Quote Originally Posted by Lilian
To me, a good villain has to be well-developed as a character, have understandable motivations, and honestly believe that what they're doing is for the greater good.
He's well-developed, it's easy to understand he wants to control the world, and he believes what he's doing is for his greater good. Makes sense.

It's more realistic that way--even Hitler believed in his cause and thought he was doing the right thing, after all.
This is a video game, buddy, not 1930s Germany. Maybe a little less serious, yathink?

Kefka, on the other hand, just comes across as evil and insane--and not a very well done evil and insane, either. Insane bad guys, if done well, can be both believable and extremely scary. Kefka is neither.
Again, this is a video game. It's not easy to make a video game character scary, especially with 16-bit graphics. I'd say Kefka is realistic and believable enough, and as scary as he could be at the time.

But really, I don't think he's any better or worse than any of the other FF villains. They all tend to more or less fit into the same mold. The Final Fantasy games had the whole Warriors of Light vs. Evil thing in the beginning, and while the stories have gotten way more complex since then, they still have a tendency to show things as stark black and white. And there's nothing wrong with that--you can pull off a perfectly good story that way (and FF does on a regular basis). But personally, I prefer more realistic stories, where everything is in a shade of gray. (Hence my obsession with the Xeno series.)
Where I do see your point, and somewhat agree with you (on all your points), again, this is a game. Why would they make a game where the player must decide what's right or wrong to do? Instead, it's much easier for all parties to simply say "this is what's wrong, fix it", and we go on our merry way. Was there a question that we should destroy Kefka and the Statues, because without curative magic, it'd be much harder to help people? Or to take all the espers instead of leaving some for others? What about the airship, wouldn't that serve a better purpose as a commercial airliner, instead of our own personal taxi?