Author guest post from Michael Greenhut.

Once, in late 1989 or early 1990, two brothers sat in front of the television during a game of Final Fantasy for the Nintendo Entertainment system. One was eleven or twelve, playing the game, frustrated as Garland continually smacked down his rushed, under-leveled party. He hadn’t yet learned proper grinding patience for JRPGs, despite dabbling in Dragon Warrior beforehand.  The younger brother was about two, simply watching and cheering when his big brother finally defeated Garland.

The older brother, of course, is now a middle aged man — me. At the time, I never imagined in my wildest dreams that such a quaint, buggy little game would grow into a monstrous mainstream franchise, or that my little brother would eventually play Final Fantasy X before me, many years later. I certainly never imagined that Garland would still be around in the 2020s, appearing in multiple spinoffs with multiple backstories, or that I’d be seeing Matoya’s Cave and listening to the same music in the fourteenth installment of the series.

Final Fantasy has come a longer way than any video game franchise I know.  Being at the tail end of GenX, the internet was just forming during my preteen and early teen years, and being a pretty stereotypical shy introvert who did not make friends easily in school, I found a community of Final Fantasy fans over dial-up services like Prodigy and AOL. Many of us from that little “Cafe Eblana” community are still in touch today, thirty-odd years later.  Today, there’s way too much Final Fantasy content for those of us with lives and families to possibly complete. But during those formative years, Final Fantasy was just an esoteric brand for uber-nerds like us and we were starved for content.  Many of us began on the original NES game, but the community really came together around Final Fantasy IV, which was still labeled “Final Fantasy II” in those days.  It was the first game in the series to feature truly compelling bad guys and a complex narrative arc (for 1991).  The first game that compelled us to trade Game Genie codes (who else remembers the walk through walls code and the gunslinger code? If you do, it’s time for a colonoscopy) and create role playing scenarios within the world. We would replay it endlessly, grinding for pink tails and minor summons. Someone claimed to level Dark Knight Cecil up to 99. I found a trick to get all vehicles on the same continent side by side and posted it as a challenge. We played Final Fantasy Mystic Quest when it came out, knowing it was aimed at younger audiences but also knowing it was all we we’d get until VI (then still called III)  hit the shelves.  The most “elite” of us imported the Japan-only Final Fantasy 5 with a converter to play on the SNES; not knowing a lick of Japanese. I printed out Mark Rosa’s semi-complete translation on my dot matrix printer and read from that.  A few years later, most, if not all of us were willing to buy an entire console with a couple hundred dollars of our parents’ money just to play Final Fantasy 7. When I did get it, it was quite the attraction in my computer geek college dorm.

With the occasional exception like Suikoden, Final Fantasy’s storytelling was in a league of its own, stoking my imagination. As I looked back over the years, I began to notice that my favorite games in the franchise were the ones with the deepest villains. With other fan favorites that had less in that department, I found myself trying to fill in the gaps of what the designers might have intended for their personalities.  I once began a fan-novelization of IV (still my personal favorite), and when I looked back at it, I noticed how I really played up Cecil’s villainous beginning.  I later wrote “Biggs and Wedge Are Dead”, giving them a Rozencrantz and Guildenstern style arc.  I published one piece on RPGamer that peeked into the sociopathic roots of Delta Heiral’s personality.  The bad guys really drew me in.

Broadening out, I still do this for a lot of media in my head. You’d think I have a psych degree, but I don’t; I’ve taken a few classes (one in villainy), I’ve read a few books (including Zimbardo’s controversial The Lucifer Effect, which in my mind still has a lot of merit) and I come from a family of psychologists, but I never formally pursued the discipline beyond that. Maybe in a parallel universe, I did.  Maybe I missed my calling. Maybe imagining real life people being evil just to be evil is too terrifying for me.  Either way, I instinctively put myself in their shoes. I imagine different villains making excuses for their behavior off camera. What would Wilson Fisk of Daredevil say? “I’m cleaning up the neighborhood as much as he is. So what if I’m using criminals to do it? I’m still getting rid of them when I’m done. I’m sorry if some innocent people get hurt, but the end result will be worth it.”  Of course, Fisk is an easy one. Let’s pull back to the world of Final Fantasy.  What about the more challenging villains like Kefka or even the cartoonishly evil Borghen?  I guess you’ll have to read and find out!

Who is your favorite Final Fantasy villain? Who should I have included? E-mail me at savedby078@gmail.com and let me know your thoughts!

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