Final Fantasy and the tradition of evil empires | VentureBeat
"Final Fantasy VI was the first game to have an empire based truly around and through humans. The emperor in this case is Gesthal, a human man with very human motivations: greed and a hunger for power. He is no warlock or grand sorcerer, but instead must use his troops, diplomacy, and subversion to get what he wants. His followers are also very human. General Leo is a man who lives by a strict code of honor and refuses to resort to some of the empire's more draconian tactics. Kefka is a general who was driven insane by the process of artificially infusing magic, which provides him with a great motivation for his evil rather than just mindless destruction. The troopers of the empire are all human as well, fighting and dying for their country with patriotic gusto. Even after the shift to the World of Ruin halfway through the game with the empire being utterly destroyed, we have a haunting reminder of it with Kefka's Tower, constructed from the ruins of Vector, the empire's capitol, and standing as a monument to madness in the middle of the ruined wasteland. Simply put, Kefka and the destruction he has wrought is because of what the Empire first enabled. "
One of the best!
Overall a great review of FF motifs.
Great article and comments.
It just made me think of something. Up until now, every evil empire has been iconfied by some big central thing. Both good and evil. Whether it's the Stark building in Avengers, the shark secret lair in Thunderball, or the Sauron's watchful eye tower in Lord of the Rings, it's always been some industrial era, centralized icon.
What does an empire look like in the information age and when will pop culture and the media catch up? How do you make something visually iconoclastic that's amorphous, de-centralized, and anonymously private?
Not sure that makes for good eye candy.
Mr. Smith in the matrix? I think what you describe to many will sound like a secret society / covert group a la Illuminati a la Davinci Code... are there any concrete examples?
I was thinking of Anonymous as an evil group and the recently reported stories about how they actively subvert central leadership and central spokesholes.
That's an interesting though. Deus Ex: Human Revolution had an interesting plot, although the entity ends up being a figure, I think a similar plot could work with an Anonymous-like enemy.
There is one movie, Guy Ritchie's "Revolver". The enemy is within all of us, it's greed. The more people become magnanimous and give up greed, other more greedy persons move in to take up the slack. The movie makes a huge cinematic display how it's the one snake that can never be tamed, though the main character does successfully give it up through a set of "chess and cons, (a dangerous combination)". By giving it up, he then becomes more successful than he ever was wanting that success (from Greed, of course).
Despite the attempted deep thinking and being bloodier than a Tarantino flick, the movie has some great characters including Jack himself, played by Jason Stantham, Andre Benjamin of "Be Cool" fame as Avi, Terance Maynard of and a whole list of other great actors.
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