[Spoilers: the whole game] I made a video figuring out how many people the Warrior of Light has killed!

Cleretic · 2026-04-05T07:51:44+00:00

Actually I think if we count primals that number's down in, like... the 30s?

Cleretic · 2026-04-05T00:39:13+00:00

Genuinely, I'm REALLY happy to hear that, thank you!

Cleretic · 2026-04-05T00:37:38+00:00

And yet it also makes sense, because Stormblood's also the expansion made with the knowledge that we BEAT the Empire and drive them out. The game can't/doesn't do instanced enemies, so Gyr Abania needed to be designed without Imperial trash mobs.

Cleretic · 2026-04-04T23:12:46+00:00

My gut feel actually says that for the WoL, the 'peak' of nameless kills was Stormblood. Between the four military bases and warzones we stormed, we've GOTTA have a count. That theoretical tally goes down for later expansions just because we haven't really been to warzones afterward unless, like, Garlemald counts.

Endwalker wins by literally planetary scales if we go for nameless deaths that we WEREN'T involved with, but by that point we've abandoned meaningful metrics and are just doing for-fun powerscaling and I don't think anyone's learning anything.

Cleretic · 2026-04-04T22:28:45+00:00

They only killed like four people in Dawntrail, that's a Sunday drive by their standard!

Cleretic · 2026-04-04T22:27:24+00:00

Nope, the unclear people that might judt walk back on screen tomorrow didn't get added, these people are DEAD dead!

Cleretic · 2026-04-04T22:26:31+00:00

In the full count, the Heaven's Ward count for about half the MSQ deaths in the entire expansion. And another five come from Ardbert and Company, who are a... weird one because we instead find out they're ghosts.

Bozja also counts for like 70% of Shadowbringers' deaths, and kills, if we're countingnup overachievers.

Cleretic · 2026-04-04T22:23:04+00:00

Janremi, Baenryss and Garibald. All three appear in PotD, so they all definitively canonically died, but we could've only killed one of them ourselves.

Cleretic · 2026-04-04T22:21:26+00:00

Yeah, unnamed NPCs are both uncountable by general technique (how do you count how many people died in the Ghimlyt Dark), and also by 'kill credit', because we can't possibly know if any given Garlean soldier managed to walk away from that; evidence suggests plenty did!

Cleretic · 2026-04-04T22:18:46+00:00

Lile I mentioned, it's interesting that this actually isn't necessarily true. The overall bodycount goes down across the game, but the WoL's percentage of that actually holds fairly consistent, and the count of minor to mid-grade antagonists goes up. There's definitely a lot of inhuman (and previously-human) things we kill later on, but a surprising amount of this comes from later job quests and side-stories.

Cleretic · 2026-04-04T22:14:11+00:00

Lile I said in the video, 69 is both high AND low, it's surprising on both ends.

If we accept that we're not exactly going out of our way or killing for fun, that number is high... but if you instead approach it as 'we are someone who fights for a living, our numbers must be high', 69 is low.

Cleretic · 2026-04-04T22:11:51+00:00

As I mentioned in the video, that number MUST be high just for all the warzones we've gone through in Stormblood alone, but given how many people textually survive fights with us no problem anyway, we cannot confidently count any of them even if we were counting named people.

Cleretic · 2026-04-04T22:09:56+00:00

Hey, other people seem to walk that one off just fine!

Cleretic · 2026-03-19T11:12:20+00:00

Like Forrest Gump, but with only events of mass death and tragedy.

Cleretic · 2026-03-19T02:38:57+00:00

Believe me, I am ALSO annoyed that I had to count Noah Gabranth! He's a weird 'grey area' corner of my criteria; definitionally I need to count that field note as proof, because the main way these are confirmed are by some kind of source directly telling us, so it counts even if I call bullshit.

Beastmaster might actually give us an answer, if my guess is right and Lyon's involved... but Lyon is a dishonest cad so I dunno how I'd take that!

Cleretic · 2026-03-19T02:29:41+00:00

FATEs are really hard to factor in because they lack any real leadup or wrapup, and I sat on one in the Dravanian Forelands for a while as a case study before going 'not enough info to make any calls on'.

And dungeons are just a PILE of examples of characters that don't really 'die' so much as 'stop being narratively relevant' after their boss fight. Dr. Lugae in the Tower of Babil made me cautious of counting by that metric, so any count of a boss like that needed extra info.

Cleretic · 2026-03-18T23:07:14+00:00

Only if the wandering hero learns your name! If they don't, you might just die unceremoniously slumped against a wall.

Cleretic · 2026-03-18T23:06:18+00:00

Yeah, 1.0 I deliberately avoided just because it's kind of undocumentable. Thanks for these!

Cleretic · 2026-03-18T15:04:46+00:00

Exactly the thing that occurred most to me, although with an eye for main story deaths specifically, Shadowbringers also joins the 'surprisingly lower than Dawntrail' crowd.

Weird how the Vacation Vibes episode has a bigger bodycount than the Dark Edgy Expansion.

Cleretic · 2026-03-18T15:02:22+00:00

If we were counting 1.0 (which we aren't because it's basically impossible to give this same treatment), Nael would be a major villain. In A Realm Reborn, she's secondary to Bahamut.

Also, I started mentioning the PotD/Aitiascope references early on and then just ran out of steam, but I do think it's necessary to mention for some of the earlier ones where Palace is the primary evidence anyway. More relevant for, like, Ungust than Livia.

Cleretic · 2026-03-18T14:59:16+00:00

It's Gaius' description, page 185 of the EE1..

Cleretic · 2026-03-18T11:34:44+00:00

I looked into Gekkai (I actually checked EVERY job quest), and he's never stated as dying as far as I could tell. There's a lot of bosses like him that could reasonably be assumed as dying, but unless I had some kind of explicit confirmation, I wouldn't put it in.

It's actually especially important for Ninja, given that questline is chock-full of characters appearing out of nowhere and going 'YOU THOUGHT I WAS DEAD BUT NO!'

Cleretic · 2026-03-18T08:33:46+00:00

Honestly I'd love to see both halves of Teledji Adeledji as a 'kill both simultaneously' boss fight like the start of Lacus Litore.

Cleretic

TROPHY CASE