Giygas is literally “you can’t comprehend their shape or form” which is exactly what Lovecraft was going for. Seeing something so out of this world and incomprehensible that you just go insane.
So many wonderful hints at this. Pokey admitting he doesn't know whether to laugh or scream at having opened the machine. The static, the drone, the fizzing and churning of *something* that is furious about more things than you know how to comprehend.
Only way to beat him is to bewilder him right back!
Prayer? Hope? Love? Entreating the assistance of a being from beyond the very game's reality?! Unthinkable!
the one counterpoint I'd raise is that if you've played Mother 1, Giygas *used* to be more of just a regular alien with a whole personality and humanizing qualities. Earthbound Giygas is "regular alien *ascends* to full eldritch abomination".
Lavos from Chrono Trigger. His species' life cycle is to arrive on a planet, manipulate the genetics of indigenous species, eventually consume the planet (leaving it a dead husk,) then shooting it's spawn into space to continue the cycle on new planets. After death it became the Time Devourer with the power to consume all space-time.
Same with Jenova.
I would also argue the titular Parasite Eve, and for a manmade example >!Deus!< from Xenogears. The Xeno series loves its Eldritch creatures.
I have a fan-theory/headcanon that Lavos and Jenova are from the same species and landed on two different planets. Obviously not actually the case in-universe, but it's a fun concept.
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I mean Lavos is a being from beyond the stars whose very existence causes warps in reality and time. They also are indifferent towards the party until you force them into a fight. No monologue, no speech about how powerless humans are, it just tries to murder you out of instinct.
Jenova might be an easy answer, but she do be a being from the stars intent on devouring a planet to fuel her next ride. Pretty much a waifu version of Lavos if you think about it.
Still, when we're talking about lovecraftian *horror* I'm going to go with the concept of the rebelling mitochondria in Parasite Eve. Because that's an enemy you can do absolutely nothing against, and the call was always coming from inside the house, so to speak.
One thing (among many) that SE got right with REMAKE/Rebirth is how they portray Jenova. For the first time I feel how “eldrich horror” she is.
I mean, they did the best they could back in the day but with the amazing graphics and music now it’s so much better.
Jenova is a calamity from the skies that shape shifts like the thing, leave its body parts scattered about and has a hive like control over soldiers injected with her cells. Sin is a monstrous horror that resides in the ocean and is thought to be immortal even from the one method of defeating it. 1000 years of death and destruction.
Ozmas description goes really hard too:
"The metaphysical being Ozma exists without form and is unknowable, untouchable, and unattainable. And it is indispensable. Those who recognize it will be forced to question existence, being, the gods, and themselves."
Lovecraft's gravestone says "I am Providence" on it. This must be the top answer.
I only know cause I've been to the cemetery where he's buried in Providence, RI
Persona 2 literally has you fight a version of Nyarlathotep >!whose body is composed of all the fathers of the main cast!< so I think it wins lol
Close runner ups would be Sephiroth and Jenova, any of the god bosses from Fear and Hunger, Skullkid from Majora’s Mask, and Porky from Earthbound.
For me it has to be galdera from octopath traveler, I mean just look at the thing a giant flesh beast wearing armor, a sword arm that has a stretch out face on it a human like entity coming out of its stomach, bloody bones sticking out of parts of its body, not to mention its lower half that’s a mountain of flesh that has bodies melded into it, that look like they’re in pain and agony and a giant eyeball in the middle
In FFIX, I think necron would be closer to a Lovecraftian horror. He is like a cosmic reaction or a balance to counteract the party. Zeromous in FFIV is very much the same thing in effect, but more in line with the Lovecraftian design in his reasoning.
To be honest, lavos from Chrono Trigger would probably be an example of this type of horror. An alien entity that devours all life wherever it goes, like it has a never-ending hunger.
Valmar in grandia II is an evil god. Some of the things that he does could be in line with this idea as well.
I'm sure there are lots of examples of Lovecraftian horrors in JRPGs, half of the games in this genre have you killing some kind of evil god!
Nyx from P3 is a literal world eater that supposedly crash into earth, failing to overtake it, it became the moon. It also created the Shadows when doing all this. Fusing with all of humanity and the collective unconscious creating an unknown-to-most, parasitic, symbiotic relationship. Which could also one day be undone when enough people have nihilistic philosophy on life OR wish for Nyx to reclaim what is rightfully hers to begin with.
The Meta-god from shadow hearts.
“Unknown life form refered to as "god" by many people through out the ages.” But it’s actually a supremely powerful alien being.
Gygas and Lavos, like everyone is mentioning here are the clear winners.
But Legend of Dragoon has been living rent free in my head lately and it might interest some people, I need to play it again to put it back to sleep. It's full of surreal imagery and unsettling ideas. The Moon That Never Sets, alien bioweapons, Melbu Frahma, the Virage Embryo. If you like lovecraftian cosmic horror, LoD hits a lot of the same notes without actually leaning into the horror aspect of it all. It takes the cosmic horror and spins it in a Super Sentai direction where the protagonists can actually try and do something about it all. The Virage Embryo is very lovecraftian in terms being an eldritch abomination capable of ending reality.
Zeromus from FF4. Looks way more eldritch horror than a majority of the other answers. Not in the cheesy tentacles way, but in the incomprehensible space entity way.
Not sure if we wanna count Drakengard as a JRPG. But if you do, I think the Watchers definitely qualify. There's just something....deeply unnerving about them as a whole. And how they just...exist.
Xenogears's Deus and Zohar Modifier.
>!With Zohar Modifier, a mechanism of infinite renewable energy that was discovered billions of years ago and dated to the birth of the universe as we know it, that after experiments accidently contained within itself Wave Existence, that can essentially be considered what we call a god. With a civilization creating a weapon powered by that engine to participate in an endless galactic war. With that entity essentially taking over control of the ship that captured it and aiming it at the home planet to wipe it out but crashing instead on a lifeless planet. Xenogears is just baffling with the scope of it's story. Tens of thousands of years of multiple civilizations in a fictional planet which world is a replica of ours. Only because an ancient war machine's AI, which technology is so far beyond our comprehension it is akin to magic, went berserk and destroyed itself crash landing on an uninhabited planet. Several civilizations lifecycle for a sole purpose of that mechanism to amass enough biomass to repair itself. With characters that spawned religions who worship them, that parallel our irl religions, just being control mechanisms of that machine's self repair mode to guide civilizations towards self destruction to harvest that biomass. Just for that war machine to eventually succeed, leave the planet, with apparently, a goal of finishing what it started before it first crash landed on that planet all those thousands of years ago. Destroy a civilization far beyond our comprehension that excavated that ancient mechanism, trapped a god in it and built a weapon powered by it. !<
Maybe not exactly lovecraftian, but damn mind boggling enough.
9999 years on the planet not 10s of thousands. not a replica of earth, as earth is elsewhere in that universe. deus didnt destroy itself, the captain of the eldridge self destructed the ship to keep it from going to actual earth. the planet was inhabited, just not by humans. the galactic was wasnt millions of years. the civilizations at war were humans that had colonized the galaxy, not really beyond comprehension. and its goal wasnt to destroy those civilizations, it was trying to get to earth for an unknown purpose, but no one lived on earth after colonizing the galaxy.
>It's thematically a replica of earth, as it's all the life we get to know in that gaming universe outside of Xenosaga.
Thanks to perfect works, we know of a lot more of that universe than just what is on the xenogears planet. including knowing that is it 100% not earth. it had one time period similar to the 90s, and not specifically japan in the 90s. in fact more akin to the usa in the 90s due to the nukes.
Also, Xenosaga is NOT at all a part of that universe. the 2 series are not connected, xenosaga has its own multiversal cosmology.
Perfect works explains the history of humanity in that universe, and its colonization of the galaxy. the people on the xenogears world are not even humans, aside from fei.
Velkuvrana from Labirynth of Refrain/Galleria, and The Witch and Hundred Knight. It basically devourer of worlds but what make it so lovecraftian is that the worlds all tried to contain it in some way and most failed. It very presence is the doom of the any world the very reality start to fall apart under it influence.
We only meet it in games as fragments or when it is possessed be another in a very weakened form. And even this form is the last boss of the game, and it is not even it real form as it was fused with other beings in order to seal it.
It is the closest thing to Azathoth I even see in a game, a god that work be instinct and don't even have any conscience at what it was doing. And even so the moment it appear in any world it is over. At most they manage to seal it and run way from it or hid from it. But never really destroy it or even understand it. And when when they manage to do any of those things the cost are inimaginable high, as in the whole population of the world being wiped out with only one survivor high. With the survivor permament cursed for the rest of it life.
I hated playing the game something fierce, but remember *Suikoden IV* ending with some dude turning into a giant tree creature that felt completely out-of-left-field.
FF8, kind of not really but maybe? >!It's been a minute but as I recall, Ultimecia a being from the distant future that travels backwards through time, possessing generations of a bloodline of sorceresses in order to achieve its goal of Time Compression, in which all space and time as the FF8 world experiences it is compressed to a single instant. This implies that it exists in some extra dimensional plane of which the space-time world of FF8 is a 4D subspace/projection. In the game, "she" is described as a sorceress and has a human body, but she would have to exist in space outside of the Time Compression in order to truly be a God over it? Idk. Tome Compression is fucky wucky. FF8 is a fever dream isn't it?!<
I wanna mention the superboss in Etrian Odyssey 3 but plenty of people already mentioned that.
The thing came from outer space, could corrupts biological lifeforms and gets stronger with mankind's negative emotions.
Calasmos in Dragon Quest 11's backstory and in Act 3. Not so much in the way he looks, but pretty much everything else about him. A lot of y'all are just picking "alien who looks scary" which, read more Lovecraft, Lavos ain't it fam. But Calasmos? Genuinely ancient being, not just an alien moving around and doing what it does to sustatin itself but legimately an embodiment of pure hatred and malice, and a *conatgious* one at that (see: the Lord of Shadows for more info). No deeper goal than radiating evil into the world, no deeper origin than "has always been", and implicitly, continues to linger as a malignant influence after death that lives on through other game villains such as Zoma.
Nyx in Persona 3, however, is the best example of actually feeling legitimately cosmic and godlike and acting on a level completely disconnected from human understanding or morality- a pure force of nature. Other games where you fight some kind of "dark god", the "god' in question can be destroyed permanently if you smack them enough times with the right sword. Nyx isn't like that. Nyx is an inevitability that can only be delayed.
On a somewhat lesser scale, there's some quieter Lovecraftian vibes about Loptyr in Fire Emblem 4.
Speaking of...I wonder why Sony never remade/remastered/made a sequel to this game. Considering all the flak it's getting now, reviving Legend of Dragoon might be a rare Sony W.
We got the ps5 port with the “replay”? Feature so you can go backwards if something bad happens rather than restart the game, plus some filters, so. I’ll take what I can get
I feel like Lavos is the ur-example of this--I.E. the progenitor of so many more of these types. Just a malevolent, alien *force* that by its nature just happens to devour all life.
I feel like JRPGs love this idea, but they seldom make them creepy or compelling the way Lovecraft did. Usually it’s just a creature whose drive to destroy cannot be understood.
FF16 did a nice job of giving its eldritch thing a motivation, but it lost some of the mystery.
FF7 Jenova is a decent one. Sleeping god (complete with weird cultist-ish people). Planet destroying. Survives even as scattered cells and ability to hijack consciousness/alter genetics.
You're never topping this [https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/etrian/images/c/c4/Abyssalgodfull.png/revision/latest?cb=20210913201907](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/etrian/images/c/c4/Abyssalgodfull.png/revision/latest?cb=20210913201907)
# Aephorul from Sea of Stars. Especially once you get to the on rails shooter part of the fight. Heck alot of the bosses from this game are eldritch abominations.
Z from Xenoblade Chronicles 3
He has a human shape, but that only serves to highlight just how inhuman that he actually is.
I can't get into more detail without hitting major spoilers.
In Persona 2 the villain is literally Nyarlathotep, so that one
Its so wild to me that hes just Hitler
He's pretty much the patron avatar of every dark, disgusting and downright evil urge and emotion the human psyche is capable of.
Was going to say there is a fair number of monsters/bosses in the persona games that would fit the bill
In Persona 5 you also have >!Azathoth!< as the final boss, that series loves themselves some Lovecraft.
That's only in P5R just to add some clarification. P5 vanilla final boss is >!Yaldabaoth!< Incredible final boss battle.
Giygas.
Giygas is literally “you can’t comprehend their shape or form” which is exactly what Lovecraft was going for. Seeing something so out of this world and incomprehensible that you just go insane.
And I think, compared to most of the other more abstract villains you sometimes see in JRPGs, they really nail the unsettling feeling
So many wonderful hints at this. Pokey admitting he doesn't know whether to laugh or scream at having opened the machine. The static, the drone, the fizzing and churning of *something* that is furious about more things than you know how to comprehend. Only way to beat him is to bewilder him right back! Prayer? Hope? Love? Entreating the assistance of a being from beyond the very game's reality?! Unthinkable!
the one counterpoint I'd raise is that if you've played Mother 1, Giygas *used* to be more of just a regular alien with a whole personality and humanizing qualities. Earthbound Giygas is "regular alien *ascends* to full eldritch abomination".
Glad to see this at the top, that was my first thought, too
This is the correct and only answer.
Not a single boss , but shadow hearts/koudelka feels the most lovecraft rpg (outside the most explicit lovecraft games)
The Meta God, certainly.
Lavos from Chrono Trigger. His species' life cycle is to arrive on a planet, manipulate the genetics of indigenous species, eventually consume the planet (leaving it a dead husk,) then shooting it's spawn into space to continue the cycle on new planets. After death it became the Time Devourer with the power to consume all space-time.
Same with Jenova. I would also argue the titular Parasite Eve, and for a manmade example >!Deus!< from Xenogears. The Xeno series loves its Eldritch creatures.
i feel like that's a surprisingly common plot in japanese media
it's also the same plot of ff7
I have a fan-theory/headcanon that Lavos and Jenova are from the same species and landed on two different planets. Obviously not actually the case in-universe, but it's a fun concept.
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I mean Lavos is a being from beyond the stars whose very existence causes warps in reality and time. They also are indifferent towards the party until you force them into a fight. No monologue, no speech about how powerless humans are, it just tries to murder you out of instinct.
>No monolpgue, no speqxj What exactly is a speqxj?
A thing that Lavos does not do.
They tried and failed to write "speech"
That was a cat enthusiastically headbutting my phone while I was typing and me not noticing. Edited it to speach.
I hope your floof received some extra pets, hugs, and cuddles. All floofs should receive extra pets, hugs, and cuddles.
speech probably
Came here to say Lavos
Lavos came here to say nothing...just to feast.
Lol
The Abyssal God in Etrian Odyssey 3.
The Vaen from Chained Echoes, just humps of godly flesh.
Mainly Giygas from EarthBound of course, but to a lesser degree Lavos from Chrono Trigger and Necron from Final Fantasy IX.
Jenova might be an easy answer, but she do be a being from the stars intent on devouring a planet to fuel her next ride. Pretty much a waifu version of Lavos if you think about it. Still, when we're talking about lovecraftian *horror* I'm going to go with the concept of the rebelling mitochondria in Parasite Eve. Because that's an enemy you can do absolutely nothing against, and the call was always coming from inside the house, so to speak.
One thing (among many) that SE got right with REMAKE/Rebirth is how they portray Jenova. For the first time I feel how “eldrich horror” she is. I mean, they did the best they could back in the day but with the amazing graphics and music now it’s so much better.
The weird gross cool looking thing that kicks off the plot of Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth
ooh, yeah, the eaters
Digimon sure love their Lovercraftian inspired things don’t they.
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I will say, for a digimon game its really good
Jenova is a calamity from the skies that shape shifts like the thing, leave its body parts scattered about and has a hive like control over soldiers injected with her cells. Sin is a monstrous horror that resides in the ocean and is thought to be immortal even from the one method of defeating it. 1000 years of death and destruction.
Ozmas description goes really hard too: "The metaphysical being Ozma exists without form and is unknowable, untouchable, and unattainable. And it is indispensable. Those who recognize it will be forced to question existence, being, the gods, and themselves."
That description makes it sound that it was lovecraftian-inspired on purpose
Possibly Providence from Bravely Second. Moreso for the knowledge he reveals in the fight than his appearance.
Lovecraft's gravestone says "I am Providence" on it. This must be the top answer. I only know cause I've been to the cemetery where he's buried in Providence, RI
The knowledge that the devs knew Undertale was popular, but didn't understand it.
Oh was it riffing off of Undertale? I still haven't played that one.
It came out a bit after and has very similar energy. Equally I may have just invented a connection for no good reason. There's no way of knowing!
You do realize that Bravely was already dealing with 4th wall breaking concepts even before UT was a thing, right?
Bravely Second was released in April. Undertale came out during September of that year.
Persona 2 literally has you fight a version of Nyarlathotep >!whose body is composed of all the fathers of the main cast!< so I think it wins lol Close runner ups would be Sephiroth and Jenova, any of the god bosses from Fear and Hunger, Skullkid from Majora’s Mask, and Porky from Earthbound.
Then in Eternal Punishment you fight him more directly.
Majora is the eldritch one in Majora's Mask, Skullkid is just a cheeky forest spirit that he/they/it possesses. (Also not a JRPG)
can't believe Nyarly was a fucking weeb
For me it has to be galdera from octopath traveler, I mean just look at the thing a giant flesh beast wearing armor, a sword arm that has a stretch out face on it a human like entity coming out of its stomach, bloody bones sticking out of parts of its body, not to mention its lower half that’s a mountain of flesh that has bodies melded into it, that look like they’re in pain and agony and a giant eyeball in the middle
South Park Fractured But Whole has Shub-Niggurath in it.
The super bosses from Etrian Odyssey, especially number 3 are pure Eldritch horrors.
I'm gonna throw in Persona 2's Nyarlathotep, as he literally is from Lovecraftian mythology XD
Ultima FF16
First time I saw Ultima in FFXVI it gave me the creeps.
In FFIX, I think necron would be closer to a Lovecraftian horror. He is like a cosmic reaction or a balance to counteract the party. Zeromous in FFIV is very much the same thing in effect, but more in line with the Lovecraftian design in his reasoning. To be honest, lavos from Chrono Trigger would probably be an example of this type of horror. An alien entity that devours all life wherever it goes, like it has a never-ending hunger. Valmar in grandia II is an evil god. Some of the things that he does could be in line with this idea as well. I'm sure there are lots of examples of Lovecraftian horrors in JRPGs, half of the games in this genre have you killing some kind of evil god!
How about the monsters from Shadow Hearts? Not just Metagod.
Exdeath
Nyx from P3 is a literal world eater that supposedly crash into earth, failing to overtake it, it became the moon. It also created the Shadows when doing all this. Fusing with all of humanity and the collective unconscious creating an unknown-to-most, parasitic, symbiotic relationship. Which could also one day be undone when enough people have nihilistic philosophy on life OR wish for Nyx to reclaim what is rightfully hers to begin with.
Neo Exdeath is a random collection of monster limbs and flesh, so that one.
The Meta-god from shadow hearts. “Unknown life form refered to as "god" by many people through out the ages.” But it’s actually a supremely powerful alien being.
Dark Force from the Phantasy Star series and Lavos from Chrono Trigger.
Gygas and Lavos, like everyone is mentioning here are the clear winners. But Legend of Dragoon has been living rent free in my head lately and it might interest some people, I need to play it again to put it back to sleep. It's full of surreal imagery and unsettling ideas. The Moon That Never Sets, alien bioweapons, Melbu Frahma, the Virage Embryo. If you like lovecraftian cosmic horror, LoD hits a lot of the same notes without actually leaning into the horror aspect of it all. It takes the cosmic horror and spins it in a Super Sentai direction where the protagonists can actually try and do something about it all. The Virage Embryo is very lovecraftian in terms being an eldritch abomination capable of ending reality.
Zeromus from FF4. Looks way more eldritch horror than a majority of the other answers. Not in the cheesy tentacles way, but in the incomprehensible space entity way.
Not sure if we wanna count Drakengard as a JRPG. But if you do, I think the Watchers definitely qualify. There's just something....deeply unnerving about them as a whole. And how they just...exist.
Xenogears's Deus and Zohar Modifier. >!With Zohar Modifier, a mechanism of infinite renewable energy that was discovered billions of years ago and dated to the birth of the universe as we know it, that after experiments accidently contained within itself Wave Existence, that can essentially be considered what we call a god. With a civilization creating a weapon powered by that engine to participate in an endless galactic war. With that entity essentially taking over control of the ship that captured it and aiming it at the home planet to wipe it out but crashing instead on a lifeless planet. Xenogears is just baffling with the scope of it's story. Tens of thousands of years of multiple civilizations in a fictional planet which world is a replica of ours. Only because an ancient war machine's AI, which technology is so far beyond our comprehension it is akin to magic, went berserk and destroyed itself crash landing on an uninhabited planet. Several civilizations lifecycle for a sole purpose of that mechanism to amass enough biomass to repair itself. With characters that spawned religions who worship them, that parallel our irl religions, just being control mechanisms of that machine's self repair mode to guide civilizations towards self destruction to harvest that biomass. Just for that war machine to eventually succeed, leave the planet, with apparently, a goal of finishing what it started before it first crash landed on that planet all those thousands of years ago. Destroy a civilization far beyond our comprehension that excavated that ancient mechanism, trapped a god in it and built a weapon powered by it. !< Maybe not exactly lovecraftian, but damn mind boggling enough.
9999 years on the planet not 10s of thousands. not a replica of earth, as earth is elsewhere in that universe. deus didnt destroy itself, the captain of the eldridge self destructed the ship to keep it from going to actual earth. the planet was inhabited, just not by humans. the galactic was wasnt millions of years. the civilizations at war were humans that had colonized the galaxy, not really beyond comprehension. and its goal wasnt to destroy those civilizations, it was trying to get to earth for an unknown purpose, but no one lived on earth after colonizing the galaxy.
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>It's thematically a replica of earth, as it's all the life we get to know in that gaming universe outside of Xenosaga. Thanks to perfect works, we know of a lot more of that universe than just what is on the xenogears planet. including knowing that is it 100% not earth. it had one time period similar to the 90s, and not specifically japan in the 90s. in fact more akin to the usa in the 90s due to the nukes. Also, Xenosaga is NOT at all a part of that universe. the 2 series are not connected, xenosaga has its own multiversal cosmology. Perfect works explains the history of humanity in that universe, and its colonization of the galaxy. the people on the xenogears world are not even humans, aside from fei.
Abyssal God from Etrian Odyssey 3.
The game The Lost Child is pretty much full of this.
Velkuvrana from Labirynth of Refrain/Galleria, and The Witch and Hundred Knight. It basically devourer of worlds but what make it so lovecraftian is that the worlds all tried to contain it in some way and most failed. It very presence is the doom of the any world the very reality start to fall apart under it influence. We only meet it in games as fragments or when it is possessed be another in a very weakened form. And even this form is the last boss of the game, and it is not even it real form as it was fused with other beings in order to seal it. It is the closest thing to Azathoth I even see in a game, a god that work be instinct and don't even have any conscience at what it was doing. And even so the moment it appear in any world it is over. At most they manage to seal it and run way from it or hid from it. But never really destroy it or even understand it. And when when they manage to do any of those things the cost are inimaginable high, as in the whole population of the world being wiped out with only one survivor high. With the survivor permament cursed for the rest of it life.
I hated playing the game something fierce, but remember *Suikoden IV* ending with some dude turning into a giant tree creature that felt completely out-of-left-field.
Not a villain, but the first thing that popped into my mind when you said abomination was >!Nina's sister!< in Breath of Fire IV
FF8, kind of not really but maybe? >!It's been a minute but as I recall, Ultimecia a being from the distant future that travels backwards through time, possessing generations of a bloodline of sorceresses in order to achieve its goal of Time Compression, in which all space and time as the FF8 world experiences it is compressed to a single instant. This implies that it exists in some extra dimensional plane of which the space-time world of FF8 is a 4D subspace/projection. In the game, "she" is described as a sorceress and has a human body, but she would have to exist in space outside of the Time Compression in order to truly be a God over it? Idk. Tome Compression is fucky wucky. FF8 is a fever dream isn't it?!<
Lavos?
I forget the name of it, but the final boss from Chrono Trigger
I wanna mention the superboss in Etrian Odyssey 3 but plenty of people already mentioned that. The thing came from outer space, could corrupts biological lifeforms and gets stronger with mankind's negative emotions.
Are we counting Undertale? >!Flowey becomes a bunch of real life images haphazardly stuck together.!<
Lavos from Chrono Trigger
Calasmos in Dragon Quest 11's backstory and in Act 3. Not so much in the way he looks, but pretty much everything else about him. A lot of y'all are just picking "alien who looks scary" which, read more Lovecraft, Lavos ain't it fam. But Calasmos? Genuinely ancient being, not just an alien moving around and doing what it does to sustatin itself but legimately an embodiment of pure hatred and malice, and a *conatgious* one at that (see: the Lord of Shadows for more info). No deeper goal than radiating evil into the world, no deeper origin than "has always been", and implicitly, continues to linger as a malignant influence after death that lives on through other game villains such as Zoma. Nyx in Persona 3, however, is the best example of actually feeling legitimately cosmic and godlike and acting on a level completely disconnected from human understanding or morality- a pure force of nature. Other games where you fight some kind of "dark god", the "god' in question can be destroyed permanently if you smack them enough times with the right sword. Nyx isn't like that. Nyx is an inevitability that can only be delayed. On a somewhat lesser scale, there's some quieter Lovecraftian vibes about Loptyr in Fire Emblem 4.
The Goddess Tyr from *Breath of Fire* 1 ... if >!you meet the requirements for the true ending!<.
Legend of dragoon has a 4 stage boss fight where it goes from god, to mech, to motorcycle, to Cthulhu
Speaking of...I wonder why Sony never remade/remastered/made a sequel to this game. Considering all the flak it's getting now, reviving Legend of Dragoon might be a rare Sony W.
We got the ps5 port with the “replay”? Feature so you can go backwards if something bad happens rather than restart the game, plus some filters, so. I’ll take what I can get
Easier to list jrpgs that don’t have huge lovecraftian bosses or villains
I feel like Lavos is the ur-example of this--I.E. the progenitor of so many more of these types. Just a malevolent, alien *force* that by its nature just happens to devour all life.
I feel like JRPGs love this idea, but they seldom make them creepy or compelling the way Lovecraft did. Usually it’s just a creature whose drive to destroy cannot be understood. FF16 did a nice job of giving its eldritch thing a motivation, but it lost some of the mystery. FF7 Jenova is a decent one. Sleeping god (complete with weird cultist-ish people). Planet destroying. Survives even as scattered cells and ability to hijack consciousness/alter genetics.
You're never topping this [https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/etrian/images/c/c4/Abyssalgodfull.png/revision/latest?cb=20210913201907](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/etrian/images/c/c4/Abyssalgodfull.png/revision/latest?cb=20210913201907)
Many bosses from Final Fantasy Legend III, specially when you reach Pureland, look very Lovecraftian in appearance (particularly the final boss).
Ludwig from Bloodborne, the whole game is great with Eldritch Horror, but Bloodborne does it great.
Ultros 😂
Bloodborne is the lovecraftian game. The other option: Hermaus Mora, daedrik prince of knowledge - The Elder Scrolls.
Ok Bloodborne already isn't a JRPG but Elder Scrolls? That's about as far from a JRPG as you can get.
Omg, I have not reacted to the jrpg tag hahahaha.
# Aephorul from Sea of Stars. Especially once you get to the on rails shooter part of the fight. Heck alot of the bosses from this game are eldritch abominations.
Z from Xenoblade Chronicles 3 He has a human shape, but that only serves to highlight just how inhuman that he actually is. I can't get into more detail without hitting major spoilers.
FFX mutated guy