Final Fantasy vs. Dungeons & Dragons
In finishing up the previous post about Secret of Mana, I realized that a recurring monster in that series may be a Dungeons & Dragons export that had been… disguised after the fact. This got me thinking about the unusual relationship that D&D has with video games in general and Final Fantasy in particular. In short, it’s complicated; video games owe a great debt to D&D, but for various complicated reasons that I will explain, it’s not always acknowledged explicitly.
To one degree or another, all RPGs re-create aspects of the tabletop experience, but how much they use and how blatantly they pull from Dungeons & Dragons could put them at risk — of seeming derivative, I suppose, but also of infringing on intellectual property. For this reason, a lot of attorneys would tell creatives to avoid using intellectual property they don’t own and, better yet, come up with their own ideas so they can own them. To a degree this is what Final Fantasy has done, as it moves away from using most but not all D&D monsters, but it’s tough guessing whether the motivations are legal, creative, or some mix of the two.
That Secret of Mana character makes for a good example of how complicated these matters can be. Late in the English version of Secret of Mana, the heroes fight a four-armed snake woman called the Hexas.
In the Japanese version of the game, however, she’s called the Lamian Naga (ラミアンナーガ), both of those names coming from folklore — Lamia being a snake-tailed monster in Greek mythology, Naga being human-snake hybrid creatures in Hindu mythology. However, both Lamias and Nagas have existed in the lore of Dungeons & Dragons going back to the first edition of the game’s Monster Manual. Given that I couldn’t find an etymology for the term Hexas or any use of it that predates Secret of Mana, I wonder if perhaps a new name had been invented for this boss monster to make it seem less derivative of anything lifted from D&D.
But here’s where it gets especially interesting: A remarkably similar boss exists in the game that preceded Secret of Mana, Final Fantasy Adventure. (Don’t forget that the Mana series began as a spinoff to Final Fantasy.) This four-armed snake lady has a different set of names. In Japanese, she’s マリリス or Maririsu, and in English she’s Kary. Now, this name should sound familiar to students of Final Fantasy history, because in the original NES localization of the first Final Fantasy, Kary is one of the four elemental fiends. She has red skin, but she’s otherwise very close to what you see in Secret of Mana: a four-armed snake woman with bad intentions for do-gooders.
Left: Kary/Marilith in Final Fantasy Adventure; Right: Kary/Marilith in Final Fantasy: Pixel Remaster, which I will be using throughout this piece, just because I’ll be referring to design characteristics and these better reflect the concept art.
Despite the obvious connections between a certain Stephen King character and fire, it’s widely speculated that Kary’s name is actually a corruption of that of Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction, who is often depicted with four arms. And while that may be the case, it wasn’t part of the conception of the character, since in the original Japanese, she is マリリス (Maririsu), a name rendered in Final Fantasy IX as Maliris and subsequently as Marilith, which happens to be a race in Dungeons & Dragons lore — specifically of snake-women with six arms.
The fact that these similar-looking creatures got so many different names in different games made by the same company might seem coincidental — a result of multiple people interpreting and translating over many years and not always agreeing with the choices people made before them. But there’s another facet to this that made me curious if it might be more intentional, with Square purposefully obfuscating whether a character originated in Dungeons & Dragons. It’s a tactic that has existed among D&D players for years and still persists today, and I’m certain a version of it would also exist in the video games that the tabletop game inspired.
More so than, say, the Dragon Quest games, the Final Fantasy games pull largely from world mythology for their rosters of enemies. In any given game, you’re just as likely to see your party fight generic fantasy types — goblins, ogres, fairies, witches, ghosts — as you are representatives of various folklores. This includes familiar monsters such as gorgons (from Greek mythology) and golems (from Hebrew tradition) but also deeper cuts, such as the Abaia, which is named after a figure from Melanesian mythology; the Ipiria, which is named after a figure from Australian aboriginal mythology; and the Dullahan, which is named after a figure from Irish mythology. In short, it’s a mix of monsters that the average gamer — American, Japanese or otherwise — might recognize and others that they might not.
The first Final Fantasy, however, features more than a few monsters that are not drawn from any real-world folklore, at least in the strictest sense, because they’re instead the creations of Dungeons & Dragons. In a post about a different Final Fantasy enemy, I told the story about how the original Japanese version of Final Fantasy featured a Beholder — a floating orb with a big central eye and then eyestalk “hair” on its “scalp.” It’s a very specific look, and that’s probably why it’s one of the most iconic D&D creatures.
Left: The Beholder, as Dungeons & Dragons depicts it. Right: The Beholder, as Final Fantasy briefly depicted it but no longer does.
Without ever having played Dungeons & Dragons, I knew that this thing was associated with the game when I saw it in a season two episode of Futurama. It’s the kind of thing you’d remember just from scanning the covers at the bookstore.
And that’s probably why Square scotched the Beholder from all subsequent versions of that first Final Fantasy game. The revised enemy, Evil Eye, looks about as different from a Beholder as it can while remaining something you can still call an eyeball monster.
As near as I can tell, no one at Square has ever explained why the Beholder enemy was removed, but the common presumption was that it had something to do with avoiding potential copyright or trademark infringement and the ensuing legal headaches that result from using something without the proper permission. The appropriation of names and likeness landed somewhat differently in Japan back in the day than it did and still does in the U.S., and while Japanese creators and companies might not sweat their characters being referenced directly, Americans love a lawsuit. In fact, as I explain in my piece about Street Fighter II character names, worries about Mike Tyson suing Capcom over using what sure seems to be his likeness most likely resulted in three of the four boss characters swapping names — and the big bad of the series being named after a slow, decidedly non-vicious herbivore. And when it comes to Dungeons & Dragons specifically, the publishers of the game had a reputation back in the day for suing to defend what they cited as their intellectual property. (The current owner is the Hasbro subsidiary Wizards of the Coast LLC, which subsumed previous owner TSR, Inc. in 1997; I’ll be addressing the history of D&D infringement suits in the miscellaneous notes section at the end of this piece.)
It makes sense that Final Fantasy would crib from Dungeons & Dragons in a broad way. While it wasn’t the first to translate elements of the tabletop RPG experience to a video game, its creators have said that D&D was a major inspiration. In 2012, Retronauts’ Jeremy Parish interviewed Akitoshi Kawazu, longtime Square employee and designer of the first game’s battle system. Kawazu admitted that not only did he try to fashion the game’s battle system to be like the one in D&D as much as possible, but also that D&D was specifically responsible for the introduction of certain western RPG elements into Japanese RPGs.
Speaking as someone who grew up playing RPGs, I was genuinely surprised to learn that one element I’d consider a genre standard did not exist in Japanese-made RPGs until Final Fantasy — and that it specifically came from D&D.
As far as my role in the game went, I was mainly in charge of the battle system and battle sequences. For that, I tried to make it as close to Dungeons & Dragons as possible. That was my goal. … [T]here are certain precepts when it comes to a Dungeons & Dragons type of environment, a western role-playing experience. Like “zombies are weak against fire,” or “monsters made of fire are weak against ice.” If you think about it a little, they all make sense, and these are all things that D&D already sets up. Certain things are weak against certain other things and strong against yet other things. They all have these relationships. Up until that point, Japanese RPGs were ignoring all of that. They didn’t incorporate those elements. It just wasn’t a part of what they were doing. That’s what I found kind of irritating. Simple as it may sound, that’s the kind of stuff I wanted to work in. Obviously it’s going to be hard to simulate the human experience of a game master and the players interacting. I couldn’t be too worried about that kind of thing. But I did want to incorporate those precepts of western RPGs into the game.
But while battle systems could be imported from Dungeons & Dragons into Final Fantasy more or less invisibly, the elements that Square borrowed didn’t stop at the mechanics of fighting enemies. No, it’s as if Square was trawling the seas of the source material with a particularly wide net, and a lot more ended up in Final Fantasy, including its class system, its magic system and many monsters concepts that you couldn’t explain away as public domain. Given Square’s treatment of the Beholder enemy, I think it’s interesting to look at what D&D monsters remained in subsequent versions of Final Fantasy 1, what re-appeared in sequels and what still shows up in the series today.
Yes, after all that is the main “meat” of this piece: a list of Dungeons & Dragons creatures appearing in Final Fantasy games that notes how Square (and later Square-Enix) might have evolved them in a way that makes them more distinct from their D&D counterparts.
Please note that my aim is to include Final Fantasy enemies that can be traced back to monsters originating in Dungeons & Dragons. Things that existed in folklore before D&D but then also showed up in Final Fantasy — vampires or werewolves, for example — as well as more or less generic real-life animals like lizards, scorpions or tigers, are excluded.
Ankheg
Localized in the NES version as PEDE and later as Centipede, the official localized English name is now Ankheg, based on the Japanese アンクヘッグ (Ankuheggu).
It’s clearly based on D&D’s Ankheg, which looks more mantis-like but is nonetheless an insectoid monster. Another version, also more centipede-like, appeared in Final Fantasy V — localized in the first English localization as Centipeeler — but no other mainline games. It does appear in Final Fantasy Type-0, Final Fantasy Dimensions and Final Fantasy Adventure, however.
Baretta
Its shelled appearance prompted the localizers to call it R.ANKLO or Red Anklo, but in Japanese it’s バレッテ (Barette). And while that’s close to the katakana rendering of the name of the Final Fantasy VII character Barret Wallace (バレット・ウォーレス), the connection here is actually the Bulette, Dungeons & Dragons’ armored tunnelling monster. It reappears in FFV, where it’s first localized as Baretta and then later fixed to match its D&D source as Bulette. Although it also appears in Final Fantasy Adventure, it did not appear in the main series again until Final Fantasy XV.
Black Flan (and assorted other slimes)
In the Marsh Cave, the party first encounters the Green Slime. In the original localization, it’s SCUM, but the Japanese name, グリーンスライム (Gurīnsuraimu), is clearly a nod to the D&D creature Green Slime. Nearly all the slime monsters in FF1 are taken directly from D&D. Compare Gray Ooze (グレイウーズ, Gureiūzu) with its D&D counterpart, Ochre Jelly (オーカーゼリー, Ōkāzerī) with its D&D counterpart, and finally the Black Flan, whose Japanese name (ブラックプリン, Burakkupurin) literally translates as “black pudding,” which is also a D&D monster.
Now, the Green Slime returns for Final Fantasy II, at which point it starts to look more like how similar slime monsters will look throughout the series, which is to say more distinctive and more sentient-seeming. As a named thing, however, the Green Slime would subsequently be relegated to spinoffs such as Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, Final Fantasy Adventure and the Final Fantasy Legend games. The FFA version of the monster becomes the recurring slime monster in the Mana series.
Left: The FF1 version of the Black Flan. Right: The look the Black Flan had from FFII onwards — but doesn’t it look weirdly like Ultros?
The Gray Ooze and Ochre Jelly do not appear in subsequent games, but the Black Flan does frequently, appearing in FFII, FFIII, FFIV, FFX-2, FFXI and FFXV — and always using that name in English localizations. What’s really interesting is that starting in FFII, the Black Flan gets a whole host of palette swaps that preserve the dessert theme, as if to further differentiate these gelatinous monsters from the D&D ones. The list includes the following:
Red Marshmallow (レッドマシュマロ, Reddomashumaro)
Yellow Jelly (イエローゼリー, Ierōzerī)
Purple Bavarois (パープルババロア, Pāpurubabaroa)
White Mousse (ホワイトムース, Howaitomuusu)
Golden Flan (ゴールデンプリン, Gōrudenpurin)
Dust Mouuse (ダストムース, Dasutomūsu)
And the finally there is the extremely rare pink variety, the Flan Princess, whose Japanese name, プリンプリンセス (Purinpurinsesu) literally means “Pudding Princess.” Am I surprised to have mentioned pudding and flan twice on this blog in 2025? Yes. Yes, I am.
Crawler
Another Marsh Cave enemy, this one was localized only as CRAWL in the original localization. It’s been Crawler ever since, and its Japanese name, (クロウラー, Kurōrā), would seem to be a reference to D&D’s Carrion Crawler. Both can paralyze opponents in battle. It next appeared in FFVI, and while both this and the FFI design resembles the D&D counterpart, the versions in all subsequent appearances drastically depart from this.
Death Knight
Though there’s not much to his design other than a guy in armor, the Death Knight can use some higher-level magic that you wouldn’t expect from a sword-swinger and that might connect him to the D&D Death Knight, which is explicitly an undead knight. Either way, it didn’t end up mattering too much in the overall Final Fantasy series, as it didn’t appear again in a mainline game until the Dawn of Souls remake of FFII.
Deepeyes
Essentially another one-off, the Deepeyes is just one of many eyeball-focused monsters in FF1. Its Japanese name is ディープアイ (Dīpuai). The Final Fantasy wiki conjectures that it may be a reference to the D&D monster Eye of the Deep, which is essentially a marine variation on the Beholder. Given that it first appears in the waterlogged Sunken Shrine, I suppose that would seem likely, although it’s interesting that this monster never looked anything like a Beholder and therefore didn’t need to be redesigned. It does not appear in subsequent Final Fantasy games.
Mindflayer
Now here’s where it gets really interesting. If the Beholder is one of the most iconic Dungeons & Dragons monsters, then the Mind Flayer is giving it a run for its money.
These octopus-headed magic-users appear frequently in Final Fantasy games, though under many names in English localizations: as SORCERER in the first Final Fantasy, as Mage in the original English version of Final Fantasy IV, and as Mind Flare in the first English translations of both Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy Tactics. Because their signature attack is Mind Blast, which causes non-elemental damage in addition to paralyzing its victims, I didn’t immediately suspect that Mind Flare was a mistranslation. Like, if the game was using flare in the burning sense, it kind of fits? Only when later entries referred to these guys as Mindflayer (as one word) did I realize the mistake. They weren’t using a mental flare attack on their enemies; they were mentally flaying them.
Mind Flayers (two words) have been present in Dungeons & Dragons lore going back to the first edition of the game. Also known as Illithids, they were created by Gary Gygax, who claimed to have made them up “whole cloth” while also acknowledging that their appearance was inspired by the tentacled monstrosity featured on the cover of the 1974 novel The Burrowers Beneath by Brian Lumley. The book is part of the larger Cthulhu mythos — the collected stories of authors working in the milieu created by horror writer H.P. Lovecraft — and I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that Lovecraft’s most famous creation, Cthulhu, is a cosmic entity that also looks like an octopus-headed humanoid, just much bigger.
Whereas many Dungeons & Dragons originals have been phased out of later Final Fantasy games, the Mind Flayer remains, most recently appearing in FFXV. I could probably do a post on them alone, and I may yet, but I’ve got no explanation for why they would persist in Final Fantasy when it’s clear that these characters are among the ones that Wizards of the Coast is attempting to control and protect. For example, they’re excluded from Wizard of the Coasts’ open game licence (OGL), a document that allows players to create their own D&D experiences but only under certain conditions. This expressly prohibits the use of certain monsters, Mind Flayers and Illithids included. Confusingly, the systems reference document (SRD), a separate set of guidelines for adapting D&D rules in creating games under different circumstances, permits Mind Flayers but not Illithids. Like I said, it’s very complicated.
Of course, it’s possible to obtain permission to use these likenesses and names, and that may be what Square-Enix has done. I just can’t find documentation anywhere. In talking to other people who track legal matters relating to D&D, it was suggested to me that another explanation could be that the past and current owners are aware of Final Fantasy’s use of these monsters but have declined legal action because they’re not sure they’d win in court. If they lost, they could be at risk of enabling other companies to use the names and likenesses of this monster and perhaps others.
It’s worth noting that the Mind Flayer came to increased levels of prominence outside the Dungeons & Dragons world thanks to it being referenced in the second season of the TV series Stranger Things. The characters on the show refer to one of the antagonistic entities on the show as the Mind Flayer specifically because they play D&D and interpet much of their adventures using the lore of the game. It’s possible that Netflix also had to ask permission to use the name, but given how popular the show is and how D&D’s presence on the show amounts to free advertising, I’d guess it didn’t take much convincing. (There’s an interesting post about the relationship between Stranger Things and D&D materials at the blog Awesome Lies, if you’re interested.)
Finally, Final Fantasy also has a recurring monster called the Piscodemon that is a palette swap of the Mindflayer. That name is inspired by a D&D creature that is fairly only somewhat similar. Another palette swap, the Squidraken, is unique to Final Fantasy.
Ochu
Here’s another head-scratcher. The Ochu is a recurring plant monster in the Final Fantasy series, but even a seasoned Dungeons & Dragons player might not realize that it’s inspired by the recurring D&D monster the Otyugh, which is not a plant-based lifeform at all.
The localized Final Fantasy name comes from the Japanese approximation of the D&D name, オチュー (Ochū). The Ochu shows up in the first Final Fantasy and then doesn’t appear again until FFVII, only regularly appearing thereafter. I don’t know why they would have brought it back, necessarily, since the series already had a plant-based monster that inflicts status effects in the Marlboro, which debuted in FFII and which is unique to the series. The Ochu seems redundant, especially if it’s the kind of thing Square would have needed to pay to license, but perhaps the Final Fantasy series has changed the original concept enough that they wouldn’t need to do that.
So why would Final Fantasy reinterpret D&D’s Otyugh as a plant monster? I’d guess it resulted from people at Square misreading the concept art drawn by Yoshitaka Amano. In the below illustration, he seems to have rendered the D&D version of the creature more or less accurately, just green, and whoever made the pixel art version for Final Fantasy just assumed it was supposed to be a plant monster.
In fact, this rendering looks so much like the Marlboro that more or less replaced it that I can only assume it was a conscious substitution.
Nightmare
A lesser recurring monster that debuted in the first Final Fantasy and then returned only for FFII, FFXII and FFXIV, the Nightmare (ナイトメア or Naitomea) is nonetheless a Dungeons & Dragons pull. People love evil horses, I guess?
Pyrolisk
Another minorly returning monster, the Pyrolisk debuts in the first game, where it was localized as the PERILISK probably because whoever was looking at its Japanese name, ピロリスク or Pirorisuku, did not get the reference. It returns for FFII and then, following a substantial gap, it only comes back in FF XII and FF XVI. It’s lifted fairly directly from Dungeons & Dragons, where it’s essentially a cockatrice-style monster with the modified powers of a basilisk; as its name would imply, instead of turning you to stone, it makes you burst into flame.
Rakshasa
In doing research for this, I found the blog Let’s Play Final Fantasy, which in 2013 did a post similar to this one, cataloguing what all from Dungeons & Dragons ended up in the first Final Fantasy, but not limited to just enemies. One of the points this post brings up is that certain monsters drawn from non-European folklore only became popular in western fantasy genre stuff because D&D introduced them. For example, FF1 also features an enemy called the Rakshasa which is based on a monster from Hindu mythology, so it’s not something that D&D invented, but the fact that it existed in D&D beforehand probably means that it came via D&D instead of directly from folklore.
In the original localization, it was called MANCAT, presumably because the Japanese name, ラクシャーサ (Rakushāsa), either wasn’t discernible or couldn’t be reduced to anything sensible in the eight characters the game allotted enemy names. The Rakshasa has appeared in later games, though not resembling anything close to what it looks like in FF1, though that original version does appear in Final Fantasy Legend and Final Fantasy Legend II.
Remorazz
Only appearing in the first Final Fantasy, the Remorazz is a *different* centipede monster whose Japanese name, レモラーズ or Remorāzu, is a alternation of the name of the D&D monster the Remoraz, which also looks like monstrous centipede.
Rhyos
I’m pretty sure Rhyos is a purposeful obfuscation of a Dungeons & Dragons reference. In Japan, this recurring monster is called ゴーキマイラ or Gōkimaira, which would seem to be the Gorgimera from D&D.
Much like the Pyrolisk, its name tells you what it is: a chimera with the powers of a gorgon, because it can turn you to stone. That’s exactly what it does. In the first English version of Final Fantasy, it was called JIMERA — clearly a truncation of the D&D name — but later remakes of Final Fantasy called it Rhyos, a name I can’t find being used in any other meaningful context. It stayed Rhyos until FFXI, when it just called it Gorgimera, as if the need to hide its D&D origins just went away, and it’s been that through FFXVI.
Sahagin
I go into greater depth in one of the first posts I did on this blog, but the Sahagin is a recurring Final Fantasy monster lifted directly from Dungeons & Dragons, where it’s called the Sahuagin. Early on, these water monsters were localized as Sea Hag, presumably because localizers thought that was what the Japanese name, サハギン or Sahagin, was referencing the idea of a sea witch or something thereabouts? The etymology of the D&D name is actually weird and surprising, if you want to read the piece, but various versions of the Sahagin have appeared in most of the entries in the Final Fantasy series, usually hewing fairly closely to the D&D version: a scaly humanoid with a bad attitude.
Tiamat (and the other Elemental Fields)
The version of Tiamat we get in the Final Fantasy series is heavily influenced by the Dungeons & Dragons character to the point that it shaped her more than the original from Mesopotamian folklore from which her name comes. To the Mesopotamians, Tiamat was the primordial sea personified as a mother-goddess and sometimes depicted as a dragon or dragon-like being. In D&D, Tiamat is the queen of evil dragons, who has multiple heads and who is the antithesis to Bahamut, who in D&D is the king of good dragons. (I talk about this in greater length in a post about how Bahamut and Behemoth’s names share an etymology.) So while I said I would skip over more D&D creatures that were inspired by real-life mythology, this is a notable exception because the D&D Tiamat is the dominant force here.
In FF1, Tiamat is the fiend of wind, and the fiends associated with the other three elements are also drawn from D&D. I already mentioned Marilith/Kary being the fiend of fire, but there’s also Kraken as the fiend of water and Lich as the fiend of earth. Krakens appear in D&D, but I don’t think there’s as much to differentiate them from the ones in Norse legend. The FF1 Lich seems fairly obviously inspired by the D&D character, but the term was generically applied to various undead sorcerers before that. Gygax admitted to being inspired by a lich appearing in the 1969 short story “The Sword and the Sorcerer” by Gardner Fox.
Barring some palette swaps for powered-up versions, I think that’s about it. Not being as well-versed in Dungeons and Dragons as I am in Final Fantasy, there’s probably an example or two I’ve missed, but this list gives a comprehensive enough sense of the first Final Fantasy’s liberal use of D&D characters. Surely, Square would return to that well for the sequel and bring in more D&D monsters, right?
Not really, no.
Here is what I was able to put together for Final Fantasy II, excluding monsters that debuted in the previous game.
Abyss Worm
This one actually might be a stretch. The in-game sprite makes this monster look somewhat like D&D’s Purple Worm, but there’s a separate entity called the Abyssal Wurm that seems more like what’s being hinted at by the Japanese name, アビスウォーム or Abisuwōmu. Either way, this monster would appear in many subsequent games.
Behemoth
Dungeons & Dragons has a monster called the Tarrasque that’s actually based on a creature from French folklore. The D&D interpretation looks almost dinosaur-like, with a spiky, shell-like carapace covering its back and then two signature horns protruding from its forehead. The original French version, however, looks more like a combo between a lion and a turtle, but you can see how certain elements of this translated into the bigger, badder D&D version. In researching this piece, I came across this message board post theorizing that the D&D Tarrasque — as especially as it looked in the first edition of Monster Manual II, released 1983 — might have been an inspiration for the Behemoth monster, which debuted in FFII, released 1988.
Top: the FFII version of the Behemoth. Bottom: The D&D Tarrasque, per the Monster Manual II.
And you know what? I can see it, though it’s notable that it was given a different color scheme and name.
Bomb
Another of Final Fantasy’s more iconic recurring enemies, the Bomb is essentially a living fireball that explodes when its HP gets low.
Bombs debut in FFII and basically appear in every subsequent title, and while their name makes them sound decidedly un-fantastic, there’s a theory that they might be adapted from the balloon-like Gas Spore from Dungeons & Dragons, as they’re somewhat similar looking and the levelled-up version of the Bomb is called the Balloon. I can see it, but again, it’s nothing so obviously cut-and-pasted like so many enemies in the first game.
Iron Giant
I suppose you could make the argument that the Iron Giant enemy could be the Final Fantasy version of Dungeons & Dragons’ Iron Golem, but then again, it’s pretty easy for any fictional universe that has golems of varying substances to eventually wonder what one would look like made out of metal. So this, maybe? They would be recurring in Final Fantasy moving forward from FFII.
That’s it.
Even if I’ve overlooked some entries, there’s clearly been an effort on the part of the Final Fantasy II staff to look to resources beyond the Dungeons & Dragons bestiary to recruit enemies. Why would this happen? Well, I would imagine for the same reasons as whatever funny business resulted in that errant Beholder being disappeared from all subsequent versions of the first game, though I can’t explain why other D&D callbacks would be allowed to say, to say nothing of the ones that returned for sequels.
You may be wondering how Final Fantasy III compares. By my count, here are the enemies debuting in this game that seem to be inspired by Dungeons & Dragons originals.
Azer
A bit of an oddity, as far as origins go. In the Japanese version of the game, this big-bellied guy wielding a scimitar was ほのおのまじん or Honoo no Majin — litereally “Fire Spirit,” but meant more in the sense of a genie. For whatever reason, the English localization went out of its way to give the character a name associated with D&D. In that game’s lore, an Azer is a dwarf-like creature associated with fire. So, like, not wrong, but a weird choice when the FFIII version could have just been Fire Genie or Flame Djinn. This enemy only appears in FFIII.
Roper
A tentacled whatsit, the Roper seems very clearly inspired by the Dungeons & Dragons monster of the same name, if given a very different physical form. Ditto the lookalike Stroper and D&D’s Stone Roper.
Again, that’s it.
I looked at the roster of Final Fantasy IV enemies and could only spot one D&D connection: the Gloomwing, although it’s in name only. The FFIV version is a butterfly monster, while the D&D one is a flying snake. If the English localization called this monster anything else, it would be next-to-impossible to spot, so I don’t know if it counts. In FFV, there’s the Shadow Dancer enemy, which shares its name with a D&D character but perhaps not enough battle traits to be considered an export. And in Final Fantasy VI, there’s an enemy called the Borghese (ボルゲーゼ, Borugēze) that in the original English localization is called Orog — which exists in D&D and is a variant of the orc — but which was subsequently redubbed to match its Japanese name. There’s also the Chaos Dragon, whose Japanese and English name would seem to match up to the D&D character, but then again it’s a generic enough name to seem like a coincidence.
Final Fantasy VI is where I stopped scanning the enemy lists. Without having pored over the enemy lists for the next ten mainline games, I can’t say whether there’s some latter-day sequel that features the debut of multiple new D&D-inspired monsters or the return of some nixed from the series long ago. Let me know if there is; the point of this piece wasn’t to track the bestiaries in every single game searching for Dungeons & Dragons exports so much as comparing the one in the first game to the ones that came out next, post-Beholder incident.
Regardless of how the Dungeons & Dragons influence might wax and wane, I feel comfortable saying that there seems to have been a push on Square’s part to minimize the presence of D&D characters. And while I don’t know the reasons for this, I can imagine it’s some combination of what I said in the intro — worry about potential lawsuits plus the desire to create characters that the company could own outright — along with the Final Fantasy series evolving from a video game translation of D&D to its own, specific thing with every new sequel. It would make sense that none of them would owe such a debt to D&D as much as the first one did.
I’m all for Final Fantasy branching out and discovering its own identity, and clearly it’s been successful in this regard. But considering the way Dungeons & Dragons helped shape video game RPGs in general, I think it’s appropriate how just a little bit of poking around reveals the D&D influence on Final Fantasy’s blueprints. I would love for someone to explain to me how characters like the Mindflayer are able to persist in these games, intellectual property be damned, but until that happens, just the fact that they’re there serves as a reminder of where Final Fantasy came from.
Does the Mind Flayer’s catalogue of arcane magicks include one for dispelling lawsuits?
Miscellaneous Notes
I couldn’t think of a way to convey this without making the intro to this piece even longer than it already was, but yes, for the record, both the past and current owners of Dungeons & Dragons have been known to resort to legal measures to protect the things they cite as their intellectual property. You can find people better versed in both law and D&D writing about these matters online. I don’t know enough to say whether Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro actually has the legal standing to actually own everything they claim as intellectual property in a cease-and-desist letter. In fact, it would be in their interest to claim as much as they thought they could get away with, in an effort to scare off other people from even trying. But again, that’s not what this piece is.
However, in trying to figure out why neither TSR nor Wizards of the Coast had ever stopped Square or Square-Enix from using Mind Flayers and the like, I asked a few people schooled in these matters, and they mostly gave me answers that amounted to “it’s complicated,” though it ultimately comes down to whether it would be in the parent company’s financial interest to attempt such a lawsuit. If no lawsuit exists, then the lawyers decided that one would be worth it. And that’s saying something, seeing as how the joke among tabletop gaming aficionados is that TSR stood for “they sue regularly.” In fact, in 2021 Shannon Appelcline put together a summary of TSR lawsuits over at RPG.net that’s better informed than anything I could write myself.
In general, people I spoke to agreed that as the new publisher of Dungeons & Dragons, Wizards of the Coast is less litigious, but there are examples in this era of smaller creators receiving cease-and-desist letters. For example, in 2012, webcomic creator Mike R. received such a letter from WotC about his series Rusty and Co., the title character of which is a D&D Rust Monster. Mike ended up pulling the comic’s website down, but after some negotiation a settlement was reached and Rusty & Co. was allowed to return in a way that WotC approved. That whole story is collected on the comic’s website, if you want to read it. This is a happy ending, but it goes without saying that without the intercession of a capable lawyer, many similar instances of cease-and-desist letters would just end with… cessation and desistance, possibly with little fanfare. There wouldn’t be a lawsuit because the recipient of that notice simply didn’t have the means to endure one.
I couldn’t find a spot to fit it into the article proper, but it’s remarkable how Square’s apparent obfuscation of Dungeons & Dragons elements parallels the effort by TSR back in the day to remove references that infringed on intellectual property owned by the estate of J.R.R. Tolkein. In 1975, TSR published three games inspired by Tolkein’s work: The Battle of Helm’s Deep, The Siege of Minas Tirith and Battle of the Five Armies. The products had to be pulled from the market when lawyers representing Tolkein’s estate sent letters, and from this point forward, D&D no longer made reference to Hobbits, Ents or Balrogs, instead calling them Halflings, Treants and Balors.
Earlier in this piece, I differentiated Final Fantasy from Dragon Quest by saying that the former is more likely to draw on real-world folklore for its enemies, and that’s mostly true. Dragon Quest bestiaries include a mix of more typical fantasy boogeyman plus weird creatures that essentially exist to be puns and nothing else. One major outlier in all this, however, is the Mimic — a monster that disguises itself as a treasure chest only to attack anyone who tries to open it.
Left: The Dragon Quest version of the Mimic. Right: The Secret of Mana version of the Mimic.
The Mimic debuted in Dragon Quest III and has remained a part of the series ever since, and it’s unusual among the DQ recurring enemies because it’s very much a lift from Dungeons & Dragons. That original Mimic functions similarly, although it can look like household objects other than a treasure chest. In that sense, I guess you could say that the Trap Door enemy from FFIV is a version of a mimic, but because the version seen in video games is almost always as a treasure chest, I’m not sure it counts. On top of that, FFIX features an actual Mimic enemy, looking all treasure chest-y and everything, and it’s appeared in the series ever since, and I’ve got no clue why it was the one D&D element that showed up in other games, including Square’s own Secret of Mana series, where it’s also appeared in every game so far.
If you’re my age, you might be wondering about the legality of a certain Beholder-looking monster that appears in a certain 1986 mainstay of cable TV and VHS rental nights: Big Trouble in Little China. In my memory, the floating eye monster looks more or less exactly like the D&D monster, but pulling up actually screengrabs from the film, I can see that it’s not exactly that. Not all floating eye monsters are the same, after all. Dubbed the “Guardian,” the Big Trouble in Little China monster has multiple eyes and doesn’t actually attack the heroes he’s sent by big bad Lo Pan to spy on. It’s more of a mystical security system and less of an attack dog.
While I’m sure this caught the attention of TSR back in the day, I can also imagine that whoever was advising their legal strategy decided that it wasn’t worth the effort of tussling with 20th Century Fox’s attorneys. I don’t blame them.
And finally, I’m concluding this with a crude sex joke. In going through the list of FF1 monsters, I was really amused to find that there’s a Dawn of Souls enemy whose Japanese name, ボーンスナッチ (Bōnsunacchi), was clearly Japanese for Bonesnatch and the English localizer was like, “Sure, nothing off-color about that. Bonesnatch it is.”