Beasts. We are afeared of them. We understand little of them.
Beasts carry gold coings. Beasts attack anything they see on sight. Beasts wield insane and powerful abilities beyond the capabilities of any of those made radiant by the lorde’s light.
If your video game contains combat, smart money says that your foes will be a beasts. Beasts can be anything, they can be a genie or a walking house or a floating diamond, or a MAN. They are the default requirement of any number of genres, so much so that 99% of games never pose any idea of what the living fuck these beasts “are”, and why they are. They’re just beasts.
After reflecting on my failed but ingenious What Was Their Deal? thread, I’m not going to overcomplicate things: If you see a beast of an unusual nature, I want to see its ass in here. I’d love some thoughts on the bugger but you can also not say anything about them.
POST YOUR BEASTS
Mr. Chupon (Final Fantasy 6)
Now I have spilled much ink on the matter of Mr. Chupon and his best friend Ultros, but I would like to take a moment to note that he is not some kind of form of life that could possibly operate under the natural laws of their world. The poop goes nowhere.
This means he must be made of magic itself, like the Espers. Are beasts in FF manifestations of that world’s magic? By that measure, why can humans wield the same magical abilities? Why can Relm control beasts with her magic?
My theory is that beasts in FF are what happens when magic - a creative and plastic force that can be shaped any number of ways by numerous cultures - is given no direction by will or a design. It must be that magical beings like beasts form from nature. Chupon seems like hunger incarnate, a very powerful force in the world.
Why he sneeze tho? Hm?? Because it’s “funny”??? Because it’s “quirky”??? You would imagine me satisfied by such an answer???
Komodo Pup (Chrono Cross)
Fuggn love these little bastards…
Komodo Pup’s run about like my favorite irl animal, the unnamed Desert Lizard That Scampers, and true to their inspiration they typically don’t try to attack you! They’re closer to regular animals than your average savage beast. That said, they can inexplicably cast CureAll, lending credence to my idea that humans and beasts in Square JRPGs are made of the same starstuff, and that humans are too sentient to effortlessly cast some of these spells like these creatures.
Notable is that they can be domesticated, meaning that some beasts do not crave the immediate death of any thinking creature they see.
There’s actually a boss fight hidden away in a subquest where you find the “Mama Komodo”, presumably some manner of broodmother for the hundreds of Komodo Pups you encounter throughout the El Nido archipelago.
Ryusight, Shibou, Fat Cell (Breath of Fire 2)
In BoF 2, you do a fantastic voyage to clear out some malevolent germs from a princess.
These guys cast spells against you. They are called “evil” by the wizard that sends you in, implying they have a will and an intelligence of some kind. I clearly remember playing this segment as a kid and idly wondering what it meant that microbes in this universe wield magic and look exactly the same as vastly more massive and complex forms of life. It sort of implies that all life of any scale in the BoFverse are the same kind of thing, including humans and cat-women, and Bow.
I can’t exactly say why but I found it very unsettling then and now this idea that we would be no different than a germ, these thoughtless goopy machines that consume and rend and wander. For this reason and others, I hate these beasts. It is a grim task to have to lower myself to do battle against them.
Blue Fish (Bomberman 64)
The beasts in Bomberman 64 do not pursue you, they amble about with dull, mindless locomotion until they wham into you. They show no survival instinct whatsoever. If you drain the water they swim within, they grow two legs and waltz about.
I don’t have any thoughts on these fellas I just like them. Check them out in motion!
Healie (Dragon Quest IV)
This one threw me for a real fucking loop because Healie speaks the word of man, and further, desires to walk as men do.
I was pretty horrified to discover beasts in Dragon Quest seem to be sentient and capable of speaking, they just choose not to. Thankfully, @bib was able to dig into this question and revealed that no beasts are actually “slain” in Dragon Quest, according to the creator, they instead are merely “defeated” and scamper away after you cast level 18 fire armageddon on them. Sometimes, they get back up, then turn to you, and ask to join you. Many questions.
My headcannon with the DQ world is that, in a similar fashion to Mr. Chupon and Ultros, they regard humans as a curiosity and hold little respect for them (certainly not thinking it worth the effort to learn their language). Healie’s a real exception here, so obsessed with these stone-shlepping apes that he successfully, through unknown means, transforms ???
In essence ensorcelling himself into beastform, though from his perspective the beast is MAN.
Portalgheist (Chrono Cross)
deep breath
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
