Yeah, basically, the impression I got was "The Empire thought that if you kill an Esper you get a useless dead body, because that's what happened when they over-drained something until it died." The Magicite reveal was "Oh, wait, so we actually want to kill them when they're fresh to get the best use out of it!"
So it was less "Kefka got magical superpowers that let him instantly kill Espers." It was more "Kefka murdered a bunch of dumb teenagers with poor control of their power because he knew that's actually how you get the most power out of them." He always had the ability to do something like that, it's just that there was finally nothing going to stop him from doing so.
Yes, but no.
Like, I get what you're saying, and it makes
sense, but you have to selectively ignore parts of the story for it to actually
work. It's a straightforward fix, but you have to overlook stuff. For instance, the espers at the Magitek Research Facility were all espers so worn out that they were already about to die, so it doesn't make sense that their dying and turning to Magicite is so different from the other espers who also died after being fully drained by force - Cid even comments about the Magicite's power being hundreds of time greater than what they had before. And every step until Kefka does his big gamer move, Magicite is framed as something you turn into by
choice, a deliberate act of self-sacrifice that an esper makes of their own, and which Ramuh explicitly contrasts with 'draining our power by force' as being a much better method for an esper to transfer their power to someone else. It's clearly something
special, distinct from just normal esper death.
Also, when Kefka shows up, he gets a little combat cutscene showing him to be completely immune to esper magic, absorbing their damage spells and then casting a single spell which does a 'warp' effect and transforms the target into magicite, like so:
It could have been that Kefka is just using an illusion to deceive them about his invincibility like he later does with Leo, but at that point we're reaching Aizen levels of using 'illusion' to justify anything, and he is directly attacking them with that weird spell.
He then proceeds to do this to all the espers, both the young ones who don't fully control their power and the older ones who come out of the Sealed Gate to try and save them. Again, he takes on all the espers and wins trivially without a single scratch on him. So either Kefka got a massive power boost into Super Kefka between scenes, or he was always that strong and has just been slagging off during the earlier parts of the game, which I could see, but we're talking like, 'I was secretly Frieza, Destroyer of Worlds' levels of hidden power. And again, he's absorbing magic and using a weird spell that seems to turn all espers into Magicite, so it seems strongly implied that he's doing something cheat and haxx to get around the lopsided logistics of the fight, rather than just revealing he was only fighting with 1% of his power and the entire population of the esper world is helpless before him.
It's just never explained.
This could make sense if, for instance, Cid had also been pulling our leg this whole time and was actually still working with the Empire, and had used the data gathered from the espers turning themselves to Magicite inside the Facility's well-monitored tanks to devise a new spells that causes the transformation forcibly, or even if the Empire had managed to do that on its ow? But you have to project that onto the game, it's not there.
But maybe it'll come up later! I don't know, I'm not done with the game yet.
