Characters / Final Fantasy VI - Kefka Palazzo

Kefka Palazzo

Voiced by: Shigeru Chiba (Japanese), Dave Wittenberg [Dissidia Final Fantasy]

"Read my lips— mercy is for wimps! There's a reason 'oppose' rhymes with 'dispose'… If they get in your way, kill them!"

The Villainous Harlequin. The Mad Mage. The Lord and Master of the World of Ruin. The man who walked so that Sephiroth could run. The man who deigned to bring all to non-existence just because he felt like it.

We know you all can hear it: "Uwee-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee!"

The main antagonist of the game, Kefka was the Gestahlian Empire's first experimental Magitek Knight. The process, not yet perfected, granted him magic but shattered his sanity, turning Kefka into a cackling psychopath who loves to destroy and kill. Although he became loathed throughout the Empire for his bloodthirst and cruelty, Emperor Gestahl appointed him his Court Mage and right-hand man.

Eventually Kefka's destructive urges and wild nature become too dangerous to control, and he kills Gestahl and takes control of the Warring Triad. Kefka becomes the God of Magic and unleashes the Triad's power on the planet, causing The End of the World as We Know It. With his newfound divinity he spent the next year kicking up his heels and blasting the ruins of civilization to even smaller ashes to pass the time, until the Returners regrouped and stormed his lair to destroy him and restore the world.

Click here to return to the main page. Also see his self-demonstrating article.

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A-L

• Agent Peacock: A hammy and flamboyant Monster Clown, but also incredibly dangerous.
• Amazing Technicolor Population: In his final angelic form, his skin is purple. In the penultimate battle, when the characters fight Kefka's tower, two of his effigies have blue skin.
• Angelic Abomination: In his godly form, Kefka is more muscular, he has purple skin, two pairs upper angel wings and a pair lower demon wings.
• Anti-Magic: He eventually proves too erratic to control and Gestahl prepares to put him down; though Gestahl is the better magician, he is killed when Kefka diverts the energy of the Triad to fend off his spells.
• Apocalypse How: He rips the continents apart and kills a good part of the planet's flora and fauna. A year later some towns are still trying to rebuild and people are having trouble getting crops to grow, so the world is slowly sliding into a deathly wasteland. At the end of the game when the party ticks him off, he seems to set his sights on destroying existence itself, going by his statement of "I'm going to destroy everything! I'll create my own Empire of Death/I'll create a monument to non-existence!"
• Arranged Marriage: Averted. In the GBA version of the climactic scene atop the Floating Continent, Gestahl urges Celes to return to his side. He then voices his expectation that Celes and Kefka will conceive children for his empire. Celes, unsurprisingly, refuses.
• Ax-Crazy: All the way. Kefka isn't truly happy unless someone is dying or suffering at his hands.
• The Bad Guy Wins: He actually manages to destroy the world and become a god, and he reigned over the ashes of the planet for a year with his new power. The second half of the game is After the End as the Returners attempt to set things right. They fail, but they are able to free the world from Kefka's nihilistic tyranny and rid the world of the influence of the Espers once and for all. For better or worse, Kefka's changes are permanent (and in fact, reduced magical capacity continues into later installments in the franchise).
• Badass Boast:
  • His dreams speech:
    SNES Kefka: Life... dreams... hope... Where'd they come from? And where are they headed? These things... I am going to destroy! (hysterical insane laughter)
    GBA Kefka: Life... dreams... hope... Where do they come from? And where do they go...? Such meaningless things... I'll destroy them all! (hysterical insane laughter)
  • There's also his line when charging Goner/Forsaken:
    SNES Kefka: The end comes... Beyond chaos...
    GBA Kefka: The end draws near...
    BNW Kefka: Beyond chaos...The end draws near.
• Bad Boss: Especially when compared to General Leo. Kefka is not only just as cruel and mean to his soldiers as to his enemies, but a few times in the game he casually kills them off for no reason. Terra's infamous burning of fifty Imperial troopers? Kefka had it ordered to test his control over her.
• Beware the Silly Ones: Despite his clownish appearance and comical behavior, he is still a very dangerous character and a grave threat. In some ways, he highlights the extremes of this trope. Part of what makes him so terrifying is how his laughable quirks pair with horrific actions. His initial appearance features him behaving like a Saturday-Morning Cartoon villain, cackling and fumbling around like a buffoon. The fact that he continues to act so silly while poisoning Doma serves to highlight how unnerving and sinister he truly is.
• Big Bad: He’s the central antagonist of the game, the direct cause of a lot of misery to the party, and the Final Boss.
• Blasphemous Boast: Thanks to some Rule of Symbolism and his final boss tower being an allegory to The Divine Comedy, all of it is one large visual blasphemous boast that all amounts to "I am all of divinity."
  • In Part I of the Divine Comedy, "Inferno", Dante travels through the rings of Hell, and in the deepest layer, he finds Satan, trapped up to the midriff in a lake of ice. Kefka's first stage shows a demon, trapped waist-deep in the ground.
  • In Part II, "Purgatorio", Dante visits Purgatory and sees humans being purified of their sins before they can be allowed to enter Heaven. In Kefka's battle, the party finds a strange tiger faced statue with people in seeming torment while bound to it.
  • In Part III, "Paradiso", Dante visits heaven itself. In the boss battle, it is represented with golden light breaking through the black and stormy skyscape, with a visage of the Virgin Mary overlooking Kefka in a Pietà Plagiarism pose where her lap would be.
  • At the end of "Paradiso", Dante then ascends to meet God Himself, who explains to him what the purpose of life is. The party ascends to one final area, filled with nothing but beautiful golden light, and Kefka descends from above, a dark six-winged angel of destruction, who tells the party that life is meaningless and that he will destroy all of it.
• Breakout Villain: Thanks to Ted Woolsey's very colorful and creative depiction in the English version, Kefka is considered one of the most iconic Final Fantasy villains, his popularity and influence only rivalled by Sephiroth. Later depictions back-ported his English-adapted personality to all versions, and he's made cameos in other media, including with his own raid boss battle in Final Fantasy XIV and a Heartless based on his god form being a crossover boss in Kingdom Hearts χ.
• Bright Is Not Good: Kefka wears an outfit with many vivid colors and different patterns on it.
• The Bully: He bullies the soldiers under his command by browbeating them, threatening them, and making them perform demeaning tasks such as brushing sand off of his boots in the middle of a desert.
• The Caligula: He's not royalty, but fits otherwise: depraved, manic, selfish, insane, and enjoys suffering and cruelty.
• Character Development: In the worst ways; contrasting the heroes with their own development arcs, Kefka's "development" concerns his Sanity Slippage. At the start of the game he's not really insane, just a bit off in the head, and resorts to extremes to get his way. As the game goes on though he begins working on his own agenda, becomes more violent and unstable, and eventually betrays Gestahl when he proves too insane to control. By the end of the game when the party has come to terms with their traumas and troubled pasts to move on and rediscover their hope, Kefka has fully embraced his "life is meaningless" ideology and sneers at them that the world isn't worth saving.
• Classic Villain: Has traits of ambition, but is more closely associated with wrath and insanity.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist:
  • Unlike previous antagonists, who started out as the Big Bad at the beginning of their respective games, Kefka started out as a subordinate to a villain that was originally thought to be the Big Bad, but is later revealed to be manipulating his boss and the party, and then managed to destroy the world and go on to be its ruler after achieving godhood.
  • Likewise, where most previous Big Bads were typical tyrants with relatively little characterisation outside of being power hungry villains, Kefka, while having similar aims, is much more maniacal, comical and yet also legitimately cruel and downright nasty, showcasing a sadistic sense of humour that differentiates him from the more self-composed antagonists of past games in the series.
• Cosmic Keystone: He ends up becoming essential for the continued existence of magic when he drains the power of the Warring Triad. After his defeat, magic disappears from the world forever.
• Court Mage: Edgar refers to him as such.
• Creepy Circus Music: Kefka's eponymous theme combines this with a military march. It starts out light and bouncy with string and wind instruments, then descends into a loud flurry of drumbeats and cymbal clashes. Which is a good indication of how Kefka himself goes as the game progresses. It's sampled twice in "Dancing Mad", the final boss theme.
• Creepy Crossdresser: The head image of Kefka that appears during dialog scenes depicts him with white face makeup, earrings, and beads in his hair.
• Death from Above: After his ascent to godhood, Kefka used his Light of Judgment to deal this to anyone who dared oppose him.
• Depending on the Writer: A case of this occurring via Woolseyism. The English Super NES version of Kefka is characterized quite differently from the Japanese version due to the translation of his lines. In general, the Japanese version is more silly and comical, emphasizing his Psychopathic Manchild traits, while the English translation depicted him as more hateful and malicious, emphasizing his joy in causing others misery. The SNES port also never mentions what, exactly, is Kefka's rank in the Empire, implying that he's some sort of General on equal footing with Celes and Leo. The Gameboy Advance re-release and his Dissidia incarnation took some cues from the English adaptation of his character because of how popular he is in the West, while otherwise remaining true to the Japanese version.
• Diabolus ex Machina: When General Leo and the Espers agree to a truce in Thamasa, things are looking hopeful, and the game even seems to be going for an "Everybody Laughs" Ending. Then Kefka arrives and is suddenly much more powerful than before, and he massacres numerous Espers (while also shrugging off their attempts at fighting back), and tricks Leo with illusions and glamours before killing him, too. While it's not impossible that Gestahl gave Kefka a power boost before sending him to Thamasa, his sudden jump in power can be jarring and seems to happen so he can deal a Curb-Stomp Battle to the heroes.
• The Dragon: While he's formally just Gestahl's court mage, in practice he relies on Kefka to take care of things more than General Leo, and often sends him on missions.
• Dragon-in-Chief: He leads the Gestahlian Empire’s imperial forces in almost every run-in the party has with them. Kefka eventually betrays Gestahl after having the Warring Triad zap him with lightning before absorbing their powers to become the new god of magic.
• Dragon with an Agenda: Gestahl wants to use the power of the Warring Triad to conquer the world; Kefka wants to wake them up and cause The End of the World as We Know It.
• Drunk on the Dark Side: If you're not quite sure how strong Kefka is at any given point of the game, don't worry, he'll be happy to show you. Most prominent at Thamasa, where he deals a Curb-Stomp Battle to at least a dozen Espers, demonstrating he can not only kill them en masse with no trouble but that he's immune to their powers.
• Dystopia Justifies the Means: Kefka's intention is to create a world full of suffering because it amuses him.
• Epic Flail: In his earlier boss fights, he has a Morning Star equipped.
• Establishing Character Moment: When first seen in Figaro outside of Terra's flashback, he complains about Gesthal's orders, Edgar living out in the middle of nowhere, and how the Gestahlian Empire's recent recon jobs are the pits, before ordering 2 of his men to wipe the sand off his boots. After the Troopers tell him everything's all set, he laughs and calls them idiots before reaching the castle. This shows his secret desire to overthrow Emperor Gesthal, his silly, but deadly nature, and his callous disregard for the Empire's men.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Even with their homes burned, mutated monsters roaming the world, friends and loved ones die, and the world a charred husk, the people of the world, including the party, find the strength to keep living and look for hope for the future. Kefka is at first confused by this, then goes enraged because it doesn't make sense to him.
• Evil Chancellor: Technically, being the Court Mage and all.
• Evil Counterpart: To both Terra and Celes in different ways.
  • Like Terra, Kefka was used as an Imperial experiment and has no friends or family and no real joy in his life. While Terra learned to control her powers and found love, Kefka's powers came at the cost of his sanity and he turned to destruction to give his life meaning.
  • Like Celes, Kefka is an Imperial general with great magical power. While Celes has held onto her humanity and principles, Kefka's madness stripped away his, if he had any to begin with.
• Evil Is Burning Hot: He talks a great deal about burning things.
• Evil Laugh: Kefka's "Uwee-hee-hee!" — the only vocalized character sound in the entire game, opera sequence, and Terra meeting Tritoch aside.
• Evil Sorcerer: He's a powerful magic user, and is deeply evil and power-hungry.
• Faux Affably Evil: He's a laughing, joking Monster Clown most of the time... at least until he decides to become a stone-cold psychopath.
• Final Boss: You will be seeing this guy in real, losable combat three times in FFVI, and the third encounter is the last stage of the game's final confrontation.
• First Injury Reaction: When Kefka gives Celes a sword as one last offer to betray the heroes and return to the Empire, Celes instead turns the sword on him. He immaturely cries about his wounds before he takes the Warring Triad's powers for himself to destroy the world.
• Flunky Boss: You have to get past his soldiers in Narshe to get to him, and the final battle only has the teams confronting him after they've already destroyed the statues on the tower in the first three stages of the final battle.
• For the Evulz: This is his defining trait — whatever the reason (see Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds further down for an explanation), the reason Kefka causes so much chaos and death is because he has fun doing it.
• Four Is Death: When he's finally confronted at the end of the game, he is the target in the last of four phases in the Final Boss fight (the second phase also has four targets that need to be destroyed.)
• From Bad to Worse: No matter how bad things are, he will always try to make it worse. Just take his destruction of the world — it wasn't enough for Kefka to murder countless innocents, rip apart the continents, and unleash mutated monsters on the people, he had to spend his time afterwards blasting the ashes of civilization when he got bored.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: He starts the game as a court jester lackey of Gestahl, and by the end of the game, rules the world as a god.
• Genius Bruiser: Kefka's very strong in magic and competent in physical combat. He is also a pretty good manipulator as well as implied to be technologically skilled (piloting and maintaining Magitek armors, single-handedly manning two cranes in Vector to prevent the Returners' airship from escaping, and presumably inventing Terra's slave crown).
• Genocide Backfire: Poisoning Doma's water supply, which resulted in a very angry Cyan. In his case, it wasn't really out of fear or hatred of the Domians as much as feeling it was a good time to do something like that. Not to mention helping the Gestahlian Empire break the Siege of Doma faster and win, though at the cost of some their guys imprisoned by the Domians also dying from the poisoned water.
• Godhood Seeker: Notably the first (though hardly the last) Final Fantasy villain to seek out godhood, and one of the few main villains to achieve it when he absorbs the power of the Warring Triad.
• Goldfish Poop Gang: He looks to be this at first; he's initially intimidating, but he gets sent scurrying multiple times over the first half, each time beaten increasingly badly by the protagonists or other factors, and eventually getting imprisoned by Gestahl for his failings. Of course, then things go horribly, horribly wrong.
• Gone Horribly Right: Ultimately, they did succeed in making Kefka a super-powered magic-user capable of destroying their enemies. He just decided to move on to everything else too.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: The Gestahlian Empire wanted to create a new breed of super-powered Magic Knights, but with the process not yet perfected, it drove Kefka insane.
• Good Wings, Evil Wings: Has four angelic wings and two demonic wings in his god form. However, they seem to be inconsistent on this — in his Anthology render, Kefka has six angelic wings, while in Dissidia, he has two demonic wings, and his four angelic wings are treated more like they're fused together so he has just two large wings instead.
• Hated by All: Everyone in the Gestahlian Empire hates Kefka, for his cruelty, brutality, and just being a rotten person. It's not without cause either: Kefka ordered Terra to burn fifty of the Empire's own men to test his control over her, and he cares nothing for how many men the Gestahlian Empire loses in its attacks as long as his side wins. The only two people who don't hate and/or fear him are Leo (who maintains polite civilly around Kefka because Leo is just a Nice Guy) and Gestahl (who likes Kefka being so brutal and ruthless).
• He Cleans Up Nicely: In his human form, Kefka wears clown makeup and a garish harlequin costume. In the final battle, he appears as a handsome, muscular angel draped in purple fabric.
• Hero Killer: He stabs and kills Leo, much to the shock and disgust of the other heroes. If you don't wait for Shadow, Shadow dies as a direct result of Kefka moving the Statues out of alignment.
• The Heavy: From start to finish: in the World of Balance, he serves as this despite being Gestahl's Dragon, as he is the one confronting and antagonizing the characters while his boss remains distant; in the World of Ruin, Kefka absorbs the power of the Warring Triad and threatens everything the heroes hold dear, forcing them to face him.
• Hope Crusher: His favorite tactics and sight are when people are in despair or agony. When he becomes a god, he destroys any semblance of hope in the world since he thinks it's meaningless (and a lot better if it's hopeless).
• HP to One: One of his attacks in the final battle is the dreaded Heartless Angel, which will reduce the party's HP down to 1.
• The Hyena: His pre-recorded sound byte of a cackle is his calling card.
• Idiot Hair: Kefka's hair inexplicably has a feather sprouting from the front.
• Ignored Epiphany: When the party explains to Kefka that no matter what he does life will go on and people will always find reasons to keep living, he lowers his head, turns around slowly... then spins back around and delivers his famous Shut Up, Kirk! comeback.
• Impossibly Tacky Clothes: Kefka could be considered Square's first shot across the bow◊ at cosplayers.
• Inconsistent Spelling: He's almost always "Cefca" in Japanese materials, including Dissidia^note with one exception — this concept art◊ (as a side note, the name "Sefilos" didn't make it in the game, but you may recognize it somewhere else). Lampshaded in the Advance translation, which has one guard in Figaro Castle mention a fringe cult that spells his name with "C"s and not "K"s, and that it doesn't really matter since it's the same guy either way.
• Jerkass: He's rude, cruel, and utterly self-absorbed due to him being the Big Bad of the game.
• Just Between You and Me: Kefka, while maniacally reveling about the power he gained in the Magitek Research Facility, is overheard by the Returners, where he also expresses his intent to revive the Warring Triad. It's subverted because despite being overheard by the heroes, he still succeeds in his plan anyway.
• Kick the Dog: His poisoning of Doma, his murder of General Leo (and his also casting an illusion of Gestahl "admitting" to Leo that he tricked him into having him collect more Espers and magicite for no reason outside of adding insult to injury), his attempted torchings of Figaro and Thamasa, his having Terra burn fifty soldiers under his employ alive, and finally his destruction of the world and his frequently using the Light of Judgment on the world.
• Knight of Cerebus:
  • Any time he shows up, things get dark in a hurry. In his first appearance he torches Figaro Castle, one-ups that by poisoning the people of Doma, and then leads an invasion of Narshe while explicitly ordering his men to kill any innocents that get in their way. Later at Thamasa he massacres all the escaped Espers, attempts to destroy the village, kills General Leo when he tries to intervene, then kills more Espers that attack him. And if you think that's as far as he could go, remember this was before the "blow up the world" part of the game — that was Kefka's work, too.
  • In a meta example, he's this to the entire series. The villains of the first five games didn't have very deep characterizations or motivations beyond being Evil Overlords who wanted to take over or destroy the world. Kefka had the same goal of world destruction/domination, but he was clearly having fun causing death and chaos along the way just because he could. And when it came time to execute his plan, he succeeded, making VI one of the few Final Fantasy games where The Bad Guy Wins, and the game picks up After the End in the dead husk of the world that Kefka reigns over, and the party tries to set things right.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: Variation. It's strongly implied that he was holding back his power significantly when confronted at the Imperial Camp by Sabin and Shadow, and was running away because he didn't want any distractions from dumping poison into Doma.
• Lack of Empathy: He just does not understand the good feelings in others.
• Large Ham: He clearly enjoys himself and provides hilarious lines along the way. "Ahem! There's SAND in my boots!"
• Laughably Evil: He does horrific, violent, inhumane things, but he just has so much fun through it all it's hard to watch his antics and not be amused.
• Laughing Mad: His boss theme "Dancing Mad" is the Trope Namer.
• Lean and Mean: Depicted as skinny in his concept art and battle sprite, and an absolutely horrible person.
• Leaning Tower of Mooks: Kefka's first One-Winged Angel form looks like a tower of Siamese mooks on top of each other, themed like characters from The Divine Comedy, that you gradually fight from bottom to top.
• Leave No Survivors: One of his favorite tactics.
• Light Is Not Good: Kefka has a weapon called the Light of Judgment that he uses to destroy towns that oppose him, and in the final battle, he turns into an angelic-looking creature. Also provides the trope image. Heck, even before becoming a god, he basically resembled a very colorful clown, was blond and blue/green eyed, and wore white makeup, and was also heavily implied to have pyromaniacal tendencies (eg, forcing Terra to torch his own soldiers alive, attempting to burn Figaro Castle, having his troops burn Thamasa, was implied to have caused a lot of fires when misaligning the Warring Triad, not to mention the whole Light of Judgment thing). His god form also mixes this with Dark Is Evil, as he possesses a pair of bat wings as well as looking more fierce and demonic than a traditional angel.
• Load-Bearing Boss: Defeating Kefka not only causes his tower to collapse, but seems to herald the rebirth of the planet's ecosystem and the cessation of magic's existence.
• Loves the Sound of Screaming: When he poisons Doma. Also a Star Wars Shout-Out.
  Kefka: Hee-hee! Nothing beats the music of hundreds of voices screaming in unison! Uwee-hee-hee! [dumps poison in Doma's water supply]

M-Y

• Mad God: He seems a bit less insane than before when you confront him at the end of the game, but he's still way off the deep end.
• Madness Mantra: "I hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate HATE YOU!"
• Mad Scientist: Probably, seeing how it was heavily implied that he was the one who invented Terra's Slave Crown.
• Magical Clown: He was implanted with special technology that turned him into a magical, maniacal harlequin. Then he becomes the God of Magic.
• Meaningful Name: Aside from his first name literally meaning "toothbrush" in Slovak language^note and bearing similarity to Franz Kafka, Kefka's last name, Palazzo, is Italian in origin that means palace, mansion, and/or castle, and also sounds very similar to Basque pailazo, Catalan pallasso, Greek paliatsos, Italian pagliaccio, Portuguese palhaço, Spanish payaso, Russian payats and Turkish palyaço, which all translate to "clown," and his appearance pretty much makes it clear that the similar names are very fitting.
• Military Mage: He acts as The Emperor's Court Mage and The Dragon (until usurping the role of Big Bad in the game's latter half) and holds the rank of Commander in the Imperial Army. He acts as an officer and artillery, commanding small detachments of troops such as the one that attacks Narshe and the task force assigned to retrieve Terra after the game's intro.
• Mind over Matter: He was seen levitating two of the Returners with telekinesis when they confront him at the end of the game. Presumably it's part of the whole "god" thing.
• Minor Injury Overreaction: After Celes stabs Kefka, he starts screaming about blood as well as either shouting insults while lying down at Celes or screaming the aforementioned Madness Mantra, depending on the translation. However, in his case, it may just be more showcasing of his insanity.
• Mono no Aware: Kefka is a study of Mono No Aware ("The Impermanence of All Things"), a staple belief of Japanese society. Kefka shows one side of the coin: that of a Straw Nihilist who believes that things which are impermanent have no meaning. The party demonstrates the other side, the Anti-Nihilist, who believe that even if everything is ultimately impermanent, that only makes them more precious, not less.
• Monster Clown: Monster harlequin, but close enough. His in-game overworld sprite doesn't look like a clown or harlequin (aside from probably the red splotches below the eyes), but he acts like it. In the Amano artwork and the cutscenes added in the PlayStation version, he wears a harlequin costume and clownish makeup, and his actions are very monstrous.
• More Despicable Minion: Emperor Gestahl is an absolutely monstrous human being in his own right, yet Kefka consistently proves to be far, far worse; Gestahl wants to rule the world with an iron fist, while Kefka desires to destroy the world and kill off the survivors one by one.
• Muscles Are Meaningless: Kefka's concept art and battle sprite depict him as skinny. Despite his slender build, he's strong enough to deal decent physical damage during battle, kill Leo, throw Emperor Gestahl off the Floating Continent, strike Celes hard enough to knock her to the ground, and effortlessly move the Warring Triad statues.
• Mysterious Past: The details regarding who Kefka was before he became the first Magitek Knight of the Empire are unknown.
• The Napoleon: According to the game's guidebook, he's 5'4". Kefka demonstrates the big ego and belligerence associated with the trope.
• Narcissist: If the tower boss at the end of the game is any indication, Kefka is enamored with his own likeness. He creates a tower with multiple effigies of himself, including a clone in a Pieta pose, which the players fight during the penultimate battle of the game.
• Noblewoman's Laugh: His laugh sound effect, at least in the SNES version, sounds like this.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: Sort of. As silly and comical as Kefka is, he is also very, very dangerous.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Kefka is caught completely off guard when Edgar submerges Figaro Castle right before his eyes. As the castle starts shaking, Kefka's jaw drops.
  • "I've got a bad feeling about this..." Said as the Sealed Gate opens.
• Omnicidal Maniac:
  Kefka: What's the fun in destruction if no precious lives are lost?
• One-Winged Angel: Technically, four winged angel, with a couple of demon wings depending on the image.
• Orcus on His Throne: To his credit, though, he probably doesn't even need to move from his chamber to destroy the party at the end of the game, but where's the fun in that? It's also implied ("I've prepared some suitable entertainment for you!"/"I've been practicing my greeting!") that he was waiting for the party to fight their way to him so he could fight them again, and created the monsters they fought to get to him in preparation for their arrival.
• Parts Unknown: According to the Final Fantasy VI The Complete guide book, Kefka's birthplace is unknown.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: He eventually kills Gestahl and gloats over his wounded body before finishing him off, but by that point you're more concerned with what Kefka is going to do once he's done with Gestahl than you are with Gestahl getting offed.
• Physical God: After he absorbs the powers of the Warring Triad, Kefka becomes the God of Magic and the first thing he does after gaining said godly power was destroy to the world, and later become the ruler of the World of Ruin. He also has his godly form which turns him into an Angelic Abomination that the party has to face during the final battle.
• Pietà Plagiarism: The third tier of the final battle. When you see Kefka in place of Jesus on the pietà and then again as a God-like angel, you simply have to face the facts: the gods are not on your side and never have been, and if you want a savior, you'll have to be the savior yourself.
• Poison Is Evil: Poisons Doma and uses the Poison and Bio spells in battle.
• Practically Joker: Arthur Fleck, you're in the Army now. He's a killer comedian from a dystopian city who has a murky past, an iconic laugh, "fanatical" disciples, and nihilist beliefs who finds death amusing and is nigh-impossible to control. He generates chaos seemingly just for the heck of it, and never offers up a clear motive for destroying the World of Balance beyond being bored of it all. Ironically, his appearance is more like a male version of Harley Quinn.
• Promoted to Scapegoat: Attempted, but defied. When the Returners meet with Gestahl at Vector, he has Kefka arrested and charged with as many of the Empire's crimes as he thinks will stand. However, this does nothing to placate the Returners, and being backstabbed by his boss this way gives Kefka the impetus to fully turn against Gestahl, leading to the events of the Floating Continent.
• Psycho for Hire: He starts out as a toady for Gestahl, performing the dirtier jobs that others lack the stomach for, though he fails to command status or respect from the rank-and-file like Celes and Leo normally do.
• Psychopathic Manchild: Kefka acts like a disturbed child, with his maniacal laughter, tantrums, and selfishness. It's especially obvious in the Japanese version, where he uses the first-person pronoun "bokuchin", which is primarily used by young boys, when joking around or trying to act sweet.
• Psycho Prototype: According to his meager backstory (gleaned from an easily-missed NPC right before the Devil's Lab), Kefka was Cid's first attempt at creating a Magitek Knight, but the process was still experimental. "Something in Kefka's mind snapped that day," turning him from a normal guy into a maniacal harlequin with an unquenchable bloodthirst.
• Put Them All Out of My Misery: There's no doubt that Kefka tries to make everyone's lives as empty and meaningless as he thinks they are. However, in keeping with Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds nudges described further down, his declaration of intent to destroy the very emotions of hope and love comes off as him deciding that if he can't feel those emotions, then no one else will.
• Pyramid Power: After absorbing the power of the Warring Triad, Kefka is shown standing inside some kind of pyramid-shaped Battle Aura that's constantly changing colors.
• Pyromaniac: He seems to love setting things on fire, seeing how most of his atrocities involve fire somehow.
• Razor Wings: His God form is fond of the physical attack Havoc Wing, his AI script allowing him the potential to use it every single turn, and later in the battle using it twice in a row.
• Recurring Boss: The Returners will engage Kefka at least 4 times, and will get propelled into a full-blown Boss Fight twice, first at Narshe, then at the end of the game.
• Sadist: Dear God. The sheer amount of glee he gets from poisoning an entire village and slaughtering General Leo is truly disturbing.
• Sanity Slippage: Kefka slides down the hill of sanity rather nicely throughout the game. At the beginning, he seems to be just doing his job, but, well, he tumbles down the slope quickly. One moment of mention is on the Floating Continent where despite all the power he's gained, Celes manages to trick him and actually stab him with a sword and draw his own blood. The moment he completely loses it is just before the last battle, after the heroes have given their self-help book speech.
• Satanic Archetype:
  • Kefka sets settings on fire throughout the game, bringing to mind hellfire.
  • His final form is that of an angel bathed in golden light, bringing to mind Lucifer as an angel of light.
• Sequential Boss: When Kefka is met at the end of the game, the party has to move up through a stack of enemies (some of which resemble Kefka) to get to him.
• Shut Up, Kirk!: His famous rebuttal at the end of the game to the mentioned self-help book speech.
• Sissy Villain: He wears flamboyant clothes, has flamboyant mannerisms, and emits an effeminate laugh. When the player characters do battle with Kefka, his battle sprite shows him prancing. Kefka's concept art also shows him prancing or striking a pose.
• Slasher Smile: He's a sprite with No Mouth much of the time, but you just know he's sporting one of these. Dissidia tells us that he definitely is.
• The Sociopath: He has no understanding of morality, no impulse control, manipulates the emotions of others, is a rampant liar, and resorts to ever greater extremes to slake his thirst for destruction. Kefka ticks all the boxes.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: The peaceful segment in the 4th part of "Dancing Mad".
• The Starscream: He has a major problem with being a servant, and by the time of Thamasa, he's not even hiding that he's taking power for himself instead of Gestahl. During the climactic scene atop the Floating Continent, he uses the power of the Warring Triad that Gestahl had hoped to claim for himself and kills Gestahl. He then hijacks the Emperor's plan to rule the world with magic by destroying it instead.
• Starter Villain: Serves this role before becoming the Big Bad. Kefka is the face of the Gestahlian Empire for the first quarter of the game or so, and the battle with him at Narshe is effectively the climax of that portion of the game. Afterwards, Terra transforms, the party heads to Zozo, and attentions turn to the Gestahlian Empire and the Espers. Kefka is still prominent, but he doesn't take center stage again until the Floating Continent.
• Starter Villain Stays: Starts as just the first noticeable grunt you fight, but eventually manages to steal the position of Big Bad from Emperor Gestahl.
• Straw Nihilist: While he really starts being this only after destroying the world, you still gotta admit that when taking everything else that Kefka was into consideration, this really wasn't something that boded well for the World of Balance.
  Kefka: Why do people insist on creating things that will inevitably be destroyed? Why do people cling to life knowing that they must someday die? Knowing that none of it will have meant anything once they do?
• Stripperiffic:
  • In his final form, he wears what appears to be a single length of purple cloth wrapped around his loins.
  • Depending on the version of the game, several of Kefka's effigies on the Tower of the Gods are either scantily-clad or nude.
• Strong as They Need to Be: After absorbing the powers of the Warring Triad, Kefka becomes unfathomably powerful, plunging the world into ruin and blasting entire cities with the Light of Judgment. Then, during the final battle, Kefka can be defeated with ease by a team of mere mortals.
• Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum: With more emphasis on Temper Tantrum. When the party tells him that all his destruction and chaos has failed to wipe out life and people are rebuilding and still have hope, Kefka snaps and goes on a berserk rampage, deciding that he simply hasn't gone far enough yet.
• Super Move Portrait Attack: Pops up during the Forsaken move.
• Super Prototype: Kefka is being far stronger magic-wise compared to the other Magitek Knight seen, Celes Chere. For one thing, he has Blizzara, Poison, Drain, and all three of the 1st level Fire, Ice, Lightning spells at Level 18. Celes, at the same level, only has Blizzard, Antidote, Imp, Cure, and Scan. Take note that she was created after Kefka was. Justified since the process was unstable when Kefka was made: he may be more powerful than Celes, but he's also absolutely insane.
• Super-Soldier: The prototype, actually. You know what that means.
• Team Rocket Wins: Kefka is a laughable threat until he gets some major magical upgrades from the Espers and becomes a killing machine in Thamasa.
• Took a Level in Badass: It's jarring to see him go from running away from a lone Sabin (granted, Shadow could be there as well) through an entire camp full of his army and having to run away with his tail between his legs from the collective party, to kicking the party's collective asses twice, then killing the best soldier in the Gestahlian Empire, without using any magic, and a small army of Espers on his own that were able to thrash the Capital City of the Gestahlian Empire. And that's just the start of the madness.
• Ur-Example: Mimicking Mateus's methods of poisoning a kingdom aside, he himself started a trend of villains who desired to become gods in the series.
• Villain: Exit, Stage Left: Early in the story, he either runs away, is left in the dust, or is blown away. He won't do this when you fight him one more time at the very end of the game; he'll outright dissolve instead.
• Villainous Breakdown: The entire game follows Kefka slowly but surely sliding even deeper into complete madness than he already is. He's actually kinda normal, if still evil and cackling, when you first meet him in Figaro. But by the end of the game he has become a deranged lunatic who is completely unable to see any value in life other than causing destruction. This almost game-wide breakdown reaches its climax when the heroes confront him and give their iconic speech on hope, Kefka goes completely off the deep end and after giving a rage filled rant, the final battle begins.
• Villainous Harlequin: If not for Terra's flashback, this would have been the first impression of him.
• Villains Never Lie: After the party reaches the part of the Magitek Factory where Espers are being held in captivity, Kefka enters and declares that Celes was a mole. Locke believes him, forcing Celes to perform a non-lethal variant of a Heroic Sacrifice to save Locke.
• We Have Reserves: This is Kefka's general approach to warfare. He broke the siege of Doma Castle by poisoning the water supply, killing everyone inside — including women, children, and even some Imperial soldiers that were being kept as prisoners of war.
• Winged Humanoid: In the final battle, he appears as a muscular, purple-skinned angel with six wings.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity:
  • When you first sneak into Vector, if you can get all the way up to the Cafe where all the Imperial soldiers are hanging out, one man will tell you what he knows of Kefka's backstory. Oddly, just hearing the broad outline and filling in the rest with your imagination is almost scarier than knowing the details.
  • In addition, it's only at the end of the game that Kefka's nihilism and contempt for life become apparent, possibly because becoming the God of Magic and spending a year burning the burnt husk of a dead world gave him time to reflect on things.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Kefka provides what is perhaps one of the darkest interpretations of the trope in video games, but yes, there is a sympathy to him behind the carnage and cackling.
  • Dissidia depicts Kefka not merely as not seeing the value of love and hope, he actually can't understand them anymore, his mind is just too broken, and he causes destruction because it's the only thing that brings him joy. He delivers his famous end-game speech from VI on the meaninglessness of life, but Dissidia frames it in a more despairing and melancholy tone. Kefka laments that everyone will die no matter what they do and all they worked for will be reduced to dust after their deaths, and he practically begs Terra to explain to him how someone can continue to live in spite of that knowledge. And the answer she has for him — live for the sake of love and happiness — is one he can't accept because it doesn't make sense to him.
  • The Ultimania guide suggests that Kefka was once one of the Gestahlian Empire's top generals. After the Magitek infusion damaged his mind, he was forced to step down and reappointed as Gestahl's personal lackey, then made to oversee the perfected Magitek Knights: Terra and Celes. What really drove him over the brink was watching Leo take up his former position and outdo him in every aspect.^note In-game, an easily missable NPC in a bar in Vector (the player has to dodge several Imperial guards to reach it before the mission to explore the Magitek research facility) also tells the player that Kefka used to be relatively normal, and that the Magitek infusion process, which Cid hadn't perfected yet, damaged Kefka's mind.
  • When the Returners give their collective Patrick Stewart Speech at the end of the game, Kefka looks down and turns away for a moment, seeming distinctly sad. Unfortunately, that's when Ignored Epiphany kicks in and he really goes off the deep end.
  • And finally, Kefka's Dissidia 012 museum profile implies that he was Driven to Suicide in the final storyline because he thought destroying himself might finally satisfy his insatiable need to destroy.
• You Can't Thwart Stage One: He succeeds in destroying the world as planned, which also scatters the party to the winds. It takes a year for Celes to re-constitute the party and fix their mistake by hunting down Kefka, now a self-styled god who stamps out signs of life wherever he finds it.

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