousioux did a similar thing, using his own aether to bring a rebirth into the land. Bahamut got in the way... Once you slay Pheonix and grandpa comes to his senses, he vanishes into aether because, once again, he was dead to beging with, his whole body WAS a construct of aether and without it...poof.

If there are others, that simply vanish (not counting primals or dungeon enemies) I forget...

[Yuyuka3]

BIG HONKING SPOILERS INCOMING

If there are others, that simply vanish (not counting primals or dungeon enemies) I forget...

I gues you can count Nidhogg and Ysayle, too. But both died in the air, both are immensely powerful creatures, and we don't know much about how dragons work, so it could be that this is related to any of this factors in Niddhogg's case, who didn't have his eyes anymore at that point. Who knows, maybe that's just what happenes when a great wyrm truely dies... (Middy never really died, imho)
For Ysayle, she pretty much died as Shiva, a primal, so I would guess that is at least part of the reason.

So, yeah, don't think too much about it, it's just the limitations present in any MMO (or RPG in general) out there.

[iZallen]

For the "everything else" portion; we can speculate we just hit the target hard enough that they vaporize on point. (A SMN's Deathflare or a BLM's Flare; judging by the visual effects, I wouldn't be surprised.)

[Niamh_Rillemaugh]

Must be jedi

[Powe]

Wait then.......... What is midgardsormr then?

[MilesSaintboroguh]

Wait then.......... What is midgardsormr then?

A dev with debug mode.

[Frederick22]

Must be jedi

Funny you said that, beacuse the patch name of 3.3 is called "Revenge of the Horde" xD