5 Fan Favorite 'Final Fantasy' Characters (Who Are Monsters)
We love the Final Fantasy series because these games teach players that the only thing sitting between them and saving the world is the will to pull off a bunch of anime-worthy shenanigans. Final Fantasy heroes were the best, at least when our young brains just immediately sided with the characters with less obviously evil hairstyles. Revisiting these games at a later age, however, reveals that many of our favorite characters back in the day are actually total assholes.
Wakka from Final Fantasy X
Why fans love him:
Wakka sounds like Bender from Futurama, has the most powerful special ability in the game, gives the main character a neat-looking sword, and doesn't make fun of his dumb shorts. Wakka is the kind of small-town person we find very nice and never find out that's just because he likes our skin color.
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Why he's a monster:
Underneath his nice facade, Wakka is terribly bigoted towards the Al Bhed, a much-maligned minority in the world of Final Fantasy X. He eventually grows out of it, in part probably because the Al Bhed create tech that makes life much easier, but that's not his only problem. He's such a sociopath that his worst moment takes place not when he's dealing with a supposed enemy, but when he's actually trying to help one. At some point in the game, the city that the Al Bhed have been confined to gets bombed out of existence, and Wakka catches one of the survivors mourning her dead family members. He tries to console her by telling her to think about the bombing as if they were “happy festival fireworks”.
Also, we've previously mentioned that he's nice for giving the main character a sword, but we actually gotta take that one back. Tidus, the main character, is a star Blitzball player, a person who's very good with a blitzball ball – and nothing else. Wakka, on the other hand, is canonically the worst blitzball player and someone who's been fending-off monsters his entire life. He could probably use the sword himself and give the actual blitzball player the ball, right?
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Cid Highwind from Final Fantasy VII
Why fans love him:
Cid Highwind flies planes and is the only Final Fantasy character who smokes.
Why he's a monster:
Even though he's pretty cool on the outside, he's a total douche on the inside (of his house).
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That's how Cid treats Shera, a woman who lives with him and does all of his chores out of guilt. Cid saved her from an accident that she believes she caused, an accident that put an end to Cid's hopes of becoming an astronaut. She also puts up with all sorts of abuse.
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He later understands the error of his ways – kinda. He apologizes because he finds out Shera wasn't indeed responsible for the incident, but not because subjecting someone to all sorts of psychological abuse isn't a bad thing to do.
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Red XIII from Final Fantasy VII
Why fans love him:
Because he looks like a dog.
Why he's a monster:
Because he's literally a monster, but also a figurative one. Hojo, a mad scientist, puts Red XIII in a cage alongside Aerith for the purpose of, ugh, interspecies crossbreeding. It seems like a terrible practice, and even the devs noticed that because they totally changed this segment for the remake. The original version of Red, however, doesn't seem too displeased with the scenario.
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To his credit, he does later apologize for his behavior, claiming that he did it only to throw the mad scientist off guard, but he just didn't need to scare the crap out of Aerith.
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The whole thing about Red is that he's meant to look like a beast but not be one, so he could've just given Aerith a sign, or, y'know, just stayed the hell away because they were about to get rescued anyway.
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Zidane is a sex creep
Why fans love him:
He's a lighter and less-brooding type of Final Fantasy main character and he reminds people of both older Final Fantasy games and of Goku from Dragon Ball/DBZ.
Why he's a monster:
There's, however, one very important aspect in which Zidane diverges from Goku. Whereas we'd have to go to dark places on the internet to find (fanmade) proof that Goku even knows what sex is, Zidane is quite the opposite. Even though he inhabits what looks like a kid's body, Zidane is quite the sex pest. Not only does he chase princess Garnet,
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he even gets to grope her.
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At least she manages to get away from him at the end forgive him and live happily ever after with his ass.
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Cloud is a Tinder catfisher
Why Fans love him:
BIG SWORD. Also, he's the protagonist who built the bridge between the world of Final Fantasy and anime fandom.
Why he's a monster:
The game introduces Cloud as a mercenary who came from a unit of supersoldiers, but it turns out he's just a regular guy who took the identity of an actual gigachad he'd previously met. He's troubled about being a master catfisher, but he enjoys the status boost. He hits it off with Aerith, the girlfriend of the guy whose identity he took. That's pretty weird by itself, but it gets even weirder when he fails to protect her and she ends up dead.
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As soon as she stops breathing, he drops her on a lake (the game's lore never states that this is a common funeral practice in that world) and he's immediately off to snowboard down a mountain. In Cloud's defense, this is less his decision and more what the game has him doing for no reason – in an upbeat minigame, no less, but one can't help but see it as just the most jarring way of mourning someone.
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Top Image: Square Enix
