2. Kefka (FFVI)
The Psycho Clown, as many call him, is a true megalomaniac. Kefka's grip on sanity slipped when he was experimented on as the first Magitek Knight, giving him untold power as the cost of any grasp of human emotion, empathy or even a sense of reality. Granted, of all the villains in the series, Kefka perhaps stands out as the candidate for mindless crazy evil without much real motivation, but it's precisely because of this that he ranks so highly. Kefka is the Joker on crack: he wants to watch the world burn, just because it amuses him. And indeed, the world does burn. He manipulates Terra into committing atrocities she had no control over, burns Edgar's castle to the ground, poisons the river of Doma's castle, killing almost all inside then muses on the sweet music of a hundred voices screaming in unison. And then he essentially snaps the world in two and makes himself a God. Kefka truly is as mad as a bag of hammers, a box of frogs, a hatter. And then some. His laugh, a high-pitched squeal that he lapses into with hysteria upon cracking one of his own jokes, is one of the most iconic sounds in the series' history. His appearance, somewhere between a clown, a court jester and a geisha, is one of the most memorable and unique of not just Final Fantasy, but all video game characters. Colourful, flamboyant, eccentric and totally without remorse, Kefka loses out to only one other.