Best Villains Ever #3
Kefka (Final Fantasy VI)Kefka is fucking evil. He’s evil and he’s crazy and he’s hilarious and he’s not nearly as annoying as you’d expect from that picture. Kefka is probably the best-paced villain in all of gamedom; he starts out as an annoying little twerp you outsmart and humiliate while escaping from Figaro, and he mainly stalks around having funny dialogue and not being any threat at all. And then you get to Doma castle, where he goes against explicit orders from his commanding officer and poisons the water supply — not because it’s necessary or even expedient, but just because he wants those people to die slow, agonising deaths. He thinks it’s funny. It’s not long until he’s slaughtering an entire species of sentient beings just for laughs — laughs and power. Always power.
Back in 1994, when Final Fantasy VI first came out, this kind of evil was totally unprecedented in video games. Compare the villains from Final Fantasies IV and V, both of whom were evil wizards from space who didn’t have any real character traits other than "cackling." Kefka is always around, always a step ahead of you, and always more evil than you think he could be. That laugh — the insane cackling Kefka laugh — haunts you throughout the game; just when you think things are beginning to work out, you hear that laugh, and then everything goes to hell. The best part, though, is that after dogging you and outsmarting you from Doma through the Floating Continent, after conquering the whole world and gaining the power of a god, Kefka remains wholly absent from the second half of the game. We know he’s there, up in his tower, but he stays unseen and unheard until the very end when you actually go in to get him. This is perfect; the first half of the game builds a complete understanding in the players’ minds of how evil this dude really is and how urgent it is that we stop him, and then the second half allows him to be remote and sinister. As a result, he never gets overused, and the feeling of satisfaction when you finally get your revenge is impossible to overstate.
