We're kind of jumping ahead in time here, because our third monster was introduced in Dragon Quest VI, but since then, it's became another "early game" staple, and in fact the very first wild monster I encountered alongside the basic, blue slime in my first DQ game, The Dark Prince. In Dragon Quest Monsters II, meanwhile, it's the first basic enemy of only the second world you unlock.

Known as basically just "fur rat" in Japan, it's also been translated as a "pillowrat," but you can see there's a lot more going on here than either just a "feral ball" or a particularly fuzzy rodent. It's more of a bipedal monkey-like creature, but with green-tinged fur so floofy it looks almost like a big rounded powder puff, with an only slightly smaller powder puff for a head. Its relatively tiny face is hairless, revealing only a toothless little mouth and three circular eyes, the middle eye situated right where you would have expected a nose.

The third eye, green fur, and those knob-tipped antennas on top leave this feeling more like a cartoonist's idea of an "alien" animal than just a fictional woodland critter, but fictional woodland critter is exactly the role this creature consistently occupies, and that's pretty fun! I like that the Dragon Quest world just has lime colored martian lemur thingies roaming around as an everyday furry mammal, if they are indeed mammals. Just like the basic slime, it's a refusal to go the most obvious, most normal route for an otherwise obvious and normal concept. A good, modestly original monster worthy of a balanced rating.