Much as it's prooooobably skirting on the edge of spoilers to keep discussing it even in spoiler tags:I feel like discussing mind control is potentially spoiler territory, so I'll put it under spoiler, although I don't think anything I'm saying here is actually a spoiler. I just want to be on the safe side.
As far as I can remember (and I might easily be misremembering, so don't take my word for it), there's exactly only one person in the entire game who claims that Golbez was using mind control on them. I would also point to Rosa, Cid, the need to replace the king with a fake, the choice of "create an army and use it to invade everywhere" as the means of obtaining the crystals rather than "just mind control people into handing them over", and many more contextual cues yet to come, as reason why the "mind control" theory, at this point in the game and without any spoilers, appears suspect. Especially when we had the perfect chance for it to be employed here, with Yang, only for the game to go "nope, no mind control here, that was a silly supposition".
So... just saying... I have my doubts about the mind control theory. Maybe the game will prove me wrong; my memory is known (to me) to be weak and I might just not be remembering a specific scene that made it fully unambiguous, outside of that one character. But from what I remember, no mind control was involved at any point in all of FFIV, and the likelihood that the character who claimed it was would be lying is so huge, I always took that as a given. After all, as we just saw last update: Cecil will believe anything, if it comes from somebody they have the tiniest reason to trust, and he's especially prone to seeing the best in people who really don't deserve the benefit of doubt.
While I can't speak for the 2D versions, at least in the 3D remake version of FFIV said character who claims mind control does, in fact, show signs of being mind controlled. The FFIV 3D has this little feature where whenever you bring up the menu, whichever character is currently leading the party has a little thought bubble of "oh hey what are they currently mulling about" and said character has at two different points in the game, thoughts along the lines of "mrggagaggg get out of my heaaaaaad", one in particular right before a mind control scene.
So at that point it's more just an argument of "is this what the writers originally intended?" since I have no idea if it's the same writing cast decades later who made the 3D remake or anything like that.
So at that point it's more just an argument of "is this what the writers originally intended?" since I have no idea if it's the same writing cast decades later who made the 3D remake or anything like that.