# before it's too late #### 18 dec 2024 >[!warning] Mild content warning for mentions of death. >[!info] I'll be talking spoilers for Final Fantasy II, V, VII, VIII, and IX. Just in case you want to avoid those. I've been thinking a lot about death lately. It's the time of year where it's common for people to celebrate some kind of holiday with loved ones--friends, family, whomever they count in that category--and yet, outside the light of joy and cheer, there is the ever-present knowledge that this will not last. This moment together could be the last one we ever know. Of course, I'm always thinking about Final Fantasy. As I'm watching the events of Final Fantasy VIII unfold before me for the second time, I think again about the old fan-theory **Squall is Dead** and how the events from Disc 2 onward are simply Squall's final moments. I think about Squall, standing over Rinoa's unconscious body after the events at the end of Disc 2 and he practically begs for the chance to speak to her one more time. Final Fantasy VIII is far from the only one in the series to tackle death and the effects it has on the living. Vivi grapples with his own mortality in IX, Galuf sacrifices himself for the team in V, and I probably don't have to mention Aerith. In a series where death is often not that high-stakes from a gameplay standpoint, it's notable that death and grief are still present, still palpable, within a given narrative. But when I think about stakes, about death and grief, I tend to think of Final Fantasy II. FFII is not strictly a game about death so much as it's a game about hope. It hammers this into you from the very start: you start the game by being forced into a battle you cannot win. The important thing isn't that you win or lose the battle, because you *will* lose the battle, but that *you keep going despite that.* You get knocked down, you get back up again. But not every character gets back up in FFII. Your party is, really, made of three core characters, with the fourth slot being filled by a guest character. Some of these characters will leave your party to pursue other goals. Some of them, simply, do not survive. They sacrifice themselves to the purpose of defeating the Emperor and you are left to grapple with their deaths. You are also left to decide: do you keep going? Do you still have hope? It's easy to feel discouraged as you lose party members to what feels like an insurmountable darkness. These characters will leave your life abruptly and you do not have time to mourn, time to think about what you should have said. I don't think FFII is the *best* example of this, but it's the first one I think of, and a very early example of it. People leave our lives, sometimes in sudden and unpredictable ways. We, the living, are left to ask ourselves if we will keep going, if we will still have hope. But we may also be haunted by all the things we never said. I wrote a mini-review for the game some time ago and the last line of it haunts me. > Tell your loved ones how you feel, before it's too late. None of us lives forever. We never know when this phone call or that meetup will be the last. When one text becomes the final text, when the book of words exchanged will come to a close. And when it does, we must have hope to keep going, to live, to fight, to love. But this line is a warning all the same. Tell your loved ones how you feel. Before it's too late.