(Firstly, this whole meme--and I can't for the life of me figure out where it started--is apparently referred to most often as "30 Days of Gaming" not "Month of Video Games" so... yeah, I pretty much just wanted to write the phrase 30 Days of Gaming to get more hits.)
My friend over at He Been Weatherbeaten predicted that we'd have the same answer for this one and, yeah, he was right. By their nature, video games are usually a classic good vs. evil story, and there are a lot of memorable villains out there, but one stands head and shoulders above the rest.
Day 17: Favorite Antagonist
Kefka (Final Fantasy VI)
(spoilers)
"Life... dreams... hope... Where'd they come from? And where are they headed? These things... I am going to destroy!"
He's got the most maniacal laugh that a 16-bit system can pump out, he's dressed up like a clown, he's completely bat-shit crazy, and his goal is to destroy everything. Some people might be tempted to answer Sephiroth from the next game in the series, and there's certainly a level of badassery in Sephiroth, though also some of that Tetsuya Nomura bishieness. But in FF VII, the whole deal with what the hell Jenova is and what the hell Sephiroth is doing with it gets a bit muddled. Kefka's motives and aspirations are elegant in their simplicity.
As someone with a border-lined unhealthy fixation of all things Batman, The Joker will always be first in the category of insane, murderous clowns for me, but Kefka is pretty damn close. The Joker certainly can't claim the successes that Kefka can. Part of what makes Kefka's character so great is the misdirection of it. For starters, he's dressed like a jester, and at the beginning of the game he seems like a bit of a bumbling idiot. In a brief flashback, we see him menacingly lording over a mind-controlled Terra, watching her murder the Empire's own soldiers, just because. The first time we seem him in the game proper, though, he's bitching about having to go out into the desert and that there's sand in his shoes. When he reaches Castle Figaro and Edgar quickly rebukes his demand that Terra be handed over to them, Kefka quickly retreats, except then he sets the entire castle on fire in the middle of the night. Later, when the Empire is laying siege to Doma, Cyan's homeland, Kefka poisons the water supply, killing everybody inside indiscriminately. And look how much fun he has killing Espers. Dude just does not give a fuck. Even still, for the first half of the game he seems to mostly be a lackly under Emperor Gestahl. Gestahl is just kind of power hungry, and is trying to obtain the power contained within Espers by converting to Magicite. This isn't ambitious enough for Kefka, who decides to straight-up murder him and then mess around with the statues that keep the world in balance, thus pretty much breaking the world. FF VI's cast of colorful rogues, of course, defeats Kefka in the end, but not before he has some time to rule over a broken and hopeless world from atop his giant ass tower. Oh yeah, he also turns into a God, and a cooler looking one that Sephiroth with his one big-ass wing sitting atop his cloud:
Next: Day 18 -- Best Protagonist. Seeing as this is basically what my day 2 post was, let's call this "best protagonist not previously mentioned"
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