No spoilers, but a thing that really annoys me in general in Final Fantasy games: when you have a dramatic scene where someone is slowly dying and giving their dramatic dying words, especially if its from battle wounds.

because you have cure spells?

Princess Emily : because you have cure spells

like with dead characters I can buy that pheonix down doesn't work because it specifically works on "KOed" characters

but when its like, dramatic scene between character A and B, and B is slowly succumbing to their battle words, asking character A to not let it all be for nothing, blah, blah, but you know character A has dozens of healing potions and a cure materia or whatever...

and I'm just sitting their going "oh for fuck's sake, CAST CURA"

kind of feeds into the general fantasy writers' rules about having magic in your world. When you establish that magic can do something, it's going to beg the question why that obvious solution isn't used when it's apparent that it could be

Like plenty of good stories have been written in other fantasy universes where healing magic is plentiful and they manage to avoid these kind of SoD-breaking situations, but Final Fantasy games do it regularly it feels like.

I'm just thinking of Phantasy Star IV, which aveets this. When the character takes a lethal blow, the party immediately tries to heal... And that fails for a reason hinted at but not established.

There's an incident in WoW not unlike this - a famous Hunter's pet has been badly wounded by the enemy, and instead of letting the Druid/Monk/various other classes with even offspec healing abilities help at all, it's "oh, too badly wounded, I will put him out of his misery CHONK". Um. Dude. C'mon.

there's a bit in FF14 where a Bad Guy does an attack that kills a good guy slowly enough to get some sad last words in

and later you fight him and he has the same attack

and it procs a debuff that prevents healing on the target

which is sort of an "oh" moment

see, I dig that