Underground Monkey

When you think their numbers couldn’t get any higher…

You might find this a rather bizarre name to give to any trope, but if you’re familiar with RPGs or Metroidvanias, you’ll have already encountered this trope in some form and not realize it. Often times there are enemies that are introduced very early on in the game that are soon dealt with. You travel further in the game and enter a new area, and suddenly that enemy you fought before in an earlier level is now back, but with a new colour, new name, new abilities and buffed stats.

This is where the term Underground Monkey comes into play. It’s essentially an enemy’s sprite or design being reused for later areas with the changes mentioned to make them ‘different’ enough from their weaker versions to give players more enemies to deal with. Most see this as a form of laziness with the developers reusing sprites to just make them harder, but there is an actual reason for this. A lot of older games, especially on the NES and SNES, are limited in what they can do in terms of the consoles hardware. Rather than make entirely new sprites that would eat up more of the file size, it’d be easier to simply reuse them since they are already there and just change the colour to help differentiate them.

Another reason could be a way of telling the story more without the use of text. Certain enemies you have dealt with before are getting stronger the further along you go on your journey, with new traits to back up that point. Animals like wolves can have subspecies that have adapted to their new environments, gaining traits that give them an advantage over their cousins. If done correctly, reusing sprites can be an effective way of providing more story for the game without being up in your face about it.

An example of reusing sprites shown above with 6 of the 15 wolf enemies you encounter in Final Fantasy XII. Despite the visual differences, this is an example of Underground Monkey.

In smaller length games, there is about three or four enemies that share the same sprite, though in longer games that range can jump to ten or so enemies or even higher. Reusing sprites isn’t necessarily limited to just normal enemies alone. Unique enemies like those found in hunts, optional encounters, or even bosses can fall under this category. This is especially prominent in MMOs.

Yiazmat, the Superboss of FFXII, shares a similar design with the optional Hell Wyrm boss, and in general the various Fell Wyrm enemies in the game.

Sometimes it doesn’t necessarily have to be limited to just RPGs or Metroidvanias. Other genre of games can also have reused sprites in one way or another. One example is Beat-em-Ups where enemies will have palette swaps, with that enemy having a new name and the various changes entailed, but still visually the same kind of enemy. Tower Defense games will also reuse enemies but may try to change things up by giving a few of them unique traits.

Some enemies in Arknights will also fall under the category of Underground Monkey with one another, despite looking vastly different from one another.

Most games will try to give these altered enemies additional benefits to differentiate them, like dealing more damage to your characters when they have a status ailment on them, or move faster when another enemy is on the field. These changes, while subtle, can help make these enemies dangerous in their own way.

So now you’re a bit more familiar with this trope and how it’s used in games. If you were already aware of it, congrats! Now try and see if you can recall any games you played in the past few years that have followed this trope.