When people die in Suikoden

[Adelaide Silverberg]

I agree with Arcana. I know it's not very in depth, or interesting, but honestly, I think that it would've been too ... difficult to feign a funeral. I think they slipped in the part about Shu going back in to talk to Nanami to make you think "Gee, that's weird, why do they need to have a conversation ... " and though it's unrealistic (slightly) of Riou to not want to see her body, it was necessary to get the player thinking. I didn't think that Nanami was alive, but after the game was over I thought it was a nice little thing they threw in there. I think it makes total sense from Konami's point. Maybe a little cutscene with a fake funeral would've been a nice touch, but I wouldn't have wanted to interrupt the storyline for it.

(Done rambling.)
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[Arcana]

Well, the thing with the funeral is that it would have made Nanami's death much too serious, and then, after the game was done, finding out that she was actually alive would have been almost a slap in the player's face.

It's the ultimate cheese factor to make a huge deal about a character death, only to have them come back to life. It ruins the effect of the funeral, and, I think, it really just ends up insulting the player. You invest so much emotion into the sadness of Riou and his torment; maybe he's crying openly at Nanami's death, cursing the war, cursing his Rune that led him down this path, and then two days later it's like, "Surprise, Riou! I'm not really dead!"

If I was Riou, I would have slaughtered Shu right there, and then I would have probably beat Nanami too so she'd need a real funeral. As for the player, the player would have probably been like, "WTF? Didn't Nanami die? We had a funeral and everything! What the hell!"

I don't really feel that it's a severe oversight, actually. It's an oversight, but perhaps one that they considered and decided not to do.

The final point is that, even in the PSX days, it's extremely difficult to render a funeral, mostly due to the limited expressiveness of the characters on the screen. Facial features and subtle motions are very difficult to convey (even in today's games on the PS2; the PS3 and the XBox 360 *might* have a chance now), and so a funeral would look a little hokey if you weren't totally invested in the game. Funerals are emotionally distressing because it's a mood - people are crying, or if they're not, their eyes are dark and they're looking into their laps, or trying their best to keep the tears back. There's so much subtlety and that's difficult for 2D sprites to express.

One large reason why Final Fantasy X's ending was so effective was because of its use of FMV in the final sequence. Had they used cartoon FMV, or in-game models, the ending would have not drawn such an emotional reaction from its audience.
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Woo, 2000 posts as of Tuesday, 2007 August 28.

[Varias Taelas]

I always figured the fading away deaths were like a side effect of dying to a rune since most of the people that do fade away are killed by a rune. When they die by conventional means they leave a body behind. The death scene with Nanami makes sense to me but my parents also owned a cemetery so i grew up around death basically,
and also like some one said earlier, it might be a cultural thing to not deal with the dead in that way. In some cultures death is kinda celebrated and very public and in others its very private.
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Champion of the Monster Arena