Insanity

I beat Final Fantasy XV recently - which was good, not great, but that's not what I want to get into - and doing so has got me thinking about the older games again. I have played all of the mainline titles outside of the MMOs, though I have not beaten them all. There are some that I adore, and some that I can not stand, but even in the ones that I don't like as much, there are things that I can not pretend are not great.

One of those games is Final Fantasy 6 - one of the contenders by most standards for the best in the series, as well as best rpg of all time. I'm personally not a fan. I enjoyed the majority of the game, but there was one specific dungeon that I hated and that ruined the game for me. That being said, it is beyond my capacity to argue that the main villain, Kefka, is not one of the greatest villains of all time. You despise him almost from the moment you first see him. He looks pathetic and laughable, but he is truly evil, and with each encounter he becomes more intimidating.

But the thing that makes him so great is that he's not just evil. He's absolutely insane. He is more than willing to kill his own men in order to kill his enemies - and I don't mean letting them die in battle, I mean poisoning their water supply so that the water will travel down river to kill another village. He truly wants nothing more than to cause chaos and destruction, to attain power to control the world so that all will be broken and scattered while he is a god. And not a god among men, but a literal god. The more times you encounter him, the more you realize that it's not rhetoric or an impossible dream. And in the end, he actually succeeds. He destroys the world, becomes a god, and breaks the lives of you and all of your friends. The world literally becomes little more than ruins.

He is ruthless, psychotic, and loves to toy with you. But, of the many villains you face in video games, he is one of the few that does not go easy on you. The moment he gains more power, he turns on you and throws it in your face. He doesn't hesitate. He only toys when he already knows that he has won. In the final battle his final form isn't something that he has hidden away from you, but is something that he only acquired by becoming a god, at which point he no longer needed to play with you to get his kicks. He discarded you along with the rest of the world. You don't see him in person again until the end of the game.

Sometimes, when I'm trying to write villains, I try to tap into that insanity. You can have intentions behind evil, or you can have a pure drive of hatred and desire of power. But it's a lot harder to do both - so try and do one well.