Game Overview: The Villains of Final Fantasy Week 4

Insert another credit, because it’s time for your weekly video game news and you’ve just hit the Game Overview screen.

With every Final Fantasy game there exists great (and not so great) teams of heroes bent on saving the world from some sort of evil force. While we could take a look at those heroes, let’s instead take a look at the evils that motivate these heroes to do what they do.

It should be noted that this feature will be full of spoilers.

Week 1 – Garland
Week 2 – Emperor Mateus of Palamecia
Week 3 – The Cloud of Darkness

Final Fantasy IV was a masterpiece of soap operatic storytelling. Characters joined, left, fell in love, died, were amnesiacs, and were under mind control. It was a mess, but it was an entertaining tale of redemption for an evil man and his love for his woman.

Unfortunately we still had this very strange story anomaly where you’d play through about 90% of the game thinking one guy was your enemy (Golbez, in this case) only to find out that the real culprit was some other bloke (Zemus/Zeromus, in this case). While we can forgive the weak characterization in these early games, FF IV started to reach the saturation point for this nonsense. Sure, we love fighting evil, but wouldn’t it be nice to not just have a quick “Oh, this guy was mind controlling everyone” kind of thing be pulled on us?

So Zemus/Zeromus happens to be a Lunarian, or a dude from the moon, who’s decided that living on the moon blows. To fix this problem, he’s decided to kill everyone on the planet and take the planet for the Lunarians to live on. The other Lunarians are, surprisingly, not on board, so it’s up to the crew to take this sucker down.

Evil Rating:

He’s evil, but not evil enough to want to get his own hands dirty. 99% of the evil he causes is realized through his mind controlled puppets. I’ll give him points for wanting to kill everyone on the planet, but he’s gotta lose some for laziness. That and he totally gets owned by the heroes and has to let the embodiment of his hatred be the final boss.

7/10 (mostly because his evil intentions raze an entire town, kill multiple player characters, and are cool, but he loses points for the totally lame mind control plot)

Cool Rating:

Well he gets cool points for being from the moon. He’s also too cool for school, preferring to make others do his dirty work while he chills out on the moon. It doesn’t get much cooler than that, except that he gets owned pretty easily and has to unleash his hatred upon the world to actually be formidable.

7/10

Images:

Zemus (DS)
Zeromus (Amano Artwork)

Video:


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2 responses to “Game Overview: The Villains of Final Fantasy Week 4”

  1. […] 1 – Garland Week 2 – Emperor Mateus of Palamecia Week 3 – The Cloud of Darkness Week 4 – Zeromus Week 5 – Exdeath Week 6 – Kefka Week 7 – Sephiroth Week 8 – Ultimecia Week 9 – […]

  2. Eric Mesa Avatar

    hehe….he’s a moononite

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