#wisglover

[monstersoffilgaia]

[dungeonecologist]

WILD ARMS 2 - Monster Island β

 So we’re at a point here where we get this rad hovercraft to bop around the inner sea section of the map in.  It means we now get aquatic overworld battles, and also we have access to a bunch of random places we can now futz around in.

I won’t tackle everything we can now run into, but the first mission we get does send us in search of 3 macguffins scattered around the inner sea, and we end up on three very specific beaches.  One is the island we find the Thunder Lion Cage in, another is a random shore of the desert region across the inner sea, and one of them is this suspiciously empty island where, if you run around in circles long enough, you can run into an unusually large number of different enemies, almost all of which are dangerously high level for where you’d probably be at this point in the game.

Oddly, there is an official Monster Island in the outer sea where nearly the full bestiary is available to help fill out gaps in the Monster Card collection, so I’m dubbing this rock, Monster Island β.

Buckle up, because this is a long one...

Okay this is a weird one but the Wojanoid is a mistransliteration of ウォジャノーイ(Uo-jya-noo-i) and uses a character model based on the Japanese Kappa.  This was supposed to read as Vodyanoi, a mythical creature of Slavic lore.  It was surprisingly hard juggling of phonetics to reverse engineer.  It didn’t help that with the way the character model is postured, hunched forward with its head “dish” facing forward, it wasn’t actually clear what it was.  Only when it attacks does it stand upright and it becomes clear that it’s a Kappa, and so vaguely frogman-like.

Vodyanoi are generally described as elderly frogmen, frequently with bearded faces tangled with algea and moss.  They sometimes are blamed for drownings where they trap the souls of their victims in teapots that they then display as a sign of wealth.  But aren’t explicitly malicious in all stories and frequently they are bargained with in lore.  They aren’t especially common in reference outside of their native Slavic regions, perhaps the only appearance I could find with any international weight behind it was the Vodyanoi race of fish people in The Witcher series, although those don’t really draw much from the actual myths in either behavior or design there.

In general, it’s kind of weird for them to be here, since the Vodyanoi are traditionally swamp creatures.  Even the Kappa are river dwelling, so that they’re in this island in the middle of a presumably salt water sea, feels a little out of place.  They also appear along side two different enemies that don’t really seem to make much sense, one of which is...

Ose, a demon taken from the Ars Goetia section of the grimoire, the Lesser Key of Solomon, a demon deemed one of 5 “Great Presidents of Hell” among the extensive infernal hierarchy --positioned between the 6 regular Presidents of Hell, and the singular Mighty Great President of Hell: Valac.  (We’ll revisit the Key of Solomon frequently moving forward, as many names therein are borrow in Wild Arms 2′s bestiary.)  Appropriately he appears here as a kind of wild cat, and source texts do describe him in the form of a leopard interchangeable with that of a man.  He makes frequent appearances in the Shin Megami Tensei franchise as well, as a man with the head of a Leopard, as seen in comparison.

I don’t know what this thing has to do with anything, honestly.  The hierarchy of demons is pretty extensive and Ose doesn’t actually occupy any particularly notable position within it.  And it’s not like the panther bit makes any more or less sense on this island.

The other enemy the Wojanoid can appear along side is the Necromicon, which I’ve mentioned briefly before.  It’s a butchering of Necronomicon, and I think most of that lore is fairly commonly known.  It appears as a black book with gold trim, kind of fancy and vaguely ominous, but basically just a Blue Book recolor.  I know this one appears to be based on the actual Lovecraftian Necronomicon and not the one from Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead film series, but it would’ve been cool to see a custom texture where it’s bound in human flesh.

Amusingly one of its magic spells is titled “Pure Literature” and causes Sleep ailment.  But I take that to have been a somewhat literal or obtuse translation of a term for formal or technical writing; basically it’s not actually a magic spell at all, the party tries to read the Necromicon but it’s boring and it puts them to sleep.  That’s not important, I just thought that was a goofy little detail.

The other most common group of enemies here is Aello, another of the Harpies we first met back around Damzen, and Pantagruel, based on a glutenous giant of the same name from the novels of François Rabelais.  The first of five books is generally either self titled or titled, The Horrible and Terrifying Deeds and Words of the Very Renowned Pantagruel King of the Dipsodes, Son of the Great Giant Gargantua.  The book series is however a comedic satire of a wide array of subjects that garnered an infamous reputation in its own time.  I think that speaks for itself by and large.  The model here is one shared with the Iron Maiden enemy, hence it’s hinged and spike lined stomach.

Somehow either the art or the models got swapped however and the Iron Maiden appears in the Gate Bridge dungeon with a red texture, and the Pantagruel here in white, even though the Monster Cards show the opposite.

A tricky one was the M.Therion monster, which I first assumed was an abbreviation of MegaTherion, in reference to the To Mega Therion of the book of Revelation.  Looking into the Japanese however, it’s actually shortened from MasterTherion.  While also derived from a reference to the book of Revelation, the title Master Therion is distinctly the title of the Thelema god, Therion.  Thelema was a religion founded by the famed occultist, Aleister Crowley.  Interestingly Crowley and the author Rabelais were known to have corresponded over the subject of Thelema.  There’s not a lot of physical features to go off of for M.Therion, other than things we can sort of assumed carry over from Revelation.

Curiously it shares a model with the monster Primevals, named after the incomplete, and famously obtuse cult classic film of the same name that existed in production limbo from the 70s through the 90s up until the director, David Allen’s death in 1999.  I don’t know that either M.Therion or Primevals is actually the core premise of the enemy model here, as it doesn’t bear any particularly strong resemblance to either.  It does appear to have The Beast of Revelation’s 10 horns, but none of the other identifying features like 7 heads and 10 crowns.

In a similar broad category with M.Therion  we have A Bao A Qu.  Another of Jorge Luis Borges’s contributions to the world of fantasy monsters from his Book of Imaginary Beings. The creature is said to stalk those whole attempt to climb the Vijaya Stambha, lying invisible at the tower’s base to take the climber’s back in chase.  As it climbs it gains form, attaining perfection in sync with any climber who can reach the tower’s peak and with it nirvana.

Although we don’t know it yet, this island is actually situated roughly at the foot of a tall tower that will comprise the final dungeon of the game, which may account for A Bao A Qu’s presence here; although if that were the logic you’d think it would simply appear in the overworld immediately surrounding the final dungeon instead.

Perhaps most notably, it is also referenced as the namesake of the last Zeon fortress, A Baoa Qu, in Mobile Suit Gundam 0079. Like M.Therion, there is no real canonical physical description of the creature, so it’s just a random kaiju here.

Also in this vein of things we have Grendel, the great beast adversary of the early Anglo-Saxon hero, Beowulf.  Once again, a nigh almighty creature of vague or non-existant description here rendered in kaiju fashion.  In the interest of saving space, I’m going to assume we all learned about Beowulf in high school English and move on...

I think it’s really interesting that we have this bizarre menagerie of really prominent monsters mixed in with some pretty random creatures on this island where they’re all given fairly even footing curb stomping our unsuspecting party.

and then...  I don’t know...  things get weird...  There’s Gasnoid The 1st, which is just a dude made of gas?  He’s clearly not a reference to anything specific?* He uses various gaseous attacks including one called Euthenasia Gas, which oddly doesn’t actually instakill, but inflicts a mix of ailments instead.  He appears alone and isn’t actually all that threatening, it makes it feel like Gasnoid 1st should be able to stand out alone the same way Grendel, M.Therion, and A Bao A Qu do, but it definitely, doesn’t.

*Upon a little further poking around he’s definitely a reference to the Japanese film Gas-Ningen Dai-Ichigo[ガス人間第1号]: “The First Gas Man”, aka “The Human Vapor,” a Japanese sci-fi film from the 1960s

Also bundled into this miscellaneous set is the Wisglover???  The Japanese name is actually ウィズグロバ (wi-zu-gu-ro-u-baa).  Depending on the time period and the conventions at hand, sometimes the “B-” phonetic category of katakana can be used for “V-” sounds, but Wild Arms 2 has already been pretty good about using variant kana for those, so I find it unlikely that this is meant to be a “Vaa”/”Ver.”  I have no idea how to handle this name.

The only vague lead I can wrangle is that it is a magic user, has a spell called Day Crest, and shares a model with a different enemy from much later in the game called the Sun Flayer.  This suggests some association with the sun, and possibly day and night cycles, and by proxy the moon(?)  Given the black and purple coloration vs the Sun Flayer’s red and orange, Wisglover might be drawn from some kind of night time or moon or dawn or dusk based mythology?

Other problem here is that the Sun Flayer seems equally obscure.  The name alone made me think immediately of Aztec lore, as it does include both strong flayed human skin and sun motifs, but the two don’t really intersect in any meaningful ways congruent to what we have here.  Curiously the Aztec god of the Sun and of War is Huitzilopochtli, and that “Huitz-” syllable would japanize as something like ウィズ (Wi-zu), but that’s as close as any of this gets before it falls apart.  The Sun god is also not The Flayed God, Xipe Totec; nor was Xipe Totec flayed specifically by the Sun God. (although the two are part of the cardinal pantheon along with Tezcatlipoca, god of providence, the darkness and the invisible, lord of the night, and Quetzalcoatl, god of the life, the light and wisdom, lord of the winds and the day.)

So after that series of tangents I’m just back where I started with, “I have no idea...”

And last in this misc. category, we have Agawogdent, a recolor of the Blue Snail.  I have no idea what or why or how.  The Blue Snail at least I kind of attributed to the curious trend of illuminated manuscript in medieval texts to include illustrations of knights in combat with large molluscs.  But this name is gibberish as best I can tell.  I can’t even find an angle of attack of a toe hold in starting to figure this out.  It’s a little erroneously romanized from アガオォッグデント (A-ga-Oo-ggu-de-n’-to) which is itself a somewhat bizarre construction.  I’ve never in my life seen オォ used  in the middle of a word like this.  In goofy texts in the same way you might type out something like “WwWwOoOoAaAaHhHh!!!” for style and emphasis, but not in something like a name or label like this.  I don’t even know what this is supposed to convey phonetically...

Oh, but Agion[sic] is here too (a recolor of the Mystical Pot) but the name is for some reason poorly adapted from the Japanese Agathion.  A strangely common name in fantasy like D&D, and SMT, and Yu-Gi-Oh, among others...  Weirder yet, all I can find is the same one sentence description no matter where I look,

An agathion is a familiar spirit which appears only at midday in the shape of a human or an animal, or even within a talisman, bottle or magic ring.

and although I don’t have ready access to ALL the sources, from what I can see all the citations just lead to further citations with none claiming any kind of origin for this thing.  I don’t get why it keeps getting used if there’s really nothing to it, and stranger yet is that it pretty consistently appears in the form of a “bottle” over any of the other listed forms, and very particularly Greek amphora.  It’s kind of bizarre...

A bit of a tangent, but in SMT’s Agathion up there, it’s clearly meant to evoke the bronze/brass vessel in which King Solomon was said to have sealed the 72 demons of the Ars Goetia.

More bizarre however, is the subdivision of this into Agion Black, Blue, Red, White, and Yellow that the base Agion can summon, if given the chance. The humanoid forms aren’t technically outside of the singular vague canon description, but interestingly they are kind of randomly worked into a hyper specific reference.

So I’ve mentioned the word Tokusatsu before in passing, but let’s take a sec to clarify that term:  Etymologically, the word references “special effects” as in in film, and originally denoted TV series that used such movie-magic tricks.  Most notable of the genre were Saturday morning kids shows, among which a man named Ishinomori Shotaro was a prodigious creator.  He was already a well established manga author (original creator of Cyborg 009, and 8 Man among many others) when he moved into television, and he continued his prolific career producing both the Kamen Rider and Super Sentai series (which would go on to be adapted into the American Power Rangers franchise) but also a slightly lesser known series called Android Kikaider, and Kikaider 01.

(sorry for the crappy phone cam pics, but it was easier than trying to get the enemies to appear at random so I could screenshot those)

Across the two series a villain named Hakaider served first as a rival and later main antagonist. (Hakaider was also a partial inspiration for Megaman/Rock’s rival, Protoman/Blues, as well as the DarkMan enemies in Megaman 5.)  In Kikaider 01, the original villain in Hakaider’s android body is also joined by 3 lesser Hakaider model robots, Red, Blue, and Silver Hakaider.

You’ll notice the chest pieces all have the correct matching letters, down to the stylized font, but most specifically the lead Hakaider’s use of a cross scar instead of a letter shared with Agathion Black.  I’m not sure where Agathion Yellow came from though...  Maybe just a nod to the Super Sentai formula as a kind of compounded reference?  The basic Agathion does call the colored team by using a move called, Summon Hero, although Hakaiders are very distinctly villains.  And they don’t bare much resemblance to any other toku characters.

So... in conclusion...  I don’t have a damn clue what is going on here...  An island full of very noticeably epic level, hero’s bane sort of monsters... but then also some random not all that threatening or epic ones... and then also a whole team of super heroes?  but also the heroes want to fight us too??  I just don’t see much of a theme.  Was this just a repository for a bunch of monsters they made but forgot to fit into other dungeons?  I just don’t know...

Let me know if you spot some thread here that I’m just not getting!