Underground Monkey: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

[[File:Bunch of slimes 5649.jpg|link=Dragon Quest|frame|[[Mascot Mook|Slime]], [[Distaff Counterpart|She-Slime]], [[Metal Slime]], [[King Mook|King Slime]], Bubble Slime, [[The Medic|Cure Slime]], Gem Slime, Jelly, Slime Knight, [[Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot|Metal King Slime]], the list goes on...]]

 

{{quote|'''Skywarp:''' At least I'm not ugly.

 

Named for a [[Running Gag]] in [http://rpgworldcomic.com/d/20030423.html RPG World], wherein the Underground Monkey is suspected of being attracted by [[Genre Savvy]] characters.

* ''[[The Legend of Zelda]]'' also produced several colors of its major enemies, indicating their strength. Versus Books' [[Strategy Guide]] for ''[[Majoras Mask]]'' characterized the White Wolfos as being "like regular Wolfos, only, um, whiter."

** The Bad Bat is an outdoor version of the Keese.

* In ''[[Jabless Adventure]]'', there are [[Everything's Worse with Bears|regular forest-dwelling bears]], a SCUBA-diving bear, and a volcano-dwelling bear with a flamethrower. There's also the slimes, which get [[Palette Swap]]ped and appear in darn near every area of the game.

 

* ''[[Double Dragon]]'' did this. While it certainly wasn't unusual or unexpected for a game of the arcade era, the fact that all of your opponents were human meant that different coloured characters got rather stupid toward the end. Whilst a man with brown or pink skin made sense, the same character with better fighting skills and blue, grey or green skin later in the game was cause for raised eyebrows.

 

* The queen of palette-swap fighting is arguably ''[[Dissidia Final Fantasy]]''. Every enemy in the game is just a crystallized palette swap of the 22 characters you can use in the game, and all the bosses are just those same characters, only normal. And it has a single-player mode that can last up to 40 hours or more if you have to beat every bonus chapter. So you better hunker down and get ready to fight Tidus about 500 times or more. The only enemy that is at all different is the [[Final Boss]], Chaos.

 

* ''[[Metroid Prime]] 2'' recycled a lot of enemies from ''Prime 1'' with new models. Some were barely changed (like the recoloured Triclops) while others were given a complete overhaul, the Beetle becoming the much smaller Splinter, the Elite Pirate the Ingsmasher, Baby Sheegoths becoming Grenchlers, Chozo Ghosts becoming Pirate Commandos, etc. There's also a few examples in the games themselves, like the normal / ice / plate Parasites in ''Prime'' and the light / dark creatures in ''Echoes''.

** The Ingsmashers simply reused the elite pirate combat codes from Prime 1 with only a small tweak being the shield thingy.

* In ''[[Borderlands]]'', when you're done with your first playthrough and start on a second one, the enemies get more health and different names, but their models don't change. Played straight in the first exapansion and the final expansion, which featured [[The Undead|zombified]] and [[Unwilling Roboticisation|"-trap'd"]] enemies. The zombies had noticably different AI, but the claptrap-ised enemies just had different skins and dialogue.

 

* ''[[Diablo]] I'' and ''II'' were full of this. Every single enemy in the games, apart from quest specific bosses, came in various levels of strength denoted by colour and had otherwise identical sprites as others of its type. It's mentioned in the first game manual that this is because the Prime Evils, the leaders of the demons, would alter their servants forms to better deal with whatever threat they were facing at the time.

** ''Diablo III'' will probably be the same. Trailers indicate that it will also allow monster subtypes to vary in size.

 

* It all started with ''[[Pac-Man]]'', where the color coding of ghosts let the designers get away with only having one enemy type—the colors indicated different AI strategies in how they pursued the heroic circle.

** Many early arcade games did this, due to the hardware limitations of the day. Some examples include ''[[Berzerk]]'', ''[[Missile Command]]'', and ''Pengo''.

 

* ''[[Super Metroid]]'' had half a dozen different colours of Space Pirates, of increasing power. From the wimpy grey Pirates in Old Tourian to the nasty red variant in Maridia that required the plasma beam to harm. There were also a pair of gold Pirates that served as sub-bosses before Ridley's lair.

* ''[[Monster Tale]]'' applies it not only to the enemies but also to one of the heroes; Ellie's partner Chomp has three basic body types (Child, Teenager, and Adult), and all of Chomp's various forms are variations of those - one may be the basic form plus wings, another plus a tail, with spikes, with just one eye, etc.

 

* ''[[Guild Wars]] Eye of the North'' has plenty of enemies recycled from the three previous campaigns, but the most egregious example is re-using a species of monsters called "Mandragors". These insect/plant hybrids are found in the deserts of ''Nightfall'', burrowing under the sand. In ''Eye of the North'', identical monsters with the same name live in cold climate and burrow under snow, without as much as a [[Lampshade Hanging]] to explain it.

** See also: the frogmen (though this is lampshaded by the fact that each color appears to designate a different tribe. This doesn't stop them from being modified versions of the Heket from Nightfall, though)

* [[Ragnarok Online]] mostly averts this, save for the Poring line of monsters, which difficulty ranges from very easy to event bosses capable of taking out GMs.

 

* Likewise, in ''[[Super Mario Bros.]]'', red-shelled Koopas were implied to be "more powerful", at least in that they had enough sense to not stroll off of cliffs like their green counterparts.

** This led to the Green Koopas marching in straight lines unless they came upon some sort of block or another enemy creature (like a Goomba), which would make them turn around. (They also tended to turn around if they walked into ''you'', which was easiest to see when the action froze as [[Death Throws|Mario fell off the screen.]]) Red Koopas behaved the same way, except that they also turned around when they came upon a cliff (instead of just walking off the edge like the green ones.) <ref>Granted, you wouldn't be laughing if a Green Koopa fell on your head, but... yeah.</ref>

* ''[[Bug!]]!'' You fight snail enemies in [[Green Hill Zone|Insectia]] Scene 3, each of which were very slow and took three hits to die. And then when you get to [[Bubblegloop Swamp|Splot]], you see them again. Except that they take ''nine'' hits, and move twice as fast. And when they see Bug, they take out freaking '''[[More Dakka|MACHINE GUNS]]''' from their shells and fire at him!

 

* Nigh-on every non-boss enemy in ''[[Super Robot Wars]] [[Original Generation|OG Saga:]] [[Endless Frontier]]'', presumably to make room for [[Hurricane of Puns|more boob jokes]].

 

* In all of [[Nippon Ichi]] games higher variations of [[Player Mooks]] classes are recolors of their basic sprite.

* [[Shining Force]] uses this extensively in all of its games.

 

* Roguelike games employ this device to a fare-thee-well, since all of the monsters are represented by ASCII symbols, color coding is often the only easy way to tell them apart. Of course, sometimes two monsters have to share the same letter and color. Which leads many players to use alternate graphical "tile sets" which offer more information. Whether or not you should do this is one of the major fault-lines in ''[[Nethack]]'' fan circles. Of course, this also led to isometric sprite based clones (''Vulture'') using mini-map and shortcuts in the original ''Nethack'' style.

** It's interesting that this trope still appears in roguelikes not just in that the monsters look the same but in that there are different variations of the same monster, even though in those there is NO work required in generating sprites for new monsters, so the imagination is the only limit. Given that ''[[Angband]]'' has close to 1000 unique monster types, the reason for this happening in such a game is probably more that the designers started running out of ideas rather than not being able to animate distinct monsters.

* The sprite based [[Roguelike]], [[Dungeons of Dredmor]], has an absolute ton of these sorts of monsters. Most have different effects - Diggles are just annoying, but Sickly Diggles debuff you and Diggle Commandos are invisible.

 

* ''Morrowind'' had a considerable lack of diversity amongst its native fauna, resorting heavily to underground monkeyism to create a wider range of enemies. This was somewhat justifiable in the sense that most of the game took place on a single island, and travelling northwest to the island of Solsthheim introduced you to a set of entirely new creatures.

* ''[[Super Mario RPG]]'' has this with a LOT of enemy types. Sometimes in quick succession.

* ''[[Hyperdimension Neptunia]]'' has this in spades, especially considering some of the monsters are from other games.

 

* ''[[Digimon]]'' as a whole loves this. The anime itself has recolors who are merely a different attribute (such as say, [[Black Rapidmon]], who is a Virus-type counterpart to Rapidmon), different element (such as Yukidarumon and Tsuchidarumon, snow and ground respectively), or just a recolor for the sake of being a recolor.

** The Digimon games add to this by not only having the original recolors included, but several entirely recolored evolution lines, Rookie to Mega, in Vaccine, Data and Virus flavors.

*** Taken to an absurd extreme with Soulmon, who is a Bakemon with a wizard's hat. That's the ONLY difference.

 

* [[Color Coded for Your Convenience|Color-coded dragons]] predate most video games, as they appeared in the [[Tabletop Games]] ''[[Dungeons & Dragons]]'', which was first published in 1974. Evil ("Chromatic") dragons have scales of a particular solid color reflecting their place in the [[Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors]] spectrum, and good ("Metallic") dragons have scales of precious metal. Interestingly, though, these aren't "palette swaps"; as it is possible to readily identify different species of dragons in greyscale artwork (for example, white dragons have a peculiar vertical crest on their head, while silver dragons have backward-pointing horns and a ribbed frill along their necks).

** On one occasion, the color-coding is used as the basis of a truly heartbreaking [[Monster Is a Mommy]] story, when a noble silver dragon is born with albinism, and is hunted down and killed by an adventurer who thinks it's a white dragon.

** There's now specific models for veteran Space Marines, with custom boltguns that look a bit different and shoulder pads that have embossed icons for non-codex chapters. Of course, these models are more expensive, so some players stick with the old palette swap method.

 

* Other toys use a similar system, often called redecos (when identical molds are used but the color of plastic is altered) or retools (when most parts stay basically the same but are altered to include, for example, new accessories; this can also include a redeco). For example, in the most recent series of ''[[Transformers]]'', [http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Storm_Cloud#Classic_Series Stormcloud] is a redeco of [http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Powerglide#Universe_.282008.29 Powerglide], while [http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Sideswipe_(G1)#Universe_.282008.29 Sideswipe] is a retool of [http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Sunstreaker_(G1)#Classic_Series Sunstreaker].

** This even leads to recolors in characters in the cartoon—for example, Thundercracker and Skywarp were repaints of Starscream. This became very confusing when someone accidentally colored two Starscreams.

** Played with in the larger sets. While each large set was in of itself different from other large sets, each early large set could produce two near-identical creatures. Justified in that back then Bionicle toys were more akin to Rock'em Sock'em robots, and the kids were expected to play against eachother so the toys had to be identical to make it fair. Newer large sets averts this since they lost the Playability of the older sets in lieu of posability.

 

* Gets parodied in the ''[[Sluggy Freelance]]'' "Years of Yarncraft" (spoofing [[World of Warcraft]], of course) [http://sluggy.com/daily.php?date=080814 here], [http://sluggy.com/daily.php?date=080817 here] and [http://sluggy.com/daily.php?date=080920 here].

* As mentioned in the trope description, the [[Trope Namer]] is [[RPG World]], and was originally a [[Lampshade Hanging]] by showing a number of "Underground (animal not usually found in caves)" enemies in succession.

 

* [[Truth in Television]]: Members of the same biological genus are usually similar enough that the main differences are color and location. Things like size, basic body shape, and diet are all almost identical.