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We were discussing in chat which Final Fantasy game has the most civilian death. It seems to me that a lot of the games don't really deal with actual civilian casualties - in FF4, for example, all the combat seems to be well-encapsulated by the party and even by the enemy so much that the townspeople should really have no idea that anything has actually happened. Compare that to FF6, where the freaking world is destroyed, or FFX, which ritually has towns destroyed by Sin. My guess is that FF6 has the most impact on the lives of civilians simply by merit of the freaking world ending.

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Hey, put the cellphone down for a while
In the night there is something wild
Can you hear it breathing?
And hey, put the laptop down for a while
In the night there is something wild
I feel it, it's leaving me

Quote (Neal @ 6th October 2011 18:07)

My guess is that FF6 has the most impact on the lives of civilians simply by merit of the freaking world ending.

The world ends, but then it grows back again and everyone's happy.

Compare with FFIX where an entire world (Terra) is destroyed and nearly all the Terrans and Burmecians are wiped out apart from about 8 people. Massacre. Lindblum and Alexandria get their share but its not quite as genocidal. I think the overarching story about Terra and Gaia is based on civilians dying. The worst part of the story, mind.

Possible spoilers: highlight to view

Could also say FFVII where humanity may or may not have been wiped out at the end of the game, and it's strongly hinted that it is. As far as civilians unfairly being punished I think that's a pretty severe example.

This post has been edited by sweetdude on 6th October 2011 17:34

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Scepticism, that dry rot of the intellect, had not left one entire idea in his mind.

Me on the Starcraft.

Like I said in chat, I agree with Neal. If we break it down, it looks something like this:

Worth Mentioning:
FFIX - Burmecia gets wrecked, Cleyra isn't looking too hot either, Terra gets destroyed (though the civilians there aren't that numerous and are debatable). There was clearly a lot of death, or at least pseudo-death, in Terra prior to the game, but not as much actually during the game. There seems to be a decent amount of civilian death here, as far as civilian death goes, but not enough to compete.

FFVIII - Trabia gets destroyed. The entire world is de-existed for a bit, but the it gets re-existed so that's all good. Not really much competition for death totals here.

FFVII - There's that whole Sector 7 getting destroyed bit, which is rough. Nibelheim gets trashed, but that's pre-game and thus doesn't count. I assume there's a fair bit of death from those WEAPONS and such. It seems like people have time to get out of the city before Meteor arrives, though.

The Real Competitors:
FFVI - Doma, Vector, Narshe, Mobliz and South Figaro get wrecked. Now, there are some civilian survivors in the case of South Figaro and some kids in the case of Mobliz, but there are minimal traces of anything from Narshe or Vector. Vector being destroyed is on the scale of what it would be like in FFVII if all of Midgar was eliminated.

FFX - Kilika gets destroyed, and operation Mi'ihen goes terribly wrong. These are pretty big events, but most of the death in FFX happens prior to the story; the downfall of the great machina cities and the spiral of death that is so central to the plot take place outside of the actual scope of the game.

FFVI takes the cake.

This post has been edited by Death Penalty on 6th October 2011 17:39

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Do non-playable party members count, such as the storyline death in FFIII?

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Quote (Glenn Magus Harvey @ 6th October 2011 18:38)

Do non-playable party members count, such as the storyline death in FFIII?

Varies from case to case but frankly given those are individuals the effects of their deaths are negligible.

It should also be noted that in FFX, Mi'Hen was not a large number of civilian deaths - they were all soldiers.

The same could technically apply to FF8 in that the one area that is deliberately attacked with confirmed casualties was a military facility. It could be argued every casualty there was not a civilian, but there's also the matter of the monsters unleashed in Esthar. That likely would result in a fair number of deaths but at the same time it was supposed to be weaker than the one that destroyed Centra, and Esthar is more advanced so their forces would likely reduce the risk and deal with the problem.

FF6 and FF9 definitely are the market leaders in bodycount. FF9 wins if we simply take only what's shown in game as the real scale (Lindblum alone would have more people killed in it than existed in the whole of FF6's world that we see), and 6 has to win if we take a more realistic scale into account.

It's therefore smart to assume it's 6/9, followed by 7.

Huh, funny that, the best ones kill lots of faceless nameless civvies. There's a lesson, FF13-2, crack out the nukes!

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"Only the dead have seen the end of their quotes being misattributed to Plato."
-George Santayana

"The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here..."
-Abraham Lincoln, prior to the discovery of Irony.

Guys. Guys.
Guess how many towns get asploded in FFII (Firion's game, not Cecil's game.)
LOTS. LOTS AND LOTS.
I mean, like, five or something. All gone. Srsly.

I think FFII has the most civilian impact/bodycount.

If you only count in game events, then I believe it'd be 6, 9, and 5. That's right. Did you all forget Exdeath going psycho and voiding huge areas of the world??????

Counting events that took place in a game's universe, but prior to their story, then I believe the winners would be 10 and 13. 10 because of 2000 years of Sin, as well as the machina wars themselves. 13 because all of pulse's people went extinct, not to mention all the fighting in cocoon, and the purges.




This post has been edited by Dr. Delinquent on 7th October 2011 00:29

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-FFIII FFIV FFV FFVII FFVIII FFX FFXII FFXIII FF:Dissidia FFVII:CC FFVII:DoC
--KHI KHII KH:COM KH:BbS
---SO:FD SO:TTEOT SO:TLH
----DQIII DQVIII
-----DA:O DAII
------VP:S

Quote

It should also be noted that in FFX, Mi'Hen was not a large number of civilian deaths - they were all soldiers.

I counted the people killed at Mi'ihen as civilians than soldiers because they really are much more a militia than an actual army.

You do have a good point with FFVIII though, Trabia doesn't count, and I should have thought of Esthar.

Dr. D probably has a good point with FFV, except that I usually try to keep FFV out of my mind.

Edit

Wait, are the Void-ed people returned to existence after Exdeath is killed? If so, they don't count as casualties!

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I think there's more in FFIX than has been discussed. I mean, starting from the end of Disc 1, you've got Burmecia in ruins, Cleyra completely destroyed, Lindblum gets attacked by Atomos (and hence an ENTIRE district is destroyed), Alexandria gets attacked, and then there's all those Terra shenanigans. By the end of the game, all of the four major cities in the game have been destroyed or are in ruins. And pre-game, you've obviously got Madain Sari, which went to hell prtty quickly.

And that's not counting how many people fell to their deaths in an airship when the Mist was removed from the Mist Continent. They don't really dwell on that possibility, though.

Not really in reply to anyone else's comment, but I just thought about FFVII and remembered how much of an emotional impact dropping the "pizza slice" had.

Everyone has the famous major plotline death spoiled for them by now, but I didn't have this lesser yet still dramatic moment spoiled for me. I didn't think they'd do it.

...but they did and I was pretty speechless. Think about all the people who lived there. Think about the fact that your characters even once called it home.

This post has been edited by Glenn Magus Harvey on 7th October 2011 16:54

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Quote (Glenn Magus Harvey @ 7th October 2011 16:53)

...but they did and I was pretty speechless. Think about all the people who lived there. Think about the fact that your characters even once called it home.

Think of all the people that died in FF7 when you blew up the No.1 reactor!

Also FFIV is sort of absent from the discussion. I don't think it's a big winner in collateral damage, but you do have

Possible spoilers: highlight to view

Cecil and Kain burning Myst and killing every summoner except Rydia.
A bunch of people get killed when the Red Wings bomb Damcyan.
And Fabul, and Eblan. One gets the impression that Eblan has very few survivors, but you could argue that ninjas who live in a castle aren't civilians.

Best I could do.

Not sure whether those black and white mages at the beginning of FFIV count as civilians. Probably not though.

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Check the "What games are you playing at the moment?" thread for updates on what I've been playing.

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I think the biggest thing for FFIV is how you count the people who died. For many of the towns, the civilians are also the military. All the Mysidians are mages, nearly all of Eblan and Fabul were fighters, and so forth. Continuing with IV, if you continue into the After Years, the planet gets nailed even harder.

In reply to DP: I didnt remember off the top of my head when I wrote my post, so I looked it up. The citizens are resurrected at the end, but the event is still very influential.

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--KHI KHII KH:COM KH:BbS
---SO:FD SO:TTEOT SO:TLH
----DQIII DQVIII
-----DA:O DAII
------VP:S

Quote (Death Penalty @ 7th October 2011 01:53)

I counted the people killed at Mi'ihen as civilians than soldiers because they really are much more a militia than an actual army.

Still men at arms or combatants. National Guard are counted as military casualties, are they not? Under our definitions, everyone at Mi'Hen was not a civilian.

Quote (footbigmike @ 7th October 2011 11:26)

And that's not counting how many people fell to their deaths in an airship when the Mist was removed from the Mist Continent. They don't really dwell on that possibility, though.

The mist probably faded slowly rather than instantly, and ships did seem to collect it and have some limited above-mist capabilities (how else did the Prima Vista make it to Alexandria? How else could Lindblum be such a busy port?) but odds could be there were a few airships that ran out of fuel and had to land, risking monsters. I don't think it would be like an EMP causing aircraft to drop out of the sky, breaking gun sights that don't even have any electronic components and generally ruining everyone's day.

Though funnily enough the Airships would probably be immune to, or barely effected by, an actual EMP. Invincible might be in trouble.

This post has been edited by Del S on 9th October 2011 16:25

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"Only the dead have seen the end of their quotes being misattributed to Plato."
-George Santayana

"The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here..."
-Abraham Lincoln, prior to the discovery of Irony.

Quote (Dr. Delinquent @ 7th October 2011 02:24)

Counting events that took place in a game's universe, but prior to their story, then I believe the winners would be 10 and 13.

I agree on this, in that 10 is entirely based on the devestatingly huge casualties and the cultural "flavor" that this has given the world. Not to forget you are actually there before Sin's first attack in-game, and as this is the only part where the main character is actually alive, you could almost count it as more important than the average scene in the game. Also, the end of all the dreams could be concidered casualties no? (not likely a very popular idea though)

Now, however, remember that there was genocide in FFVII as well, pre-story wise, ending with Masamune penetrating the last Ancient. And in a way, the happennings in FFVIII were very much affecting the civillian world, in which you happen to be a soldier. But, not that many casualties (until the destruction of time itself that is)

I do believe, however, that the FF series could do well returning "anguish and destruction of an innocent people" as plot devices at a greater extent without failing :-) Imagine getting to know a town as well as you did Balamb Garden, and then while on some important mission to bring justice to evildoers, you have to rush back only to find it as violated and sad as Burmecia was.

But the massive casualties in 10 are offscreen, as is the genocide of FF7, so arguably they wouldn't really count as happening in the game itself. There's only one on-screen death of that genocide that is carried out upon a civilian - because Aeris is can arguably be described as a terrorist thanks to armed acts against the Shinra, only her true mother was an undisputed civilian.

The events of FF5 and FF8 probably shouldn't count due to reset buttons. Arguably no one noticed in FF8 at all.

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"Only the dead have seen the end of their quotes being misattributed to Plato."
-George Santayana

"The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here..."
-Abraham Lincoln, prior to the discovery of Irony.

Uh, does anyone even care about how many people died in FFII? I'm seriously surprised nobody's mentioned it besides me.

Quote (Del S @ 10th October 2011 04:36)

But the massive casualties in 10 are offscreen, as is the genocide of FF7, so arguably they wouldn't really count as happening in the game itself. There's only one on-screen death of that genocide that is carried out upon a civilian - because Aeris is can arguably be described as a terrorist thanks to armed acts against the Shinra, only her true mother was an undisputed civilian.

The events of FF5 and FF8 probably shouldn't count due to reset buttons. Arguably no one noticed in FF8 at all.

The casualties in X weren't completely offscreen. In fact, you are there for sin destroying Zanarkand, as already mentioned. Also, when did we get this unspoken rule that the casualties had to be on screen and in game, not just in that game's world's timeline? The opening post surely didn't follow those rules. For many of the games, the whole plot is either based on or is vitally involved with some offscreen and/or pre-game massacre.

The matter of V was already settled.

As for VIII, I really don't think we want to start a discussion into the mechanics of time compression and what it does to people (unless someone here is quite knowledgeable on the subject and would like to enlighten the rest of us.)

For 7, you can also very successfully argue that the shinra company was a tyrannical corporate dictatorship/monopoly, which would make aeris a revolutionary. But she doesn't count as a civilian either way. However! The plate falling, diamond weapon attacking, sapphire weapon attacking, nibelheim burning, and the reactor explosion are all on camera and in game. All of them also would have killed unarmed civilians no matter how you look at it (with possible exception of sapphire).



And to Chell:
Apparently not.

This post has been edited by Dr. Delinquent on 10th October 2011 23:06

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-FFIII FFIV FFV FFVII FFVIII FFX FFXII FFXIII FF:Dissidia FFVII:CC FFVII:DoC
--KHI KHII KH:COM KH:BbS
---SO:FD SO:TTEOT SO:TLH
----DQIII DQVIII
-----DA:O DAII
------VP:S

Quote (Dr. Delinquent @ 11th October 2011 00:04)

The casualties in X weren't completely offscreen. In fact, you are there for sin destroying Zanarkand, as already mentioned. Also, when did we get this unspoken rule that the casualties had to be on screen and in game, not just in that game's world's timeline? The opening post surely didn't follow those rules. For many of the games, the whole plot is either based on or is vitally involved with some offscreen and/or pre-game massacre.

We can argue that Zanarkand wasn't the real Zanarkand. Counting that which happens offscreen isn't really invalid, but it doesn't really happen in the game itself so it arguably changes the results depending on what we mean by "in final fantasy". In addition, since it's offscreen it's a lot harder to make guesses as to numbers without explicit numbers from other sources.

For instance, what has the higher bodycount: FF7 or Call of Duty World at War? Or any WW2 game? Onscreen, FF7 since Sector Seven was basically two large towns affected with heavy casualties, definitely ranging into five figures at least - way beyond likely outcomes for the players in WW2 games. Offscreen? Any WW2 based game has 50 million plus because that's a fact. It's based on a historical event and not a fictional one, and we know that historical event, IE the second world war.

Meanwhile... try it with any two FF games and problems begin. For FF7 versus FF8, well, we have no idea how many Cetra there were, how many in Centra. Nor do we know what effect the Wutai-Shinra war had or the Galbadia-Esthar war, except that logically as superpower conflicts there should logically have been heavy casualties.

In FF7 Elmyra in her story about Aeris and how she adopted her claims it was common during the war to see "this sort of thing", IE children weeping over fallen loved ones. And this was in Midgar, while the front was some "far away place called Wutai". Something meant that such things were common on the home front, but we have no idea what. Also, this was fifteen years ago. Cloud mentions the war ended at least five years before the game. Up to a ten year war?

Conversely in FF8, it's obvious that the war caused damage enough to orphan children and that's about all we really know. We don't know anything about civilian life then except that during the invasion of Timber at least Deling city wasn't prone to corpses everywhere except for Laguna's efforts to talk to a pianist. This war's timeframe is vague, at least two years.

It does look likely the FF7 war had more casualties from sheer length and the fact it's proven something is causing civilian casualties in Midgar.

We know less about offscreen than onscreen, as onscreen shows us the vague size of cities. It's easier to determine onscreen comparisons IMO.

At the end of it though it just means we probably need two tables, both are speculative, but in such different manners that cross comparisons will be tricky since the second table relies on very vague and variable information that has a massive reliance on information with even less numbers or visible scale than the vagueries of onscreen catastrophes.



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"Only the dead have seen the end of their quotes being misattributed to Plato."
-George Santayana

"The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here..."
-Abraham Lincoln, prior to the discovery of Irony.

Quote (Del S @ 11th October 2011 11:21)

Quote (Dr. Delinquent @ 11th October 2011 00:04)

The casualties in X weren't completely offscreen. In fact, you are there for sin destroying Zanarkand, as already mentioned. Also, when did we get this unspoken rule that the casualties had to be on screen and in game, not just in that game's world's timeline? The opening post surely didn't follow those rules. For many of the games, the whole plot is either based on or is vitally involved with some offscreen and/or pre-game massacre.

We can argue that Zanarkand wasn't the real Zanarkand. Counting that which happens offscreen isn't really invalid, but it doesn't really happen in the game itself so it arguably changes the results depending on what we mean by "in final fantasy". In addition, since it's offscreen it's a lot harder to make guesses as to numbers without explicit numbers from other sources.

For instance, what has the higher bodycount: FF7 or Call of Duty World at War? Or any WW2 game? Onscreen, FF7 since Sector Seven was basically two large towns affected with heavy casualties, definitely ranging into five figures at least - way beyond likely outcomes for the players in WW2 games. Offscreen? Any WW2 based game has 50 million plus because that's a fact. It's based on a historical event and not a fictional one, and we know that historical event, IE the second world war.

Meanwhile... try it with any two FF games and problems begin. For FF7 versus FF8, well, we have no idea how many Cetra there were, how many in Centra. Nor do we know what effect the Wutai-Shinra war had or the Galbadia-Esthar war, except that logically as superpower conflicts there should logically have been heavy casualties.

(etc)

I would agree with the argument that Sin destroying Zanarkand at the start of FFX doesn't count, as these aren't actual people.

Del's right, I think, that FFVII and FFIX have higher casualties in-game than FFX.

As far as the debate between in-game and out-of-game casualties, Del nailed pretty well what I believe we addressed in chat: that it becomes considerably more complicated to look at total-game-universe-deaths as opposed to death seen throughout the course of the game proper.

This post has been edited by Death Penalty on 11th October 2011 20:17

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The newest CoNcast is up! Have a listen!

All I'll say is that what game has the biggest civilian impact depends on how you look at it. Whether you take a game's whole story line -- or just what you see. For many of the "vague" genocides, we are given some sort of scale, whether it was the whole world, a civilization, or just a city.

The problem here is we keep disagreeing about what guidelines to use. The members who discussed this in chat use the guidelines from that discussion, which were not apparent in this topic until they were used to argue against posters that may or may not have been aware of those guidelines.

So yes, that results in two different categories, which is why I still stick with my original decisions:

VI and IX for in game, on screen.

X and XIII for inclusion of total timeline.

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-FFIII FFIV FFV FFVII FFVIII FFX FFXII FFXIII FF:Dissidia FFVII:CC FFVII:DoC
--KHI KHII KH:COM KH:BbS
---SO:FD SO:TTEOT SO:TLH
----DQIII DQVIII
-----DA:O DAII
------VP:S

I want to add something:

Do we have an estimate of how many planets jenova hit before reaching earth?

If we could,then it might be quite a large number.

FF9:cleyra was also destroyed,but alexandria wasn't totally destroyed,so there would have been a lot of deaths probably,but not as much as burmecia which was totally destroyed.

FFX:Sin did do a lot of damage in zanarkand,because there was quite a large populace there.I got this feeling that taking down zanarkand entirely was like taking down midgar,because they were two very densely populated areas of the game.

FF6:You not only have to count how many towns kefka burned down,but also how many espers he killed.Even if the world returned to normal,he still killed a heck of a lot of people,and espers.


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We are stardust.Our bodies are made from the guts of exploding stars.

Neil Degrasse Tyson.

Quote (Chell172 @ 10th October 2011 19:15)

Uh, does anyone even care about how many people died in FFII? I'm seriously surprised nobody's mentioned it besides me.

Yeah the Dreadnought Airship bombs a couple of towns from memory. FF II shouldn't be ignored on this.

Not only that but main characters also got caught in some of the tragedies as well, which is rather depressing.

FF4. Edward's Kingdom was completely slaughted, Elban lost their King and Queen, and the place at the beginning *forgot * a few people die by Cecil and the other Red Wings, and Rydia's village.

FF6. Kefka destory's many homes and villages and leaves children orphaned, people homeless, and causes many suicides.

FF7. Avalanche's bombings.

FF8. The war between the two main Gardens, and Selphie's Garden gets completely bombed by a attack of missiles.

FF9 Burmecia gets attacked, Cleyra gets completely wiped by Odin, Lindblum a few soldiers die and a central block gets completely wiped by Atomos, Alexandria gets destoryed by Garland's Invincible, and Terra, but from memory Zidane helps the people there escape and they live in the Black Mage Village, erm Genomes ?

FF10. Sin

They all get it pretty bad, but yeah FF2 gets some pretty huge impacts as well.






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