Kefka vs. Sephiroth

Dark Hellion · Post by **Dark Hellion** » 2004-03-02 04:29am

If you want to go by just game difficulty, Kefka is retardedly easy. Simply have ultima on 4 people and you cannot lose. I may be overstating it a bit, but you can beat him with under 10 hours of play quite easily if you are insane enough to put up with having to get lucky against a lot of early bosses.
Sephiroth is actually a challenge some of the time. He at least takes a beating better.

Frankly, given what Kefka actual did with the goddesses power, and the fact that you can so easily trounce him means either A) he was rather retarded and couldn't use the power fully, or B) the goddesses sorta sucked.

Don't get me wrong, I like FF3 more than FF7, especially because of Mog, Umaro, Gogo, and my undying hatred of Gau, but Sephiroth is seemingly tougher, because we don't have a very consistant base of actual numbers to go off of.

Post by **Ghost Rider** » 2004-03-02 09:23am

If we use Ultima the stick to use the standard by for Kefka, then what's good for the goose is good for the gander.

Four Knights of the Round and Sephy dies(meaning all three forms of him), he's that retardly easy.

Hell, with the right Materia combo...I only have to touch the controller once. to hit Mime for one more time. Sneak attack make the game even more broken.

But storywise, Kefka has done more.

Smiling Bandit · Post by **Smiling Bandit** » 2004-03-02 10:18am

Phoenix Downs restore KOs, not death.

What, being burned alive from a meteor spells smacking you itno the face isn't good enough?

Final Fantasy gmes don't make a distinction beteen KO and death. Some other similar games do.

Darth Raptor · Post by **Darth Raptor** » 2004-03-02 10:31am

Smiling Bandit wrote:Final Fantasy gmes don't make a distinction beteen KO and death. Some other similar games do.

You can't recover from fatal wounds by getting a good night's rest.

General Zod · Post by **General Zod** » 2004-03-02 11:48am

Smiling Bandit wrote:
Phoenix Downs restore KOs, not death.
What, being burned alive from a meteor spells smacking you itno the face isn't good enough?

Final Fantasy gmes don't make a distinction beteen KO and death. Some other similar games do.

FF6 actually -did- have scenarios where you could permanently lose characters in your party. when that happens they effectively died. the phoenix downs i'd chalk up to strictly battle mechanics, as opposed to in-universe mechanics. (as we've seen various things happen in cinema scenes that showed certain spells/summons being used, but were rather different from what happened in battle).

Gil Hamilton · Post by **Gil Hamilton** » 2004-03-02 10:14pm

Smiling Bandit wrote:What, being burned alive from a meteor spells smacking you itno the face isn't good enough?

Final Fantasy gmes don't make a distinction beteen KO and death. Some other similar games do.

Yes they do. KO is just that... a knock out.

BlkbrryTheGreat · Post by **BlkbrryTheGreat** » 2004-03-03 12:55am

One Winged Angel.... the best final boss song in a RPG...... EVER! Sepiroth takes it for that reason alone in my opinion

Sporkzen · Post by **Sporkzen** » 2004-03-03 12:34pm

Smiling Bandit wrote:
Final Fantasy gmes don't make a distinction beteen KO and death. Some other similar games do.

What about general Leo?

General Zod · Post by **General Zod** » 2004-03-03 01:08pm

BlkbrryTheGreat wrote:One Winged Angel.... the best final boss song in a RPG...... EVER! Sepiroth takes it for that reason alone in my opinion

have you ever actually heard Kefka's boss theme? so much cooler, imo.

Dark Hellion · Post by **Dark Hellion** » 2004-03-03 02:39pm

I don't know, Kefkas theme isn't all that cool compared to belting Latin Chorus. Kefka would win if we allowed techno remixes, but I think we can assume that the OP didn't want those.

Seriously, can we establish any numbers for these people. Otherwise, we have a psychopathic clown and a psycopathic pretty boy, who both, might, if pushed, be able to destroy the world. And thats about that.

Smiling Bandit · Post by **Smiling Bandit** » 2004-03-03 02:55pm

What about general Leo?

That was sort of my point. The systems make no distinction between being shot to death, hit by fireballs from orbit, or blasted by the uberbeam of the ultimate dragon. All of these can hit and kill you, and a simple item available in any store can bring you back if used quickly. The world of RPG's implicitly breaks the 4th wall of their own accord.

Connor MacLeod · Post by **Connor MacLeod** » 2004-03-03 05:08pm

The main problem I have with Sephiroth's "Meteor" attack actually destroying the entire planet/killing all life is that... well.. to my memory we never really saw it accomplished. Everyone was certainly afraid it would do that... but had it really been done before (and who survived to be able to verify this?) We know Meteor summoned a bigass hunk of space rock and pulled it towards the planet... but why does this automatically make it a planetkiller (to know we'd have to be able to scale the size of the asteroid and velocity... shouldn't be too hard from some of the cutscenes.)

Even if the rock is a planetkiller... the fact remains it still apparently took some time for it to hit (days? Hours? weeks?) - not only does this mean it takes that long to actually execute the attack (which makes it rather impractical) it also means its unlikely he could deliver that much energy by any quicker or more direct means (in other words, it places a firm upper limit on Sephiroth's sustained power output.) Incidentally, this upper limit also sortt of rules out any claimed or inferred "planet killing" or "Supernova" abilities, since both would involve delivering energy levels capable of wiping out all life (in the case of the supernova, what I refer to in terms of energy level is what hte supernova releases - it should quite easily be enough to wipe out all life on an Earthlike planet - and quite probably more quickly than Meteor would have.)

Third... how the hell is it Holy is the only way to kill the asteroid? Its a big rock, yes.. but that doesnt make it invulnerable - deliver enough energy and you can deflect it, fragment it... whatever. Nothing suggests you need anything "special" to stop it.

I should be fair though - many of these same limitations apply to Kefka and his planet-killing/continent destrtoying - he's limited by timeframe, and observation can also limit or negate the probability of his capabilites..)
I should also poitn out that in both cases, that these capabilities may not be proof of high level of energy generation - dumping as high a level of energy as we are talking about in both cases involves significant side effects that would be noticable (among them, the size/duration of fireballs...) If the fireball is only a few kilometers across or lasts only for a handful of seconds, it could not possibly be a gigaton-range input of energy. If the energy outpu twas in the e8-e9 range, for example, the fireball would be thousands of kilometers wide, and persist for over a day.

Cthulhu-chan · Post by **Cthulhu-chan** » 2004-03-04 01:52am

The thing about meteor is that Sephy never intended to destroy the planet in the first place. He DID intend to cause a grevious "wound" to the planet so that virtually all the lifestream energy would have to be redirected there to repair the damage. Of course, he'd be there to absorb it all instead, thus elevating him to "godhood". You are right, though. Meteor does place an upper limit on his power, otherwise he'd just blast a hole in the ground himself, eh? Anyhow, I'm pretty sure that meteor couldn't actually destroy a planet, but was intended to cause extinction level events.

As for the little cataclysm that occurs because of Kefka, the actual mechanism for that was him moving the goddess statues out of alignment. Kefka hadn't even absorbed the power of the goddess statues by that point.

Smiling Bandit · Post by **Smiling Bandit** » 2004-03-04 10:13am

I think the votes are in and Kefka wins by 67%!

Go evil jesters named after Russian psychological fiction writers!

The Kernel · Post by **The Kernel** » 2004-03-04 10:28am

Cthulhu-chan wrote: As for the little cataclysm that occurs because of Kefka, the actual mechanism for that was him moving the goddess statues out of alignment. Kefka hadn't even absorbed the power of the goddess statues by that point.

Good point, I'd forgotten about that. As the Espers said, the power of the statues being moved out of alignment would be enough to rearrange the surface of the planet. Kefka wasn't involved in that, but he did harnes their power later to build his tower and use his "Light of Judgement".

The problem with either of these guys having uber-power is that they were both defeated by mere mortals. That puts a certain limit on what they can do since neither of them was defeated by any cheap tricks, but by a straightforward battle.

Admiral Valdemar · Post by **Admiral Valdemar** » 2004-03-04 11:35am

Connor MacLeod wrote:The main problem I have with Sephiroth's "Meteor" attack actually destroying the entire planet/killing all life is that... well.. to my memory we never really saw it accomplished. Everyone was certainly afraid it would do that... but had it really been done before (and who survived to be able to verify this?) We know Meteor summoned a bigass hunk of space rock and pulled it towards the planet... but why does this automatically make it a planetkiller (to know we'd have to be able to scale the size of the asteroid and velocity... shouldn't be too hard from some of the cutscenes.)

There's a good part at the end with the thing fit in the old crater as the Highwind flies off.

Even if the rock is a planetkiller... the fact remains it still apparently took some time for it to hit (days? Hours? weeks?) - not only does this mean it takes that long to actually execute the attack (which makes it rather impractical) it also means its unlikely he could deliver that much energy by any quicker or more direct means (in other words, it places a firm upper limit on Sephiroth's sustained power output.) Incidentally, this upper limit also sortt of rules out any claimed or inferred "planet killing" or "Supernova" abilities, since both would involve delivering energy levels capable of wiping out all life (in the case of the supernova, what I refer to in terms of energy level is what hte supernova releases - it should quite easily be enough to wipe out all life on an Earthlike planet - and quite probably more quickly than Meteor would have.)

IIRC, the idea was that the planet utilised the lifestream energy which may also mean eradicating humans to repair the damage, hence Holy was a message to Gaia if you will to spare life on the planet. And I think the time from the summoning of Meteor and the release of the Weapons to the final fight was around a week or so.

Third... how the hell is it Holy is the only way to kill the asteroid? Its a big rock, yes.. but that doesnt make it invulnerable - deliver enough energy and you can deflect it, fragment it... whatever. Nothing suggests you need anything "special" to stop it.

They flung a big chunk of Huge Materia at it with the old #26 Shin-ra rocket and it simply blew a large chunk that reformed itself into Metero again. I think it's safe to say that you'd need to vape the whole thing to stop it and even then we don't know what it was made of and it seemed to have a magical ability to reform.

Mayabird · Post by **Mayabird** » 2004-03-04 04:54pm

Admiral Valdemar wrote:
Third... how the hell is it Holy is the only way to kill the asteroid? Its a big rock, yes.. but that doesnt make it invulnerable - deliver enough energy and you can deflect it, fragment it... whatever. Nothing suggests you need anything "special" to stop it.
They flung a big chunk of Huge Materia at it with the old #26 Shin-ra rocket and it simply blew a large chunk that reformed itself into Metero again. I think it's safe to say that you'd need to vape the whole thing to stop it and even then we don't know what it was made of and it seemed to have a magical ability to reform.

**MAJOR SPOILER ALERT**

In the ending sequence, Meteor didn't seem very, well, meteror-ish to me (not that it ever looked properly meteor-ish anyway). I expected it to approach the planet and just before it makes its super-jumbo ultra-crater where Midgar used to be, Holy would stop it somehow and then you have the happily ever after sequence. I wondered why they thought that hiding in the slums would be any protection. But then Meteor slowly approaches the world and sends out these giant red tentacle things to rip the city apart instead of just crashing and going boom. I think I was wondering as I watched it, "What's going on? It's going too slow!" Sephiroth just wants the Lifestream energy brought in one place and Meteor seems to be more into the magic of destruction than physics.

(This is where my memories of the game storyline get a little fuzzy.)
For some reason I was thinking that Sephiroth summoned Meteor. It would make more sense in some ways than just "I'm going to pull in a giant rock which for some reason doesn't obey physics." This may have been a major job of summoning; however, it means that Sephy himself was not up to the task. Anyway, if this was some ancient demon, the opposite of Holy, let's say, then it would still cause plenty of damage to the world through whatever sprirtual/magical mechanism that giant evil ancient demons use. The Lifestream would still have to be sent into the area to repair the damage, and then Sephy wins.

I'm not saying that Meteor was a demon or anything. I'm just saying that it doesn't seem like just a giant rock for massive destruction like the KT impactor. And if it really just was an Ultimate Summon of Destruction, well, keeps Sephiroth from looking all that powerful.

**/MAJOR SPOILER ALERT**

Of course I might be wrong. I can't remember all those discussions about Sephiroth and Meteor that well. I should probably stick to leveling up in the late hours of the night instead of letting the plot develop. I miss so much that way.

GoldenFalcon · Post by **GoldenFalcon** » 2004-03-05 12:54am

I believe Kefka wins purely because of his insanity.

Hey, even Sephy would get scared at that maniac. Wouldn't you get scared of a glowing killer clown in control of turbolaser-quality beams?

But then again...there's always Supernova...

Post by **Lagmonster** » 2004-03-08 12:38pm

I kinda figure it this way:

Sephiroth was trying to achieve godhood. Kefka was in direct command of the powers of THREE goddesses. There's a level-of-power difference there that says to any reasonable person, "Kefka should have wiped his ASS with your whole party, Ultima or no".

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Kefka vs. Sephiroth

Kefka or Sephiroth?