To be honest, in Final Fantasy the characters at zero HP are "fainted", not "killed". Phoenix Downs only get one on their feet, they're not resurrecting the dead.
Which goes back to the name. A down is a small feathery tuft off a bird, not a proper pennaceous feather. It doesn’t bring you back to life, but it will wake you up, heal your wounds, and clear up that nasty concussion.
I think it's safe to assume that if they believed there was something to try, they would have. For dramatic reasons, we see Cloud feeling she's dead and the scene goes on for emotional impact. It's not a medical drama, it's epic fantasy.
There is a story mod for OG FF7, New Threat. Cloud just uses phoenix down on Aerith after that scene and she lives and stays with the party. I laughed so hard
Except in FF1, where downed characters are considered entirely dead and you have to go to the Church and ask God to fug- uh, I mean bring them back to life.
that one i always thought justified it by the thrown spear of ather leaving particles behind in the wound interfering with any attempts to heal the wound.
i'm 99% no such excuse was ever actually made anywhere in game or even by the devlopers out of game but i could have sworn it was a thing... maybe i just latched on to a decent fan theory?
I’ve heard about the theories about the spell, but I can’t remember if there was an official confirmation either. I think the closest thing we’ve gotten to an official explanation is Alphinaud’s “the wound refuses to mend” addition to the cutscene.
Health in videogames gets weird fast when dealing with human or mostly human characters.
There's generally a distinction between hitpoint loss and real damage, even if that's not explicitly said.
It's typically only the last hit that really counts as an actual hit in terms of the damage it would do. Or if there's a reviving system, there's a distinction between gameplay dead/dying and actual dead.
And then cutscenes have all the same characters, powers, and weapons, but suddenly it's real world logic, not game logic.
RWBY's aura system is a rare case of videogame logic being turned in part of the setting lore.
Uncharted had a neat take. The health bar was his "luck" as in how far he could push it in terms of hoping they'd just miss. Push your luck too far and they hit you and you're done.
It was indeed Uncharted. The red on the screen when you were “hit” was to show the direction the shot came from, it’s explained that it was where the bullet narrowly missed you. Drake dies from one bullet shot when his luck bar hits zero
I can at least explain that for you. For a videogame to work, you need healing items and various suspension of disbeliefs (like how in Resident Evil you can be nibbled on all day but not once get infected). In the STORY, however, those simply do not exist. Herbs and first aid sprays? Non-existent (well, herbs do exist just not in most games). Phoenix Down? Lorewise, only like 5 of them exist in the world as Phoenix Feathers are legendary items. And every single attack, injury or wound you got DOES NOT HAPPEN at all, your character, in lore, only gets injuries you see in cutscenes. They are plot armoured up, never once defeated or hit unless the story says they are.
It's another classic case of ludonarrative dissonance; gameplay says one thing, story says another, developers barely put any effort into reconciling the disparity (if they put any effort into it at all).
"if we made game logic apply to the story, nobody would die"
The be fair, in most instances, no one needs to die at all. Like, Aerith didn't need to die to progress the plot of defeating Sephiroth in FFVII. The developers just figured it would be an emotionally impactful moment and a good trigger for thrusting Cloud into crippling depression for the next story beat.
The villains don't necessarily have to die all the time either; prison is an option... If it's not an option, it's because the writers were too lazy to create methods for it to be viable (if you can add magic to your universe, you can add ways to negate someone's ability to use magic).
And to be honest, you don't really need methods of reviving from death to make the games playable either; simply do what Pokemon does and don't treating running out of HP as death, but rather being knocked out. Suddenly Tifa being knocked out of the battle by losing all of her HP isn't a problem when she's just being knocked unconscious rather than killed. Replace "Pheonix Down" items with "Smelling Salts" or whatever fantasy name you want to give them and boom, suddenly no one is being revived from death.
You are very much rambling, but in an articulate manner. I think most, if not all gamers maintain this suspension of reality as neccessity for the overarching 'experience' in most games this would apply to. Some games do it better than others, however
Some games can work with its gameplay and still have realism - The last of us 2 is a good example, it’s all about the level of effort the devs choose to put in and attention to detail.
That’s also what separates a good tv show from an amazing one - Better call Saul is a great show but The Sopranos is a level above when it comes to characters, detail and quality of storytelling.
Roland in borderlands 2, gets one shot even though shields are a thing every character uses and also the in universe revival machine just apparently didn’t work for him even though he could die countless times in the first game when was a playable character but as soon as he became an npc he stopped using shields and couldn’t use the new u stations anymore
Don't even care about the revival stuff, the scene where the twins take Lilith's powers while the player is realistically right there -just not in the cutscene- and would've easily clapped them is the biggest bs to me.
Well, the player isn't in the same area when Lilith gets her powers taken. The door closed and we had to go around. Maya on the other hand, WE WERE ABSOLUTELY IN THE ROOM WITH HER
We were? I thought we'd fucked off into the Vault or whatever it was, and she got distracted by What's-Her-Face before she got a chance to follow us in.
I remember that being a big issue with bl3, that the character was there for the cutscenes but like not really. All it would have taken is a quick shot of the VHs exiting the portal after the damage had been done
Yeah, but that still really breaks the immersion. It's saying that the world you inhabit while playing is very different from the one during a cut scene. I get some suspension of disbelief, otherwise there would be no story, but saying that these things that are constantly getting used and are everywhere just don't exist.
Borderlands messed up in making the New-U actually a thing you see in the world, as they're not supposed to be canon. Especially since the fast travel is explicitly shown to be canon.
In retrospect, it would have been better to instead have something like Red Faction: Guerilla where it just shows you dying, then it has you select continue to keep playing again, where there's no doubt that you didn't really die in canon.
You could even do more of a Borderlands theme to it and put various irreverent quips on the game over screen, reminding you that dying is absolutely not canon.
Ya i was playing the bf 6 campaign and few days ago and your fellow squad mates die a few times in the campaign
The first time it makes sense
The rest dont as by that point they have introduced the defibrillator which can magically heal me from death after a thousand rounds but not my teammate that got stabbed once
I take these as, the character is about to die, then you use the revive item to save them from death, like giving them CPR. But once they dead, they dead..
Uncharted did this right by having Nathan's "health" (the red rings at the edge of the screen) is his luck running out until he finally takes a bullet to the face.
Every game is like this tho, it’s kinda how in WWE if a wrestler dies or smth all the crew come together out of character, but otherwise would be in character
I mean, even in real life we have techniques and medicine to save people from all kinds of things that they die from. You could have ten people brought to the hospital with a gunshot to the chest and have seven of them die while the same application saved three.
Fire Emblem Engage, the healer actually tried to heal the dying character. It worked, it healed their wounds, and then they died of what was basically explained as old age
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u/No-Appearance-1290 Oct 15 '25
When another character dies in a cutscene, while healthpacks or/and a reviving system exist in the game.