Essentially, Crowe dies a hero's death. The narrative classifies it as a death, fully legitimate, which would be in line with rules. Thing is, there's a secret ending(one of two.) The ending related to him outright shows he survives the event horizon he creates with his ship as it transported him to a planet the main cast visits. Narratively, he's dead. A secret ending shows otherwise.
TECHNICALLY, his death is outright seen and narratively considered legitimate with no questions unresolved. Everyone acknowledges that a guy who flies straight into a plasma space dragon and triggers an inescapable black hole is in fact, DEAD. Also TECHNICALLY, he gets a "happy ending" where he doesn't actually die but barely survives and is transported to an ancient planet as a piece of a prophecy unexplored, but that's an ending with a large number of hoops to jump through to even trigger it.
TL;DR: Narratively, he's KIA. No questions, no suspicions, no but maybes. At the same time, a secret ending reveals something else. Do you consider a secret ending as invalidating the main narrativewhen the main cast will NEVER know he actually cheated death by a miracle?
The thing is, that secret ending is canon as shown in Star Ocean 1 where you get Crowe's laser swords near the end of the game, and there's no other way that they could've gotten there if he didn't end up on Roak. So it falls under rule 1, since he was never dead even if you don't get that ending.
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""Love" is making a shot to the knees of a target 120 kilometers away using an Aratech sniper rifle with a tri-light scope." HK-47