WILD ARMS 2 - Withered Ruins
Wild Arms 2 is a personal favorite of mine and so an easy target to go back and pick through.Ā Thousand Arms is populated with original enemies in design and origin, but like many of the classic RPGs that theĀ Wild ArmsĀ 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.Ā So, Iāll 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 "firstā 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.Ā Other than being a well known magical creature of German folk lore, it is also a common enemy in other RPGs.Ā Dungeons & Dragons in particular memorably depicts them as reptilian humanoids in the service of greater Dragon races.Ā JRPGS frequently depict them as dog-like or otherwise furred savage humanoids.Ā 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 ofĀ Four Elements.Ā 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...Ā Another type of kobold haunts underground places, such as mines. A third kind of kobold,Ā 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.Ā Later Wild Arms games will shift towards depicting them as Earth spirits, complete with a dramatic redesign, but this iteration doesnāt have any specifically Earth based attacks.Ā 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.Ā An original monster to the original Dungeons & Dragons as part of the Greyhawk supplement.Ā Initially more bird-like, save itās long blood sucking proboscis, later editions would shift the Stirgeās 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.Ā But otherwise, it varies drastically in that it seems to borrow from H.R. Geigerās Alien Facehugger some, playing into the monsterās 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 theĀ Gagison of all things, a very obscure choice for an early dungeon; a spirit only briefly mentioned in The Book of Abremelin.Ā He also appears in the Shin Megami Tensei games under the name āGagysonā (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 āminor god of plague,ā the Wild Arms 2 version does utilize the Disease status ailment.
So what I really love here is how perfectly āFirst Dungeonā 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...Ā 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.Ā 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 Gagisonās Disease ability.Ā All together these three give off the impression of a dungeon not only āwitheringā in physical form, but in regards to an earthly life force; It is a place abandoned, drained of life, sickly, and falling apart āa 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.Ā 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.Ā 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.Ā Defeating specific limbs awards their own exp and disables their own set of attacks and abilities.)
But hereās the thing... I have absolutely NO idea what the hell Kalivos is supposed to be...Ā
Itās the name of a town on the island of Crete in Greece, apparently?Ā The Greek town is written asĀ ĪĪ¬Ī»Ļ
Ī²ĪæĻ, which technically ought to sound something like āKah-loo-bohsā I think?Ā It might actually be a reference to Calibos, from Clash of the Titans (who, oddly enough, isnāt a mythological figure, but a character original to the 1981 film) but honestly there arenāt 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 wouldnāt really add to the āWitheredā theme of the dungeon?
Anyway, thatās really all Iāve got to say about this one.
