Lone_Scout: That's why permadeath is the best choice. :)
Crosmando: Permadeath has become a bit of a meme in the last couple of years, devs use it as a kinda catch phrase for "our game is so hard and badass", there's no reason why permadeath should always mean that the game is harder, most players will just reload a save before the fight if they lose a party member. I think it's a lore question, if resurrecting the dead is possible in the universe or not. Also there's the possibility of resurrection have permanent side effects like stat penalties.
I prefer the game to be designed so that the temptation to reload if someone dies is significantly reduced. In particular, having resurrection be cheap (or automatic after battle, which I have seen in a few games, including SaGa 2 and 3, as well as Paladin's Quest and its sequel) and not having any permanent side effects will remove the main reasons players tend to reload when characters die. (It would also help if dead characters would still get XP from battles, or if there aren't non-repeatable battles with high XP yields (some Final Fantasy games, including 5, 6, 8, and 9 (not 7), solve this by having bosses not award any XP).)
Permadeath is the sort of mechanic that I generally consider to be a dealbreaker when choosing which game to buy or play.
(Incidentally, it's worth noting that Final Fantasy 5 has one Blue Magic spell that can't be learned without a character dying unless you wait until much later, when you have Bone Mail, and at that point, it's a while before you find another enemy to learn the spell from.)
Also, in the games I am talking about, there are multiple party members, so if one character dies, another character might be able to revive them, so the questoin does come up. One character's death does not end the game. (It doesn't really come up in Final Fantasy NES, as resurrection can't be cured during combat, and the only statuses that doesn't go away at the end of combat are poison, stone (which can't coexist with death), and death. In case you're wondering, status ailments do persist after death in battle, as can be evidenced by the fact that characters can still recover from them.)
paladin181: Theoretically, death being the end-all-be-all of ailments should require powerful magics to heal. Any other ailment should be cured by a resurrection spell since the healing power is immensely powerful, having to heal all contributing factors to death. Death doesn't cure all ailments, the act of healing death does.
Death isn't always the end-all-be-all of ailments; there are some games where that isn't the case.
In classic Wizardry, ASHES is worse than DEAD; furthermore, LOST is even worse than ASHES. (There are ways to cure LOST in some of the games, but it isn't as simple as casting a spell, and if you return to town, the character is buried and deleted, so the temple can't help you there.)
In Wizardry 7 (and maybe 6), Stone is harder to cure than Death, and it carries the same penalties when removed.
In Final Fantasy, the spell to cure Stone is higher in level than the basic revive spell. (With that said, you can cure Stone with buyable Gold Needles, while in pre-GBA versions there are no Phoenix Downs to revive your characters.)
Final Fantasy 5 and 6 have a Zombie status ailment, which can only be cured by one specific item (no spell will work, and the only Mix that will work in FF5 requires two of that item). (Interestingly enough, some enemies in FF5 (including the final boss) have an attack that simultaneously inflects Death *and* Stone, requiring two actions to restore the character.)
In Bard's Tale 3, the Heal All spell can cure Dead but not Stone when it heals your party, and Old is also not so easy to cure (but doesn't prevent the character from acting, nor does it trigger game over). With that said, the spell to cure Stone is acquired before the basic revive spell, but it only heals one charater and doesn't restore any HP.
In Bard's Tale 1, Stone is more expensive to cure than Death at the temple, and there's no spell to cure Stone.