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Sprites are expensive. Rendered 3D objects even moreso. As a result, there is a tendency to keep the number of distinct enemy types small. In an RPG or similar game where the player is expected to become more powerful over the course of the game, this is a problem, as the monsters stop being challenging about the time you Get On The Boat.
The solution many games go for is to have a small set of monster types, but have them appear in different colors. Often, this change of hue will be accompanied by a new adjective to go with their name. Typically, all such monsters will be vulnerable to the same strategy, or a variation thereupon, but later colors will tend to be more powerful. One of the colors might be invisible.
Results in the somewhat strange phenomenon that as you travel a diverse world, rather than seeing a diversity of creature types, you see the same creature types, in a diversity of colors: in The Lost Woods, you find the Wolf, the Giant Rat, and the Forest Dragon; in the Slippy Slidey Ice World, you find the Arctic Wolf, the Snow Rat, and the White Dragon; in the Temple Of Doom, you'll face the Dire Wolf, Plague Rat, and Zombie Dragon.
The most common Underground Monkeys are those whose names begin with one of fire, ice or lightning. In games which play Elemental Rock Paper Scissors, the colors may also indicate elemental weakness.
Named for a Running Gag in RPGWorld , wherein the Underground Monkey is suspected of being attracted by Genre Savvy characters.
Examples:
- It all started with Pac Man, where the color coding of ghosts let the designers get away with only having one enemy type — the colors indicated different AI strategies in how they pursued the heroic circle.
- Many early arcade games did this, due to the hardware limitations of the day. Some examples include Berzerk, Missile Command, and Pengo.
- Likewise, in Super Mario Bros, red-shelled Koopas were implied to be "more powerful", at least in that they had enough sense to not stroll off of cliffs like their green counterparts.
- In Super Mario Bros 2, Shyguy came in pink and red, with pink being the marginally smarter. However, Snifit came in a rainbow of colors, each with different behavior.
- The Legend Of Zelda also produced several colors of its major enemies, indicating their strength. Versus Books' Strategy Guide for Majora's Mask characterized the White Wolfos as being "like regular Wolfos, only, um, whiter."
- The Wind Waker and Twilight Princess avoid this with every enemy except for Darknuts, whose armour changes colour to indicate different levels of strength. There are some minor palette swaps as well, but these take the form of giving the enemies extra armour and better resistance to the player's special attacks.
- In Dragon Warrior, one of the first common enemies you encounter is the blue slime. Then, you meet the red slime. And the green slime. Then the Metal Slime. All the way up to the exceptionally powerful gold slime. It also featured color-coded dragons.
- Don't forget the Spotted Slime, the Beast Slime, the Wing Slime, the Healer Slime, the King Slime, the Gran Slime, and the various combinations (Gold King Slime, for instance).
- Metroid Prime featured a set of color-coded pirates, each of which was weak only against the matching color weapon.
- Metroid Prime features a set of color-coded [*], each of which was weak only against the matching color weapon. There is an alarming number of things that can fill in for "[*]". Including the Metroid Prime itself.
- Somewhat averted in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, where all Pirates are the same base model, but different types have different equipment. ...then you meet Commandos, who are like the normal Pirates but with red armor.
- Completely justified by the fact that the Space Pirates are a sentient species with a distinct military hierarchy - there's not much difference in appearance between a human private and a human general other than uniform, after all.
- Final Fantasy uses this in most incarnations, especially with the Elemental Rock Paper Scissors aspect: the blue monster casts water spells and is weak against thunder, the white monster casts ice spells and is weak against fire, etc. Final Fantasy X made some extra use of this, as a side quest rewarded players for capturing entire "species" of monsters.
- Final Fantasy XI has tons of instances of monsters that look exactly the same, only stronger and with a different name, including several Notorious Monsters.
- Final Fantasy XII manages to subvert the spirit of this trope without subverting the letter of it, by making slight differences in the meshes of any given group of monsters (i.e. some toads have claws, others have webbed feet).
- More prominent example: the Hellhound has a large horn that the Desert Wolf does not.
- Final Fantasy XII also justified it to some extent, as many of the monsters who share a given sprite are in fact related to one another, as the Bestiary implies.
- Final Fantasy XII is a good example of how to do palette swap enemies, with different species of monster varying by environment: their primary diet, the climate, and some being mutations caused by Mist.
- Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII took this to ridiculous extremes. If a monster got a special white coloration with feathers, & a pattern of a certain character's face, it became a 'copy' of said character. Despite essentially being the same monster, it was implied to be much more powerful as a result.
- Worse yet, after a certain point, they didn't even bother to change the enemy colors. This left you with about 200 missions of fighting the same, boring avatars.
- Final Fantasy IX averts this trope, where (almost) every monster type in the game has a unique mesh and animations.
- Color-coded dragons predate most video games, as they appeared in the Tabletop Games Dungeons And Dragons, which was first published in 1974. Evil ("Chromatic") dragons have scales of a particular solid color reflecting their place in the Elemental Rock Paper Scissors spectrum, and good ("Metallic") dragons have scales of precious metal. Interestingly, though, these aren't "palette swaps"; as it is possible to readily identify different species of dragons in greyscale artwork (for example, white dragons have a peculiar vertical crest on their head, while silver dragons have backward-pointing horns and a ribbed frill along their necks).
- On one occasion, the color-coding is used as the basis of a truly heartbreaking Monster Is A Mommy story, when a noble silver dragon is born with albinism, and is hunted down and killed by an adventurer who thinks it's a white dragon.
- This was parodied in the webcomic Order Of The Stick: in one comic, a paladin discovers the titular party has killed a dragon. She then accuses them of possibly killing a creature of benevolence and wisdom, and asks why they thought it deserved death, to which Roy Greenhilt replies, "Erm... its scales weren't shiny?" which placates the paladin. Elan then breaks the Fourth Wall by winking at the reader and saying, "Dragons - now Colour Coded For Your Convenience!"
- Ironically, the comic does this itself with goblins/hobgoblins/ghouls.
- The Elves of D&D come in high, wood, sea, grey, wild and several other varieties.
- The third edition of Dungeons And Dragons features templates, giving uncreative GMs the opportunity to color-code any monster into a water monster, a fire monster, slime monster, etc.
- Gameboy games had the lack of memory needed to justify Underground Monkeys, but, being monochrome, had no way of switching palettes. Generally, this led to enemies either never improving or simply gaining more hit points, though turn-based RPGs (Such as the SaGa/Final Fantasy Legend series) were able to circumvent this by... giving the sprites new names. (Say, isn't that Master Dragon the exact same size as the Baby Dragon from the start of the game?)
- Interestingly, this hardware limitation led to an inversion in Metroid 2. In the original, getting Samus's Varia armor made the sprite change color, which wasn't possible on the Gameboy. To compensate, gaining the upgrade gave the Varia suit the huge shoulders that are now the character's trademark look.
- Metroid: Zero Mission, which is a remake of Metroid 1, lacks the round shoulders on the Varia Suit. However, near the end of the game, Samus's Power Suit is destroyed, and she obtains a new one. The new one has the large shoulders. The end of Zero Mission takes place in the immediate aftermath of the ending of Metroid 1, and as such explains how Samus came to possess the Metroid 2-style Varia suit.
- But not how she came to lose it again...
- Legend of Mana notably had Underground Crabs in the very first dungeon.
- In the Fallout games, a common practice was to have different individuals represented by a sprite of the same person (usually the male and female sprite used for the Player Character, no less) stuck in a different suit of armour or clothing. The second game in the series contained a couple of self-conscious Lampshade Hanging jokes on this theme, including the henchman of a crime boss confiding that he suspects there must have been a big cloning accident at some point in the past, and an Easter Egg location in which a pair of sprites originally intended to be player characters but retooled to only fill NPC duties lament over their fate.
- FPS games regularly do this with at least one of the more basic enemies (but tougher opponents sometimes get the same treatment). In the older era, this was done by changing the colouring of otherwise identical sprites, in 3D games it takes the somewhat more advanced and differentiating form of using different skins for the same model (or even different models for the same enemy). Common expressions of this includes;
- Different weaponry and/or levels of toughness of the opponents (e.g. the processed humans of Quake II, the Cabal followers of Blood, Barons of Hell and Hellknights in Doom and Doom II).
- Somewhat different abilities between the enemy types (e.g. the semi-invisibility of Spectres in the Doom series, the personal teleporters of Alien captains in Duke Nukem 3D)
- Just plain diversity, especially common in regards to enemies meant to be more or less regular human beings. This in order to avoid the effect of feeling that the enemies faced are the same individual cloned countless times, usually to the effect of creating the impression that such cloning rather took place on three to five different individuals instead.
- In Brave Story: New Traveler, the exact same enemy can come in multiple different colors, so the difference between genuinely different enemies is at least slightly greater, with a few exceptions. This editor isn't quite sure how to label this.
- Guild Wars Eye of the North has plenty of enemies recycled from the three previous campaigns, but the most egregious example is re-using a species of monsters called "Mandragors". These insect/plant hybrids are found in the deserts of Nightfall, burrowing under the sand. In Eye of the North, identical monsters with the same name live in cold climate and burrow under snow, without as much as a Lampshade Hanging to explain it.
- See also: the frogmen (though this is lampshaded by the fact that each color appears to designate a different tribe. This doesn't stop them from being modified versions of the Heket from Nightfall, though)
- At the same time, Guild Wars will often subtly alter the mesh of different "species" of the same sort of enemy (the Tengu, the minotaurs, the Nightfall insects, and so on)
- Nethack and other Roguelike games employ this device to a fare-thee-well, since all of the monsters are represented by ASCII symbols, color coding is often the only easy way to tell them apart. Of course sometimes two monsters share the same letter and color. A master mindflayer and a dwarf lord LOOK the same...
- Which leads many NetHackers to use alternate graphical "tile sets" which offer more information. Whether or not you should do this is one of the major fault-lines in Net Hack fan circles. This editor went so far as to create his own.
- Dwarf Fortress inherits this particular version, including the tileset option. For example, color is usually the only way to differentiate between rocks of different ores (which can be very important when you need to smelt metals).
- Unless you use the 'k' key to move into "Look Around" mode. This will tell you what kind of rock a rock is.
- Double Dragon did this. While it certainly wasn't unusual or unexpected for a game of the arcade era, the fact that all of your opponents were human meant that different coloured characters got rather stupid toward the end. Whilst a man with brown or pink skin made sense, the same character with better fighting skills and blue, grey or green skin later in the game was cause for raised eyebrows.
- Diablo I and II were full of this. Every single enemy in the games, apart from quest specific bosses, came in various levels of strength denoted by colour and had otherwise identical sprites as others of its type. It's mentioned in the first game manual that this is because the Prime Evils, the leaders of the demons, would alter their servants forms to better deal with whatever threat they were facing at the time.
- Diablo III will probably be the same. Trailers indicate that it will also allow monster subtypes to vary in size.
- Persona 3 is another good example of this trope—practically every enemy inside Tartarus, the game's sole real dungeon, uses one of a select number of sprites, and most sprite-sharers are vulnerable to the same kinds of tactics (if not necessarily always sharing elemental weaknesses).
- World of Warcraft changes the colour and increases the size of a monster to indicate that it is a higher level. Nearly every zone has some version of a wolf or boar to kill.
- As humanoids go, nearly every zone has some version of a gnoll or murloc. They are just everywhere!
- Played extra-straight with the monster (and quest) Terokkarantula. Tougher than the smaller spiders nearby, as would be expected by it's named nature and elite status, the player who hasn't been there before is probably STILL not expecting a spider that's larger than a good-sized HOUSE.
- Somewhat averted in expansions as the developers go through a good deal of work to create a few "unique" creatures for each expansion (especially the alien planet Outland). Still, you're unlikely to hit a zone that doesn't have at least two or three models you've seen before.
- An extra bit — some of the more recognizably human of the undead monsters you fight use the same model types available for Undead characters (Justified as they share a common origin — reanimated by the Scourge).
- It is found already with the creeps in Warcraft III
- Okami has the same set of tactics with occasional additional attacks for the successive areas of enemies. Difficulty is achieived late in the optional extras with nigh-endless waves of enemies.
- The Monster Hunter series uses this repeatedly. A prime example is the Kut Ku, one of the easiest wyverns in the game, which appears later on as the Blue Kut Ku, a stronger (and blue) version identical in every other way. Not only does the game do this with the enemies, but the armour then made from the enemies looks exactly the same apart from a colour swap to fit with the wyverns' colour.
- Grandia II starts doing this about halfway through the game.
- Averted in Pokémon, in which there are no palette-swapped sprites of Pokémon (aside from "shiny" Pokémon, which are simply extremely rare versions of the exact same Pokémon that sparkle when the appear and are colored differently, though these don't serve the same purpose as other palette-swapped sprites listed here), with later areas instead having evolved forms of Pokémon encountered earlier in the game or Pokémon from previous areas at higher levels.
- And then Un-averted with some of the trainers - While there are no palette swaps, and the in-battle sprites of the trainer types are all unique, often several types share the same overworld sprite, so that in Diamond/Pearl/Platinum, for example, Ace Trainers and Rangers look the same until you fight them (and the sprite is clearly that of the Ace Trainers). The most egregious example is perhaps the Rich boys, Psychics, and PIs/Gamblers. PIs/Gamblers wear a fedora and a trenchcoat in battle, while Psychics wear a purple jumpsuit with greenish hair; the overworld sprite used for all three clearly has the Rich Boy's dark purple hair and white suit.
- Although the reasoning behind P Is having Rich Boy's look could be the fact that they're supposed to be incognito. Psychics and Gamblers, however, have no excuse.
- Taken to a more extreme level by the Wizardry games, particularly VI and VII, wherein enemies were given graphics by type-all slimes use the same graphics, as do all demons, all bugs, etc, including non-hostile NPCs and bosses. Further complicating matters is that unless a party member has a high mythology skill, all you'll see attacking you is generic "birds" or "crawling wastes". Experienced players can usually determine what particular monster is attacking them by the area they're in or the attacks the monster uses. Occasionally leads to party kills when the player mistakes a very nasty enemy for an easy one.
- Gets parodied in the Sluggy Freelance "Years of Yarncraft" (spoofing World Of Warcraft, of course) here, here and here.
- In the first two Halo games, the Elites got different-colored armor based on their military rank (Authority Equals Asskicking by the way). In Halo 3, the Brutes got the same treatment.
- Chrono Trigger includes the "Debugger" and "Debuggest" robot-bug enemies; "Rolies", "Polies", and "Rolypolies"; "Cave Apes" and "Goons"; and "Mutants" and "Metal Mutes", among others.
- Don't you mean Roundil-*is shot*
- Golden Sun has this all over the place, although there are certain occasions where an enemy will be slightly powered up without changing the name/color.
- The later sprite-based Might and Magic games, especially the seventh incarnation, played this trope hilariously straight. How do you tell the difference between a minotaur and a minotaur lord? The nastier version is almost identical - it's just a bit bigger. And bright purple.
- Games based on Bionicle, since the toys are pretty much like this. "You are attacked by an Air Burnak." "You are attacked by a Stone Burnak." "You are attacked by an Ice Burnak."
- Other toys use a similar system, often called redecos (when identical molds are used but the color of plastic is altered) or retools (when most parts stay basically the same but are altered to include, for example, new accessories; this can also include a redeco). For example, in the most recent series of Transformers, Stormcloud is a redeco of Powerglide, while Sideswipe is a retool of Sunstreaker.
- This even leads to recolors in characters in the cartoon—for example, Thundercracker and Skywarp were repaints of Starscream. This became very confusing when someone accidentally colored two Starscreams.
- The most annoying use of this in recent series has been making Galvatron a redeco of Megatron.
- Albion does this a little differently. The enemies are different on each continent, but come in a small variety. Stronger versions of certain creatures accompany larger packs. They don't even bother with creative names (Animal3)
- Nigh-on every non-boss enemy in Super Robot Wars OG Saga: Endless Frontier, presumably to make room for more boob jokes.
- Digimon as a whole loves this. The anime itself has recolors who are merely a different attribute (such as say, Black Rapidmon, who is a Virus-type counterpart to Rapidmon), different element (such as Yukidarumon and Tsuchidarumon, snow and ground respectively), or just a recolor for the sake of being a recolor.
- The Digimon games add to this by not only having the original recolors included, but several entirely recolored evolution lines, Rookie to Mega, in Vaccine, Data and Virus flavors.
- Truth In Television: Members of the same biological genus are usually similar enough that the main differences are color and location. Things like size, basic body shape, and diet are all almost identical.
- Wario World does this a lot. There's a few unique enemies, but generally there's about four or five standard enemy types, and each world just changes the theme of them. You've got Magons, which then get reused as Skeletal Magons, Clowns, Snowmen, Wolves, Puppet Magons and Mummy Magons. You've got Cractyls which come as Bone Cractyls, Pigeons, Snow Bombers, Hawks, Masked Crows and Mummy Hawks. And the same for another four or so types of enemies.
- EverQuest 1 used this extensively. It may have been possible to fight a "variety" of Skeletons — sharing one model and possibly one texture (with Palette Swaps) — all the way from level 1 to max level.
- Cave Story has a nice variety of enemy types, but recolors the critters (those beanbag-looking hopping things) and bats in several different caves.
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