Quote Originally Posted by SannaR View Post
@cleretic non named, minor, and faceless npc deaths don't count to a certain crowd. Same crowd also doesn't take in that story beats ect have to be written differently from single player games due to one being an on going saga and the other having to wrap up at some point. So one can have a fake out last most of the game in a single player meanwhile in an MMO when you need to cram the equivalent of a complete single player game into an expansion some of the things need to get shortened. Endwalker is probably the first time it's been heavily slapped into your face.
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.