By Jonathan Wojcik and Rev Storm

ENTRY 13: SNAILS!!!

I'm sure everyone must have been as thrilled as us to discover that this game has SNAILS! Rev's first encounter with them wound up being the subterranean crystal snails, encrusted with crystalline shards and armed with a breath weapon that "freezes" adversaries in instantaneous crystal growth.

As you can see already however, these snails aren't just mollusks. Their bodies are actually those of snakes, just with tentacles in place of eyes and a broader snaily midsection where the shell is positioned.

This crystalline flavor is really just a variant on the "serpent snail," which we never really came across on these initial playthroughs.

The skeletal snaiL is another, even more extreme variation, its body resembling a venomous snake rotten almost down to nothing but bones, while the shell is an abnormal large and rounded humanoid skull. That giant skull is what tells us these can't simply be an undead version of the other snails, but had to be constructed from different corpses, right? Or maybe they tend to lose their shells when they die, but whatever magic animates their bones might allow them to integrate a skull as a replacement shell?

Some of these ghouls are armed with a spell that conjures flying, homing killer skulls, which I personally think is a very funny spell in any context, but it's especially funny for a big dead bone snake to do.

Reptogastropoda get their oddest with the Spirit Caller Snail, which is even encountered briefly as a boss battle! This one has a gooier, more snail-like body, but a less snail-like head, bearing the face of an otherwise completely normal serpent. Except for its blue eyes and the pinkish interior of its mouth, the entire thing - shell and all - is a pale, luminous white.

You can guess why it's called a spirit caller snail, too; it's not a very strong creature itself, but it can conjure ghostly warriors in much the same way that you can summon the spirit ashes of so many other monsters and characters. It basically wants a Pokemon duel, but don't fall for it! It'll never stop spamming spirits until you beat it up!

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