Most hated Final Fantasy Villian

[Wolf Kanno]

Personally, I think Yu Yevon is the villain of FFX, Seymour is merely the antagonist, like Gilgamesh, the Turks, Beatrix, Riku and Ritz. The only major difference is that he doesn't switch to your side, which would have completely ruined his character.

I actually agree with you on this point but many FF fans consider Seymour to be the villain. My post can be thought more of a commentary on this odd phenomenon.

An antagonist is a character or group of characters, or, sometimes an institution of a happening who represents the opposition against which the protagonist(s) must contend. In the classic style of story wherein the action consists of a hero fighting a villain, the two can be regarded as protagonist and antagonist, respectively.
Contrary to what some people commonly believe, the antagonist is not always the villain, but simply those who oppose the main character.

One of the main conditions of being a villain is that they have to know that they're evil, which Seymour fails to fulfil decisively.

Actually, most of the main villains don't consider themselves evil either in their respected games. Hell I don't think any of them ever recognize it.

Seymour is the lamest villain in the series by far cause he is irrelevant to the plot of the game he's featured in.

The same could be said for any of the antagonists I mentioned, except for Riku.

Ritz is actually relevant to her plot but that's for another forum. With the exception of her and Riku as you said, it's true but you forget one thing that makes the Turks and Gilgamesh different from Seymour. Besides the addition of comic relief (and I know that's a moot point) the characters mentioned are all actually underlings to a major villain. They do their "flunky" work cause they are ordered to do so by the game's real villain cause you know... they are flunkies . Like your posted definition of antagonist, all of them eventually reveal they are rooting for the heroes and usually your final encounter with them has these characters revealing they are finally fighting for themselves rather than to achieve the goals of the main villain.

Seymour breaks this tradition, he fights only for himslef and eventually chases after Sin in hopes of using it as a vessel to carry out his insane plan. Yet despite his reletive independance from the actual main villain, he's pretty irrelevant, neither his motive, his role, or general purpose does anything to help or expand the storyline except to give your party something to do while they run around Spira collecting summons and searching for Zanarkand.

His crimes are weak compared to what every previous villain and even compared to what Yu-Yevon/Sin was doing in his own game.

That's what antagonists do. They let the villain do all the crimes. Though Seymour has a pretty impressive list for an antagonist.

Hardly, chasing your party around and attacking the Al Bhed and Ronso while attempting to carry out a plan to wipe everything out (which he fails) is pretty weak to the sheer planetary and political strife caused by previous villains in the series. In fact, only the Ronso were really affected by Seymour which is greatly expanded on in X-2.

His motive was lame

Compared to stuff like:
"I'm enslaving the world because I hatehatehateHATE you!"
"If I can't exist, then I'll destroy all the universe!"
Seymour's motive, to send all of Spira into a spiral of death to end their suffering, is very deep.

Kuja has quite possibly the best motive of the villains in the series. You forget that he only tries to destroy everything towards the end of the game. His real motive for most of the game was to gain freedom from his servitude to Garland. He wanted to be free to do what he wanted. His "Destroy the world" motive is not generic either since Kuja is an artificial lifeform that (to him at least) was created to be perfect. His narcissism is different from previous villains.

Kefka, though from a story standpoint is nothing more than a "crazy guy who becomes a god", is much more interesting from a symbolic level. First, he's one of four villains in the series that's actually human. He's also the only villain who does not have a real motive or sob story to explain why he holds his beliefs. Since we have no idea what Kefka was like before the Magitech experiments, blaming them is irrelevant. We only know it made him more crazy. He could have just as well had been an arrogant, cold hearted asshole who never cared about the life of others before as well and the experiments may have just made this more pronounced.

Since it's up to speculation, I don't think either side of the debate can truly use it as a "origin of evil". But Kefka does symbolically represent something that no other villain has before. He's everything wrong with humanity. He's a narcissist, a coward, cruel, wrathful, and a nihilist. That and he's basically a sociopath. He works well for VI cause VI's story is about fighting against human nature. To try and not repeat the mistakes of the past and to hold onto hope for a better tomorrow. Kefka is a wonderful antagonist and villain to coincide with such a theme. Though as a character he has the potential to give us some underlying cause for his insanity and cruelty, he offers nothing. It's just who he is and in the case of sociopaths that's the only true reason most of the time.

Kefka was the first villain (and still the only one to blatanly exclaim his ejoyment of it) to actually revel in the suffereing of others. He doesn'y wipe out humanity when he becomes a god, he destroys everything they have and wipe out's their loved ones so he can enjoy their suffering. He does this for a little more than a year and finally notices the cycle. No matter how amny times he destroyes humanities ambition, they continue to rebuild and hope for a better future. He can't fathom why one would struggle if they know the inheriant suffering that existence brings and thus comes to the conclusion that life is meaningless. That is when he decides to destroy everything...

I feel that is pretty damn deep as well.