#professor shields

[endless-bestiary]

VORTIGAUNT

While it would be mean to call Vortigaunts "monsters", they still have a very interesting design that I'd love to talk about. Everything about the Vortigaunt embodies the aesthetic philosophy of Xen. These beleaguered alien hippies live in a dimension full of ravenous killer squids and flesh-melting hiveminds, yet manage to be deeply philosophical and maintain a connection to their spirituality that's difficult to find even here on Earth. To that end, I'll probably get into a little anthropology at some point, which is outside my wheelhouse but still quite interesting to me.

As far as bipedal humanoid aliens go, Vortigaunts push the boundaries in a fantastic direction. Honestly, describing them as humanoid is a bit of a stretch - the only real similarity is the number and orientation of limbs. Vortigaunts sport four eyes in a diamond arrangement, bright red sclera (if you can even call it that), lamprey-like mouths, tubular "ears", and are hunched over to an extreme degree - and that's just their head. There's a clear amount of love that went into crafting a vastly alien appearance that simultaneously registers as inhuman and nonthreatening. There's an aura of physical weakness to them that is followed through by their personalities. Vortigaunts are just that - gaunt. Despite all of their strange features, the effect of their nonthreatening appearance makes you inherently trust the first one you see in HL2 (yes, they're enemies in HL1, but they're enslaved there and the slave collar changes their aesthetics). 

Vortigaunt culture is incredibly deep and interesting. All Vortigaunts share a low-level telepathic bond, meaning that they have a much more intricate understanding of each other and their society as a whole. I love finding in-lore explanations for otherwise arbitrary design choices, and this telepathic bond serves one up on a silver platter. Vortigaunts don't need to be physically strong because they have the same "power" we do turned up to 11. Humans flourished without claws or venom because we could use tools and work together to solve problems in ways other animals couldn't. Vortigaunts can do that to an even greater degree. We know that they can communicate over large distances in an instant, so they basically started with the internet in their heads - and not our terrible one with racism and TERFs. Vortigaunts are serial collaborators, easily integrating with the resistance due to their easygoing and social nature, and they appear in many resistance camps performing important jobs that humans cannot. 

It's important to note that Vortigaunts *are* combat capable - they can perform electrical blasts and shockwaves that can kill multiple Antlions at once, and there are unused game files that indicate they can stomp Headcrabs and use projectile weapons with great success. Their martial prowess isn't the point, though. A cooperative, psychic, empathic race is (in my EXPERT opinion) the ultimate goal for any sapient society. I'd wager that if humans could empathically sense the suffering of those around them, there would be a great deal more countries with infrastructure to help the less fortunate. Vortigaunt society is a society of healers and scientists. I believe that we have the same capacity. 

SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF: 9/10 DESIGN COHESION: 6/10 PSYCHIC SOCIALIST ALIENS: 10/10 PERSONAL RATING: 8/10

[endless-bestiary]

GRAVELORD NITO

"But then there was Fire, and with Fire came disparity. Heat and cold... life and death... and of course, light and dark." Before the Age of Fire, there were two major species: eternal dragons and stone trees, neither of which were known for dying. When fire rolled around, it invented the idea of living, which invariably meant it also invented death so as to differentiate things that were living from things that weren't. At some point, some poor schmuck pulled the short straw and got offed. As a consolation prize for literally being the first person to die ever, he got upgraded from "tonight's biggest loser" to "God of the Dead", which is a pretty good trade off. Thus, Gravelord Nito was born, and he participated in the war against the dragons by doing what a god of the dead does best: sitting back and letting plagues happen. 

Visually, it's hard to mistake Nito for anything other than what he is. His entire body is made of skeletons and indistinct Bad Grave Stuff, which is a much better look than a lot of games usually shoot for with their God of Death. There's a sort of somber uselessness to his hulking figure that doesn't imply lethality. A god of the dead doesn't run around killing things; Lordran has enough murder and death that he's probably up to his highest set of eye sockets in paperwork. His body is just a big death slug with a sword sticking out of it, and that really does work. The multitude of skeletons that comprise his body look like one big tangle of bodies without being visually overwhelming. Somehow, he has one clear central head without marking it in any way. The arms and bodies of the non-Nito skeletons form a sort of wreath around his neck, giving him a cloak while still remaining one undifferentiated mass. 

Nito's sword is a great imitation of the traditional Western Grim Reaper's scythe. Eastern cultures don't have the same image of death as Western ones, so it was an interesting decision to go with good old Grim. My favorite part about it is that it isn't a forged weapon, but a protrusion of bone and skulls, since the Gravelord may have been born before the blacksmith god and well before ironworking had been passed on to the living. Ironworking requires fire, and fire had literally just been invented. For someone as lore important as Nito, I'm glad they went the extra mile to make every facet of his design lore-friendly, even his weapon. 

I mean, yeah, it could also just be a spooky bone sword, but where's the fun in that?

SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF: 9/10 DESIGN COHESION: 10/10 CALCIUM POWER: 9001/10 PERSONAL RATING: 9/10

[endless-bestiary]

MESMER

Hell yes, fourth wall fish!! The Mesmer is very far to the "game" side of the realism/game scale, but it's done in such an inventive way that I can't really fault it. The Mesmer's particular gimmick is that it can hypnotize prey into approaching it, at which point it can reach out with its four jaws and feed. While this isn't the first or last time we'll see something like the Mesmer in a game, I have to respect the way it's implemented. When you're caught by its shimmering scales, your screen starts to glow and your cursor magnetizes to it. Your PDA, the disembodied voice that provides helpful and sarcastic advice that helps you survive, then instructs you to swim towards the Mesmer. I love that! It's the right mix of creative and a little bit spooky that tips you off to the rest of the game's ruthless nature. When not in Hypnotoad mode, the Mesmer is still a neat looking critter, but you can tell almost all of the effort in its design went into making its gimmick work. Its color scheme directly reflects its mesmeric nature, but I will give the artists some credit - a wavy purple and cyan design can offer some halfway decent camouflage in its native Kelp Forest biome. The body plan of the Mesmer is distinctly "generic fish", complete with the rounded head and flared triangular tail section. The most interesting parts of it that are divorced from the hypnosis gag are its eyes. It has very cuttlefish-inspired wiggly eyes, a detail that both reinforces its "magical" nature while still having some grounding in reality. The Mesmer is a great exercise in exploring the logical conclusion of ambush predators. It asks the question, "What if an animal was itself the ambush?" It flips the game so that it wants to be seen, rather than hiding and waiting for the prey to become vulnerable. Consistent with that, its hunting mechanism is adapted to catching helpless prey, with four spindly mandibles that can only really hurt you if you "allow" it to. Without its gimmick, the Mesmer would likely feed on small crustaceans and the occasional helpless small fish. Instead, it's able to predate larger targets, which allows it to 𝓈𝒽𝒶𝓇𝑒 𝒾𝓉𝓈 𝒷𝑒𝒶𝓊𝓉𝓎 𝓌𝒾𝓉𝒽 𝓎𝑜𝓊...

SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF: 3/10 DESIGN COHESION: 7/10 𝐵𝐸𝒜𝒰𝒯𝐼𝐹𝒰𝐿 𝒞𝑅𝐸𝒜𝒯𝒰𝑅𝐸: 10/10 PERSONAL RATING: 6/10

[endless-bestiary]

GAPING DRAGON

From Software is very good at building a world that feels hopeless by inundating it with all manner of messed-up creatures and run-down settlements. From Blighttown's awful bloated insects to Darkroot Garden's terrifying predatory flora, there's a pervasive sense of the whole world just being against you. I can't think of anything that encapsulates Dark Souls' feeling of desolation, of grimdarkness, of fall-to-your-knees-and-weep-ness than the Gaping Dragon. The game has a number of horror themes running throughout, including traditional American horror (baby skeletons?) and Japanese horror (yokai-like possessed trees), as well as cosmic horror - and that's what our friend here is all about. It's almost impossible to show real cosmic-scale horror in a video game, but this is the kind of monster that a regular person living in this world would simply collapse and surrender to. 

The Gaping Dragon is a perversion of a perversion. Dragons are based on the idea of unchecked greed: they keep hoards, they demand tribute, they pillage and destroy to get what they want. In turn, the Gaping Dragon is a creature so twisted by greed that it doesn't even have a hoard. It just eats. This specific dragon is only distantly related to the everlasting dragons, but manages to be a grotesque mockery of their opulence. Its entire body is a single massive mouth that it throws at anything it sees. In reference to its ruptured rib cage, the lead designer of Dark Souls said it "simply did what it had to, to continue to exist". This is the other half of what makes Dark Souls so grim - no one's in control. This incredibly powerful creature that can kill and eat anything it wants is still just barely scraping by. 

Speaking of its exposed ribs, there's something about rib-mouths that I cannot get enough of. In "The Thing" (the 1982 one), there's a scene where a character goes to defibrilate an unconscious victim, and the victim's chest cavity opens and bites down on their would-be rescuer with their ribs. That scene, along with a lot of the other practical effects in that movie, stuck with me as genius uses of body horror in a functional way. The Gaping Dragon takes that idea and turns it up to 11. Part of its endless maw is made of ribs, but beneath those are rows and rows of cruel teeth. Getting eaten by the Gaping Dragon is less getting chewed up and more being haphazardly torn to shreds by a berserk lawn mower. There are a million fates worse than death in Dark Souls, but few of them are so overwhelmingly primal. This thing has snapped its entire rib cage open with the express purpose of *blending you into a fine meat paste*. At the end of the day, the Gaping Dragon is just a big evil lizard, but it occurs early enough in the game and is so peerless in scale by that point that it can make you sit back and ask "Is what I'm doing really the sane choice?"

One last bit: its dinky little head. Creatures can certainly have vestigial features, like the back phalange bones on a whale, but to reduce the head to such a state requires some serious dedication to mindless consumption. There's some inherent comedy in the Gaping Dragon's intro with how it shows its head before slamming onto the stage mouth-first, but it also drives home the idea that this is a hunger-crazed creature. Every inch of Dark Souls is draped in some sort of lore without being an infodump like other RPGs. You get the emotional core of what everything is supposed to mean without having to read flowery prose in an out-of-the-way codex. Sometimes the lore is in the flavor text on your ring; other times it's nonverbally shown to you with enemy animations. This sort of genius environmental storytelling is why Dark Souls is such a well-respected game.

SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF: 8/10, SOMEHOW DESIGN COHESION: 10/10 RIB AND TEAR: 10/10 PERSONAL RATING: 9/10

[endless-bestiary]

TITANITE DEMON

If you have to make a human-shaped enemy that has no reason to be human-shaped, the Titanite Demon is a great example of how to do it. Most of its anatomy is just a big stone human, but there are several changes that break up the silhouette to the point where you can enjoy the demon for what it is: a demon. I wish we had more lore on these things, but like most things in Dark Souls, all we know is that they're the children of an unnamed blacksmith god that sprang from his leftover titanite when he died. How cool is that? Souls lore never disappoints when it exists. 

The chief modification to the Titanite Demon's body, and the biggest reason I like it, is its complete lack of a head. The spot where its neck ends is instead a slab of titanite, the upgrade material that you can use to improve your weapons and armor. Dominating the space where its head should go is instead a pair of circular horns. The cumulative effect of the missing head, mechanics-reinforcing slab, and visually striking and unique horns all put the Titanite Demon among my favorite Dark Souls enemies. 

The horns in particular inspire a different kind of emotion than regular ram or goat horns. With organic horns, you know that the enemy is a Bad Guy and wants to Attack You because it's Bad. The inorganic geometry of perfectly circular horns evokes a feeling of unease rather than fear. This headless, artificial creature drags itself along the ground, a halo of stone above its neck-stump? That's some Bible-tier angel nonsense, and it works to assert that these are both not to be messed with and very important. 

The Titanite Demon's bizarre form of locomotion is part of its menacing appearance. If it just walked around, it would be a little less intimidating because you kind of get what's going on. The headlessness is weird, but the fact that it's also limping around on one leg makes you start to wonder what's *wrong* with it. Two huge chunks of its body are missing despite its otherwise photorealistic human body. It's *supposed* to have those bits. Where did they go? Is the fact that each of them has the same parts missing intentional, or just a limitation of the medium? Is their mutilation a result of the death of the blacksmith god, or would they also have created something like this? Once again, I'm busting out my mantra: the best designs are ones that ask more questions than they answer. 

I find it kind of fun that From Software decided to make the basic upgrade material into a monster. Everything you use in your quest comes from the environment in some way or another; you eat moss, you harvest eyes and blood, you ingest cursed flesh to fight ghosts. Titanite pieces, supposedly, are ancient fragments of timeless slabs of metal that the blacksmith god either created or used himself. Being able to encounter an enemy that's made of it and harvest it off of the resulting corpse makes the world feel a little more immersive.

Tangiental Titanite Trivia: Since posting its review, I have been informed that people like to farm the Man-Eater Shell for its twinkling titanite drops. I think that's a really cute secondary reference to its stash of pearl-like objects!

SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF: 4/10, BUT IN LIKE, A GOOD WAY DESIGN COHESION: 7/10 METAL BABY NEEDS CLEANER: 10/10 PERSONAL RATING: 10/10

[endless-bestiary]

PISACA

What a truly classic-feeling monster. Classic is a different feeling than unique, and both are good; unique monsters are very original takes on ideas, while classic monsters adhere to a known formula that inspires a feeling of nostalgia. Pisaca has both in spades. Even though it is largely just a snake with tentacles (snentacles), Pisaca manages to feel at home with the rest of the snake-inspired monsters of Greek and Dark Age myth (the Hydra, the Gorgon, the Cockatrice, etc.). A lot of monsters in Dark Souls as a whole have that same sort of feeling going on, but this one in particular goes above and beyond. The Pisaca foregoes arms and legs, making do instead with a mass of writhing tendrils for both grasping prey and for locomotion. It's a phenomenal look, sort of becoming the logical endpoint for the tentacle-covered monsters in Lovecraftian myth, while not going too overboard. Here, less is more, and the few large tentacles on the Pisaca's head do the work that a throng of them couldn't. Having so few allows the silhouette to be strong and readable. In a game that prioritizes rewarding skill and forethought, it's important to make the enemies have good outlines, and a writhing mass of blue pasta does that significantly worse than having enough to communicate "octopus head" and show where its attacks are coming from. The hidden "spike" the Pisaca conceals under its bell shows the designers went the extra mile in making an octopus enemy. Its spike is a sort of monstrous version of the octopus's beak. Despite looking like a mosquito proboscis, it's merely for impaling - and possibly generates the spit attack - but it adds a real sense of malice to what would otherwise be kind of a cutesy enemy. A sad, jellylike snake thing that wanders around a prison feels only vaguely threatening, so I like the direct representation of its danger. My only real question is who decided that the weird blue raspberry gorgons would be ideal wardens? I guess if you just kind of fill a prison with dangerous animals, the only people who break out weren't going to be stopped by sapient guards anyways.

SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF: 7/10 DESIGN COHESION: 9/10 SEATH'S PARENTING SKILL: 0/10 PERSONAL RATING: 9/10

[endless-bestiary]

#4 - LILEEP

Crinoids! Fossil crinoids! Hell yes!! ...What, you want more than that? Alright, fine. Lileep is part of the second wave of "fossil" Pokémon, following in Omanyte and Kabuto's footsteps with its buddy Anorith to represent criminally neglected ancient creatures. Later generations would go on to give us much less obscure animals, but for two glorious sets, we received a trilobite, an ammonite, an anomalocaris, and a crinoid. Given the widespread coverage and duration of these animals, it makes sense that those four were discovered before the relatively short-lived dinosaur ones. Even anomalocaris, the shortest-lived of the four, still had a stint thousands of years longer than most dinosaurs. And for our friend Lileep here, crinoids have persisted to this very day in the form of sea lilies. Clearly they're doing something right!

Like all fossil Pokémon, Lileep is part Rock type. There's two interesting angles to this that I like a lot. From the lore angle, the Rock typing is supposed to represent the parts of it that were permineralized when it became a fossil, and that makes fossil Pokémon tough and ponderous opponents. Lileep is uniquely positioned to take advantage of this, even compared to its shelled siblings, because of its entirely sedentary nature. One of its most important moves is the status move Ingrain, which prevents it from being switched out and heals it for 1/16th of its HP every turn. On top of that, its normal ability is Suction Cups, which also prevents switching out. Lileep stays put no matter what! From a competitive standpoint, this holds true as well. (Everything here applies to Cradily more than Lileep, but I think Lileep is cuter.) On Grass Monotype teams, it's a precious resource that isn't slam-dunked by Fire types - the only other option is the Lotad line, and Earthquake is a much more potent attack than anything Ludicolo brings to the table. Lileep walls as best it can against most of Grass's weaknesses, shrugging off Fire, Poison, and Bug type attacks, while sporting a decent set of Def and Sp.Def stats to back up Stealth Rocks and STAB Stone Edges. No matter how you cut it, Lileep is a patient and persistent Pokémon, which is exactly what I like to see from a stone flower.

One design element that we see from time to time is the "eyes in a void" face. From what I can tell, the gene that makes people review monsters is 100% correlated to the "likes eyes in a void" gene, because I am not alone in having a massive preference for this shy visage. It manages to look both cute and a little spooky at the same time. Two little dots is all it takes to suggest a hidden creature inside some sort of shell - in this case, Lileep's "mouth" - but we don't know everything about it. I touched on this with Tangela, but Lileep goes into more detail that makes it all that much more interesting. Lileep is described as swallowing its prey whole. The obvious question is "with what?" We can't see its mouth, or its mouth truly is the dark opening on top of it, and both prospects are equally as unsettling. Real-world crinoids are passive filter feeders, so we don't even have something to base it off of. Is there a maw of teeth somewhere in that cup? If you stick your hand in, do you not get it back? Or does it close around prey like an undersea pitcher plant and digest them inside its bell? I'm inclined towards that last one. Included in Lileep's moveset are conspicuously low-pH moves like Sludge Bomb, Acid, and Gastro Acid. Those are by no means ubiquitous moves. Only Pokémon like Swalot, Guzzlord, Pukumuku, and other sludgy Poison types get it. This, of course, means that Lileep's eyes are either protected by some form of thin keratin, or just straight-up acid proof, and that's hilarious and upsetting to think about. Does it... watch its prey dissolve for the whole time? Lileep may be Rock type, but that's pretty metal.

SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF: 9/10 DESIGN COHESION: 8/10 MY ATTEMPT TO NOT BE ELITIST ABOUT PEOPLE LIKING DINOSAURS: 4/10 PERSONAL RATING: 10/10

[endless-bestiary]

#9 - BELLSPROUT

Some Grass-type Pokémon are deeply in tune with nature, or cultivate flowers, or allow plants to grow on them in return for magic powers. Some are just plants with eyes on them, and that's all you really need. Bellsprout is no-frills plant thrills from start to finish. Its legs are roots, its arms are leaves, and its head is a pitcher plant on a road trip. There's so much to love about this little floral stick figure that it's easy to forget how few elements there are in its design.

Bellsprout is a master-class on "less is more". When you're establishing a franchise with a number of disparate types of monsters, it's important to have very clear displays of those types. Bellsprout, along with its version-exclusive partner Oddish, basically has a billboard on its forehead that screams "GRASS TYPE". (The fact that it was also Poison type was an issue with Poison being tacked on to all but five Grass types in gen 1, but that's another story.) If you're riding your starter to victory, like so many first-time players did, it's almost impossible to not get a sense of Grass's interaction with the core rock-paper-scissors of water-grass-fire. Paras, encountered earlier in the game than Bellsprout, has the distinction of being more Bug than Grass, so Bellsprout is a much clearer sign of what works and what doesn't against Grass types. From a lore perspective, it's also a great way to show how far Grass type can foray outside of the kingdom Animalia. There isn't a single animal trait on Bellsprout outside of its eyes, and even then they're beady little deals with no corneas or pupils. The rest of its body is straight foliage in a vaguely humanoid shape. It's always so nice to see a monster game pull from every angle, instead of just making a hundred weird dogs. 

The simplicity and uniqueness of Bellsprout is its strength. If it had even one extraneous detail, it would be much less effective. When you need a plant monster, you don't need a plant monster with marketable points or a human face or whatever. You need a plant. Like I mentioned before, Oddish and Bellsprout are considered to be counterparts to one another, but Bellsprout takes the favorite spot for me because it really does go all-in on the plant aspect. Oddish is a spherical creature with some grass parts; without the leaves on its head, it would just be a generic monster. There's nothing you can remove from Bellsprout to remove its plant-ness. It even lacks the animal-like intelligence that could be argued to be behind Oddish's eyes. This thing is the ideal plant fantasy (plantasy): the ability to get up and go after food instead of having to wait around for it to come to you. Good on Bellsprout for living its dream. 

We won't talk about what happens to this perfect creature after it evolves, though. I like to believe it keeps its legs forever.

SUSPENSION OF DISBELEAF: 7/10 DESIGN COHESION: 10/10 :O : :0/0: PERSONAL RATING: 10/10