[quote=Dervish]
Spoilers for Mass Effect if you haven't played and intend to ahead:Going back to Mass Effect for a minute, I was just thinking about it, but you're looking at that from a player perspective. Any game that lets you reload can apply to that, but Mass Effect was actually pretty good for character deaths that could have been prevented if you did the right thing, but your team can die if you don't do things right. Like Wrex in ME1, not upgrading the Normandy in ME2 as well as picking the wrong people to do certain duties on the suicide mission, and quite a few variations in ME3 like not being able to talk the Virmire survivor into trusting you about Udina, if Thane died in ME2 than it's Kirrahe who dies in ME3, and if both were dead by ME3, then the salarian Councillor gets assassinated, sabotaging the genophage with Wrex still alive has him confront Shepard, forcing Shepard to kill him. Mordin is almost guaranteed to die in ME3 unless you do some very specific things leading up to it, and so on so forth. Mass Effect kind of handles death with a sudden and rather unpreventable finality if you don't do things the right way well in advanced, and simply loading a save often can't prevent someone's fate from coming to pass, unless you wanted to replay the entire game.
[/quote]

Played it, but yeah, this isn't about the other deaths in ME, this is about bringing someone back from the dead and how that can impact the narrative and, well, the impact of death.

I used ME 2's opening as an example because you have literally no control over whether you live or die, and regardless of the fact that you do actually die, fall into a planetary atmosphere after suffering emergency decompression and presumable [i]splat[/i] against the surface of the planet they reincarnate you and the only lasting consequence is a scar on your face that is apparently affected by whether you're a nice guy or a raging dick.

The death had no consequence on the story. Shepard is still alive, Shepard can still do everything he did before, and aside from a cosmetic effect Shepard is otherwise not in any way, shape, or form affected by the experience of spacial decompression, falling into an atmosphere, and hitting a planet from orbit at terminal velocity aside from the occasional "oh yeah I'm not dead guys" moment. Which, while funny, again, holds little consequence and no long term effect.

tl;dr: Mass Effect failed to wield a Jesus Arc properly by ignoring the latter half of it. Kind of like how it ignored having a quality ending, but I digress.

As I said above. Death has tension if actions have consequence: If the character's death and reincarnation causes a long lasting effect on the world in some manner (ex: the main hero sacrificing a village and becoming evil to bring their lover back from the dead) then it had a lasting consequence, not necessarily on the person who was dead, but on the world itself and the people they once knew. :p