Final Fantasy is one of the longest running videogame franchises ever, and it's extremely successful. This is due to the franchise’s ability to adapt to the market, but more importantly, they’ve always focused on the basics, core gameplay, story and what goods a story without someone to hate. Final Fantasy has a long and storied villain ensemble with a vast variety of tragic flawed villains players feel bad for, your run-of-the-mill evil kings or CEOs, horrifying otherworldly deities and maniacal monsters.
This list won’t go over how sympathetic a character was, or how much their plan made sense. All that matters is how brutal, ruthless and downright savage these guys were. These villains are determined and stubborn, stopping at nothing to get what they want.
8 Vayne Carudas - Final Fantasy 12
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The big bad of Final Fantasy 12 was ruthless in every sense of the word. He stopped at nothing to fulfill his ambitions. He killed his two older brothers remorselessly at the behest of his father and used the uprisings in Nabradia as an excuse for invading the region.
Through political maneuvering, he finds himself as counsel. When Vayne’s father removes him from this post, he’s found dead in the throne room, and the accused culprit has conveniently taken his own life. Clearly Vayne would stop at nothing to see his plans come to fruition. Vayne’s plans were pretty run-of-the-mill when it comes to villains, but the manner in which he executed them showed his tenacity, while not a memorable villain perse, he was undeniably ruthless.
7 Ultimecia - Final Fantasy 8
The sorceress from Final Fantasy 8 wants to compress all of time and space, to make herself a living god - sounds simple enough. To do this, she starts by killing President Deling tossing his corpse aside like a wrapper. She is cruel and conceitful, as her speech following this makes clear.
Ultimecia wants to make herself the focal point of the universe, with nothing else deserving to live without her. While her hatefulness is evident, in all honesty her character isn’t fleshed out at all and leaves a lot open to player interpretation. Her most iconic scene described above does, however, show her brutality.
6 Delita - Final Fantasy Tactics
This may be seen as a controversial pick; but his actions speak for themselves, despite any righteous intentions. Delita makes a habit of manipulating Ramza, among others, to do his bidding.
Throughout the entirety of the second act of the game he does whatever he wants and hurts whoever he wants all in the pursuit of a higher righteous goal. Lastly, let’s not forget how he mercilessly stabbed Princess Ovelia. Delita is an exceptionally well-written character, but he’s a brutal menace.
5 Kuja - Final Fantasy 9
The main villain of Final Fantasy 9 is a maniacal warmonger hiding behind his silver tongue and endless penchant for metaphors. This egotistical sorcerer’s slow descent into madness is perfectly written in a manner that makes the audience sympathize with him, some even consider him an anti-hero.
Kuja does, however, time and time again display his nefarious intent and at the end of the day his actions can be boiled down to; the world need not exist if Kuja doesn’t thrive in it. Kuja was the catalyst for multiple wars and directly responsible for mass genocide. He burned down and completely destroyed Alexandria to further his own cause of becoming master of ‘Terra’ and ‘Gaia’.
4 Sephiroth - Final Fantasy 7
Sephiroth is one of the most iconic characters in all of gaming. He’s also an absolutely ruthless, brutal villain. While a ton of gamers feel bad for him and consider part of the blame for his actions to lie elsewhere, at the end of the day he did them. While Sephiroth’s backstory in Crisis Core: Final Fantasy are tragic, especially his relationships with Angeal and Genesis, but it doesn’t discount his impressive resume of brutality. He slaughters everyone in his way at Shinra Headquarters to rescue Jenova. Consequently, he burns down the entire town of Nibelheim. Sephiroth kills Tifa’s father and constantly manipulates Cloud throughout the story of Final Fantasy 7. Most importantly, let’s not forget how he impaled Aerith.
This rundown above doesn’t even go over his actual plans and what he does to achieve them. Sephiroth is one of the best written characters in Final Fantasy by far, but he’s as ruthless as they come and no amount of manipulation by Shinra or Hojo changes that.
3 Professor Hojo - Final Fantasy 7
Professor Hojo is the mastermind behind the Genova project and is interconnected with every antagonist in Final Fantasy 7. For him, the only thing that matters is the success of his scientific theories, everything else is just a price to pay. Hojo manipulates Sephiroth leading to the Nibelheim crisis, later injecting the survivors with samples of Sephiroth’s genetic material in an attempt to further his hypothesis.
Hojo is sadistic and doesn’t care how much destruction he causes pursuing his aims, in a way the terror he causes, and his own ruthlessness is quite underrated as it remains in the background largely which is why he's one of the most ruthless villains in the franchise, maliciously working the dark.
2 Emet-Selch - Final Fantasy 14
Emet-Selch is one of multiple antagonists in Final Fantasy 14 and definitely the most popular one. Slech probably has the most lore and background history surrounding him of any character on this list, in Final Fantasy 14 Stormblood he reveals that he only built the Garlean Empire to create chaos and invoking another Calamity, plotting a civil war after the death of his previous vessel as a means to that end.
Emet-Selch’s ruthlessness is evident by the fact that he didn’t consider killing human beings as murder, as they were ‘lesser beings’ thus his actions of mass genocide were all done remorselessly. A tragic character, marked by loss and sorrow and fueled by revenge, Selch remains one of the most popular characters in the series, but his end goal is harrowing.
1 Kefka Palazzo - Final Fantasy 6
Kefka is the most terrifying and ruthless villain in the series. This mass murdering harlequin actually succeeded in his end-goal for some time at least, essentially destroying the world in a massive cataclysm killing millions and ruling over its dilapidated remains. Kefka’s actions led to the deaths of multiple important story characters, and he ran a cult in his glory. He’s one of the few characters mentioned here with no morally gray areas-he’s all evil.