i love how every character has their own deeply important objective like saving their family or freeing their country from oppression and then they just poof and die because i forgot to bring along a healer or cavalry escort. whoops guess the revolution is over... but i recruited a vaguely adolescent archer with larger than average breasts... looks like i got my losses recuperated.
fire emblem does a better job helping you come to terms with the existential crCIA of death than xcom does
i loving hate how xcom actively has that negative gameplay loop of losing a top level character -> the entire run is forgeted, forcing savescumming to even beat the game
like it seems purposefully designed to make you want to savescum when you can permanently lose a character you spent hours leveling up at the cost of the rest of your roster since splitting exp is a way to just gimp your own power level. this is accentuated by the fact that losing a character mid mission can end up meaning losing your entire roster of high level people, and that leveling up newbies later on is exponentially more difficult as the difficulty of missions increases to match the power level of your expected elite team.