Have you ever read about someone in a book, had a favourite protagonist or antagonist that you envisioned a certain way, which did not look at all as you thought when it went to movie? My experience was kind of like that.
When I was elementary school age – grade 4 or 5 – I met a man who changed my life forever. He was hidden, not inside a book, but inside a game cartridge. One of those old plug and play ones that people make Facebook groups about. You know the ones that say “When I was your age, I had to blow on my video games to make them work”? I blew on this cartridge about a zillion times.
My brother and I bought it when it was new – it was called Final Fantasy 3 (well before the global markets chimed in and reminded us that it was an import from Japan, and was actually the 6th game in the series). As I recall, we split the cost 70/30, and it was my aunt who originally found the game in the big city and purchased it for us.
It was, what is now understood as, a stereotypical RPG. The lines were cheesy and on top of that, the translations didn’t always perfectly line up. The pixels were small and terrible causing an image that may have resembled, at some point in someone’s mind, a human being. And the music... the music had about 64 bits between the songs – it’s where I learned what a “midi file” sounded like, if that means anything to you.
But I fell in love. And all the beatitudes of love applied their rosey hue. I invented lines and hidden jokes when translation failed. I imagined the characters looking each other in the eye when they spoke, and none of them ever laughed at how stupid the other sounded. Each line was meaningful magic. The pixelated world-savers and villains re-moulded themselves in my brain, and transformed into elaborate magnificence. Each three-picture action was a movie in my mind. All the while, orchestras set the perfect moods.
There were lots of themes that, as a growing boy, I found endearing. The theme of love – platonic love, maternal and paternal love, romantic love. The theme of good vs evil, and the greyness therein. The corruption of man and a metaphor for nuclear weapons. And, of course, the vision of the self – 14 different characters with different lives, different passions, and different reasons to live. They all united, and they all saved the world. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was my first encounter with philosophy.
My main interlocutor was also the primary antagonist. Or as the kids say, the villain. His name was Kefka, and he was a power hungry nihilist. And since the beginning, I knew that he had a winning perspective. An outlook that questioned the very nature of “valuable existence.” He also had a cool laugh. While other children pretended they were Spiderman or Lex Luthor, I was him. I even made a shirt once with this glow-in-the-dark goop of the icon of his power and his name.
I still love him to this day. I love the questions he raised. I love the struggle to answer them. If C.S Lewis’ “Chronicles of Narnia” is the reason why I started to enjoy Christianity, Squaresoft’s Final Fantasy 3 was the reason I started to enjoy philosophy. I still don’t know if I’ve got what it takes to take him on. Every time I rally up a team, XP build (what the kids these days call “grinding”), and take them into the catastrophe of a tower that houses him, I read his words and feel unprepared. Like I’m fighting against truth.
Violence is a great way to solve disagreements, it’s true. No doubt about it, it gets things done. In this case, it saved the world. But it never solved the questions he asked.
In the remake, they redid the world in a few extra, beautiful, CG scenes. In those scenes, they made him a clown.
A fucking clown.
It’s probably closer to a court jester. They don’t show him too much. But my imagination never saw the man as a fool. Goofy? A little, certainly. Every villain’s gotta have a bit of humour. And the way he saw the world, for what it really was, he honestly and earnestly thought it was funny. Insane? Sure. People of his world thought he was a lunatic. And what he saw certainly overwhelmed him.
But he was no joke. He was never a man who lived to be silly. He lived with open eyes to the world’s silliness – in all its struggling and suffering and incompatibility with eternity. A very important distinction. He was a man that honestly challenged the nature of things, by bringing them to their extremes. He said “LOOK AT THIS” and when we said “what?”, being blind to our own hypocrisies, he said “I’LL SHOW YOU.” He was the kind of guy that watched Rome burn, not for fun, but because it was inevitable. I imagine he was the kind of guy that would think this world was just as laughable.
I was devastated. This thing, on the screen, was not Kefka. He was not my Kefka. He was a mockery. A pop-culture’s write off, instead of an attempt to make him identifiable. Recently, we saw the remake of Batman and the Joker in “Dark Knight”. There, the Joker – an actual jester – gave a phrase “I’m like a dog chasing cars... I would know what to do if I actually caught one!” The difference is that Kefka caught one, and he knew exactly what to do. That made him human, not a clown. And that makes him scary.
In the very end of the game, when Kefka goes on a tirade, he reveals his true nature. We learn a lot about who he really is there, in the final moment. A special kind of nihilist, he demands from his opposition the presentation of genuine meaning in the face of natural conflict and inevitable suffering. The climax of the story, our fair protagonists provide their answers of self-discovery, and we learn about their core motivations. Their answers, while endearing, noticeably struggle to do the job. And, when it is all over, it is only with the accompaniment of a phenomenal ending sequence and beautiful music that I can be lulled into thinking they are enough. Just enough.
In the end, I’ll remember Kefka with his royal green robes over his shoulders, not with make-up on his face. And I’ll remember that his laugh is a symbol of our madness, not his.
- Z
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