lightning returns (from the dead)
I made a cryptic tweet a couple days ago: Thinking more on Lightning Returns, I become ever more convinced that FFX-2 was Final Fantasy's Death of Superman.
So here's at least a little bit of why. Spoilers for FFVII, FFVII Advent Children, FFIX, FFX, FFX-2, FFXIII, FFXIII-2, and FFXIII: Lighting Returns -- all of which, for the record, I enjoyed to some degree or another, so don't expect that it's going to be a big hatefest. In fact, there were parts of all of them I really liked (and I love FFX perhaps best of any video game ever)! But there's still a bigger problem at work.
To completely understand what I mean, you have to have seen Max Landis' superior drunken analysis of The Death of Superman. You need to have seen that anyway. It's an important seventeen minutes with hilarious cameos. Just trust me.
Anyway, now that you've seen it, go with me on his idea of breaking death.
I think FFX is a perfect story. And by that I don't mean that it's flawless (trust me, my love for it does not blind me to its faults), but that it's got itself perfectly self-contained. It starts where it wants to start, it does what it wants to do, and it ties up everything so it can end where it wants to end. Even the slightly ambiguous post-credits tag doesn't open the story up to a sequel so much as it throws the nature of the whole story itself into question in an interesting meta way. That's great!
That's why I was mad about FFX-2, in the same way the idea of Hamlet 2 or (to go less highbrow about it) The Cabin in the Woods 2 would irritate me. You've taken a story that was wholly self-contained, and now you're slapping an unnecessary New Threat and New Antics on the end of it. It's just the crassest marketing decision of all -- hey, this story worked well, so why don't we ignore the artistic merit that made it so great in the first place and create something else for consumers to buy? Let's make a game that's an unnecessary sequel, introduces a lot of new characters without giving them much/any coherent backstory, throws in cameos from old characters in wacky new situations, and breaks the world's laws of physics (more on that later)!
And of course, it has to offer to Fix The Great Wrong of FFX. In FFX-2, if you do everything right, at the very end, you get Tidus back.
I've seen defenses of FFX-2 as being a good end to Yuna's story, the happy ending she 'deserves'. I don't agree with all these analyses, but I respect that they make a lot of good points, especially about how Yuna's FFX-2 character arc totally wasn't necessary in light of the first game, but as long as you're going to do something to follow up, FFX-2 is probably the least harm you could have done. The crux of the argument about why that ending is not only appropriate but necessary, though, generally goes like this: Yuna grows up through the catastrophe of FFX, she matures into a capable young woman, she establishes her independence -- so doesn't she deserve to get her boyfriend back?
I'm going to go with no and add a side order of hell no. Look, I've grown up through catastrophe. I've matured into a capable young woman. I've established my independence. So when do I get back all my dead people?
The answer is, of course, that I don't. Not that I wouldn't become a pop star and race across the world doing ... things (look, I'm sorry, I have literally forgotten 90% of what FFX-2's plot was about) if I thought it would get them back, and I have all the sympathy in the world for Yuna's slightly misguided decision to do so. In fact, if you have to make a sequel, doing a 'here's a chance to get your dead friends back!' lure is a pretty appealing one. But it doesn't help -- or at least it shouldn't.
I might even have been able to handle all of this if FFX's whole entire theme hadn't been about accepting loss -- both well and badly. Lots of people in FFX react to death poorly and can't let go, and the game makes a point that when you're holding on, bad things happen. If you can't accept your hero father's death, you wind up throwing yourself into the same sacred meat grinder that killed him in the first place. If you can't accept your best friend's death, you crawl back over a mountain and get yourself killed by a scary lady who casts Zombie recreationally. If you can't accept a city's death, you capture hundreds of people in a shared living nightmare. If you can't accept your own death, you become a monster.
The game argues that Yuna gets Tidus back because she's special and he's special and yaaaay, aren't you happy? But Spira is built on corpses. There isn't a single character in that game who hasn't suffered some horrific loss. In light of that, their happy reunion seems a bit unkind to everyone else.
FFX-2 wasn't the first solid instance of that, though. I admit I'm talking out my ass a bit when I get to FFIX, because I never played it -- I saw the beginning, some parts in the middle, and the final dungeon and end. But what I know about it, I've gotten from listening to drmoonpants talk about it and from reading her story Understudy. And the crux of the game as it applies here is this: the final battle's aftermath kills Zidane, except the game says 'just kidding!' and he's inexplicably there at the end for a Happily Ever After.
I suppose FFIX's reniging on Zidane's death is a little more forgettable and forgivable, since it is a game that was going for a happy, cute aesthetic throughout. But the decision has a very strong air of 'he survived because we wanted him to survive, so we waved our hands and said he lived' to it, and that's a dangerous precedent to set, story-wise. FFX-2 makes a much bigger deal about how you can (but don't have to, except it's the Best Ending) undo death, but FFIX slips it right in, just under the wire.
This is not to say that this death-breaking has been entirely pervasive in Final Fantasies following, but it starts to show in most the games' follow-ups. The absurd FFVII post-game sequels call up some ghosts but leave their bodies in the ground: Aeris, Zack, even the real Sephiroth (and the weird fanboy masturbatory fantasy JENOVA monster that possesses Kadaj) show up but go away. However, Advent Children does bring back Rufus -- and really, dude, we all saw you die. At least to me, Rufus' return doesn't feel like a violation of my emotional responses, since I didn't really have a huge emotional response to his death -- I mean, I wasn't happy about it, but there was a whole lot going on there at the time, and his dying wasn't really milked for pathos or carried forward as a major emotional event for the characters to stumble over.
It does, however, follow in FFX-2's dead-death pattern, in that it lets me know I don't have to be sad about dead characters anymore. Even when Kadaj (whom I adored despite myself) finally bit it, there was a part of me that just wanted to shrug, since I know that if the next movie wants to bring him back, he'll be back.
True story: If I played FFVII now for the first time, I wouldn't be upset at all by Aeris' death; I'd just expect her to show up alive again before the end.
(Side note: notice that FFXII and its associated media get excepted from this discussion. That's because FFXII takes place in Ivalice, where the bad end unhappily and the good unluckily, because that is what tragedy means. FFXII may be rosier at the finish than most, but when the people at the end are smiling, you know they're doing so after crying themselves to sleep many, many nights. ...Well, maybe not Vaan, but bless him, he's not that bright.)
FFXIII starts from the beginning with the idea that not all death is death -- so long as you die by getting turned into a rock, you're liable to be fine. In fact, you know from the start that getting turned into a rock isn't permanent, because you have two of your heroes vowing to turn your Damsel In Distress back from a rock into a person, and that's the entire mission of the game.
Well, great. That completely removed for me any stress I had about people who turn into rocks. I could tell that it was supposed to be a very emotional scene when Dajh (who is the most unrealistic child in any video game ever, seriously, he's like an animatronic Cabbage Patch Kid) gets turned into crystal, but I knew that all we had to do was wait long enough and someone would figure out how to un-do that.
Please note: I don't necessarily think making the crystal people un-crystalizable was a bad plot decision, and in fact I think they made it work well with Fang and Vanille's initial confusion. But it does take some of the emotional resonance out of their fantastically lesbian decision to hold up the world together at the end, since they're not dying, they're just getting put into a state that the other party members could presumably get them back out of, if they tried real hard and maybe built some good scaffolding first. As Great And Noble Sacrifices go, 'we'll be chilling here until you come get us' is a little weak tea.
(...And this too is another case of, how many folk have turned into crystal? And we get how many back?)
I will give FFXIII, though, that it realizes that there's a disconnect between death and death-by-rock, and that it makes that gap a major point of contention for Hope (whose mother is dead) and Snow (whose girlfriend is a rock). Snow's all perky about how he's going to get his rock girlfriend back, while Hope seethes that he'll never be able to get his dead mom back. That's great to acknowledge! Won't last, as a distinction, but it's still great.
Here's what I mean when I say something breaks a world's laws of physics.
Fantasy worlds of all stripes definitely break usual laws of physics, but they have their own internal rules. In Middle Earth, for instance, you can cast all sorts of magic, but you can't get technology from Martians, because that breaks the rules. In Star Trek, the opposite is true: aliens yes, magic not without some science-y alien reason.
FFXIII introduces a world where: giant monster-things have basically created a terrarium for people; that terrarium hangs in the sky over a gone-to-seed planet; humans can do magic; all sorts of technologies exist, including ones that summon fighting monsters and ones that have flying motorcycles; the giant monster-things can press people into service, tattoo them, turn them into rocks if they do good, and turn them into smaller monsters if they do bad; and if you're turned into a rock, there's a way to turn you back into a person. Whether or not you like any of these elements is irrelevant -- this is how the world of Cocoon and Pulse works.
FFXIII-2 agrees that the world has always been like that, but now tries to sell you on a number of other things that are not new, but are the way the world has always worked, really. The world has always had time travel, by the way, and sometimes you can fall through holes and wind up different places. The world has always had a sequence of creepy identical girls who die because they see the future. The world has always had a God and a Death Goddess. The world has always had an out-of-time place where people go and have big fights or something. And the world has always declared that the very end of FFXIII didn't really happen, except in the minds of Serah and the gamer.
These aren't little things you can slip under the table, like 'now the world has a moogle you can turn into a weapon!' -- well, okay, no one in the main party in FFXIII ever tried using a moogle as a sword, so I guess that's something we might well have missed. But even though FFXIII's story was told out-of-order in a lot of places, it was never that way because someone had traveled through time.
The surest sign that a sequel was never intended during the production of the original is when you have to bend its laws to physics to make it work.
I loved Serah. I thought Serah was a great protagonist -- especially in light of how Lightning seemed to be entering phase II of her Cloud impression and going from Still Snarky But Basically Happy at the end of the real game to Doom Doom Depressed Doom Angsty Doom at the start of the sequel. Serah's like, fuck that shit, I don't know how I wound up in this stupid dress, but I've got my gay boyfriend and we're going to go find my crankypants sister!
But FFXIII-2 was all about breaking death, too. Yul kept dying, except she didn't keep dying, because there were like a billion of her, and I know Noel thought his Yul was special, but seriously, not only could I not pick her out of a lineup, I wouldn't swear that he could either. Caius was ... something, that's for sure, and it involved not dying, even when you really wanted him to. And Serah and Noel went forward and backward in time, and Hope was older (yay!) but Dajh was still a toddler (seriously what the fuck), and it was all kind of messed up. And then some large number of Yuls died, and then Caius died, and that was a thing.
And then Serah died. Died-died, died for real, not died in a rock, but straight-up died. (And the moogle died too, but seriously, fuck that moogle.) And this was sort of the Death of Superman moment: Serah, whom you'd spent the whole first game trying to un-rock, who'd spent the whole second game being a wonderful player character, was actually dead. This has serious repercussions. People are going to flip the fuck out over this. You should be sad.
Except that by this point, I'd stopped believing in death, at least as far as anything titled 'Final Fantasy' could take it for its main characters. Any sad was squandered on wondering what the third game would do to bring her back.
Lightning Returns is nonsense. I mean, plot-wise, it's basically utter garbage. It has some fantastic scenes, but overall, I can't even make fun of how garbage the plot is, that's how garbage it is: Once-again-shota-Hope is now totally emotionless and living in a magic saucer with a tree, and near-emotionless Lightning has to come back to him every day at 6AM to feed souls to the tree so the tree turn back the clock of destroying the world because God (God? seriously?) wants to destroy everything and build a new world, and only the souls the tree eats will get to be people in the new world, and... yeah.
If FFXIII-2 breaks FFXIII's laws of physics, Lightning Returns shatters them. It's basically its own bizarre game that coincidentally stars FFXIII's main cast -- and not even the main cast, but characters that just coincidentally look like that main cast. Lightning's still doing her Advent Children Cloud impression. Hope's just a constant exposition automaton. Snow's a giant bucket of angst who oversees raver orgies. Sazh has descended into self-pitying anger and uselessness because still-five-year-old Dazh is now in a coma, making the kid only slightly less useful than he was before. Vanille's gotten into organized religion and is the hapless main priestess of some cult. Fang is ... well, bless her, she's still Fang, though she's left Vanille in the hands of some awful people for some fetch-quest reason.
To continue with the Death of Superman model, Lightning Returns literally includes a character who's supposed to be (among other things) a jacked-up version of Serah. She's way more of a problem than Serah ever was, and she seems to be interested in making a mess of everything -- except at the end she turns out to be Lightning's vision of her younger self (who was a gothic loli, apparently) as a coffin to hold Serah's soul, and speaking of breaking the laws of physics, nothing in any game up to this point suggested that such a thing might be possible. I would have more easily believed a giant black Serah with a great steel-drivin' hammer.
Lightning Returns dispenses with the idea of large-scale time travel and goes for the subtly more Groundhog Day approach. Now it's at the end of the world, and the point of the end of the world is that nobody's aged for a long time and no one's being born, but people can still die. In fact, there are a bunch of little fetch-quests (which make up the bulk of the game) that involve having to deal with someone who's grieving a dead friend or family member ... only a surprising number of those supposedly dead people are still alive and kicking. Lightning's job is to gather souls so that people won't be left behind, but once they die, it's too late. Except it's not really too late, because after a while, Lightning meets a couple ghost-girls whose souls she gets to save. And then Vanille can sing a song that makes all the dead souls come along. So nobody gets left behind! No matter how badly you screw up the game (so long as you don't get a game over), everyone gets to go on to the happy paradise, and some people don't even have to die first!
I didn't say 'left behind' unintentionally. If you've ever read any Protestant Evangelical rapture fiction, you know the trope: Jesus is coming back to get us special people before we die, and even though it'll be for everyone else exactly like we died, it won't be like death for us, and that's what matters. If you're special enough, you can avoid dying. If you die, it's because you weren't special enough.
Lightning Returns doesn't have that same evangelical exclusivity to it, but a worldwide Rapture is basically what happens at the end. Everyone who isn't dead already gets to move on to the special new world, and everyone who is dead (Hope is also dead too, apparently? it never says what happened there), in a shocking twist, gets to move on too! Everyone gets to be together! Nobody's sacrifices mean anything! Everyone gets to live (except for a bunch of identical dead girls we don't care about and Caius the Apache Tracker, and even they get to live on as ... God?)! Hooray!
Killing death basically guts a lot of emotional resonance. It reduces the tension that might otherwise by raised by threatening characters. The space catch in FFVIII, for instance, was so harrowing for me because I was just coming off of FFVII and therefore trusted no one's plot armor. In FFVI, you could really kill both Cid and Shadow -- and I accidentally did both, to my eternal shame and distress! Yet as much as I liked all the FFXIII main cast, I didn't even flinch when I saw Sazh in the coffin after seeing him put the gun to his head, because I knew he wouldn't be dead dead, because only the little throw-away people ever get to be dead dead. If you die, it's because you weren't special enough.
Worst of all, for me, that's not something I can relate to. I sobbed at the end of FFX because, among other things, it made me think of my grandfathers, stepfather, and other male parent-types I've loved who've died. It was a good sobbing, though, and it's part of why I love FFX so much. That was a game that understood loss and what a triumph it is not to say 'just kidding!', but to move forward with that hole in your heart.
Which is why the end of FFX-2 continues to be such a kick in the balls for me, and why the cheapness of death in FFXIII continued to cheapen its sequels, and why I'll never believe a Final Fantasy death again. If I do play some future installment in the series to the point where another character dies, I won't be sad, because I'll figure that character's just going to come back later. Big deal. And if that's not what you wanted, Square? You should never have cried wolf.
So here's at least a little bit of why. Spoilers for FFVII, FFVII Advent Children, FFIX, FFX, FFX-2, FFXIII, FFXIII-2, and FFXIII: Lighting Returns -- all of which, for the record, I enjoyed to some degree or another, so don't expect that it's going to be a big hatefest. In fact, there were parts of all of them I really liked (and I love FFX perhaps best of any video game ever)! But there's still a bigger problem at work.
To completely understand what I mean, you have to have seen Max Landis' superior drunken analysis of The Death of Superman. You need to have seen that anyway. It's an important seventeen minutes with hilarious cameos. Just trust me.
Anyway, now that you've seen it, go with me on his idea of breaking death.
I think FFX is a perfect story. And by that I don't mean that it's flawless (trust me, my love for it does not blind me to its faults), but that it's got itself perfectly self-contained. It starts where it wants to start, it does what it wants to do, and it ties up everything so it can end where it wants to end. Even the slightly ambiguous post-credits tag doesn't open the story up to a sequel so much as it throws the nature of the whole story itself into question in an interesting meta way. That's great!
That's why I was mad about FFX-2, in the same way the idea of Hamlet 2 or (to go less highbrow about it) The Cabin in the Woods 2 would irritate me. You've taken a story that was wholly self-contained, and now you're slapping an unnecessary New Threat and New Antics on the end of it. It's just the crassest marketing decision of all -- hey, this story worked well, so why don't we ignore the artistic merit that made it so great in the first place and create something else for consumers to buy? Let's make a game that's an unnecessary sequel, introduces a lot of new characters without giving them much/any coherent backstory, throws in cameos from old characters in wacky new situations, and breaks the world's laws of physics (more on that later)!
And of course, it has to offer to Fix The Great Wrong of FFX. In FFX-2, if you do everything right, at the very end, you get Tidus back.
I've seen defenses of FFX-2 as being a good end to Yuna's story, the happy ending she 'deserves'. I don't agree with all these analyses, but I respect that they make a lot of good points, especially about how Yuna's FFX-2 character arc totally wasn't necessary in light of the first game, but as long as you're going to do something to follow up, FFX-2 is probably the least harm you could have done. The crux of the argument about why that ending is not only appropriate but necessary, though, generally goes like this: Yuna grows up through the catastrophe of FFX, she matures into a capable young woman, she establishes her independence -- so doesn't she deserve to get her boyfriend back?
I'm going to go with no and add a side order of hell no. Look, I've grown up through catastrophe. I've matured into a capable young woman. I've established my independence. So when do I get back all my dead people?
The answer is, of course, that I don't. Not that I wouldn't become a pop star and race across the world doing ... things (look, I'm sorry, I have literally forgotten 90% of what FFX-2's plot was about) if I thought it would get them back, and I have all the sympathy in the world for Yuna's slightly misguided decision to do so. In fact, if you have to make a sequel, doing a 'here's a chance to get your dead friends back!' lure is a pretty appealing one. But it doesn't help -- or at least it shouldn't.
I might even have been able to handle all of this if FFX's whole entire theme hadn't been about accepting loss -- both well and badly. Lots of people in FFX react to death poorly and can't let go, and the game makes a point that when you're holding on, bad things happen. If you can't accept your hero father's death, you wind up throwing yourself into the same sacred meat grinder that killed him in the first place. If you can't accept your best friend's death, you crawl back over a mountain and get yourself killed by a scary lady who casts Zombie recreationally. If you can't accept a city's death, you capture hundreds of people in a shared living nightmare. If you can't accept your own death, you become a monster.
The game argues that Yuna gets Tidus back because she's special and he's special and yaaaay, aren't you happy? But Spira is built on corpses. There isn't a single character in that game who hasn't suffered some horrific loss. In light of that, their happy reunion seems a bit unkind to everyone else.
FFX-2 wasn't the first solid instance of that, though. I admit I'm talking out my ass a bit when I get to FFIX, because I never played it -- I saw the beginning, some parts in the middle, and the final dungeon and end. But what I know about it, I've gotten from listening to drmoonpants talk about it and from reading her story Understudy. And the crux of the game as it applies here is this: the final battle's aftermath kills Zidane, except the game says 'just kidding!' and he's inexplicably there at the end for a Happily Ever After.
I suppose FFIX's reniging on Zidane's death is a little more forgettable and forgivable, since it is a game that was going for a happy, cute aesthetic throughout. But the decision has a very strong air of 'he survived because we wanted him to survive, so we waved our hands and said he lived' to it, and that's a dangerous precedent to set, story-wise. FFX-2 makes a much bigger deal about how you can (but don't have to, except it's the Best Ending) undo death, but FFIX slips it right in, just under the wire.
This is not to say that this death-breaking has been entirely pervasive in Final Fantasies following, but it starts to show in most the games' follow-ups. The absurd FFVII post-game sequels call up some ghosts but leave their bodies in the ground: Aeris, Zack, even the real Sephiroth (and the weird fanboy masturbatory fantasy JENOVA monster that possesses Kadaj) show up but go away. However, Advent Children does bring back Rufus -- and really, dude, we all saw you die. At least to me, Rufus' return doesn't feel like a violation of my emotional responses, since I didn't really have a huge emotional response to his death -- I mean, I wasn't happy about it, but there was a whole lot going on there at the time, and his dying wasn't really milked for pathos or carried forward as a major emotional event for the characters to stumble over.
It does, however, follow in FFX-2's dead-death pattern, in that it lets me know I don't have to be sad about dead characters anymore. Even when Kadaj (whom I adored despite myself) finally bit it, there was a part of me that just wanted to shrug, since I know that if the next movie wants to bring him back, he'll be back.
True story: If I played FFVII now for the first time, I wouldn't be upset at all by Aeris' death; I'd just expect her to show up alive again before the end.
(Side note: notice that FFXII and its associated media get excepted from this discussion. That's because FFXII takes place in Ivalice, where the bad end unhappily and the good unluckily, because that is what tragedy means. FFXII may be rosier at the finish than most, but when the people at the end are smiling, you know they're doing so after crying themselves to sleep many, many nights. ...Well, maybe not Vaan, but bless him, he's not that bright.)
FFXIII starts from the beginning with the idea that not all death is death -- so long as you die by getting turned into a rock, you're liable to be fine. In fact, you know from the start that getting turned into a rock isn't permanent, because you have two of your heroes vowing to turn your Damsel In Distress back from a rock into a person, and that's the entire mission of the game.
Well, great. That completely removed for me any stress I had about people who turn into rocks. I could tell that it was supposed to be a very emotional scene when Dajh (who is the most unrealistic child in any video game ever, seriously, he's like an animatronic Cabbage Patch Kid) gets turned into crystal, but I knew that all we had to do was wait long enough and someone would figure out how to un-do that.
Please note: I don't necessarily think making the crystal people un-crystalizable was a bad plot decision, and in fact I think they made it work well with Fang and Vanille's initial confusion. But it does take some of the emotional resonance out of their fantastically lesbian decision to hold up the world together at the end, since they're not dying, they're just getting put into a state that the other party members could presumably get them back out of, if they tried real hard and maybe built some good scaffolding first. As Great And Noble Sacrifices go, 'we'll be chilling here until you come get us' is a little weak tea.
(...And this too is another case of, how many folk have turned into crystal? And we get how many back?)
I will give FFXIII, though, that it realizes that there's a disconnect between death and death-by-rock, and that it makes that gap a major point of contention for Hope (whose mother is dead) and Snow (whose girlfriend is a rock). Snow's all perky about how he's going to get his rock girlfriend back, while Hope seethes that he'll never be able to get his dead mom back. That's great to acknowledge! Won't last, as a distinction, but it's still great.
Here's what I mean when I say something breaks a world's laws of physics.
Fantasy worlds of all stripes definitely break usual laws of physics, but they have their own internal rules. In Middle Earth, for instance, you can cast all sorts of magic, but you can't get technology from Martians, because that breaks the rules. In Star Trek, the opposite is true: aliens yes, magic not without some science-y alien reason.
FFXIII introduces a world where: giant monster-things have basically created a terrarium for people; that terrarium hangs in the sky over a gone-to-seed planet; humans can do magic; all sorts of technologies exist, including ones that summon fighting monsters and ones that have flying motorcycles; the giant monster-things can press people into service, tattoo them, turn them into rocks if they do good, and turn them into smaller monsters if they do bad; and if you're turned into a rock, there's a way to turn you back into a person. Whether or not you like any of these elements is irrelevant -- this is how the world of Cocoon and Pulse works.
FFXIII-2 agrees that the world has always been like that, but now tries to sell you on a number of other things that are not new, but are the way the world has always worked, really. The world has always had time travel, by the way, and sometimes you can fall through holes and wind up different places. The world has always had a sequence of creepy identical girls who die because they see the future. The world has always had a God and a Death Goddess. The world has always had an out-of-time place where people go and have big fights or something. And the world has always declared that the very end of FFXIII didn't really happen, except in the minds of Serah and the gamer.
These aren't little things you can slip under the table, like 'now the world has a moogle you can turn into a weapon!' -- well, okay, no one in the main party in FFXIII ever tried using a moogle as a sword, so I guess that's something we might well have missed. But even though FFXIII's story was told out-of-order in a lot of places, it was never that way because someone had traveled through time.
The surest sign that a sequel was never intended during the production of the original is when you have to bend its laws to physics to make it work.
I loved Serah. I thought Serah was a great protagonist -- especially in light of how Lightning seemed to be entering phase II of her Cloud impression and going from Still Snarky But Basically Happy at the end of the real game to Doom Doom Depressed Doom Angsty Doom at the start of the sequel. Serah's like, fuck that shit, I don't know how I wound up in this stupid dress, but I've got my gay boyfriend and we're going to go find my crankypants sister!
But FFXIII-2 was all about breaking death, too. Yul kept dying, except she didn't keep dying, because there were like a billion of her, and I know Noel thought his Yul was special, but seriously, not only could I not pick her out of a lineup, I wouldn't swear that he could either. Caius was ... something, that's for sure, and it involved not dying, even when you really wanted him to. And Serah and Noel went forward and backward in time, and Hope was older (yay!) but Dajh was still a toddler (seriously what the fuck), and it was all kind of messed up. And then some large number of Yuls died, and then Caius died, and that was a thing.
And then Serah died. Died-died, died for real, not died in a rock, but straight-up died. (And the moogle died too, but seriously, fuck that moogle.) And this was sort of the Death of Superman moment: Serah, whom you'd spent the whole first game trying to un-rock, who'd spent the whole second game being a wonderful player character, was actually dead. This has serious repercussions. People are going to flip the fuck out over this. You should be sad.
Except that by this point, I'd stopped believing in death, at least as far as anything titled 'Final Fantasy' could take it for its main characters. Any sad was squandered on wondering what the third game would do to bring her back.
Lightning Returns is nonsense. I mean, plot-wise, it's basically utter garbage. It has some fantastic scenes, but overall, I can't even make fun of how garbage the plot is, that's how garbage it is: Once-again-shota-Hope is now totally emotionless and living in a magic saucer with a tree, and near-emotionless Lightning has to come back to him every day at 6AM to feed souls to the tree so the tree turn back the clock of destroying the world because God (God? seriously?) wants to destroy everything and build a new world, and only the souls the tree eats will get to be people in the new world, and... yeah.
If FFXIII-2 breaks FFXIII's laws of physics, Lightning Returns shatters them. It's basically its own bizarre game that coincidentally stars FFXIII's main cast -- and not even the main cast, but characters that just coincidentally look like that main cast. Lightning's still doing her Advent Children Cloud impression. Hope's just a constant exposition automaton. Snow's a giant bucket of angst who oversees raver orgies. Sazh has descended into self-pitying anger and uselessness because still-five-year-old Dazh is now in a coma, making the kid only slightly less useful than he was before. Vanille's gotten into organized religion and is the hapless main priestess of some cult. Fang is ... well, bless her, she's still Fang, though she's left Vanille in the hands of some awful people for some fetch-quest reason.
To continue with the Death of Superman model, Lightning Returns literally includes a character who's supposed to be (among other things) a jacked-up version of Serah. She's way more of a problem than Serah ever was, and she seems to be interested in making a mess of everything -- except at the end she turns out to be Lightning's vision of her younger self (who was a gothic loli, apparently) as a coffin to hold Serah's soul, and speaking of breaking the laws of physics, nothing in any game up to this point suggested that such a thing might be possible. I would have more easily believed a giant black Serah with a great steel-drivin' hammer.
Lightning Returns dispenses with the idea of large-scale time travel and goes for the subtly more Groundhog Day approach. Now it's at the end of the world, and the point of the end of the world is that nobody's aged for a long time and no one's being born, but people can still die. In fact, there are a bunch of little fetch-quests (which make up the bulk of the game) that involve having to deal with someone who's grieving a dead friend or family member ... only a surprising number of those supposedly dead people are still alive and kicking. Lightning's job is to gather souls so that people won't be left behind, but once they die, it's too late. Except it's not really too late, because after a while, Lightning meets a couple ghost-girls whose souls she gets to save. And then Vanille can sing a song that makes all the dead souls come along. So nobody gets left behind! No matter how badly you screw up the game (so long as you don't get a game over), everyone gets to go on to the happy paradise, and some people don't even have to die first!
I didn't say 'left behind' unintentionally. If you've ever read any Protestant Evangelical rapture fiction, you know the trope: Jesus is coming back to get us special people before we die, and even though it'll be for everyone else exactly like we died, it won't be like death for us, and that's what matters. If you're special enough, you can avoid dying. If you die, it's because you weren't special enough.
Lightning Returns doesn't have that same evangelical exclusivity to it, but a worldwide Rapture is basically what happens at the end. Everyone who isn't dead already gets to move on to the special new world, and everyone who is dead (Hope is also dead too, apparently? it never says what happened there), in a shocking twist, gets to move on too! Everyone gets to be together! Nobody's sacrifices mean anything! Everyone gets to live (except for a bunch of identical dead girls we don't care about and Caius the Apache Tracker, and even they get to live on as ... God?)! Hooray!
Killing death basically guts a lot of emotional resonance. It reduces the tension that might otherwise by raised by threatening characters. The space catch in FFVIII, for instance, was so harrowing for me because I was just coming off of FFVII and therefore trusted no one's plot armor. In FFVI, you could really kill both Cid and Shadow -- and I accidentally did both, to my eternal shame and distress! Yet as much as I liked all the FFXIII main cast, I didn't even flinch when I saw Sazh in the coffin after seeing him put the gun to his head, because I knew he wouldn't be dead dead, because only the little throw-away people ever get to be dead dead. If you die, it's because you weren't special enough.
Worst of all, for me, that's not something I can relate to. I sobbed at the end of FFX because, among other things, it made me think of my grandfathers, stepfather, and other male parent-types I've loved who've died. It was a good sobbing, though, and it's part of why I love FFX so much. That was a game that understood loss and what a triumph it is not to say 'just kidding!', but to move forward with that hole in your heart.
Which is why the end of FFX-2 continues to be such a kick in the balls for me, and why the cheapness of death in FFXIII continued to cheapen its sequels, and why I'll never believe a Final Fantasy death again. If I do play some future installment in the series to the point where another character dies, I won't be sad, because I'll figure that character's just going to come back later. Big deal. And if that's not what you wanted, Square? You should never have cried wolf.