The Maulusc (DQII)

Oh my god, we're here, in just ten reviews we're here at one of my specialest of special little guys. Special enough to be the mascot of these reviews! I was first introduced to this monster as "GIANTSLUG," all one word, in the original Strategy Guide and Bestiary for Dragon Quest Monsters II, and it was love at first sight. I already love all mollusks automatically, but gastropods perhaps most of all, and slugs even moreso than snails. So even with such a weird little freak as the Drohl running around, I was still drawn even more to this straightforward giant banana slug, an excellent choice for specific type of slug I might add.

What WAS it about this particular limacid I instantly adored? Is it not "just" a drawing of a slug, like any cartoon slug? I don't know! I guess there's just something about the face that hits exactly right. It has a big, gaping black void for a mouth with a bright green, humanlike tongue flopping out, oozing with drool. It gives the impression of "teeth" via the thin drips of flesh dangling from its upper lip. Its head is surrounded by four blunt tentacles, and then its BIG eyeballs stare off in opposite directions on their thin, straight stalks, with pure red pupils. It's such a vacant, ghastly and deranged face, but in a wonderfully silly way. The very nanosecond my eyes landed on this creature I considered it my "main" for this franchise, a full twenty some odd years before I ever even got to playing a Dragon Quest game myself.

...And if you already read my intro in Review #1, you know that my first Dragon Quest game was missing precisely my three highest tier favorite creatures, Giantslug or "Maulusc" being one of them. This was, in fact, almost the first time all three of those favorites were missing from a "Monsters" game, and one of the only times they left out this one in particular. Mean. They were mean to me. They bullied me.

This was, in fact, the final push that got me to check up on the emulation and translation progress of another, older Monsters title, the 2014 Iru and Luca's Marvelous Mysterious Key, a complete 3-d remake of Dragon Quest Monsters II that you will continue to hear more and more about as these reviews progress, and at the time of this entry, I'm still playing in at least monthly segments on twitch. It was never released in the USA, but it remains by far the largest and most thorough Monsters game in the franchise, so of course it has my "main"...with one teensy, tiny little caveat. Or two, rather. The first one being:

The 3ds remakes introduced giant-sized, multi-slot creatures to the game, and upgraded several classic oddballs to kaiju status. Here, Maulusc takes up a whopping three spaces in your party, and it isn't just scaled up from the classic design, but given more monstrous proportions with a towering, blobby body and gigantic tongue lolling from a ghoulishly stretched maw. They even saw fit to give it a realistic looking pebbly, fleshy texture, rather than the cartoonish shading common to smaller monsters.

The upside to this is that my grisly child can trample entire enemy parties at once. The downside, however, is that I still can't actually make my "dream team." The original game allowed only three slots at all, so I always had my three favorites picked out for the day I ever finally play. The remakes give you four slots, but here, that's still only room for one Maulusc and one of my other two pals! Unfair. The Dark Prince at least allowed any monster in the game to come in any size, but again, skipped right over my babies.

On the flip side again, the original design is still technically present, because the mega-maulusc's spell animations summons a whole cornucopia of them! I bet you didn't know that's a proper term for a plurality of shell-less terrestrial Gastropoda, did you? A pack of dogs, a murder of crows, a cornucopia of slugs! You can also say a phlegm of slugs or slime of slugs, but I prefer the one that implies we should be grateful for nature's generous bounty.

I did mention another caveat though, didn't I? That would be the fact that the Maulusc actually still isn't in this game by default. It appeared only as a boss fight in the remake of the first monsters game, and is only normally available in "Marvelous Mysterious Key" as a transfer if you happen to have a save file of the prior title. It is, in fact, one of only two or three monsters this applies to at all, so yet again I am bullied.

Fortunately, I was also given access to a save file with every single monster unlocked, and I used it solely to gift myself my precious baby first thing. One final "upside" to flip back to is that you get to carry around two teams of monsters, your main four slots and a backup four slots. So my giant giantslug may not get to technically fight right alongside my second and third top picks, but I still get to play through the game with ten tons of mucus as my secret backup weapon. Just like in real life!!!