Final Fantasy VII debate: Aerith's........

Oddly enough, to start my case concerning the story plot of a video game, I’m going to start out by talking about stories written for comic books. Being a comic book fan I have observed that for the writers, bringing death upon a character is what they do when they can no longer think of anything good to do with the character story wise. Throughout a characters history the writers use them for all sorts of plot or stories they can think of to do with them, then when they hit there creative blocks they kill off the character to create a brief, to later forgotten emotional effect on another hero, like when Gwen Stacy was killed of to make Spiderman hate green goblin, or recently they decided to kill of Bruce Wayne to make superman really sad for one comic page panel. As you can see the practice has gotten out of hand since the days of Gwen’s death in comic writing history. But thankfully some of the greatest writers out there today for the comic industry, disagree with the practice of just killing off the heroes in the stories like Grant Morrison . http://www.comicbookresources.com... When being interviewed about Batman R. I. P. he said “…But like I say, it’s so much better than death. People have killed characters in the past but to me, that kind of ends the story! I like to keep the story twisting and turning. So what I am doing is a fate worse than death. Things that no one would expect to happen to these guys at all. ” It’s hard to argue with Grant here. The logic is irrefutable, killing the character ends the story, ends that characters story, and ends there use as an active protagonist that can continue affect plot. Any more use of a character after they are dead in the story has to always draw back to referring to something that individual did before they died. But that can only last so long and eventually those kinds of plots are resolved and used up. Back the FF7…. All of these concepts toward the plot of comic book writing apply just as much to plot for video games. Killing Arieth off made sure that any of here involvement in the plot of the 2nd and 3rd disk of the game drew back to something they discover she did while alive. Like pray an important prayer to a material they did not even understand needed that prayer to stop the meteor back when Arieth was alive. Yet somehow Aries knew more than the rest of the group about what needed done even though she had been traveling on the same adventure learning the same info as the rest of team Avalanche. She did not need to die herself to make that prayer work, or for the gang to be sent on the chaotic quest that followed her death to get to where they were by the end of the story and the game to stop meteor. Cloud could still flip out and give Sephiroth the black material when they first northern crater the first time. The weapons would still need dealt with when they popped out of the sea. You would have still had to find where cloud got lost at, and still go on the huge matira hunt. It would have all worked out the same. Her death was in no way pivotal to get the plot to where it would eventually lead. So what good did her death do? Did it make it personal for Cloud to kill Sephiroth like in the case with Gwen death at Green Goblins hands? Of course not, that dynamic already existed between Cloud and Sephiroth with the destruction of Clouds ENTIRE HOME TOWN. All of clouds family and friends killed, with the exception of Tifa. His home burned. It was personal since the beginning of the game, and Cloud let the rest know as much in his flashback story in Kalm. Fact is her death simply did not need to happen for this story. And now because it has happened, use of her is severally limited to any future game installments, or the many fan-fictions out there use the game has there stories starting point. The last living ancient that did not need to be killed because of evilness by the end of the story and they killed her off. What wasted potential. And let us not forget the story was being made for a game, and Arieth was a playable character. Surely its undesirable to permanently disable the use of team of characters until the end of the game. You kill off the character we the gamers no longer get the joy or experience of using it. We cant for bragging rights purposes finish raising the character just as high as we do all the other characters. And Arieth was an important game functional character. Her special brand of limit breaks made her a gamers’ natural ‘healer’ of the party in battle. I think I have said enough for my opening arguments to summarize A) Its a sign of poor writing skills when you kill off a character B) you can no longer use characters that are dead because they are dead. stories over concerning them. C) all the plot that followed and game quest you play through after Arieth death through to the end of the game would be the same with aries alive. D) her death really did not contribute anything to plot really, It was arleady personal for Cloud and all the stuff invoving the 'holy' materia was done in her life, not her death. E) plot made for video games should let you keep all your characters as useable up to the very last boss fight. espically a healing character like Arieth Good luck to my opponent, I await your response.