Samven's Writing Lectures

[Samven]

I find that Kuja is actually better in the beginning when he is ambitious rather than crazy. In my humble opinion, FFIX shot itself in the foot by making him the ultimate villain. I would written him so that he meets his end at Garland's hands. He would have chased his ambitious dreams for so long, only to have them stolen from him: thus giving him a more sympathetic end. He fell victim to something all humans fear at some point - the fact that we may not be good enough. The fear of failure. This way, Kuja would have been just another pawn of Garland's and it would have been possible to see more of Zidane in him. But no.

Kefka I can sort of get behind because he's just a pantomime villain, really. Not great but at least the writers seem to know he's kind of crappy and just have fun with it. Which makes sense to me. If your villain is unoriginal and full of cliches, the least you can do is have some degree of amusement with them. Plus, they treat Kefka in Act Two more like a huge mass of chaos. The "force of nature", if you will. Kefka might be the final boss but Gestahl was the antagonist. Gestahl set the whole plot into motion and Gestahl can be linked back to everything wrong in the world. Gestahl I like because his goal is very clearly control. He even says that he doesn't want the world destroyed because then he can't rule it. This is a point I wish a lot more JRPG baddies would understand.

Honestly, I don't think a villain necessarily needs to have necessarily "good" traits. They just need to have some degree of personality. A human emotion that drives them. I can't get behind "insane" villains myself because they're just not interesting. You might as well just stick a raging monster in the top villain slot. It'd do the same job. I want my villain to feel like an active, thinking human being: not some violent force of nature. This is why Chrono Trigger works, despite being a Square game. Lavos is treated as a non-sentient being that just destroys because that's its primal nature. There's more to it than that but I honestly prefer this impression of the character.

What I would say, though, is that a villain who is driven by ambition should feel like they're pursuing that ambition. See Jirall from The Last Story for a great example of this. He becomes increasing desperate and frenzied and his motives shift at first from putting himself ahead of life to simply making sure the heroes can't get any further by putting them down at every turn. Jirall is a good villain because, even in his most panicked moments, he's still a person. He never just slaughters for no reason. Everything he does has a motivation behind it: even if that motivation is completely selfish. It's characters like that that I think you could look at for this villain of yours in question.