Having been available for 10 years now and with multiple expansions, Final Fantasy 14 has accumulated a large cast of characters that you interact with during your journey as the Warrior of Light. While there have been some character deaths along the way, it seems to happen less often with every expansion. Then, with every new expansion, it feels like there are more fake deaths, where the character is revealed to have survived or returned somehow. At this point, it’s hard to be emotionally invested in a character’s death, because you end up not believing that they’ll actually die, or you start assuming that their death is temporary and the plot will bring them back to life.
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Warning: This article contains spoilers through FFXIV patch 7.1.
Dawntrail has a lighter tone for a significant part of its narrative compared to recent expansions that came before it, so not having a lot of death in the plot would’ve been understandable. Of course, some deaths stick, but it’s usually minor characters who don’t get a lot of screentime that have the highest chance of staying dead if they die during the MSQ. However, it’s starting to seem like FFXIV is increasingly afraid of killing off characters and keeping them dead.
7.1 Continues the Trend of Fake-Out Deaths in FFXIV
Making it seem like a character has died just to bring them back isn’t a new concept in FFXIV. There’s also nothing wrong with using this trope a couple times, but the problem is that it’s been used too much in FFXIV at this point. Dawntrail has some deaths that have so far stuck, but 7.1 took tragic fates from 7.0 and made them much less tragic by bringing back characters we were led to believe are dead.
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At this point, having characters die–or implying they died–and be brought back makes it difficult to be upset about a death, since you start assuming that they’ll return. As a result, the intended emotional impact just isn’t there, unlike with Final Fantasy’s most famous death in FF7, which was rare, unexpected, and hit you hard with its impact. This is the same in Final Fantasy 16, since the game has deaths, and they’re impactful even if the character returns because you don’t anticipate that return.
FFXIV Doesn’t Want to Fully Eliminate Characters
If you think of characters as tools used to tell a story, it feels like FFXIV is in a position where it’s concerned about losing a tool, then realizing it would be useful later. While that’s an understandable position to be in, the answer isn’t faking deaths instead. Now, even if a character actually dies, it’s not that sad anymore. You become desensitized to character deaths. While it’s not an impossible issue to fix, FFXIV has a lot of work to reverse the damage done by years of fake-out deaths in order to prevent deaths from continuing to fall flat.
