It's been a while since I did a Bogleech-style monster design showcase! That was a thing that I was planning to do more with this site back when I made it, and then that ended up not really happening. I just couldn't really summon the motivation for any past the first couple. Oops. But! I've finally stumbled across another selection of obsure enough creatures that I feel compelled to talk about here, because I think they deserve to have a record of them online.
If you haven't been keeping up with my yearly game blog articles, I've spent the past year and a half or so slowly working my way through the early release catalog of one FromSoftware, starting with their very first game and from there playing all of the slow, methodical dungeon crawlers that their Souls series eventually acted as a spiritual successor to. I'm most of the way through that list now, but I've inadvertently ended up injecting a little detour into the marathon in the form of the Evergrace series, a duology of early PS2 games they made which are primarily known for their unusual music but also happen to share a good amount of DNA with the other games on my list. The first, Evergrace, has some really great creature designs and its main menu features a bestiary with a built-in model viewer that updates with everything new you encounter. Its prequel Forever Kingdom also has a bunch of fun creatures, canonically said to be mutants, but for some reason they left the bestiary out this time so the entire enemy roster is pretty much completely undocumented outside of a couple obscure JP-only guidebooks and websites. Until now!
All of these are my own screenshots! Any weird interlacing you might see is a side effect of upscaling the game from its native resolution, which kinda breaks all of the game's blur effects. There are no ingame names for the vast majority of these, so I've gone through and hunted the official ones down through the aforementioned Japanese sources and transcribed/romanized them within my limited ability. I am not going to attempt to translate them because I will embarrass myself. (Credit to Taptroupe for her excellent work archiving the guidebooks, and the siterunners of Shooting-Star for their walkthrough.) If I call something by a specific English name instead of the Japanese one, you can assume it's official unless otherwise specified.
The first area of the game introduces your starter enemy in the form of these pig critters (ペッペル Petsuperu), which have the weird bipedal rodent body plan of a jerboa, a long tail ending in a tassel, and strange yellow patterning along their back. The area immediately after replaces these with a variant (ペッペルホーン Petsuperuhōn) that has a pleasant strawberry-looking red and green color scheme, and also just a bed of huge spikes sticking directly out of the top of its head. These guys get stranger the longer you think about them, but while you're actually playing the game they probably won't strike you as worth writing home about. Fairly basic little hybrid creature with some fantasy patterns for flavor.
The strawberry piggies are accompanied in the same area by these cleaver-wielding goblins (ジャマハン Jamahan), which are lanky little red guys with limbs longer than their whole body, while their torso and head are covered by shaggy brown hair that gives them a bit of a monkey vibe overall. I didn't really appreciate these guys that much at first, but running through the game again at upscaled resolution to get a better look at these designs definitely made them feel a bit less generic to me. The perfectly round, empty yellow eyes in particular make this guy feel like a classic cryptid. Notably, for some reason this enemy and this enemy alone releases a little pink orb when killed that floats away and disappears as part of its death animation. What is that. Is that its soul? Is this the only type of enemy with a soul? Is this just some guy and not actually a mutant? Don't worry about it.
This lizard thing (ゼンバー Zenbā) is sort of like a cross between a naked ugly baby bird and a wildly inaccurate shrinkwrapped dinosaur you'd buy a plastic toy of at the dollar store. It doesn't even bother with arms, because they are equally useless to both of those things and it doesn't need them because it can just spit fire to kill you anyway. I appreciate how gross and wrinkly this guy's head is. That look combined with how glassy the eyes are and the sort of bloated abdomen make the whole guy a little grotesque looking, which I can definitely get into despite the fact that conceptually the design isn't really terribly interesting.
There's also an ice variant way later in the game, which is the exact same but blue and white and missing the noise filter on their texture. Literally all of them are trapped in ice that you have to go out of your way to melt to free them, and there is zero reason whatsoever to do that because they will immediately just start trying to kill you anyway. I'm honestly not sure why they're even here.
Chests in this game have a chance of containing one of these two little freaks, who fill the role of mimics. The red guy (ピグミー Pigumī) is actually one of two returning creatures from the first Evergrace, where it didn't have a bestiary entry or consequently a name either because it's not actually possible to kill. The same is true here: whenever you open a chest with this guy in it, it'll unavoidably cling onto you for like a full minute and poison you and it's kind of the worst mechanic in the game. Putting aside my bias against it, though, it's a decently fun critter for how simple it is. It's got a flat little body with only a thin tail and a pair of long, lanky arms, and a sleek black underside to contrast the fiery color on its back, which is a cool look for a little devil. It has big purple bug eyes under a pair of short horns, and it has a short snout with a disproportionately long Violator-type jaw that sorta dangles loosely under its head, complete with a snakey forked tongue lolling around. Honestly, the mouth adds a whole unsavory character to this guy that really complements how much he sucks.
The other guy (タグミー Tagumī) just explodes as soon as it pops out of its chest, which made getting a decent screenshot of it a total pain in the ass, for the record. But it's pretty cool if you have the time to process what it looks like. Same body plan as the red guy, but instead of a smooth body it's covered in what looks like fluffy white down or fur, save for its thin black arms and a tail which ends in a reddish tip in a way that loosely evokes a fuse. It's got a yellow face with a couple of squinty red eyes and a pointed beak with a skullish-looking nasal cavity, and the color scheme kinda makes the whole thing resemble a secretary bird. A little exploding secretary bird that also has the vibe of a weird bug.
The other returning monster from the first game is the Palmira Bee, which is a secret bonus enemy that you can find by smacking certain parts of the environment and will drop a huge reward if you can manage to kill it before it leaves. This thing is like the platonic ideal of a cartoon bee. It's literally just a yellow sphere with wings and little dot eyes. It's kind of hilarious how out of place it is compared to literally everything else here.
I'm mostly including these trolls (ハガン Hagan) for comprehensiveness's sake here, because there's kinda nothing going on with these guys save for the fact that they move really really fast for some reason. But worry not!! If you can get behind them they also have a poison fart attack, to really keep it classy. These are big guys wearing nothing but loincloths and arm/legbands and they have a big pair of bull horns on their head. They come in color variants of green, yellow, and blue, and one of the green guys will turn red and get way faster when you defeat his friends, therefore representing the last element's color. I have not bothered to take a picture of the red troll because he is technically the same monster as the green one, but he gets a second axe in his other hand. I have confidence in the power of your imagination to visualize this.
These guys are big, round floating dudes who appear to be some sort of magic balloon man (ホロ Horo), which are actually controlled by little wizards hanging out in a pouch strapped to their back. The front side of this harness is attached to a huge circular plate of armor, which is decorated to resemble a skull with some pretty cool stylization; the balloon guy's face is also stylized similarly, but instead of the complicated skull he's got a simple little sawtooth frown and a couple of cute dot eyes. For some reason their feet are asymmetrical because the texture seemingly isn't applied correctly on one of them?
When you defeat the balloon guy, it inflates really big and then pops, leaving the wizard (ホアン Hoan) behind to flee and vanish in a puff of smoke after a couple seconds. You can kill him before then if you want to, despite the fact that he's completely harmless now, you monster. Please pay no attention to the fact that he was just taking potshots at you. This guy's got a mask in a matching style that is half huge goofy grin, and big shocks of electric blue hair sticking out from between the straps holding it on. He's a little bit Nightmare Before Christmas with it. That's one of the best personalities a little gremlin freak can have.
These are certainly slimes! Yup! (テサリジェル Tesarijeru)
There's only a couple of this guy (シュミナ Shumina) in the whole game, but they're really charming. These things have a big flat drum for a body and rest low to the ground like a spider until you approach them, at which point they stand up and start flinging fire at you from said drum. I really, really like the head on this dude, which is sort of like a cartoon sea urchin with five eyes and spines arranged like a messy hairstyle that spikes out in every direction. You could stick this guy's head on a Splatoon character and it'd look right at home.
This appears to be an animated statue of a guardian lion sort of creature (ルノルフォ Runorufo), which I wish I knew enough about to identify more specifically. It's not the most interesting thing around, but it's definitely pretty to look at! The gold trim is a nice accent to a very lovely shade of blue, and the level of polish on it definitely sells it as being made of a solid ceramic material. These guys are very well-kept for something that seems to exist exclusively to kill you. (Their tail is not usually perfectly straight like this, but all the good shots I kept getting were always of this animation frame for whatever reason.)
Jesus christ what is that. We're just dipping into actual serious body horror for this one boss. Okay. Sick. This thing (エフェソス Efesosu) is like, a towering pile of gore contained inside a skin "cloak" that gives it the overall shape and impression of a hooded humanoid figure. It appears to have some sort of magical propensity given that its gimmick is that it repeatedly vanishes and reappears accompanied by two illusory copies of itself, which turn into red slimes when killed, and it can shoot balls of energy when it's not just launching a massive horrible mouth out of its meat mass to bite you. It's like a Silent Hill monster with a Resident Evil monster hiding inside it. This game really just shows you its silliest cutscene and then drops you directly into a fight with this thing and never addresses it a single time. It's awesome. I love this for it. This thing rules.
Immediately after the flesh mage (or sometimes before, it seems like the order is random per file) we get thrown into another fight against this wacky dancing cactus thing (マンスルバディ Mansurubadi), which is apparently hollow on the inside because the first thing it does is leap into the air to land directly on top of you and start trying to digest you until your buddy smacks it off. Annoying as hell to fight, but the design IS really fun. It walks around on four nubby roots while waving its arm branches around like an inflatable tube man, it's got a fiery red "hairstyle" of leaves on top, and it's got multicolored fruits hanging from its arms that it can fling at you whenever it's not trying to eat you alive or smack you with the electrified spin attack it has for some reason. It's great! It's a silly, festive-looking weirdo! I wish it did not kill me instantly so many times!
After that fight we are dumped into a cave for pretty much no reason, and before we're allowed to leave we have to kill this sandworm (ザンクトーム Zankutōmu) that's been enchanted to be massive. This thing's gnarly. It incorporates the aesthetics of a knight's armor in a way that reads as partially inorganic, but the slotted plating on the side of its face segues directly into a natural proboscis that's more like an exaggerated witch's nose, and then the underside of its head is lined with thick yellow cilia that give it the impression of a mustache. The alae of the nose attach to the plating but also leave a barely noticeable hole opposite the nostril on top, which is the closest this thing gets to having eyes underneath its big bulbous forehead. The whole thing's this reddish-pinkish color that makes it look uncomfortably fleshy despite the implied rigidity of the armor. It reads more like a grotesque exaggeration of an old man than anything. It's so bizarre. It's a perfect horrible oldman knight worm. This feels like the type of guy I'd see in a Heironymus Bosch painting.
As a hazard throughout the cave, you'll also run into swarms of baby versions of that worm (デハルワーム Deharuwāmu), which latch onto you to deal passive damage and inflict curse. Annoying, but they're real easy to overkill, so they'd make for a decent way to grind out upgrades if there weren't a way more efficient method in literally the next area. They're tiny, so playing normally (especially at native resolution) you'll never really get a good enough look at them to see that they have the same design as the big guy. It's a fun bit of attention to detail.
The same cave also has these crabs (カンブシャ Kanbusha). They're about as generic as you can get, but I appreciate how disproportionately low-poly they are for some reason. This guy is so triangles.
This (デルカル Derukaru) is some sort of... haunted tree man? I think? We got this flowing blue-grey bark texture on a body that splays outwards at the top around a pair of mournful-looking human heads gazing skyward, a set of asymmetrically placed arms, and legs that taper very thin until ending in enormous feet that look more like thumbless hands (roots?). These things passively make an inexplicable bubbling sound whenever they move, which they do by just sliding forward along the ground instead of using those huge feet to walk at all, and they shoot projectiles that are ghostly projections of their own faces. Obviously. It should go without saying by this point that I think this thing is awesome.
These guys (エンキイド Enkiido) are kind of like if you put a bunch of wasps and true bugs and mosquitoes in a blender and the result came out with this sorta symmetrical shape, with a huge nasty stinger on one end and an equally huge proboscis on the other. It's got two antennae pointing straight down on either side of its body that have a bunch of prongs reminiscent of a seven-branched sword or a sai, and then the shell over its head resembles a manmade helmet. But where its silhouette gets weird is in the fact that all of its limbs, wings included, have been condensed down into just two huge arms, which curve at the bottom to create the effect that it's standing on its knuckles like a gorilla. I won't lie, I don't think this would be a very effective way to keep yourself balanced if you happened to be shaped like this. But what do I know!! What I do know is that it gives this guy a pretty unique identity for a bug monster and I think that's great.
The lake is a small area populated entirely by these little scarecrows (リッパー Rippā) with button eyes and huge stitched-on smiles, who wield pairs of shears that are as big as they are. They come in a boy and a girl version, giving us both a very traditional big coat straw hat scarecrow and a farm girl doll with a pink dress and twin braids. These are mostly identical outside of aesthetics, but I think they might technically have different health values? They're nothing all that special, really, but they're pretty charming.
This is a fairly bog standard mage enemy (ヴォンクレ Vonkure), but it's got the fun detail that it is visibly just a hollow cloak and isn't even bothering to imply anything obscured by darkness inside, and it does not let this stop it from having the classic glowing-dots-in-a-black-void eyes anyway. It's barely possible to see even here, but they have tiny perfectly vertical slits for pupils, giving it just a touch more of an inhuman edge on top of the fact that they're like, slightly too low down to line up correctly with the implied face. The eyes peek out from just above a very long paper talisman that is the only other visible element of the design, and then the bottom half of the cloak kinda looks all covered in dust like it's been dragging around on the floor. Instead of casting spells like you'd think they do, this thing's only offensive ability is just a spin attack, which has lightning properties so you can say there is any magic at all involved.
Siiiiiiick. All the other enemies in this palace are mostly here to distract you from these ghostly-white women who hang out in huge mirrors on the wall, who will either stick a hand out to blast you with fire or fully emerge like this to throw out an ice attack. (I couldn't find the name for this one!) More importantly, she looks like she belongs on a heavy metal album cover, and for this she is perfect. She's fairly low-poly since you only see this model for a second at a time, and her body texture combined with that gives her a bit of an androgynous look. She's got wild blown-back bangs like she died in some cartoonish electrocution accident, and then a whole huge head of hair that melds back into almost the entire mirror. The one splash of color on this design is the red eyes crying streaks of blood down each side of her face, but her mouth is also twisted into a gleeful grin, so she's clearly having the time of her life (or I guess her undeath) doing this and the bloody tears are just for the goth aesthetic. This is so aspirational to me. This is what I wanna be when I grow up.
This thing's just a big floating woman head (ファーハン Fāhan), which has a glowering gray face pocked with holes like a hockey mask and a fully rigid head of hair(?) with a flowing, fiery texture. Bereft of any other means of hurting you, these things do what is only natural and float slowly towards you, at which point they extend giant deadly needles directly out of their face-holes in a multitude of directions. (Despite being bright purple the needles don't poison you or anything. They just hurt A Lot.) The visible tris on the model's shading lends a bit to it feeling like some sort of melee-focused divergent evolution from SNES Andross, maybe crossbred with the Castlevania Medusa heads. These are bizarre enough that I feel like I should have more to say about them, but they really just speak for themselves. And what they say is "..." while they gore you with their face spikes.
The writing briefly remembers to acknowledge that monsters exist by springing this guy (フェイディアス Feidiasu) on you as an optional boss fight, who is sort of implied to be a restless spirit or something who once served a couple characters important to the game's backstory. You could do worse for a design that is fundamentally just a guy with a big sword. He's got a vaguely Roman style going on with distinctive laminar armor and a pair of open-toed sandals, all of which are in a rusty red color over a tattered brown tunic, and his helmet doesn't really resemble anything so much as just a misshapen, weirdly organic-looking glob of metal that doesn't even have eyeholes. Under the armor he's this pinkish red color that looks pretty much exactly like exposed muscle, like someone flayed the poor guy alive, and he has this perpetual way-too-wide grimace showing off every last one of his little yellow teeth. Awful! Thanks! The plot forgets he exists as soon as you leave the room, which is par for the course for monsters in this game, but at least he gets to be talked about for another cutscene first after you beat him. Nothing that tells you his name or anything, though. Don't be ridiculous.
This guy also gets a bespoke intro cutscene even though it has nothing to do with anything besides being an obligatory boss to put at the end of the area. This is like some sort of demonic bull (ジャブルー Jaburū) with a big thick lizard tail and two heads, each with an affinity for fire and ice respectively. There are four short horns on the sides of each head, and then the ice head also gets one big horn right on its forehead while the fire head gets a more traditional pair of them. It's got six legs, and the body above the back four is a more neutral tan before the front two split off into their elemental colors, which implies an anatomical plan that's kind of like a centaur that just continues forward into More Animal instead of a guy. Altogether a reasonably cool Elemental Thingamajig, though not terribly memorable.
These fish warrior guys (クテテツン Kutetetsun) suuuuuuuck to deal with, but they're pretty fun to look at. Their proportions are completely out of whack. We've got long, lanky arms and legs lined with small spikes along one side, which attach to a very slender body that's a bit shorter than the limbs themselves are, and then it's got a tiny little head and a tiny little tail, like someone just took a regular fish and stuck its midsection into a taffy puller that somehow also gave it human man limbs. These guys have a really nice color scheme with a deep red underbelly to contrast the pleasant blue of its body, and then round out the primary colors with yellow webbing between its digits and on the fin along its back. They carry a spear and just slowly inch towards you in this pose before smacking you, mouths perpetually agape. I don't think the mouth even animates, actually. It's just stuck like that.
Here we've got a giant frog (クシュ Kushu) standing plantigrade on its hind legs, no real extra frills or anything besides the same sort of patterned markings we saw on the pigs at the beginning of the game. Of note, these markings are consistent with a type of magically animated doll that's relevant to this game's plot, so it's interesting how rarely they appear on the enemies; all of these other mutants just showed up on their own, but someone deliberately went out of their way to make some really big frogs. I appreciate that. These guys have a distinctively narrow, pointed face that gives them a bit of a sneering expression, and their eyes bulge more out the sides of their head than the top like most frogs. They hop towards you and lash out their tongue at you at close-range, which is actually a fairly realistic length compared to the chameleon tongues that are incorrectly given to frogs in a lot of pop culture. I am especially grateful for this because if they were any longer their capacity to stunlock you would be horrendous. Instead they're just normal annoying.
These things (コンメラ Konmera) feature in a brief sequence where you fall into a trap and get all your party members kidnapped by them out of nowhere, after which you must find them in a place the game calls the "Sleepers Room", so I guess these must be the Sleepers? Which I suppose is as good a name as any, because what the hell do you even call this. This is a Pikmin enemy that independently got invented months before Pikmin even came out. It's like a flower, complete with a stem and a bulb, which has evolved to resemble some sort of yellow dolphin with long propeller-like ears(?) on each side of its head and six red eyes. These guys exist in both the ice temple (where they seem to just grow down from the sky) and in the directly adjacent fire temple (where smaller ones instead live in little fire pits on the sides of the halls), and they make this otherworldly, howling birdcall sound whenever they attack you. As a sidenote: it seems like the vertices in the middle of its mouth weren't rigged correctly to its animation skeleton, because its teeth visibly clip through the bottom of its head whenever it opens its jaw in a way that does not look intentional.
This is a pretty nondescript mammalian demon beast (バルクワラ Barukuwara) to populate the fire temple with, just kind of a big weird red dog with a stubby tail and a head that looks like it belongs to a C-list DOOM enemy. He's just this gormless-lookin' guy with big curved devil horns and a broad mouth with little tusks jutting up from the far corners. I can at least appreciate how strange the arrangement of its eyes is; there's just seven of those things symmetrically dotted Wherever on its face, in a way where if there was an eighth to mirror the one that's currently dead center you'd have a fully plausible spider face. The fact that it's an odd number is kinda more fun, though.
This is a pretty garden-variety phoenix (ファラージ Farāji), but I can appreciate that it looks all gooey and amorphous like it's made out of cartoon lava. It's less a bird with a fire affinity and more just a molten glob that's been crudely molded into a birdlike shape. Not much else to say about it, really.
What is seemingly considered part of this area but never actually appears in the main story are these nautilus guys (コティマ Kotima), which are exclusive to the coliseum bonus mode that becomes progressively more difficult and swaps out its featured enemies throughout the game. Their exclusion from the main game probably has something to do with the fact that they don't adhere to the ice/fire gimmick that all of the other enemies in this area do; their offensive abilities begin and end at omitting electricity that frustratingly has priority over just about anything you can do to them. Overall pretty standard design for a nautilus that doesn't do much of anything to set itself apart from its inspiration, aside from replacing the mass of short tentacles with five big long floppy cartoon ones and rotating it a bit so the hole in the shell faces straight down. It's fine, and I'll never say no to a nautilus, but even this far back we've already seen FromSoft do far more interesting things with them.
Actual plot-relevant boss Solca, who is not included here because she is just a human character who has her own official art and everything, is assisted in her fight by these bizarre summons (ギョレメ Gyoreme) that self-destruct after a short time and get respawned in exponentially greater numbers the longer the fight lasts. These things are so cool, man. They feel like the type of entity you'd see described in an old alien sighting; pale, towering humanoids with a distinctively flat triangular head and short, blunt horns growing straight out sideways, completely featureless save for thin red eyes that vertically run the whole length down its face. They move in perfect synchronization and their heads aggressively pivot left and right whenever they take a step to add an ambiguously mechanical, clockwork quality that really complements the vibe they got going on. Their torsos are very long (and also have the doll patterning on them, reinforcing their artificiality) and their arms nearly reach down to the floor, tapering abruptly at the elbows like a puffy sleeve to segue into thin, chitinous-looking purple forearms ending in simple two-fingered claws. Their legs are much shorter and structured like an animal's with a similar transition to purple at the joint where there's a little dewclaw, and they terminate in a single curved point. All they do is hurriedly strut around and then stick their arms out and start levitating before they explode. And like, yeah. Sure. They might as well do that.
Yeah this guy's like extremely up my alley. This (ロビアン Robian) looks like the sort of prehistoric crustacean that's all the rage with the kids these days, with two big hooked claws for forelimbs and the rest of its limbs all condensed around the horseshoe crab telson on its backside to propel itself around, and it somehow uses these things to effortlessly fly around through the air like it's water. Its entire underside is covered in what looks to be hundreds of bright orange eggs, which it can and will just drop on you in a concentrated stream one at a time, at which point they will hatch into a beautiful baby known as Fireball Explosion. This thing was a complete pain in the ass to get a good picture of because its default behavior is to float around way above everything in the sky, so the first person mode is useless for getting a good angle and it also likes to constantly hang out behind the UI at the top of the screen. I still love it on principle in spite of this. They could never make me hate you. You could never make me hate you, even if you're so so annoying. Also it makes a cartoon splat noise when it dies, so it's even more perfect somehow.
This little bat (ケワルナイ Kewarunai) is a completely unique enemy that only appears once in the entire game, guarding an item that's required to progress through one of its smallest areas. Honestly this thing is so nothing that I didn't realize it even existed until I ran through the game a second time to grab screenshots of everything. The whole area's a bunch of cliffs where you need to drop down to proceed, so I honestly think on my first playthrough one of my party members might've fallen ahead and killed it before I even saw it, because it also dies instantly if you can hit it on account of being a regular small animal. It's just a realistically tiny purple bat with a very simplified body and an oversized cheshire cat head, which does give it a personality to match the fact that fighting it consists of trying to hit an annoying little moving target. The shading around its eyes gives it sort of a raccoon mask. That's kind of it. It is certainly a Video Game Bat.
A couple of these swordfish-shaped things live at the bottom of this waterfall and emerge very briefly to shoot electricity at you every few seconds, and they're in and out so quickly that you'll basically never have time to process that they're seemingly not fish at all. (I also couldn't find this one's name.) What this appears to actually be is some sort of arthropod that's evolved to have an inexplicable piscine body plan?? Its "head" appears to just be a huge downturned proboscis, while the rest of its face runs along the full length of its body with eight huge eyes on its sides and a spiked shell down its back, and its front two limbs are completely vestigial while the back pair has turned into a long set of finlike paddles. After you get past this it kinda loses the plot a little on the bug thing and its back half is just a long, flexible tail with a few additional sets of fins. Regardless, this guy's cool as hell on a conceptual level and I wish it was actually possible to notice at all when playing the game normally.
Here's a fun lanky bugman (パシュミナ Pashumina) with some wacky shapes going on. It's got looong arms on a looong torso, with a couple pairs of wings more than halfway down its body instead of near the shoulders like you'd expect, and then its body just kinda ends in a teardrop shape as a single segment instead of continuing to an abdomen like a real insect. it is also wearing a tasteful loincloth, which rests on the bit where its wings jut out instead of on its weirdly broad hips that attach to sorta mammalian-looking legs. Its head has a couple of short outward-curving horns rather than antennae, and four small red eyes, and then under its chin there's something that looks like a tattered sheet of red cloth and it is fully unclear whether that's an organic part of its body or not. It also reads a bit as like, a bandana that a bandit might wear over their face to make it feel a bit more rogueish? But there's no obvious place where it's affixed like the loincloth is, so who knows. Instead of any naturally bugly means of attacking like pincers or stingers or what-have-you, it does just stab you with a knife, because this thing is Civilized and Cultured.
This guy (カルナック Karunakku) is fun because at a glance you see it and you think "okay, that's basically a male harpy", and then you continue looking at it and it just gets more confusing. So like, we've got a masculine torso with bird wings, and a head with a mane of spiky white hair and a beard. Okay. And there's this big mass of fluff sticking out of its rear where a tail would normally be, but then its legs are also fused into what looks initially like a furry scorpion tail. But then you look closely and see that said tail actually ends in a harmless rounded tip and instead seemingly has thorns growing along its bottom like a plant as its main offensive means, and it has a couple of glowing red spots at the end that appear to be eyes? It's basically impossible to make out these things' faces at native resolution because their details are so small, so on my first playthrough I was under the impression that these guys had mostly human faces going on, maybe a Wind Waker Rito-style beak nose, but instead they do in fact have horrible eyeless monkey faces with huge lipless grimaces full of tiny teeth. The eyes on the tail are the only ones it has, actually. Of course. This is the kind of creature design I come to these games for.
As we start to reach the endgame we come to the doll graveyard where we finally encounter the Palmira Dolls we've been hearing so much about firsthand, discarded en masse and never given a soul or purpose. These things are essentially mannequins in their most uncannily realistic format, and they're decorated with much more elaborate versions of the markings we've seen on other creatures in a way that mostly looks like tribal tattoos, in a nice purple and orange gradient. They come in both a masculine and feminine figure, and both types always tend to spawn together as a unit. They cast a handful of spells, but they're kinda pushovers, so they get away with just having a boss fight where you have to fight your way through a swarm of like fifty of these things and try not to let yourself get overwhelmed; later, the boss at the end of the area (another one I'm omitting for the same reason as Solca) also has them as summons, and if you let them live long enough they will start turning into copies of your own party members in their starting equipment.
While half of your party is fighting the doll swarm, the other half ends up contending with this lady (試作パルミラ人形 Prototype Palmira Doll). She's this broadly human-looking woman with empty white eyes and long blonde hair that just perpetually stands straight up and out and everywhere like it has no gravity. She's wearing a long striped skirt and a corset, and then her entire torso is just kinda covered in Blue Stuff that's spread around like the organic lacing of a fungal network. She doesn't have arms, but the blue stuff does continue off of her body like DNA strands where her arms should be, before terminating unhelpfully in singular sharp points. This is because she has no need for her own hands, on account of the massive green ones she can just control psychically to grab you and beat you up. This fight Absolutely Sucks because she's constantly zigzagging away from you and your party members automatically target the closest enemy, so you are constantly being dragged away from the target you actually have to damage to focus on the hands, and it's completely disorienting and you never have any idea where she is because your camera's already flipped around to look at the thing behind you. It's a mess. But at least this design's cool. No but seriously the coliseum rematch where I got to just push her off a platform into lava was so cathartic
The penultimate area has these floating disembodied hands wielding swords (セヴェルス Severusu), and these things are grisly. I love that for them. The skin on these is the deep, unhealthy blue you get when you fully cut off circulation to a limb or get really nasty frostbite, and then the entire thing is caked in viscera that even spreads onto to the sword itself a bit. The severed stump at its wrist splays out into big ridges of gore, with a single huge spike jutting straight out of the back, completely rigid in a way that feels like that thing's gotta be all bone. It looks like it's been ripped off of its host body as violently as possible. Awful. Just totally gruesome. None of this is a negative, by the way. I don't feel like I should need to explain this by now, but I want to be clear here. Everything I've described here rules.
These wizards (ギブラ Gibura) are kinda the least interesting of the cloaked "mage" enemies in this game at a glance, just having a regular human man face but blue and a little Dragon Quest-looking horned cowl, and then you get too close to them and they just launch a massive serrated blade the size of a person straight out of their torso at you. Hello?? Okay?? There's an uncomfortable veiny quality to the base of the blade, and those same veins also cover the entire top of the cloak in a way that sorta recontextualizes the design as deceptively organic and sorta looks like roots. Like, this dude never emotes and we never get a chance to see what he looks like under that cloak. Maybe this is some sort of weird murderplant that evolved into the shape of a decoy wizard. That's how it gets you. You see a wizard and you're like "well that guy's gonna cast spells at me," and then it summons lightning at you to convince you of this so you let your guard down in close range and get gored by the megaspike. That's just science.
This guy (ティダル Tidaru) is literally flawless. You're just never gonna do better than this. Everyone else can go home. I am tempted to leave it at that but if you've made it this far you're probably enjoying reading me actually talking about the designs. So like, this is essentially a slug with a raised body held up by a couple of three-toed froggy hands and a single stem-like foot that splays out into eight round points in a star shape. And it just sorta hops towards you using all three of these limbs at once, and sometimes stands up on its foot to shoot confusion beams out of its hands at you, and it makes a delightful "wrow!" noise every time it does so. This is another Pikmin enemy that got invented pre-Pikmin. It is also the worst most obnoxious enemy in the entire coliseum mode because having more than one of these around at once leaves you with essentially zero openings to do anything at all, but I can't stay mad at this thing. Just look at it.
The final area of the game starts throwing in monsters that represent multiple elements at once, starting with these fire guys (マグナード Magunādo) wielding a pair of shock batons. These dudes are SO sick. They've got this masculine humanoid figure with lanky overlong limbs, and then instead of a recognizable face their heads are just shaped like a thin hatchet blade with a row of spines along the back like a lizard. The only thing resembling an actual facial feature are the rows of wavy lines along the side of their head like the slits in a helmet, where I think there might be an eye between those near the bottom? But it's unclear. Their spawning animation is an honorable bow (rather than just sitting there invincibly like every other enemy, so you can actually tell when they become possible to damage), and then they smoothly skate around just above the floor on their weird ball-feet. Also they are always on fire. I feel like this is a given, but I should stress that it was very difficult to get a good picture of these guys where they weren't covered in their own particle effects.
These cherubs (イネーニ Inēni) are earth-aligned but carry a horn that doubles as a flamethrower. They sport a pair of very striking crimson wings that don't seem to adhere to any sort of proper anatomy in favor of just going all-out on the pretty flowing patterns; similarly cool if you actually pay close enough attention to notice (which you probably never will at native resolution) is the fact that their abdomen is split into a bunch of separate slices like someone chopped apart a hollow doll at its midsection, which move around independently of each other in a disorganized jumble. This is such a neat detail that I'm kinda shocked they kept it as subtle as it is, knowing what resolution the PS2 runs at? Anyway, very traditionally biblical at a glance, but looking more closely at the mischievous face on these things and the little pointed elf ears, I'd say these are undeniably fairies.
The first of the two final boss fights pits you against the game's two antagonists, Darsul and Drumhort, and it is a horrible brutal nightmare slog, but more importantly Darsul constantly makes sure there's one of these huge, bizarre summons on the field to shoot lasers at you while everything else is also happening. I couldn't find the name for this thing, but it is so interesting. It resembles some sort of prehistoric sculpture, vaguely humanoid in that it has a bunch of thick cylinders sticking out of it around where limbs and a head would be, except they're all pointed backwards to line up with an array of four more along its back. The circle on its "chest" that it attacks from is lined with runes and is the source of a few thin golden lines running along its body like simple veins, and then each of its extremities also has a golden cap on the end that turns red whenever it charges up its big scary beam. It floats around like a parade balloon and rapidly inflates into a massive fiery explosion whenever it's killed. This feels like the type of thing that would be the inspiration for an ancient aliens conspiracy theory if they found something shaped like it in real life.
After Darsul is defeated it's revealed that the souls of Solca (right) and Karmyla (left), the Twin Goddesses relevant to the local folklore of the region, are bound to a magic Crystal of Truth, and now that Darsul's not in control of it anymore it goes haywire and drops you into some sort of divine pocket dimension where they mutate into these gnarly, towering monster versions of themselves. They have what looks like a colorful exoskeleton instead of skin and exaggeratedly statuesque proportions, very thin and very tall with elongated necks and spindly arms ending in strange robotic-looking claws, and they each have a pair of odd fin-like wings. At a glance these look like palette swaps of the same model, but closer inspection reveals a lot of their minor details are actually unique from each other; beyond their hairstyles they don't draw terribly much from their human designs for these, though their arms do loosely reflect the shapes of their sleeves, I guess? Karmyla's puffy shoulders get translated into a sort of pattern of large rigid flares around the biceps that weirdly connect into her torso via long tubes, whereas Solca's loose sleeves turn into... like, a weird mechanical thing where her forearms are a separate piece latched through a hole at the elbow. I don't know what's going on here but I do know it's cool as hell.
When both of the goddesses are downed there's a brief period where the Crystal of Truth itself emerges from under the ground and you gotta tear through its health bar before it drops back down and resets the fight. It's just a perfect sphere, which has a blue circle on the bottom for Solca and a red one on the top for Karmyla, and the rest of it is this sort of mottled grayish purple like a space rock. It is certainly an Orb. Nothing much to say about it.
Meanwhile, if you've done all of the coliseum challenges throughout the whole game, you get a final bonus round that ends with this secret superboss, and if you beat him you can get your hands on the Moonlight Sword as the game's ultimate bonus weapon. The name the walkthrough gives this dude appears to be a joke so I have no idea what his real name is, but he's super sick. We got this black-and-red dragon-centaur thing with four arms, four legs, and a pair of wings that are functionally just big spikes there to look cool because he does not appear to actually need them to rocket around like a jet. One of his sets of arms is always crossed and it's very DBZ. This is what kids these days call "aura", I think? He does have an aura. It's blue. From head-on this guy's silhouette and color scheme makes me think of SpaceGodzilla.
Full disclosure: I did not beat this guy, because the final coliseum sucks colossally and I savescummed my way through it and I was extremely ready to be done with this game by the time I made it to the end. I took this screenshot and bounced. I played through the game three times for this because I didn't realize there would be coliseum-exclusive enemies until it was way too late into my second run, so I also speedran like 90% of the game again after that. I am ready to play anything else now. Goodbye, Forever Kingdom. I sure did have to play you for what felt like Forever. Please get me out of here.
