FINAL BOSSES
The final bosses in FF games aren't lifted directly from mythology (it makes sense that Square would want original characters for such important roles), but they are often modelled around mythical creatures and tend to embody certain archetypes. This page is slightly different to the rest - I'll be going a little more deeply into archetypes and paying more attention to the FF stories while comparing and contrasting the characters.
Chaos -- Darkness Cloud -- Emperor -- Emperor's Curse -- Garland -- Zemus -- Zemus' Breath -- Zemus' Mind -- Zeromus
Garland (along with his other form, Chaos) is an archetypal villain, whose sole aim in life is to take over the world (using a plan that will forever confuse gamers across the globe). His main counterpart is, fittingly, the figure who has become Western mythology and religion's chief villain: Satan. Garland is described as once being a good knight, which parallels the Christian belief that Satan was once an angel. Chaos also matches up, as he is a "basic demon" with a face on his abdomen, a common feature in Medieval depictions of the Devil.
Chaos' name has other mythological connotations. In Greek mythology, Chaos was the entity that existed before any other beings and was seen as either total emptiness or a goddess. Chaos gave birth to Gaia (Earth), Eros (love) and Tartarus (later used as a prison for the Titans), and a number of other mythologies have parallels (Babylonian mythology, for example, has Tiamat). However, as "chaos" has gone on to become a common dictionary word, FF's Chaos may not be based on the Greek figure.
IMAGES: Image of Satan with a face on his abdomen, from Pierre Boaistuau's 1597 book Histoires Prodigieuses
Aside from being a generic evil ruler, Emperor Paramekia appears tobe based around the folklore surrounding Johann Faust, who lived from the late 15th century to the mid 16th. He (or they, the legendary figure may be an amalgamation of more than one histroical figure) claimed to be a magician, and, according to hearsay surrounding him, sold his soul to the Devil, as did Emperor Paramekia. The Faust legends were collected in the 16th century Faustbook, which was translated into English as The Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor Faustus" (the translator obviously didn't think too much of him). Later variations included Christopher Marlowe's 17th century play The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus and J.W. Von Goethe's 19th century opera Faust
The Emperor's curse - a creature, resembling the Emperor, that attacks you when you try to take a piece of treasure from his castle, is most likely based on the story of the Pharaoh's curse - that is, the idea that breaking into a Pharaoh's tomb and taking artifacts results in bad luck. This can be traced back to Egyptian legends (see the mummy entry), but is very much a part of modern mythology. The expedition that discovered Tutankhamun's tomb supposedly suffered from bad luck afterwards, although sceptics argue that their mishaps were simply coincidental.
Having sold his the Devil, Emperor Paramekia is able to return in an undead form at the end of the game. This is an old supervillain cliche (Garland pulled a similar stunt in FF1, for a start). Arguably the archetyal "Bwahahaha, I'm BACK!" bad guy is Dracula - in Bram Stoker's novel he was implicitly Prince Vlad II back from the grave, and there are any number of films which resurrected him again. The idea was alter popularised by Sauron in The Lord of the Rings.
As she first appears right at the end of the game, the Darkness Cloud doesn't get any character development, and so just ends up being evil for the sake of being evil. This way, she resembles the bad guys in some of mythology's more clear-cut cases of good vs. evil - a good example is St. George and the dragon. The dragon isn't characterised in the story, he's just there as an evil figure to be killed by St. George.
Zande, FF3's true main villain, is a Satan figure in much the same way as Garland - he used to work for the archmage Noah but turned against him (paralleling Satan's fall from heaven), and he resembles the "basic demon".
Much the same story as the Darkness Cloud archetype-wise; Zemus (and his other incarnation, Zeromus) is pretty much just pure evil - in fact, Zeromus even implies that he's anger incarnate.
On another note, anyone besides me think it's a bit odd that Zemus' mind attacks you, while his breath checks your stats? Shouldn't it be the other way round? And doesn't Zeromus' second form look like a boss from R-type?
Back to...GARLAND, CHAOS
EMPEROR, EMPEROR'S CURSE
DARKNESS CLOUD
ZEMUS, ZEMUS' BREATH, ZEMUS' MIND, ZEROMUS
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