To me it is illogical it shouldn't be avoided at all costs, unless it is some kind of afterlife game. As a matter of fact, the whole concept of "reviving" dead characters is silly to me. If a person can be revived, DON'T CALL IT DEATH. Death if final. If they still can be revived, then they were just unconscious or in coma or whatever, not dead. Dead is dead, D-E-D ded! He's dead Jim, you can'r revive him!

I recall how miffed I was how in Final Fantasy 7, in order to beat the Ruby Weapon, I think you were supposed to kill all but one of your party members, in order to avoid some super attack from RB that would kill your whole party. Errr, commit suicide in order to avoid defeat? Yeah that makes sense... NOT!

Yeah I remember how in the movie Abyss one of the characters needed to drown in order to save her life... but that was an exception.

My stance is, it's a mechanic that the developers deliberately put in the game; therefore, it should be something the player could use to her advantage. To me, the concept of "death is final" is not the sort of thing that belongs in a video game.

Funny you mention Final Fantasy 7. When a certain character is killed in the plot, the party makes no attempt at all to revive that character. Earlier, there's even an annoying part where you need to perform CPR on the character, despite the game having healing spells that you do have access to at that point. In both cases, the event is detrimental to the gameplay.

If you want an example of a plot death handled well, Final Fantasy 5 (which is a *far* better game overall) handles a similar situation *much* better, and without harming the gameplay.

I'd say any Bethesda game works great with this, but then, any GAME that uses sandbox does, it's a MUST (but do try not to cut yourself if your setback by playing that way is an uncontrollable glitch)