Last time where we left off was after the whole Midgar chapter of Final Fantasy VII, and I've finally gotten access to the world map! Or, well, the part of the game that allows me to run around the world map, at any rate.
As a little repeat of myself, I'm going in this more or less blind about the monsters, I'll talk about them in chronological order from when I meet them in the game. I'm playing this game more or less blind (other than general spoilers about the plot of a now-20-year-old-game) and it's been kind of fun. This is more or less my little reaction to the monsters of the game as I play through it. I did reorder some of the monsters, but this is more or less the order that you would encounter these guys.
I debated on whether including Red XIII among the monsters, but he's honestly not that monstrous, is he? He's sort of like a Digimon or a more complex Pokemon, some sort of ambiguous canine-feline mixture of features that's not quite wolf but not quite lion, a bunch of human-looking accessories, tattoos and his tail's on fire. He's cool, I like him.
Devil Ride
And we'll start off with my favourite enemy in the 'Midgar Area', the area around Midgar, and it's the rare encounter, the "Devil Ride", a bizarre robot motorbike that drives itself. And when someone says that you just think that the motorcycle runs around on its own, or it's a Transformer or something. But no. This Devil Ride has a weird knight-like head, giant exhaust vents that splay out like some sort of bizarre peacock, an utterly odd-looking contraption with the front wheels, overly-long handles, and most hilariously, two long pink robot arms that are holding the handles. It's such an overly-exaggerated version of a chopper motorbike.
I don't have fancy new 2020-era models for me to compare with, but some of the more memorable FFVII monsters have shown up in Moebius, a digital trading card game, and they got fancy artwork. Yeah, Devil Ride looks like a particularly crazy half-transformed version of a Transformer for sure! I like this guy. He's so ridiculous. Presumably these guys are Shinra robots that went wild or something. If they had launched the Devil Rides at Cloud instead of generic goons on motorbikes, maybe they'd be far, far more successful in stopping Avalanche.
Kalm Fang
The first real area around Midgar has the party sort of wander around a general grassy field between Midgar and the town of Kalm. One of the monsters you fight is this, the "Kalm Fang", and... they're just regular giant wolves. Not much to say here, I guess it's basically obligatory for any fantasy game to beat up giant wolves. Shinra's creepy tentacle-guard-dogs really make these guys feel extra bland.
Prowler & Custom Sweeper
This dude's a straight-up repaint of the Vice enemies in the slums of Sector 5 and 6. They're just thieves, aren't they? Just generic bandits that roam around the countryside. Neat that they're part of the random encounter table, but they're real annoying in-game.
The Custom Sweeper, meanwhile, is a green version of the Sweepers you fight in Shinra buildings. Since the Midgar area is still near where Shinra operates, I guess it makes sense that their machines would be roaming around. In this sequence and the future, I'll be grouping any sort of 'repaint' enemies together since I've talked about them visually before. Again, it's very cool that we see more of these guys, and I 100% love the idea of repainted enemies showing up as stronger variants. It's just that I don't have much to say.
Technically at this point, via a flashback, my party gets to potentially meet a bunch of new enemies (including a dragon!) but I don't fight them so much as get to see another character easily one-shot them in a flashback. I've been told that I'll revisit this area later on, so... yeah, later on it is.
Mandragora
Outside of the town of Kalm is a huge expanse of grass and swamplands, and of course there are plant-themed enemies! Borrowing its name from the many legends surrounding the Mandrake plant, FFVII is the first game where the Mandragora shows up as enemies before they become a recurring enemy. And... it's pretty fun, isn't it? It's just a clump of weed, but it's bunched up like a shoot near the base with a most adorable :< face. Those glowing eyes, that mouth, and, best of all, the roots are arranged like some sort of spidery or virus-like configuration. Perhaps not the most creative plant monster, but for a hostile, simple-looking common plant monster, I do like this little dude!
Elfadunk
Another enemy that appears near Kalm and the Chocobo Farm, the Elfadunk is also a relatively simple "it's an animal, but just with a couple of extra features that make it weird". It's a bright baby blue elephant, but instead of just tusks, it's got spiky bony horns, too. And a rather manic-looking expression with its tongue hanging out and eyes that look like they belong more on a snake or a cat than on a normally gentle looking animal like the elephant. Judging by that concept art, the Elfadunk was always meant to look weirdly unsettling. It attacks by shooting little bubbles from its trunk that inflicts the 'sadness' effect. Okay, sure.
Levrikon
Alternatively called "Reblicon", there's really no telling what the original intention of this dude's katakana name is meant to be. It's like, an angry ostrich or something, but not content at being just a big scary ratite, Levikron's wings have mutated into bizarre stumpy arms with spiky fingers. Reminds me a lot of Digimon like Biyomon and Hawkmon, but putting those sort of hands on the body of a clearly-rabid ostrich is so much more threatening.
Chocobo
A bit of "well I need a guide" moment, because the Chocobos will only spawn if you equip your party with a specific Materia, and then buy a bunch of herbs called 'Greens' that you must toss at the beginning of the battle to prevent the Chocobo from running away. It took me a while to realize what's going on, let's just put it that way, and that there's a second NPC tucked away in a barn in the Chocobo Farm that explains everything to me. Anyway, the Chocobo sort of puts you in a Pokemon-esque game where you need to bait it to stay, kill the monsters it spawns with, before you can ride it... for a time. And you need the Chocobo to bypass a swamp stalked by the mighty Midgar Zolom, which we'll talk about in a bit. A bit of an annoying little minigame, but a fun one to make Final Fantasy's mascot giant ridable chickens integral to the plot.
There are apparently several different 'levels' that can spawn, but all that's really different is just the type of skill you can steal from them if you get them to attack you.
Mu
The last one of the enemies that I can found in the Kalm/Chocobo Farm area is the rare encounter that I actually didn't realize existed until sitting down to do this article. Mu is another recurring element in many Final Fantasy games, almost always portrayed as a cute rodent that burrows into the ground. A lot of the other Mus are obviously meant to be mascots... but FFVII's Mu looks just so much like a regular squirrel with a spikier tail that hides under the ground. I think it's the head that makes it look too much like a realistic rodent; its original concept art for FFVII gave it a more stylized Pokemon-esque head.
Mu's basically part of a weird little very hidden learnable 'enemy skill', L4 Suicide, which will one-shot around 96% of an enemy health if their level is divisible by four. No idea why a burrowing rodent can do this, or what it's meant to represent, but it sure is there.
Midgar Zolom / Midgardsormr
And here's the reason we need a Chocobo. In the overworld, a gigantic black shadow just moves under the waters of a swamp that blocks Cloud's way to newer areas, and he needs a speed boost in the form of a chicken mount to bypass the swamps patrolled by the Midgar Zolom. His original name was intended to be something along the lines of "Midgardsormr", an alternate name for Jormungandr, the Midgard Serpent of Nordic myth (if you can't tell from Nibelheim and Midgar, there's a vague Norse-realm theme to the places in FFVII), and that is so much more cool when you realize what it really means.
He's a big-ass snake that's very very difficult for a party at this period of the game to kill, which I think is a running theme among Final Fantasy games. He's honestly not that weird, just a giant cobra with a weird looking head (look at how tiny the eyes, fangs and tongue proportionally is), goat-horns and a trident tail. But the fact that it prowls the overworld and requires you to jump through hoops to avoid it (or kill it) adds such a gravitas to this overworld boss. Oh, and speaking of which, after you successfully got through the Zolom's swamp, you get a fun little cutscene showing the corpse of another Zolom just impaled and skewered. Hey, Sephiroth, the guy you're trying to chase and stop? He can do this. That's a simple but pretty damn effective way to hammer home just how much Cloud and company are actually outclassed by Katana McWhitehair at this point in the game.
Castanets
The area unlocked by juking the Midgar Zolom is the Mythril (sic) Mine, which has at least one familiar enemy, the Castanets, a purple version of the Caesar Scissor we fought before. It's actually the obligatory weak enemy in the area, I don't have much to say here other than the name's funny.
Crawler
FFVII's Crawler is actually a relatively simple looking snake, but the longer you look at it the weirder it is. It's got its body reared up, but way too much of it is up compared to how a cobra would otherwise do a threat posture. Its flat tail just sort of trails off into two rattlesnake-looking tails, its 'cobra hood' is a huge chunk of flesh, and its head looks more like an angry fanged turtle than an actual snake. What a weirdo; and instead of being a poisonous monster, it actually attacks by breathing ice at you.
A weird giant ice-snake is fun enough, but apparently the Crawler is a legacy enemy in Final Fantasy, being a weird worm or snake like enemy... and this is its first appearance in FFI. And... it's just straight-up a Carrion Crawler, from D&D! That was a fun little trivia to find out, especially after seeing how the Otyugh evolved into a huge plant anglerfish giant in FFXIII. Fun!
Ark Dragon
They call this guy a 'dragon', but he looks so different from the much more traditional looking dragon that Sephiroth one-shots in the flashback. Look at those really large insect-looking wings, and that long, slender body. It took me a bit to realize that those aren't just regular dinosaur arms, but simply pixelated giant mantis arms. And its legs only have a single pointed toe. So this is a bug dragon? I do like it a lot, mostly because of how oddly proportioned its serpentine body is in regards to where the limbs and wings sprout out. Not a whole ton to say other than just I really, really like the idea of a bug dragon thing. I'm not 100% sure why it hangs out with ice-breathing snakes and weird purple crabs, but hey.
Madouge
What is a "Madouge"? Nobody knows. It's this bizarre humanoid with chunky Zaku-style legs, claws on one hand, and a huge iron ball on another. And it's got a bizarre mouthless frog face on its lumpy not-head, and a quasi-robotic or runic face with five eyes built into its chest. It's the rare enemy in the Mythril Mine, and I know this because I was sorta following tips for a friend who loves this game and told me that there's a weapon I need to steal from these guys. But man, what a fucking weirdo. Its attacks are the obvious 'iron ball', as well as... 'swamp shoot'? Yeah, that's not what I expect from a weird pink flesh man with a wrecking ball for an arm. I guess he's some sort of weird ogre-like monster? He's a weirdo. I like him.
Nerosuferoth
Another huge part of the overworld is the "Junon Area" and some of the weaker enemy here is the "Nerosuferoth", which is... it's a weirdo! The limitations of the graphics engine make it a bit hard to tell what it really is, but it's some sort of four-legged creature with the legs and the head of a bird, I think? Some sort of bizarre wingless gryphon or something? The name's bizarre, and it somehow attacks with wings of flame? Okay, a fun weirdo.
Formula
A lot of the enemies in the Junon area are bird-themed for some reason. "Formula" over here is such a sleek fantasy bird, though, with very nice bright purple-pink colours, a blade-like dorsal fin, and generally exudes the look of some over-the-top blade bird. Its attack involves it teleporting (or is it an anime 'flash step'?) and doing a bombing run with its blade like wings, with cool attack names like Blue Impulse and Cross Impulse. It's otherwise a pretty generic enemy, but I do like that it's got a surprisingly large amount of thought put into it.
Zemzelett
Another bird weirdo, the Zemzelett looks like some sort of over-exaggerated owl, only it's got spikes running all around its huge flat wings, it has got huge chunky legs, and it's got a bizarre face that resembles a cat and an owl all at once. The Zemzelett is huge, too, and it really reminds me of an Owlbear of sorts, if Owlbears was more 'owl' and less 'bear'. I do like the proportions on this one, from its chunky legs and its weird body. It's almost got a tokusatsu-monster vibe to it, like a suit actor could get into this thing comfortably and fight a Kamen Rider or something.
Capparwire
An utter weirdo! One of the two enemies in Junon to not be bird-themed in any way, the Capparwire is just a grinning wooden face with two thorny whips for arms (or horns, considering where they sprout out) and two thin legs with pointed toes. Compared to the Mandragora, this thing looks so much more bizarre, huh? Also, for some reason, the Capparwire is an electrical-themed enemy, attacking with lightning bolts and stuff. And yet it still looks so much more natural than half the creatures that Hojo unleashes upon us in the Shinra labs.
Hell Rider VR2
Speaking of electrical-themed monsters, this guy! The Hell Rider VR2 is a weirdo! Its Japanese name is "Hell Harley VR2", apparently a reference to Harley-Davidson... which really should've been the name for Devil Ride up above, the actual demon motorcycle. Also, yes, despite having the codename of VR2, there isn't a "Hell Rider" or "Hell Harley" anywhere in this game, because the original Hell Rider is from Final Fantasy VI, an entire universe away. Okay? It's some armoured dude with a long hammer, riding a cool horned hell-beast, and its attack is a surprisingly elaborate giant electrical dome explosion. Again, there's no real explanation to the Hell Rider VR2. Is it actually just some dude who likes medieval armour and tamed a local wild beast, a tribe of this universe's equivalent to orcs, something involved with Shinra or just straight-up a demon from hell?
Bottomswell
This giant eel-dragon-serpent monster is sort of a boss in the Junon Harbor town, where it terrorizes a little girl and her pet dolphin. It actually has three phases, but when playing the game I actually didn't notice. It's just the fins being spread a bit larger, anyway. There's a lot in this guy, a lot of colours and parts and fins and spikes jutting all over the place. It sure looks impressive, although I feel like there's just something off seeing something that was introduced as an aquatic beast and has such an aquatic theme to its design just floating and wriggling in the air. I do like its bizarre, almost cartoon-wolf looking face. It's ultimately a bit too busy to be one of my favourite monsters, but I did like him as a boss.
In addition to general tidal waves and magical attacks, Bottomswell is also able to trap your party members in bubble prisons that slowly drain their health. I also really like the name "Bottomswell" as a monster from the depths of the ocean.
Marine & Scrutin Eye
The Marine and the Scrutin Eye ("Search Eye" in Japanese) are just stronger versions of the MP and Mono Drive enemies you meet in the very first Shinra dungeon. Cloud and company infiltrate a Shinra base in Junon and basically end up fighting these guys. Not much to say, other than I really didn't care for this whole sequence in the actual game -- the Junon city was pretty bland and the minigames were frustrating.
Jenova∙BIRTH
The final enemy we're covering today is the final boss in this whole 'infiltrate Shinra's boat' sequence, the giant monstrous being called "Jenova∙BIRTH". Or, as I shall refer to her in these couple of paragraphs, "Jenova Birth", because it's annoying to try and get that dot in the name all the time. I suppose I should talk a bit about Jenova? With me trying to say as little as possible (because I actually haven't played through the entire game, so there might be revelations that I'm not entirely sure of yet. Jenova is an ancient being that was dug out of the ground after spending 2000 years frozen in stasis, ostensibly part of the 'Ancient' race that a lot of Shinra's goals revolve around, and the source of a lot of their bio-weapons... including Sephiroth! Whose descent into lunacy and evil is spurred by knowing that he's a clone from Jenova's ancient-being cells, which in turn leads him to want to continue the goal of his "mother" in wiping out humanity and reclaiming it for the Ancients. Okay, ecological Cthulhu.
Sephiroth shows up on the Shinra boat and leaves behind what our party later describes as an "Arm of Jenova", a tentacle which mutates into this huge being. And it's... it's mostly just a huge formless being of flesh with spikes, tentacles, wing-like hands (or hand-like wings), a huge pillar body and the vaguest sense of a humanoid face and a woman's torso at the center. She mostly just attacks by shooting lasers or poisonous gas, though. That Moebius artwork makes her look a lot more humanoid, and a remake-unique boss Jenova Dreamweaver seems to be mostly based on this look... and Jenova BIRTH is... all right, I guess? I just don't have much of an opinion on this huge beast. It sure is a huge monster that looks a lot more impressive than Bottomswell or the Shinra robots, and sure fits a strange flesh-beast mutation elder-ancient-god being thing. She's all right, but this is clear that it's just the prelude to something more since, well, again, this huge flesh-monster is just the first of Jenova's (hopefully) many forms.
______________________________
And that's it for today! This had a bit less monsters because there was a lot of exploration and flashback sequences and generally non-combative stuff on this leg of the game. See you guys next time for the next part of the game's bestiary!
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