FF Enemies = Rehash?

[Red XIV]

I've noticed, particularly in the older FF's that many of the enemies are just other enemies in different colors. For example, in FFIV, Ogopogo and Leviathan, Goblin and Domovoi, all the soldiers, Alligator and Giga Gator, and all the undead creatures (for the most part). I can understand why they do this, though. Probobaly to save money and time. I guess it would take a really long time to create all the monsters and make them all unique and different. I'm not yelling or anything, just wondering if anyone else noticed.

And, I would like to add, Square's collection of unique monsters are neat!
(Flan, moogle, couerl, zu, etc.)

[Ted Zanarukando]

I've noticed, particularly in the older FF's that many of the enemies are just other enemies in different colors.

This is called pallette-swapping. Similar occurrences appear in the newer Final Fantasy games as well, thus texture-swapping.

[awall]

Yep. Pallette swapping is a tried and true custom in almost every video game out there (even non-rpgs... think about the different colors of koopa troopas in the original Super Mario Bros.). I guess I could see how some people would consider it a cop-out thing to do (not to imply that I interpreted what you said as a complaint... but I'd guess that there's at least one person who's gonna see this topic and go off on how Square is full of lazy artists who just change the enemy's color and put "Ice _____" in front of the name). I think that there are several advantages to doing it though...

1) Less work for the artists. You can double/triple the size of the bestiary with little additional work by swapping monsters' pallettes. However, this is the least important of the reasons.

2) Takes up less space in the game. They only have to store the animation for beast-type enemies once, and several different monsters can share that same data.

3) Most importantly, it helps the player. Generally, different forms of the same monster graphic are fairly similar enemies. The only change is likely to be either the monster's element (i.e. the different types of flans), the monster's difficulty (FFIV has several nearly identical bat-like monsters that differ only in attack power and HP), or sometimes both. This means that the player can use the skills and strategies that I've learned against one monster of that type to fight the others. Think about it: you fight a Red Dragon early in the game and discover that it uses a lot of fire attacks, so you cast NulBlaze on your party to counter that. Now, you run into a Blue Dragon later on; what is the first thing that you should cast on your party?

[Angantyr]

Ive noticed it too, I think I have found all three orges on FF1, I completely agree with the above statements, I think its similar with the basic black magic, and cure2 cure3 ect.... Just used to make a more powerful variation to it