I flip-flopped a lot on exactly what order I should review these in. Chronologically, game by game, in official bestiary order would be far too tedious, but reviewing whatever I feel like, whenever I feel like it would be chaos with a side of choice paralysis. What I finally settled on was to look at a few classic monsters first, then prioritize monsters of interest in loosely the order we've encountered them as I finally, finally get to experience the Monsters series. And as it just so happens, our second subject would make the same sense regardless of my approach; Dracky comes immediately after the basic slimes in the very first game's bestiary, and can be encountered in the first major areas of both The Dark Prince and Monsters II!

Dracky is sort of a "bat monster," but perhaps not in the authentic zoological sense. It's a uniformly black, roughly egg-shaped being, its entire front surface dominated by its simple face. Its small, round eyes are identical to those of the Slime, albeit closer together, and its mouth is only a large, gaping, perfectly crescent hole with two triangular, white fangs. It has two soft looking antennae on top, rather than any ears, two leathery wings as crude and simple as any Halloween cut-out decoration, two bean-shaped featureless feet on short, tubular legs and a long, dangling tail with only the slightest knob at the end. Its name, the same in both English and Japanese, obviously takes after "Dracula," and it is indeed a bloodsucker!

Reminiscent of a child's crayon doodle or play-doh sculpture, the Dracky comes across as if one of the Slimes has shaped itself into what it thinks a bat must look like, but has only ever heard a second-hand description. I do believe that in the original "Monsters" games, the most basic breeding formula to make your own Dracky called for a Slime family parent, but it's only ever been categorized as part of the "flying" or "demon" monster families, which is not the case for any of the setting's literal winged, flying Slimes, so we aren't especially meant to extrapolate any biological significance from their similarities.

But there can't very well be bones in that thingy, can there? It has to be some sort of stretchy, rubbery lifeform that convergently evolved batlike wings and vampiric habits, right? If you were mean enough to swing one around by its tail, it would surely SPLAT into surfaces like one of those sticky hand toys. All we're ever told is that they're "bat-like" creatures, stated in some descriptions to be "born from a world without light" or of a "dark domain."

Unsurprisingly, the Dracky is close to the Slime in overall fame and popularity, with a fair bit of its own merchandise and appearances in virtually all Dragon Quest media. Their visual similarity may not officially imply any Darwinian relationship we know of, but it does communicate to the player that these two are complementary level-one weaklings, bouncing blob-thing mascot and flappy bat-thing mascot; two scary little critters boiled down to fun and functional platonic symbols.

I'm going to give Dracky a 4/5; I actually find it personally a little more interesting than the Slime, myself, but the Slime's balance of streamlining to recognizability demanded that perfect 5/5 and makes an almost impossible act to follow. Dracky is like the Luigi to the Slime's Mario; it has an arguably deeper identity of its own, even if it can never beat its counterpart in terms of innovation or starpower, and that's fine!