For the month of October, we are highlighting the top villains in gaming. Andrew, Jeff, and Jeremie have teamed up to take all those guys you love to hate, and rank them. We will reveal them to you in a countdown, starting with #31 and ending with #1 on Halloween. Check us out each day of the month to see where your favorite villains rank!
#5: Kefka
First Appearance: Final Fantasy VI
Most Noteworthy Appearance: Final Fantasy VI
When most people think of the greatest Final Fantasy villain, Sephiroth of Final Fantasy VII usually comes to mind. And how can he not? He is already hard at work, murdering people when you first meet him! But if you go back just one game prior, you’ll find that Final Fantasy VI’s main antagonist Kefka is not only the best Final Fantasy villain, but also one of the great video game villains of all time.
Depending on how far you’ve progressed through FFVI will definitely influence whether you agree with that statement. When you first meet Kefka, he’s looking for a fugitive, of sorts, and when he discovers you were hiding her, he sets fire to your castle. From there, you fight him and beat him, rather handily, and you never really think much of him after that.
But that doesn’t last long, as Kefka begins a mass killing spree; one that is actually quite shocking from a SNES era game. Poisoning a water supply and thus bringing an entire kingdom to its doom, just to pass the time, an Esper genocide and generally killing whoever he could, made him extremely easy to hate.
By the end of the game, this psychopath had made himself a god and basically wiped out most of the entire surface world’s population. In the end, your party comes together and is barely able to defeat him, but this comes after so much destruction was already allotted to millions of innocent people.
Although many gamers might not know who Kefka is, he still deserves to be given his due recognition. For those of us who have played FFVI, we can agree that it never felt better to beat a villain in a video game as when we finally stood victorious against this lunatic.