The Lunatick

Today's entry was the first of two very special monsters in the original Dragon Quest title. It was only the ninth in its bestiary, quite the jump in weirdness after such common critters as the giant scorpion and the skeleton, while appearing fairly early into many subsequent games; one of the most common monsters in the second major area of my first Dragon Quest game, The Dark Prince, and also found in the second unlockable world of the 3DS Dragon Quest Monsters II, where it immediately became a staple of my own in-game teams. A sort of curious, otherworldly Cephalopoid, it has a smooth, rubbery blue shell over its lozenge-shaped, saclike head, except for two gently curving snail-like antennae. A single small eyeball bulges from the front, and its underside is a cluster of wormlike, segmented yellow arms with a single pair of longer, smoother, red-tinted tentacles.

Beautifully peculiar! Its overall body plan is like an octopus, but its details aren't so Earthly, it floats through the air in subterranean environments and it often wields some sort of paralyzing eyebeam or offensive magic spells. Its name was translated to "Druin" in the first English translation, but would later change to "Eyeder" for a few years straight until the localization team at last settled on "Lunatick," an interesting name that implies some sort of extraterrestrial parasite. Some games also categorize the creature as a "bug," while others opt to place it with Devils.

...So what IS this creature, exactly? Well, the Japanese name is simply "Eye," and just as "slimes" were cemented as standard dungeon dwellers by tabletop role-playing, so too were floating eyeball creatures, tracing back to Gygax's "Beholders." It's likely Toriyama was prompted to design some sort of "evil eye" enemy, but you may have also noticed that this monster is not, itself, something you would describe as "an eye." It has an eye, yes, but one that constitutes only a minute fraction of its overall biomass. By these standards, aren't you more of an "eye creature" than what we're seeing here?

Perhaps that's why the final English name doesn't even reference anything ocular, but there is in fact a precedent for another "eyeball monster" with quite similar anatomical proportions:

The titular aliens from 1958's "The Crawling Eye" have several things in common with "Druin:" an octopus-like bag body, multiple lower tentacles, and a single relatively small eyeball. Could this film have left an impression on Toriyama? Is this where his mind went when Dragon Quest called for a monster just called "eye?"

In-universe, I suppose a floating creature with one staring, beam-throwing peeper has every right to just be called "an eye;" it'd certainly be the most noticeable and memorable part of it as it skulks in the darkness of a dungeon, especially when it's the eye in particular that unleashes energy attacks.

Despite enduring as a series staple, precious little has been said of "Eye" biology, ecology or culture, save that they prefer to ambush their prey and that their tentacles have various functions. There also exist "queens" and "princes," the latter of which have even been portrayed with little, golden crowns, though we're not told exactly what this means in terms of their social structure.

Especially peculiar is a variant appearing only in Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 3, known as basically eye board; this one's purple carapace is elongated into a tapering, backswept shell, giving it a sort of stingray or horseshoe-crab appearance, with relatively stubby antennae and arms but much longer, whiplike red tentacles. Very cool looking, and actually one of the rideable monsters in the game! Yes, like a surfboard!