#gagison

Damn, I was convinced for a second that Gagyson didn’t exist. Well, you know. Anyway, pic:

Yeah, Gagyson is cool because he’s just your basic medieval demon with an animal head and feet and besides the Goetia demons that are direct copies of Dictionnaire art (which is most of them, granted), these don’t make up a lot of the hellspace of the SMT roster.

Anyway, he is sourced to a grimoire, the highly interesting Book of Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. Written as “Gagison,” the demon is listed as one of the 8 servants of Oriens and that his name means in Hebrew “spread out flat” (I wouldn’t trust most of these translations). That’s it. He’s basically just a name, so it’s right that Kaneko gave him a fairly generic look. But why not Oriens instead of a truly obscure demon?

The games get his boss wrong. Here’s his compendium entry:

"A low-ranking demon whose name means "spread out flat." He is thought to originally have been a Hebrew plague god. Opinions vary to Gagyson`s master, but he is commonly depicted as a servant of Orias or Ose."—Devil Survivor 2 compendium

Wild Arms 2 is a personal favorite of mine and so an easy target to go back and pick through.  Thousand Arms is populated with original enemies in design and origin, but like many of the classic RPGs that the Wild Arms franchise draws upon for influence, Wild Arms 2 is chock full of neat and often obscure monsters drawn from myth, folk lore, historical grimoires and fiction, as well as other inspirational genre sources like Dungeons & Dragons and western horror films.  So, I’ll try to not only comment on the monsters and how they relate to their dungeons but also their origins going forward!

Starting with what is basically the canonical "first” of three prologue chapters; our central protagonist, Ashley Winchester, is a militia soldier deployed to an old abandoned and structurally unstable ruins to rescue an orphan boy, kidnapped by disgruntled and disenfranchised laborers.

The dungeon has 3 basic enemies, 1 boss, and 1 secret enemy that pops up WAAAAYYY later in disc 2...

The most accessible (knowledge wise) and the weakest is the Kobold.  Other than being a well known magical creature of German folk lore, it is also a common enemy in other RPGs.  Dungeons & Dragons in particular memorably depicts them as reptilian humanoids in the service of greater Dragon races.  JRPGS frequently depict them as dog-like or otherwise furred savage humanoids.  They are also frequently in the company of other mythological spirits like the Undine, Salamander, and Sylph as a representative of Earth, rounding out the set of Four Elements.  Oddly none of these depictions adhere to much integrity to the source folk lore.

Although usually invisible, a kobold can materialize in the form of an animal, fire, a human being, and a candle. The most common depictions of kobolds show them as humanlike figures the size of small children.

Legends tell of three major types of kobolds. Most commonly, the creatures are house spirits of ambivalent nature; while they sometimes perform domestic chores, they play malicious tricks if insulted or neglected... Another type of kobold haunts underground places, such as mines. A third kind of kobold, lives aboard ships and helps sailors.

Kobolds who live in human homes wear the clothing of peasants; those who live in mines are hunched and ugly; and kobolds who live on ships smoke pipes and wear sailor clothing.

Given the context what we see here is a type 2 Kobold; child-sized, vaguely humanoid, somewhat animal-like, and haunting the dusty remains of crumbling sandstone ruins.  Later Wild Arms games will shift towards depicting them as Earth spirits, complete with a dramatic redesign, but this iteration doesn’t have any specifically Earth based attacks.  Curiously however, its bestiary entry does in fact list a weakness to Air magic and resistance to Earth magic.

The other common enemy in this dungeon is the Stirge.  An original monster to the original Dungeons & Dragons as part of the Greyhawk supplement.  Initially more bird-like, save it’s long blood sucking proboscis, later editions would shift the Stirge’s design more toward insectoid, and later still toward a leathery aberration unlike any insect or avian entirely.

Here the Stirge retains both its leathery wings, and its signature ability to drain its enemy of HP.  But otherwise, it varies drastically in that it seems to borrow from H.R. Geiger’s Alien Facehugger some, playing into the monster’s tactics of grasping onto its prey with pincer like claws before draining them of blood, although it replaces the variable beak-like appendages of classic designs with a striking tail.

Somewhat rarer is the Gagison of all things, a very obscure choice for an early dungeon; a spirit only briefly mentioned in The Book of Abremelin.  He also appears in the Shin Megami Tensei games under the name “Gagyson” (An image of which I used above in the absence of any historical illustrations) where his descriptions mention:

His name means "one farms striped mullet". Originally a Hebrew minor god of plague. While in "The Book of Abramelin" he is a low-ranking demon subordinates to Arioch.

In line with being a supposed “minor god of plague,” the Wild Arms 2 version does utilize the Disease status ailment.

So what I really love here is how perfectly “First Dungeon” this set up really is: It showcases 3 different kinds of monsters (from folk lore, from pop culture, and from myth) but despite disparate origins, they do all paint a cohesive picture...  The cutscenes showing the exterior of the dungeon show a desert terrain, the sandstone architecture has an earthen tone, both of which place comfortably place the Kobold in this dungeon.  In addition the Stirge, while traditionally a dark forest dwelling monster, has been known to have desert and jungle varieties, and the ability to drain HP fits with the withering theme, as does the Gagison’s Disease ability.  All together these three give off the impression of a dungeon not only “withering” in physical form, but in regards to an earthly life force; It is a place abandoned, drained of life, sickly, and falling apart –a prevalent tone for the planet Filgaia at large, and indeed a major theme of the later plot of the game.

But then we come to the Boss monster, Kalivos.  Despite some flavor thrown into the ending cutscene that mentions explosive secretions, Kalivos does not actually use any kind of explosive or Fire based special attacks.  Instead Kalivos had two massive rending claws and a Laser Breath attack. (One fun feature of Wild Arms 2 is the segmentation of boss monsters into a core enemy and various specialized body parts.  Defeating specific limbs awards their own exp and disables their own set of attacks and abilities.)

But here’s the thing... I have absolutely NO idea what the hell Kalivos is supposed to be... 

It’s the name of a town on the island of Crete in Greece, apparently?  The Greek town is written as Κάλυβος, which technically ought to sound something like “Kah-loo-bohs” I think?  It might actually be a reference to Calibos, from Clash of the Titans (who, oddly enough, isn’t a mythological figure, but a character original to the 1981 film) but honestly there aren’t enough shared features between them to really pin that reference down: Horns? A tail/whip? A tangential relation to a kidnapping?

More over, even if it was in fact Calibos, that wouldn’t really add to the “Withered” theme of the dungeon?