I will die on the hill that VI is the best Final Fantasy and Kefka Palazzo is the franchise's best villain. But setting that aside, replaying FFVI after IV and V has me really thinking about what it's about and what Kefka means in terms of that story.
IV was about hatred. Racism, nationalism, jealousy, the barriers between people that can only be torn down by cooperation and mutual coexistence.
V was about generational trauma. The struggles that the children of the future are put through in order to correct for the mistakes of their parents. The sins of the past suddenly and disruptively coming due.
Final Fantasy VI is about war. Brutal, cruel, callous, destructive war. The kind that leaves nothing but victims in its wake, on every side.
FFVI is the darkest game in Final Fantasy history, which is a large part of why it has the reputation that it has. It talks about war, genocide, soldiers massacring civilians of lands they're occupying just for the fun of it. At one point the player protagonist, believing herself to be the last living person in a world ravaged by Fantasy Nuclear Holocaust, attempts suicide onscreen.
The game has some shit it wants to talk about.
And, going hand-in-hand with war, FFVI is about loss. It features a much larger playable cast than most contemporary RPGs, and every single character is damaged in some way. Not all by the effects of the war, but most. The violence and horror are inescapable, and what happens affects everyone whether they wanted to be involved or not.
It's a cast including multiple genocide victims, a prince so broken by the assassination of his parents that he fled his country rather than face the pressure of sitting on their throne, a feral boy cast into the wilderness to be eaten by wolves by the madness of his grieving father, the daughter of an oppressed people who grew up enslaved by the empire, and a man so haunted by the death of his girlfriend that he has a complex for rescuing women in peril just so he can pretend for a moment like he could have saved her.
This is what makes the cast of FFVI one of the most interesting and complex character casts in the franchise. FFVI is an emotional one-two punch. The story in World of Balance is an examination of the damages that each character is carrying.
The story in World of Ruin, then, is about how we come back from it. In contrast to the overbearing darkness that seems to permeate every corner of the World of Ruin, the character beats it delivers are about finding hope, finding the strength to get through another day, and ultimately finding yourself.
It's about Terra finally learning to experience love, parental love for the children of Mobliz, the very love she was denied all her life in the Empire's custody. It's about Setzer finding the strength to face Darill's grave. It's about Locke finding permission to finally move on and let Rachel go.
If World of Balance is the story of the fall, World of Ruin is the story of healing even when coming back seems impossible.
This is where Kefka comes in. Kefka has a reputation for being one of the franchise's most entertaining and charismatic villains, but he's more than that. Kefka represents the worst impulses of war. He is the architect of pain and loss.
The World of Balance storyline contrasts Kefka against the Empire's two other generals: Celes and Leo. In the wake of the Empire's cruel invasion of the northern territories and Kefka's genocide against the people of Doma, Celes defects from the Empire and joins the Returners in fighting against them.
Leo also opposes Kefka's cruelty, but he doesn't go as far as Celes does. One point the game repeatedly hammers about Leo is that even though he is the general of an imperialistic colonizing force, Leo himself is a man of upstanding honor and dignity. He is the mythical "Good Guy on the Wrong Side", working to keep the Empire's darker impulses in check and combat its worse traits from within.
Leo is buried in a shallow grave on foreign soil far from his homeland after he tries to make a stand against the senseless slaughter of a village and gets fragged by his own side. After establishing himself with an ineffectual scolding that does nothing to prevent the genocide in Doma, the imperial machine rolls right over Leo when he tries to make his stand.
Because Celes was right and Leo was wrong. There is no place in the engines of imperialism for men of honor and dignity. This was always how it was going to end for Leo. For all the mythmaking of a Good Imperial, the moment he tried to make it actually matter was always going to be the moment when the machine consumes him and spits out his bones.
Conformity or that shallow grave were always the only real options available to Leo.
And, of course, the deed is done by Kefka. It's Kefka's hand that ignores Leo's wishes and poisons Doma, and it's Kefka's hand that puts an end to Leo's life. Kefka is the ugliness of war incarnate.
A war that ultimately ends just as badly for the people who started it as it does for everyone else, which is what really cements Kefka's role as embodying war itself.
Emperor Gestahl is introduced as the villain of FFVI and to a large extent, he is. Everything that happens is the product of his greed and ambition. Gestahl seeks to steal the power of the Espers for himself so that he can build a global empire. He aims to conquer every land, and he brings war to every nation.
Kefka is a product of Gestahl's ambitions. A Magitek-infused super-soldier, Kefka was created by and for Gestahl's war. He is not the progenitor of war but a product thereof. A product that grows beyond Gestahl's ability to control, that rages uncontrollably until the fateful moment when it consumes Gestahl and his Empire, setting off global catastrophe.
Gestahl does not live to see the war he started reduce his own Empire to ash. Indeed, in the World of Ruin, most cities have been devastated by the magical apocalypse, but one city is nowhere to be found. Vector, the Imperial Capitol, is wiped from the map and replaced with Kefka's Tower; A monument to a war that has ceased to be Vector's. A graveyard of imperial ambition.
In the wake of the war, both factions are annihilated. Everyone suffers, nobody benefits, and Kefka ends up a hollow shell of a person obsessed with destruction because he is more weapon than man. He is brutal and bloodthirsty war still perpetuating itself after its original architects are gone, after all reason or meaning is gone, after any idea of what it even means to win is gone. Even when there's nothing left to fight for, still Kefka rages on.
