Quote Originally Posted by Nezerius View Post
We fought him to the death in the Royal Menagerie. Also, how would "erased for a period of time" even work? Would NPCs be shocked at seeing you, claiming that they're seeing someone who is supposed to be dead? How exactly would the story progress, considering the player character is kind of the vessel through which people play this game? Would we go to some kind of Spirit World for an expansion/couple of patches before fighting our way back to the lands of the living?

Even if that'd happen, we'd likely still end up defeating Zenos afterwards, because I can't see SE going with a permanent bad ending. They couldn't even kill Y'shtola in Stormblood, there'd be a meltdown on the forums if they permanently killed off the WoL.
No, what we fought in the Menagerie was him testing out controlling a primal for himself... and he "offed himself" knowing what his power was capable of. And everything you mentioned and more could happen. As far as seeing a villai be defeated... you can argue that on any villain we've had in this whole game. Killing the WoL for what seems like permanently but ends up being temporary I find fascinating myself... But I digress. There's also something else to consider with knowing which characters they will kill. The character cannot have appeared in a previous optional questline, so we can count out a lot of the main protagonists... We're prolly never gonna lose thancred unless the end of Eden does otherwise. Same with Urianger now. Correct me if I'm wrong(as the forums are wont to do already), but I believe Y'shtola was in the beginning of Alexander's introduction as well. Point here being, if we're going to go the route "well that's boring because we're just gonna defeat them"... Then every villain is boring. I could see them using Zenos to absorb powerful entities and strike us down and have to find our fragments to become whole again or some bizarre concept we can't fathom.