Both Final Fantasy I and Final Fantasy II have official explanations for where their monsters come from. In the first game, they come from the instability of the four elemental crystals. In the second game, they are summoned from Hell by the evil Emperor Mateus. And the monsters seem to have been mostly scattered around haphazardly from an old AD&D Monster Manual with little thought put into where they were placed. But if we ignore that and take a closer look anyway, what does the placement of the monsters suggest about the world?
In Final fantasy I, monsters can be split into three categories: Fiend-aligned, fiendspawn, and wild animals. Wild animals might be driven to some kind of madness by the four fiends who are corrupting the elemental crystals, but they aren’t created by them. Fiendspawn are corrupted elemental beings directly tied to the theme of at least one of the four fiends. Fiend-aligned creatures are intelligent beings who’ve decided to take the fiends’ side of the war for reasons that are usually not at all clear, although we can glean some clues that they’re probably associated with nearby bosses.
Corneria
In the starting kingdom of Corneria, we encounter goblins, which the NES version called imps, but there was a really strict character limit, so we should probably think of this as a synonym for imp that was easier to cram into six characters (the same reason why what are clearly complete, animate skeletons are called a “bone”). These creatures are visibly armed with forged weapons, so they’re some kind of intelligent monster, and they’re found primarily in and near the areas controlled by the rogue knight Garland. They aren’t especially in theme with the earth in general, nor with the Lich’s undead theme, and the more powerful goblin guards get more common as you get closer to Garland’s stronghold in the Shrine of Chaos while the less powerful goblin NOS is found exclusively here in Corneria, so I think of these guys as a pre-existing population in Corneria that sided with Garland in the Cornerian civil war and whose full-time soldiers show up far from home in the armies of the Lich, but whose part-time militia or bandits (the ones just called “goblin”) are found exclusively in Corneria near their homes.
Likewise, while the wolves found in the Cornerian wilderness are clearly a wild animal, the warg wolves and werewolves suggest intelligent creatures with a goblin association, and they appear exclusively in places that also have goblins, usually goblin guards. Since wolves aren’t really earth-themed or undead themed, my assumption is that the goblins, warg wolves, and werewolves are all aligned with one another somehow, an alliance that reaches across the large southern sea of the game, because encounter density suggests that they have a large population in Elfheim. Since werewolves are people who can transform into wolves, it’s possible this is a power that goblins have exclusively, but given where they show up, it’s probably something that renegade elves do as well. The ability to turn into werewolves might also be a dark power taught to them by the Lich or a curse placed upon them by the corrupted power of the earth crystal.
The Cornerian region also has skeletons, ghouls, zombies which are clearly fiendspawn of the Lich, giant spiders and mad horses, which are probably affected by the elemental imbalance somehow but are still probably ordinary wild animals, and gigas worms, giant burrowing monsters that might be wild animals or might be fiendspawn from the Lich as a force of corrupting earth, particularly since worms eating corpses is a whole thing.
Pravoka
The region surrounding the port town of Pravoka gives us giant lizards, cobras, sharks, and slightly different giant spiders, which are wild animals, “big eyes,” which are beholder-ish bizarre aberrations and which I’m going to label as fiendspawn of the Kraken because they’re found exclusively at sea, pirates and buccaneers, which are intelligent creatures loosely aligned with the fiends in that they impede our heroes’ quest to stop them, even if only in an effort to rob them, and sahuagin and red sahuagin. Sahuagin might be an intelligent race that’s chosen to side with the fiends, but they might also be fiendspawn of the Kraken, and since the Kraken has been stomping around for centuries at this point, it’s splitting hairs a little bit to say one way or another – the sahuagin’s origin might be that the Kraken created them to terrorize the world, but they are now a civilization that has existed for centuries.
The Lich, contrariwise, has recently awakened, prompting the quest of our heroes, so it would be a huge difference if the goblins and ogres we see early in the game were fiendspawn rather than pre-existing creatures who decided to join forces with the Lich.
Elfheim
Speaking of ogres, we first start to see them around Pravoka and we’ll see a few of them later on near Melmond, but they’re most heavily concentrated in and near Elfheim along with the werewolves. The Elfheim region is also where we first find ogre chiefs, which the NES version called GrOgres, presumably short for “greater ogres,” and while I usually assume that the NES version is constrained by harsh character limits, in this case it makes considerably more sense: These greater ogres are, like goblin guards, found in far away regions with no other ogres, which suggests that these are full-time professionals that the Lich can move around, while the ordinary ones are part-time militia who have to stay close to home.
The primary danger in Elfheim is the Marsh Cave and the dark elf king Astos. There’s no sign of any other dark elves and Astos doesn’t look at all like an elf in his combat sprite, so “dark elf” might just mean “renegade elf” here, in the same way that Garland is a renegade knight from Corneria. I always thought it’d be cool to replace the ogres with dark elves, though, make it an actual conflict between two different kingdoms.
The Marsh Cave also gives us a wide variety of undead and giant animals like scorpions, our first slimes which come up all over the place and which I’m pretty sure are naturally occurring cavern hazards in this world, and the piscodemon, which looks like the mind flayer in every version including the NES, but which is called “wizard” in the NES version. These guys are the boss in the Marsh Cave, and their staves and robes and magical capabilities all suggest intelligence, but they don’t seem to be aligned with Astos the way the ogres seem to be. Astos needs you to go into the Marsh Cave to retrieve the crown that the piscodemons are camping on and there are no ogres in the Marsh Cave, which suggests that the Marsh Cave’s piscodemons and the ogres outside are not aligned. We’ll see them working together in the Lich King’s stronghold later on, though. So, it seems like Astos is the leader of the ogres and the piscodemons, despite also being vassals of the Lich, are at war with him. I say they’re vassals of the Lich, but in fairness, the damp circumstances we meet them in, the squid faces, and the fact that their name means “fish baddies” (pisco- meaning Pisces meaning fish) suggest they might actually be Krakenspawn – but they show up pretty much exclusively in places overrun with the undead, so that suggests they might actually be Lichspawn again.
Since this is also where we find the greatest density of werewolves, it’s also possible that the intelligent fiend-aligned creatures are mutations caused by aligning with the fiends, so the goblins in Corneria and the ogres and piscodemons in Elfheim are humans and elves (respectively) twisted by the corrupt magic of the earth crystal, which would also explain why the dark elf Astos looks so freaky and weird.
Melmond
The Melmond area is right on the Lich’s doorstep and gives us tigers and hyenas, which is ecologically weird but still naturally occurring wild animals. The Lich’s stronghold in the Cavern of Earth gives us mummies and cockatrices, who, funny enough, are only ever encountered together, and who will be returning in the Mirage Tower in the desert of Tiamat, the first of the fiends to awaken. They also crop up in fixed encounters in the Kraken’s lair, but in the Mirage Tower, they’re just a regular random encounter. This suggests that the mummification method of undead-ification predates the Lich King’s awakening by some time, a form of dark magic that fiend-aligned people worked out for themselves long before the Lich King started reanimating skeletons, zombies, ghouls, and wraiths en masse. And also that the cockatrices are their pets, somehow, in the same way that goblins have a whole thing about wolves in their culture.
The Lich’s stronghold is also the first appearance of earth elementals and gargoyles, clearly fiendspawn of the corrupted earth crystal, the minotaur, which we’re encountering here for the first time but which, based on their world map spawns, are native primarily to the Crescent Lake region, and the trolls, who are not only found near Crescent Lake but also in the northeastern continent (devastated by Tiamat) near both Lufenia and Gaia. Regular minotaurs are not found on the northeastern continent, but zombie minotaurs are, specifically near Lufenia. The Lich’s awakening is relatively recent, years instead of centuries, but clearly there’s been enough time to move some troops around, because the zombie minotaurs are zombies and therefore Lichspawn.
For the intelligent fiend-aligned races so far, we’ve been able to sketch out a pretty clear homeland for them: Goblins are from Corneria and are never found elsewhere unless they’re soldiers. Sahuagin are found throughout the oceans. Ogres are found most often in Elfheim, but also spread throughout the mountains near the Ice Cave and Pravoka. Living minotaurs are found exclusively in Crescent Lake (or the Cavern of Earth, where the Lich employs them as foot soldiers).
But trolls have a wide range going from Crescent Lake across the sea to Lufenia and the impenetrable valley of Gaia, reachable only by airship. In fairness, Gaia has an utterly bizarre grab-bag of overworld encounters that’s going to need its own explanation because almost nothing there makes sense, and Lufenia also has lots of strange foreign monsters, but I need to stick the troll homeland somewhere. We’ll also see palette swapped sea trolls in the Onrac region where the Kraken lurks, especially underwater. From all this, I conclude that the trolls are originally from the Gaia Valley or perhaps Lufenia and were early allies of Tiamat, who have been moved around the world by fiends of both air and water. They patrol what’s left of Lufenia with zombie minotaurs on loan from the Lich even as the Lich got several of them in return to help guard his Cavern of Earth, got transformed into sea trolls to serve as the shocktroops of the Kraken, and got airdropped into the Crescent Lake region to guard the sleeping Marilith once the Warriors of Light started stomping around. It’s possible to reach Crescent Lake before the Cavern of Earth, but you probably won’t actually go there until after, and since the game’s programming doesn’t really handle updating encounter tables easily, we can do a little handwaving and even say that the trolls only arrived after the death of the Lich, when the Marilith wakes up early and fiend-aligned forces start shuffling troops around to try and harden her stronghold against the Warriors of Light, who’ve just proven they can kill a freshly-awakened fiend.
The Cavern of Earth is also where we find our first gigas. This is a themed set that includes hill gigas, fire gigas, and ice gigas. The fire gigas is very well behaved: They live in Gulg Volcano and are otherwise only found in the Temple of Chaos as part of a grab-bag of monsters clearly recruited from all over the world. The ice gigas lives exclusively in the Ice Cave except when they live in Gaia Valley, halfway across the world. The hill gigas doesn’t have an obvious home. They show up in the Cavern of Earth, but also near Lufenia, in the Gaia Valley (again!), near Crescent Lake, in Gulg Volcano, and near the Citadel of Trials, another section of Tiamat’s northeastern continent. They’re very dense in Tiamat’s continent and otherwise almost never found on the world map, only in dungeons, although they do show up, and fairly commonly even, in Crescent Lake. My explanation for this is that they are native to the northeastern continent, probably the Gaia Valley in particular since that place is full of mountains, but they spread through the whole thing. They were another early fiend-aligned race like the trolls and were recruited in large numbers by the Lich to defend the Cavern of Earth. When the Lich was defeated, surviving hill gigantes fled towards Gulg Volcano to regroup and try to defend the Marilith from the Warriors of Light.
Crescent Lake
The Crescent Lake region is mostly full of leftovers from the Cavern of Earth. I like the story this suggests, in the same way that Corneria being the goblins’ homeland suggests an alliance with Garland, of defeated minions of the Lich making their way to the homeland of their minotaur comrades and flooding the area near Crescent Lake in an effort to clean out the Marilith’s region and secure the place against the coming attack of the Warriors of Light.
We also see ankhegs here, which could be earth-aligned fiendspawn, but since we never saw them or anything like them anywhere near the Lich, I’m going to assume they’re wild animals. The rivers have “ocho” plant monsters, hydras, piranhas, and crocodiles. Some of these are definitely wild animals, and the hydra might be too, because magic. Even the ocho could be a natural hazard of the rivers, which are in extremely rugged terrain and thus might just be an ordinarily dangerous place. It’s not really clear which fiend would be responsible for ochos, but the presence of a neochu in the Flying Fortress of the Lufenians suggests that it’s probably a naturally occurring monster that was already around before the fiends, which the Lufenians modified. Hydras could definitely be Krakenspawn, but if ochos are just a thing that happens, then hydras can be, too – nothing about the rivers near Mt. Gulg suggests that its monster infestation is a recent problem, this part of the map is super remote and hard to navigate.
Gulg Volcano
In the Marilith’s lair in Gulg Volcano, we get ogre mages for the second time – they were also in the Cavern of Earth, but there was a lot to talk about there, so I shunted these guys here instead. We only see ogre mages in three places, two of them are fiend lairs, and the third is in the desert on the northwestern continent, in the Kraken’s quadrant of the map but too far from the water to be meaningfully connected to him. The ogre mages in the Cavern of Earth and Gulg Volcano are probably fiend-worshipping mage-priests. Being random encounters suggests a persistent population in the desert near(ish) Onrac, but there’s no other ogres there, so I would interpret this as some kind of pilgrimage site with a semi-permanent population. For some reason, ogre mages – and only ogre mages – come journey here with such regularity that you can put down roots and start a community based on, essentially, tourism.
Also in Gulg Volcano we get some straightforward fiendspawn, like the fire elemental and the horned devil (a gargoyle palette swap), as well as things that suggest their originals might be fiendish because Marilith was able to make palette swaps of them: The pyrolisk is a palette swapped cockatrice, which suggests the cockatrice is a Tiamatspawn, especially since the Mirage Desert where you find Tiamat is full of mummies, who show up with cockatrices a lot. The pyrohydra suggests that maybe the hydra really is a Krakenspawn. On the other hand, the Hellhound is a palette-swapped hyena, but it’s probably not actually related to the hyena, they were just saving time by doing a palette-swap and it’s actually just a regular Hellhound. The lava worm and the fire lizard are clearly Marilithspawn, but I don’t think they’re necessarily mutations of regular worms or lizards (although the gigas worm is plausibly a Lichspawn anyway).
We also first encounter dragons, here, in the red dragon. Dragons are found exclusively in dungeons in a way that might suggest they’re fiendspawn, created by the fiends to garrison specific locations and otherwise ignored, but there’s one obvious problem with this, which is that Bahamut and several non-fiend aligned dragons exist, and one less obvious problem, which is that the ice dragons have no obvious fiend to be attached to. So, dragons are a partially fiend-aligned race where Bahamut remains on Team Crystals but a significant chunk of dragons flew off to join Tiamat, and later signed up with other fiends based on elemental allegiance, so a bunch of red dragons showed up to help Marilith when she woke up because Tiamat said so.
I think it’d be cool if the Marilith leaned more heavily into the demonic angle for more of her fiendspawn, her dungeon is full of a whole lot of “animal but fire” where the Lich has undead armies and the Kraken has aquatic horrors.
Ice Cave
The Ice Cave has a ton of ice themed enemies: Frost wolves, ice gigantes, ice dragons, and the remorazz. But it’s also full of undead, including some old favorites like bloodbones, ghasts, and mummies (with their cockatrice pets!), plus some new hits like wraiths. It’s got the mind flayer (“sorcerer” in the NES version), which is clearly an upgrade to the piscodemon we last saw in the Marsh Cave, as well as some original flavor piscodemons. There’s also dark wizards here, who are palette swaps of Astos, suggesting they are dark elves. Last time we encountered piscodemons, it was as Astos’ enemies, who he tricked us into killing for him. We also meet the evil eye, here, a beholder-looking monster who is not a palette swap of the big eyes from earlier, and whose concept art makes them very definitely a straight-up beholder, no hiding it (the actual in-game sprite is less obvious about it, though).
We’ll later meet more mummies, dark elves, mind flayers, and evil eyes in Tiamat’s stronghold in the Floating Fortress, and we’ll also encounter a lot of ice gigantes on her continent (though not in her stronghold). So although there’s some Lich King forces here to help bulk things up, this seems like it’s definitely an outpost of Tiamat’s still camping on some ancient Lufenian stronghold they destroyed centuries ago, which is why you can find the parts needed to repair the airship here.
Cardian Islands
The Cardian Islands themselves, as well as the western edge of Tiamat’s continent where the Citadel of Trials is located, is packed with wild animals that require no special explanation beyond Tiamat having wiped out Lufenian civilization centuries ago leaving the wilds to overgrow the whole region. Hydras and ochos pop up again, along with manticores, wyverns, wyverns’ palette swap the wyrm, basilisks, sand worms, and barettas (or ankylosauruses, for some reason this dinosaur and only this dinosaur gets retconned to be a fantasy creature after the NES version). The wyverns/wyrms in particular might be Tiamatspawn rather than wild animals, and if we assume from its presence on the Floating Fortress that neochus are some kind of ancient Lufenian science experiment, then wyrms might be modified in the same way.
Less straightforward in this region is the weretiger and the sphinx. We’ve had sphinxes in the Cavern of Earth and Gulg Volcano, but never on the world map before, and this is the first time we’ve met weretigers. We’ll meet rakshasas later on, which are to weretigers as warg wolves are to werewolves: A stronger palette swapped version whose name implies that they are the pure strain version of the thing that a were[thing] sits at the halfway point from humanity. Since we only find these guys near the ruins of Lufenian civilization, the weretigers are Tiamat-aligned Lufenians using lycanthropy (felinthropy?) to survive in the wilderness of their ruined civilization, while sphinxes are either Tiamatspawn or else a Tiamat-aligned race native to the Yahnikurm Desert in the heart of Tiamat’s territory.
Citadel of Trials
This place is weird, but that’s probably because it’s a menagerie set up by Bahamut as part of some weird test of worthiness. That’s kind of a dumb way to hand out prestige classes, but that is the actual story: Bahamut sends you to the Citadel of Trials to prove your worth and the only thing you accomplish there is getting a rat tail. We have a lot of monsters that we’ll see again in the nearby Mirage Tower or Flying Fortress, like medusas, mummies, and mind flayers, the horned devil returns, plus here we see one of the only appearances of the zombie dragon. If I wanted to rewrite this section, I would make it a holy sanctuary of the dragons that Tiamat corrupted, but the official story is that it’s a challenge given by Bahamut, so presumably all these guys are here either from wandering in from nearby or else by Bahamut’s power.
Onrac
In the desert near Onrac we find those ogre mages mentioned earlier (and they have Hellhound pets they brought with them from their primary temple at Gulg Volcano), plus several wild animals like the sabre tooth tiger, ankylosaurus, and remorazz.
In the rivers near Onrac, we find a bunch of wild animals like crocodiles and piranhas, plus the neocho. This is the only place we find a neocho on the world map, and it’s in the rivers leading up to the waterfall dungeon, where we’re going to recover a crucial bit of Flying Fortress tech from an abandoned robot. However that thing got detached from the Flying Fortress and wound up here, it must have brought some neochos with it, enough to start a breeding population (they’re plants, so it might’ve just been some seeds spilling out onto the wrong part of the river).
Waterfall
Everything in here is a Mirage Tower expat except the green dragon, which is found exclusively in here and the Chaos Shrine, the latter of which gathers monsters from all over the world. We’re not that far away from the Caridan Islands, so this is probably the home of several green dragons working for Tiamat and the rest are Mirage Tower forces left here by Tiamat after wiping out some Lufenian holdouts.
Sunken Shrine
As the end of the game gets closer, most of the monsters we’re encountering for the first time are, by definition, not in very many parts of the game. Even so, the Sunken Shrine has very few repeats even in the Tiamat sections still ahead. Here we have mostly just straightforward Krakenspawn like water elementals, wild animals like sea snakes and sea scorpions (lobsters in the NES original), and the appearance of the new ghost enemy. The Lich had lots of ghost-y things, but the enemy actually called “ghost” is exclusive to the Sunken Shrine and thus must be some kind of drowned soul who belongs to the Kraken instead of the Lich because they were never buried in the earth. We also see the sea trolls, which we’ve talked about before as indicative that the trolls have probably been fiend-aligned for a long time, as well as the sahuagin priest (or sahuagin prince, depending on your version), indicating that this place holds religious or political importance to the sahuagin in the same way that Gulg Volcano and the Cavern of Earth does for the ogres. Plus the deep eyes, which confirms that the big eyes is some kind of Krakenspawn, although not really what else it might be or do.
We also encounter the water naga here. Water nagas are never found on the overworld map and their spirit naga counterparts are found in the Flying Fortress. We don’t otherwise get any signs of Lufenian influence here, so I don’t think nagas were made by the Lufenians, but rather they’re fiendspawn: Water nagas are Krakenspawn and spirit nagas are Tiamatspawn.
Valley of Gaia
We’ve talked about this place before because it helps make trolls, hill gigantes, and ice gigantes hard to place, since all three of those monsters show up very far away. I ultimately decided that this is probably the hill gigantes’ homeland, since they’re found on the overworld here and there’s lots of mountains nearby. Most monsters here are airborne, like wyverns or manticores, so that requires no special explanation, but what the Hell are the ice gigantes doing here? There’s no particular reason to retreat to this particular remote and secluded part of the world after the Ice Cave gets sacked (although we do at least know the Ice Cave has been sacked – you can’t get here without the airship, which you need to complete the Ice Cave to repair). I realize that coming up with an explanation for these things is the whole premise of this post, but I can’t come up with anything better than “gigantes are elemental creatures and spontaneously generate anywhere their element is common,” which I would think is fine and even kind of interesting as it would presumably make them renegade crystalspawn, but there’s no storm gigas or air gigas or anything like that.
It’s also possible the ice gigantes are associated with Tiamat somehow. They’re found on Tiamat’s northeastern continent except for the Ice Cave, which you would think would be their primary home, but might also be a place they were left to garrison after hunting down some Lufenians, since we do find the parts to repair a Lufenian airship there.
Lufenia
This is also a place that’s already come up because of how hard it makes it to place other monsters. we find some spillover monsters from the Yahnikurm Desert nearby, but also trolls and zombie minotaurs. Zombification was the Lich’s schtick and living minotaurs are only found in the Cavern of Earth and near the Crescent Lake area, so I have no idea what zombie minotaurs are doing up near Lufenia, far from both the minotaurs’ homeland and the Lich’s stronghold. I’d swap these two around, having zombie minotaurs be weaker and found in the Cavern of Earth and near Crescent Lake, thus suggesting that they are the Lich’s troops, and stronger living minotaurs found here, thus suggesting that this is their homeland. That’s not how the game works, though, so I guess the Lich created zombie minotaurs and deployed them exclusively to a fringe sector of Tiamat’s continent for some reason.
Yahnikurm Desert
In contrast to the last two overworld map areas, this one is super straightforward: We got a bunch of wild animals like allosaurs and tyrannosaurs and wyverns and sand worms, and since civilization was destroyed here a full 400 years ago, no special explanation is required for how that happened.
Mirage Tower/Flying Fortress
We’ve already talked about several of the monsters that have presumed origins here: Mummies are presumably from here because they’re an undead type associated with the desert and found here, in places associated with the Lich King, and nowhere else. Since they’re mummified, these guys were probably fiend-aligned Lufenians buried here centuries ago, awaiting the coming of the Lich and the corruption of the Earth Crystal so they could be reanimated. Also they have pet cockatrices. Not totally clear why, but cockatrices consistently appear alongside mummies – maybe it was a gift from Tiamat for being some of the first fiend-aligned creatures. We also see black knights alongside nightmares, one presumably riding the other, and later death knights riding the same, presumably elite Tiamat cultist warriors, the fiend-aligned Lufenian descendants of those guys who eventually became mummies. There’s lots of golems and mechs like the “guardian” and “sentinel” mechs as well as the nuclear-armed WarMech (a weapon to surpass Metal Gear).
We’ve got blue dragons, swayed to Tiamat’s side, and “dark fighters,” who are palette swaps of Astos again and thus presumably dark elves. If “dark elves” are just elves sided with the fiends, then the split between dark elves and Elfheim may have happened some time ago, and these guys have been in the Floating Fortress for a while, and we also encounter mind flayers and evil eyes just like we found in the Ice Cave, suggesting that these guys are Tiamatspawn, not Lichspawn or Krakenspawn.
But we also see vampires down in the Mirage Tower, and while I didn’t discuss him back in the Cavern of Earth, the first vampire we encountered was unambiguously a Lichspawn, and one of the Lich’s top lieutenants at that. Not only is the vampire back as a standard enemy, he’s also joined by a vampire lord (vampire wizard in the NES version). Where were all these guys when the Lich needed them? Hellhounds and pyrohydras, both Marilithspawn, also show up, but as returning monsters, they’re much more easily explained: They retreated here (presumably picked up by some point, since the Flying Fortress is flying and can probably move around) after the death of the Marilith.
Medusas are here, which we first encountered in the Citadel of Trials, and while these sure seem like some kind of Lichspawn, we’ve never seen them until now, the Floating Fortress, heart of Tiamat’s power, so…I guess they’re Tiamatspawn? That seems thematically wrong, but from their placement in the game, it’s hard to come to any other conclusion. I’d like to say they’re Lichspawn who retreated here after the destruction of the Lich, but just like the vampires, that raises the question of where they were when the Lich was still animate.
The chimera is found exclusively in here, and this is also the only place we find the neocho besides the rivers leading to the waterfall dungeon, another Lufenian holdout location. The chimeras and neochos are both probably Lufenian experiments, genetic/biological tech in the same way that the sentinel bots are more standard hardware tech. The manticore might be as well, but since it’s found outside the Flying Fortress, it could also just be a magical beast in a magical setting.
Fixing It Up
Probably mostly by coincidence, Final Fantasy 1’s monster placement mostly tells a story of which monsters are native to where, with a handful of exceptions that mess up everything. So if we ignore fitting it all in perfectly and instead just try to make something loosely FF1-shaped while having an actual history and place in the world for the random encounter monsters, what does that look like?
Goblins live near Corneria. They side with the rogue knight Garland along with several undead monsters to kidnap the Princess Sara of Corneria and blackmail the king of Corneria into a standoff while the power of the Lich creeps out from Melmond.
Pravoka is ruled by pirates who have an Innsmouth-style corrupt bargain with the sahuagin that answer to the Kraken. Dark elf raiders are also prowling about from when they stole Matoya’s eye so she couldn’t heal the wood elf prince.
Elfheim is split by civil war between dark elves who’ve sided with the fiends and the wood elves. The dark elves have undead allies from the Lich, plus the help of piscodemons sent by the Kraken. Many elves have been transformed into werewolves by the lycanthropic bite of warg wolves, ancient creatures of Chaos. The werewolves believe that after civilization is destroyed, only those transformed in this way will be able to survive in the new world of Chaos.
Melmond is besieged by undead forces of the Lich King, including mummified aristocrats of corrupted Lufenia finally reanimated after centuries of being entombed beneath distant sands, powerful vampiric elite warriors and mages, zombie minotaurs reanimated from the powerful beastmen of that continent, hill gigantes drawn from the foreboding mountains of the Valley of Gaia, goblins from Corneria, dark elves from Elfheim, ogres from the Gulg mountains, and trolls from Crescent Lake. It’s a vast army drawn from all over the southern continent aimed at wiping out civilization here just like Tiamat did to Lufenia.
Crescent Lake is the homeland of the trolls, and the Gulg Mountains to the north are the homeland of the ogres. Gulg Volcano is the main sacred site of the ogres, it is the fire gigantes’ home, and it is also where Marilith has awakened, corrupting the fire crystal and using its power to spawn an army of demons that have spilled out into the mountains and attacked Crescent Lake. She’s not nearly ready for a fight with the Warriors of Light, though, and neither is the garrison of ice gigantes left by Tiamat on a remote Lufenian stronghold, which the Warriors of Light use to repair the airship downed by her draconic minions here centuries ago.
That said, it would also be fine if Onrac was accessible by regular ship. Tiamat’s territory is accessible only by airship, but the Kraken’s can be reached by ship. There’s almost nothing to do here, so we’re going to make this place much more island-y. The Cardian Islands are still where the good dragons, including Bahamut, can be found, and the Citadel of Trials is now an ancient draconic sacred place seized and despoiled by Tiamat’s armies, full of troops found in the Mirage Tower.
Onrac is still here, but rather than a seaside town, they’ve retreated to the mountains near the waterfall dungeon in the heart of the biggest island of the Cardian Archipelago (still much smaller than the Onrac continent in the game as it is). That waterfall dungeon is another Lufenian outpost garrisoned by Tiamat’s forces, in this case mostly rogue dragons. Onrac avoids the shore because the water is dangerous, with the sahuagin having defeated the merfolk for rule of the sea ages ago. The spirits of the defeated mermaids lead the Warriors of Light to oxyale, they take a submarine down to the Sunken Shrine, the central landmass that the Kraken pulled beneath the waves when it destroyed the greater Onrac civilization centuries ago.
The Lufenian continent is still intact, but civilization there was laid waste long ago when Tiamat took over the Flying Fortress. The rakshasas of Chaos have transformed Lufenians into weretigers, who, just as the prophecy foretold, are now the only ones able to survive in the world of Chaos left behind by the annihilation of Lufenian civilization. The minotaurs’ homeland is in the southeast, near one of the last hidden outposts of Lufenians, while the hill and ice gigantes are native to the remote Valley of Gaia in the north, where another outpost of Lufenians is found. But mostly this continent is full of wild monsters, some spawned by Tiamat like wyverns and others just grown out of control like tyrannosaurs, growing wild in the ashes of civilization.
The Mirage Tower and the Flying Fortress above are guarded by the ancient mechanical war machines of the Lufenians, the rakshasas and the weretigers, the traitorous dragons, the mummified traitors reanimated by the Lich King, the Lufenians who twisted themselves into mind flayers while seeking genetic perfection and immortality, the chimeras and the neocho monstrosities they created while seeking to understand life itself.
And in the Temple of Chaos is found not only a gathering of all these, but also the Chaos mages and Chaos warriors, our own time’s traitors seeking to destroy civilization for the glory of Chaos that they might rule over the ashes.
Bonus Round: Final Fantasy II
While Final Fantasy I had a wide variety of what either clearly were or at least were implied to be intelligent monsters, several of which had presumably been around for centuries as they are associated primarily with the Kraken and Tiamat, in Final Fantasy II the monsters are said to be summoned from Hell by Emperor Mateus. It’s not stated exactly when Mateus did this, but everyone expects the Emperor to die when he is killed (he doesn’t, but that comes as a surprise), so the very longest these demons have been around is 50 years, and the Emperor doesn’t look particularly old, so it’s probably more like 5-20 years.
So while I do think the FF2 monsters can be split into wild animals, undead reanimated by demonic spirits, corporeal demons with bodies conjured entirely, and Imperial soldiers. You can use some amount of context clues to figure out which is which, like, leg eaters and vampire thorns could be conjured demons, but could also be wild animals, since they seem to appear only in places that are not actively patrolled by Imperial forces, like the world map, sewers, or ruins (and also, bafflingly, Fynn during its occupation, which recycles world map encounter tables and includes no Imperial soldiers), whereas goblins appear in the Imperial slave labor camp at Semitt Falls.
But, y’know, so? There’s not really an expansion of the setting there, beyond the bit where undead are demonic spirits called into dead bodies to serve Mateus. It’s not like with Final Fantasy I where I can sketch out the shape of societies that flesh out the game’s world and make it more interesting. The Final Fantasy II equivalent of that would be to flesh out not the monsters, but the towns, figuring out how the Kingdom of Fynn interacted with Paloom, Poft, and Bafsk before the Imperial invasion, and in the “fixing things up” bit I’d have Kashuan be more of an actual surviving society under Imperial occupation to make Gordon’s arc more relevant and also to make the total annihilation of the Deist dragoons a more unique thing – as it is, it seems like total destruction of society was SOP for the first couple of kingdoms and then Mateus got bored of that and switched to regular conquest, then got bored again and destroyed most of what was left with the Cyclone.
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