Kefka Palazzo

A nihilistic, psychotic court mage who serves as the main antagonist in Final Fantasy VI. Kefka Palazzo, also known as Cefca, is the main antagonist of Final Fantasy VI. The court mage of the Gestahlian Empire, Kefka was their first experimental Magitek Knight, giving him the ability to use magic. However, the process was not yet perfected and the infusion damaged Kefka's mind, transforming him into a maniacal harlequin with an unquenchable thirst for blood. Chaotic and unpredictable in his drive to cause destruction, Kefka eventually turned on Emperor Gestahl and seized control of the Warring Triad to become the god of magic and used their power to destroy the known world. Kefka has long blonde hair tied into a ponytail, worn with a feathered headdress. His face is painted white with red around his eyes and his lips are variably bright red or purple. He wears a large, ruffled collar that is primarily yellow with red stripes. His eyes are green. In his original concept art, which has been used as the basis for his spin-off appearances, Kefka wears robes with an erratic mix of colors and patterns. The torso of his robes is a mash-up of white with pink polka-dots, black with yellow stripes, and plain purple. He wears a long red cloak with a yellow lining and red triangle trim along the interior and yellow and red tassels along the edge. Emerging from above his left shoulder is a mass of material in different patterns. The largest is white with red triangle trim and with it are three more swatches of material; yellow with blue crown-like patterns, blue with red and white stripes and red trim, and the last is a solid green. His left sleeve is red with an elbow-length yellow glove that fades to white at the wrist and has green accents along the fingers. His right sleeve is a puffed purple pattern with red polka-dots and ends above the elbow at a yellow material. His glove is orange with a large cuff, white fingers, red claws, and white swirl patterns like flames emerge from under the cuff and run up his sleeve. His leggings are red, his left leg runs down to his boot, which is two-toned black with pink and gold lining, and the right leg has the red end above his knee over a single blue tight and his boot is white with a black triangle trim and pink lining. Both of his boots are pointed and curled. Finally, he has a yellow skirt wrapped around his waist and a red sash dangling over his right leg, which bears a pattern of black triangles with red lining and half-black, half-white spots. As the god of magic, the only remaining traits of Kefka's previous human form are his blond ponytail and feathered headdress. His skin is violet and he is bare save for a purple loincloth wrapped around his waist; the exact shade of his skin and loincloth vary between depictions. He is more muscular and, in some depictions, has a golden crest of swirls running along the center of his torso. Kefka has six wings in this form; the upper two pairs are feathered wings in a pale purple color and the lower pair is a set of leather wings, black with a gradient purple lining. The central pair of feathered wings are much longer than the other two and, in some depictions, Kefka's upper pair of wings merge with the middle pair. Kefka cares nothing about anyone or anything but himself and he finds no greater joy in life than in inflicting suffering and death unto others. He has no long-reaching goal for his destructive actions, destruction itself is the goal. He manipulates the emotions of others and will readily lie without hesitation, but his purpose for doing this is again usually nothing but his own amusement in tormenting them. Kefka's need to inflict suffering drives him to continuously greater heights to satiate his urges, culminating with the ruination of the entire world and the deaths of countless creatures. Confronted by the party at the end of the game, Kefka reveals the ultimate revelation he has achieved—that life is meaningless. All things that live will die, everything people care about will be destroyed, and everything they achieved will be forgotten. Because of this, Kefka declares that struggling to continue living in the face of death is pointless and stupid and people should accept their fates and surrender themselves to destruction at his hands. When the party refutes his claims with their personal reasons for living, Kefka flies into a rage and declares that he will destroy those reasons, that the concepts of love and hope are worthless, and he will destroy them as well. Kefka is flamboyant and childish. He is short-tempered, flies into rages at the slightest provocation, and has no self-control or restraint. He cracks dark jokes about the atrocities he commits and frequently breaks into hysterical laughter. He is a narcissist who enjoys crossdressing and admiring his own appearance in mirrors. His Ultimania profiles state that he enjoys playing with dolls and hates General Leo, who is a morally upstanding soldier. Though he enjoys hurting others, Kefka cannot stand to be hurt himself and the sight of his own blood sends him into a violent rage. Kefka's powers grow throughout Final Fantasy VI as he accumulates magicite and absorbs power from espers. He prefers ice and poison spells, as well as the Drain spell. When faced as a cinematic enemy using his field sprite, Kefka wields a Morning Star as his weapon. Kefka has an aptitude with machines: he uses a Slave Crown to control Terra, operates a pair of cranes to attack the party, and his tower contains extensive factory areas still in operation with upgraded forms of Imperial Magitek machines. Prior to becoming a god, he was strong enough to neutralize the powers of espers and possessed a spell to instantly kill them and transform them into magicite, which he could cast on groups of espers after taking a moment to channel his power. The ability he used to neutralize esper magic was also implied to be capable of killing non-espers. At this level of power, he could also create convincing illusions of himself and others and have them fight for him while he remained hidden. As the god of magic, Kefka possesses some of the strongest magical attacks in the game and it is this form that spin-off titles usually base his skillset on. Kefka uses Firaga, Blizzaga, and Thundaga and his Heartless Angel drains the party's HP to 1. He possesses a powerful physical attack called Havoc Wing, which, in spin-offs, is depicted as Kefka using his wings to strike. His other attacks include Hyperdrive, sending a wave of explosions along the ground at a target; Trine, using a triangular field of energy to inflict status ailments; Meteor, summoning a swarm of meteorites to bombard the party; and Ultima, creating a sphere of energy that grows and explodes. Kefka's ultimate attack in Final Fantasy VI is Forsaken, which assaults the party with a wave of magical energy with a distinct visual effect similar to television static. Though he does not use it as a boss, Kefka also possesses the "Light of Judgment", a beam of destructive light that he fires from high atop his tower to destroy towns that anger him. In spin-off titles, either Forsaken or the Light of Judgment are often depicted as Kefka's Limit Break or equivalent mechanic. A recurring theme in Kefka's attacks is that they hit in erratic patterns that are difficult to predict, such as his Firaga spells zigzagging in the air before converging on enemies in the Dissidia series. In Final Fantasy XIV, he can invert the areas his spells affect, leaving the spots they would normally hit as the safe areas. As the god of magic, Kefka's telekinetic powers are strong enough to levitate debris from around the world to form a massive tower to serve as his lair. When the party confronts him, he levitates them and throws them around with ease. He creates monsters to defend his tower and he revives the Warring Triad from their petrification for the same purpose. He possesses at least a minor level of omniscience, able to see things around the world, and an man in Tzen claims that he felt like Kefka was watching him shortly before the Light of Judgment struck the town.[4] Kefka's Light of Judgment is strong enough to sink towns into the sea and severely alter the landscape around them and it is implied that it may create monsters in its wake.[note 3] Due to his nature as the god of magic, Kefka is the source of magic in the world and his death marks the end of magic and the destruction of all espers and magicite. When the party confronts Kefka, he appears before them using his normal field sprite, but is in his god form in battle—it is unclear if this is due to technical limitations or if Kefka is able to shift between his human form and god form. His appearances in other titles depict him as being able to shift at will, entirely or partially to manifest his wings to attack with. Powers: Kefka’s arsenal combines elemental fury with manifestations of pure, chaotic energy: his elemental magic sets the screen ablaze with the blue flames of Firaga, shatters the battlefield with the biting ice of Blizzaga, and tears through the sky with the lightning of Thundaga, escalating to cosmic terror with a rain of flaming meteors and the overwhelming greenish-light dome of the Ultima spell. This destruction takes on even more dramatic proportions in his signature attacks, where the dreaded Heartless Angel manifests as a twisted celestial flash that drains the party's vitality in the blink of an eye; Hyperdrive slices through space at high speed as a devastating, defense-piercing beam of technological plasma; and Havoc Wing concludes the macabre spectacle with a violent physical strike delivered by his immense, grotesque fallen-angel wings.