Summary
Just because you’ve arrived at the end of a journey anddefeated the big bad, it doesn’t guarantee that you will have that happy ending you were imagining. Sometimes, you might have to make the hard choice of leaving a loved crew member behind or destroying something to save the greater good.
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Other times, you might have to give yourself up to save others, and the hardest part is that no matter what you do, discover, or invent, you won’t be able to do anything to stop your death. Below are characters who paid the ultimate price.
10The Grey Wardens - Dragon Age: Origins
Whenever the threat of The Blight starts calling out, those who can hear the message in their blood shall answer the call.Grey Wardens are warriorswho heed the call and do all they can to prevent the Blight, and can do so by performing the Joining ritual and ingesting darkspawn blood. Those who can survive become the warriors that protect the world.
Once they succeed in staving off another Blight, there isn’t much a Grey Warden has to look forward to. Ingesting the darkspawn starts a countdown before they lose all sense of themselves and turn into ghouls if they don’t go out in a blaze of glory down in the Deep Roads. Whichever way they go, there is nothing but death waiting for them.
9Frédéric Chopin - Eternal Sonata
The JRPG does nothing to hide the fact that your main character is going to die. That’s Eternal Sonata’s main selling point: You are inside the dream world of the dying composer, and he is trying to understand how and why he got here. The world of Sonata is a vivid and beautiful juxtaposition to the sad and bleak story beats.
What starts as a generic-feeling JRPGevolves into a story about accepting the inevitable. We are in the real Chopin’s dying dream, after all, and there’s no way to escape the fate laid out before him. No matter how badly he wants to.
8Calliope - Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical
Murder mystery turned musicalStray Gods: The Roleplaying Musicalputs Grace as the primary suspect in the death of the muse Calliope. As you unravel the mystery surrounding her death, you come to understand that many could seemingly have a motive to take her life and frame you.
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Later, after talking with Hecate, the goddess of Witchcraft and keeper of the Book of Prophecy, you learn that though Calliope’s death is fated to happen, the timing is all wrong and happened a year too early. Knowing she was meant for death doesn’t make her loss any less heavy. Calliope was the tricky glue that tried its hardest to keep everyone together.
7Serge - Chrono Cross
Serge is a time anomaly and technically should have diedas a child. In one dimension, this is a canon event and does not change. The Serge that is alive gets transported to the dead dimension and has to figure out why he’s dead in the first place. There are a lot of outside forces at play, with Serge being the literal key to it all.
The AI who chases him down is legitimately named FATE and needs Serge dead to regain control of Chronopolis and, by proxy, both dimensions. Even after all these events, Serge in the dead dimension remains dead, while the living serge gets to be free back at his home, overcoming his fate.
6Tidus - Final Fantasy X
Tidus felt like he knew what he was destined for in his life as anup-and-coming Blitzball star, popularity and fame, money, and everything that comes with that sports fame. Nothing could prepare Tidus for what fate had in store for him, Zanarkand, and all Spira as he was whisked away by the abomination Sin.
As Tidus travels with Yuna and her beloved guardian crew, he learns that he is a being stuck between existing as a person and a dream of those who wish to no longer dream. So when he and the crew save the day and defeat the big bad, he will cease to exist in return.
5Solid Snake - Metal Gear Solid Series
Solid Snake was created to be the ultimate tool of war, solely to be used to win secret wars waged between countries and whoever decided to try and disrupt the tentative peace between nations. He’d be double and triple-crossed so many times that allies become enemies and back again more times than you can count Snakes.
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Being genetically modified to be the perfect super soldier has some drawbacks for Snake. For starters, he’s been modified to be sterile, so he can’t be used to father another super soldier in the making, but worse, he’s been made to age at an accelerated rate. By the time he’s 40, he has the presence and cellular aging of a man in his late 70s. A hero was taken from the field much too soon.
4Makoto Yuki - Persona 3
If you were given the choice betweensaving the entire worldbut giving up your life or staying with your friends and loved ones but dooming the earth to its final destruction, which would you choose? Sure, you could easily sit and say you would save the world in exchange for your life, but could you really give up the people you love?
For Makoto, it was an easy choice to make. No one deserved the fate of having to choose between the two, but he faced that challenge with extreme bravery and chose to protect the world from death incarnate herself, Nyx. All hope isn’t lost, however, as a solution for his return is currently being searched for by those who love him.
You knew Arthur Morgan was a dead man walking the minute you started the prequel game Red Dead Redemption 2. Nothing in the game’s opening gives this away, of course, but the huge, glaring fact is that he is completely missing from OG Red Dead Redemption — so much so that he isn’t even mentioned by name once.
What makes it worse is watching Arthur’s health slowly decline, and there isn’t anything we can do about it. Antibiotics were not available for another fifty years by the time we had our adventures with the Van der Linde gang.
2Edith Finch - What Remains Of Edith Finch
Each family member’s story we come across in What Remains of Edith Finch tells a tale of a life cut way too short. Whether it be caused by a freak accident or being at the wrong place at the wrong time during a home invasion. There is a lot of tragedy within those walls, and in the game, you play as the latest generation of Finches trying to find the truth.
Playing as Edith gives you hope that somehow she’s escaped the same fate that awaited her family members, but then you realize that none of what’s going on in the game is present day. All the experiences you witness are nothing more than passages in a journal written by an already deceased Edith. The Finch family curse continues.
1Nariko - Heavenly Sword
The village Nariko hails from has a myth about the sword of a deity who left the powerful weapon behind in the mortal realm. Unfit for mortal hands, the sword will drain the life force of anyone who uses it, regardless of the user’s intentions. At the beginning of the game, you see the last of Nariko’s life being drained from her body, just as the myth speaks of.
Nariko’s will is much stronger than that, as she defies the myth and returns from the dead, seemingly able to wield the weapon without being drained. The sword has granted her the gift of more time to save her village but has led her to her death not once but twice.
