The Villains of Final Fantasy Week 11 [Game Overview]

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
Week 4 – Zeromus
Week 5 – Exdeath
Week 6 – Kefka
Week 7 – Sephiroth
Week 8 – Ultimecia
Week 9 – Necron
Week 10 – Yu Yevon/Jecht/Sin
Week 10-2 – Shuyin

If you thought sequels were a strange place for Final Fantasy to go, now we get to the only ongoing iteration of the series, Final Fantasy XI. The first (and so far only) MMORPG to hit the market with the Final Fantasy name, FF XI is unique among MMOs in that it allows both console and PC players to play in the same world along with an integrated Japanese and English playerbase, with communications facilitated by a neat little translation program.

All MMOs have a final boss, but the challenge in this feature is which boss do I cover? There have been three expansion packs released thus far with three new final bosses, so instead of bothering with backstory (this is the one modern Final Fantasy game I have never played) I’m just gonna present the bosses as a whole and evaluate them as one.

The original boss is the Shadow Lord, a fairly generic dude being controlled by magicite and Zilart princes to unleash beastmen on the world. As you’ll see below, he kind of looks like Dark Cecil, which is both cool and incredibly lame. I mean, this is the final boss? He’s way generic.

The next boss of XI is Eald’narche. Despite his fairly unintelligible name, I think he’s the most interesting villain of the lot. It turns out that he was really mind controlling the last dude, the Shadow Lord (they didn’t think to give him a name?) to bring about his goal of opening the door to paradise, despite the fact that it would destroy the earth. What a selfish jerk!

Our next villain is Promathia himself, the Twilight God of Chaos or something like that. Fairly typical FF villain with an embarrassingly lame character model.

The final final boss is an FF classic, Alexander. Meant to duel with Odin to bring about Ragnarok, he’s your fairly typical esper, avatar, aeon, etc.

Evil Rating:

Unleashing beast men ranks pretty low, but threatening to destroy the universe isn’t exactly nice.

2-6/10

Cool Rating:

The only inspired models are Eald’narche and Alexander. Doesn’t bode well for coolness.

1-5/10

Images and Video:

Shadow Lord
Eald’narche
Promathia
Alexander