12 Days of Monsters: Day 11
12 Days of Monsters is a series exploring the visual design of different monsters - looking at what makes them successful (or not), what trends they represent, and what they mean to me personally.
The Monster
Ceadeus
from the 2009 video game MONSTER HUNTER TRI
The Set-up
“Imagine if each day a man must try to kill the moon...”
In the Monster Hunter games, nearly every enemy is a boss fight. You're a hunter in a world with an ecosystem that consists almost entirely of big badass dragons and dinosaurs - each of which can take 15-30 minutes to kill for a casual player (who isn't over-leveled or anything). You spend a lot of time tracking, chasing, fighting, trapping, and slaying these monsters.
The game lives and dies on the quality of its monsters: Are they visually interesting and impressive? Are they distinct from each other and memorable? Are the battles engaging in a variety of different environments and with each of the 14(!!!) different weapons in the series?
Do you get to feel like a resourceful warrior, preparing for epic hunts with traps and tools and specialized armor and weapons, using your surroundings and other wildlife, and taking advantage of your deep understanding of the monster's behavior to making hunting a dragon into just another day's work?
The 5th game in the main series - 2018's MONSTER HUNTER WORLD - was a huge success, surpassing 2009's RESIDENT EVIL 5 to become Capcom's single best selling title of all time, so the series is kind of a household name now. But the series was delivering on all the questions I asked above for years before then. I got into it a couple years after 2009's MONSTER HUNTER TRI released, and the final monster you hunt in the single-player mode of that game is one of my favorites from the series.
Official render of Ceadeus as it appears in the game. Known as “shining giants of the depths”, the armor you can make from parts of these beasts is named after the moon.
The creature is called Ceadeus, and it's an example of an "elder dragon" - a type of monster in the game that is extremely rare and powerful, with single individuals capable of affecting entire biomes or even weather systems. Ceadeus lives up to that descriptor. This behemoth is almost 200 feet long, and it's been threatening to destroy a local village - so you need to drive it away.
There's so much I could say about this guy (and about the Monster Hunter games in general), so I'm just going to dive in. Instead of focusing on just one part, I'm going to go through each of the main/distinctive components of Ceadeus's design - and explain what real-world analog it is based off (or not), as well as why they add up to such a memorable monster.
The Head
A close-up of the Ceadeus you have to repel in order to save your village in MONSTER HUNTER TRI
The skull, jaws, and head-plates of the Dunkleosteus terelli specimen on display at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History
Ceadeus starts off strong with a somewhat iconic face, at least for any paleo nerds. Its facial features are lifted almost entirely from Dunkleosteus terrelli, the largest known placoderm - a group of prehistoric fish characterized primarily by a set of armored plates encasing their head and jaws. Dunkle's face is pretty memorable, with a set of interlocking bladed plates instead of teeth, and an intimidating tank-like noggin that you probably saw in a museum. Ceadeus is a nigh-mythical aquatic behemoth, so giving it the face of an iconic superpredator from millions of years ago definitely gets your audience in the right headspace. It tells you this thing is ancient, massive, and to be revered.
Equally cleverly, though, the next several elements of the head contrast that starkly. Whereas Dunkle's head was probably one of the wider parts of its body, Ceadeus's head sits on a sort of throne of other features that build it up even more. It has a hooded nape - conceptually similar to a cobra's hood, but permanently expanded, and also much thicker, more like the body of a sea turtle. Underneath that hood is a billowing patch of fur - the only hair on the creature's body - that is known as its "beard". This could easily be the silliest part of the design, but I think it kind of works here. The intent is clear - to make this creature seem majestic - and I think it comes across. Interestingly, the games suggest that this fur actually has a function, which I didn't expect (apparently, it's to trap algae). But the next most important feature of the head is probably the most obvious.
The Horns
A cape buffalo, showing its incredible horns. Photo by Piet du Toit, one of the owners of this particular animal - whose name is “Horizon”, and is the most expensive buffalo in the world.
I couldn’t find a site I’m comfortable linking to for that, so you’ll either have to take my word for it or look it up yourself.
Ceadeus's horns generally resemble those of a black wildebeest (Connochaetes gnou) or a cape buffalo (Syncerus caffer caffer), which is just such a great decision because - along with the "beard" - these elements are recognizably lifted from the notably non-aquatic bovines, and so when placed prominently on an aquatic "dragon", give it the impression of being a sort of chimera. Creatures of myth (like the Ancient Greek chimera itself) were often described as being comprised of totally disparate parts from unrelated mundane animals. Often, those anatomies didn't "make sense", as though these fantastical creatures weren't subject to the same rules that govern the physiology of normal things. This sort of "dissonance" in Ceadeus's design, rather than making the animal look implausible, makes it evocative of these sorts of tropes from myth.
The horns also serve an important narrative function in the game. The village you are trying to rescue sits on top of an underwater cave system that is vast enough for the enormous elder dragon to swim through. When it does, its huge horns rake the ceiling of the cave, causing earthquakes in the village above. And the reason why this is happening is because, when a Ceadeus's horns grow too big, they can actually overtake its eyes - causing it to go blind, and presumably making it more prone to causing accidental cataclysms. The particular Ceadeus you fight at the culmination of the game's story is indeed so old that one of its horns has completely overtaken one of its eyes.
(Quick aside, just because it's funny: This is all pretty nonsensical - the roofs of these caves would need to be wildly thin for Ceadeus's horns to have any sort of noticeable effect, and even then an outright earthquake would still be preposterous. But it makes a kind of sense, the sort of intuitive you-can-follow-along plausibility that governs myths, which works well enough in this game - especially for a creature that is itself supposed to be essentially mythical.)
I love this, because it is basically an entire story woven into a detail of the creature's design. Even if putting gigantic bony horns on basically a whale "makes no sense" (weight! drag while swimming! constant erosion from saltwater!), it is still a very motivated and purposeful choice in the context of this particular fictional creature. This plausibility of this fantastical element of Ceadeus's anatomy is partially subsidized, again, by the fact that we are supposed to think of this being as mythical - and partially by similarities to real animals, specifically around the story of the horns growing too big.
Somewhat famously, the irish elk (Megaloceros giganteus) is a species of giant deer whose extinction thousands of years ago is often attributed to its massive antlers becoming too big to sustain, but this is a simplistic framing - and we don't even need to look at extinct fauna to find analogs to Ceadeus's horn problems.
A common sheep (Ovis aries) whose overgrown left horn is completely covering its left eye.
This animal also has a name - Roger Ramjet. And don’t worry, he’s fine now. Photo credit unknown
From time to time, the horns of an unlucky sheep may blind the animal if they grow large enough that they block the eye, as you can see in one of pictures below. And somewhat famously, many rodents have teeth that grow continuously throughout the animal's life, so much so that if the animal doesn't keep gnawing on things to keep their teeth in check, they can grow wildly out of control and end up starving the animal as it becomes unable to eat. Ceadeus's horns grow "too big" in a way you don't typically see in animals, though - the base of the horn itself grows bigger, taking up more space on the animal's skull. That's a bit more fanciful, but at least it looks cool. And speaking of things that don't look like real animals...
The Tail
Another cinematic shot of Ceadeus from MONSTER HUNTER TRI, this time showing off its distinctive three-lobed tail
I know that all the action is at the head and horns, but I really can't stop thinking about Ceadeus's tail. While the head is a mash-up of recognizable anatomy from real animals, the tail is (as far as I can tell) entirely made-up. There's almost a split in the creature's design, between its head - with its fanciful, distinctive, clashing parts - and the rest of its body, which seems focused more on the meeting the more practical demands of locomotion for an animal of its size. I almost get the impression that its head is like a sort of regal/ceremonial mask being worn by this enormous, strange-looking relic from an evolutionary branch that never panned out in our history. It's cool.
The weirdest this about the tail, to me, is the very end. If you were to take a cross-section, it would be sort of T-shaped - with the two lobes of its fluke going out to the sides, like a whale's, but also with this thick fleshy ridge jutting down perpendicular to them, like a ship's rudder. From what I could find after some admittedly light amateur Googling, no other living or extinct vertebrate has this sort of "three-lobed" tail structure. Typically, you see tails on aquatic animals having the distinctive horizontal flukes of cetaceans, or the thin vertical blades of nearly all fish - from tuna to sharks.
Well, why do we have these two different layouts when it comes to the same basic problem (propelling oneself through water) in the first place?
A diagram showing the undulating swimming motion of a river otter, excerpted from this paper. Drawn by Frank Fish
One article I found suggested it largely boils down to an evolutionary coin flip in terms of ancestry. Whales descended from four-legged land-dwelling mammals. When quadrupedal mammals run, their spine flexes up-and-down. And when you translate that body plan to swimming, you can often wind up with a process that involves undulating your back half up-and-down, which you can still see today in semiaquatic mammals like the river otter (Lutra canadensis). And so, if you keep iterating on that design, over millions of years of evolution, you end up with modern cetaceans - whose primary mode of propulsion through water comes from undulating their wide flukes up-and-down. Fish, meanwhile, apparently relied on side-to-side movements all along - and thus, so do their extant aquatic descendants.
Modern cetaceans aren't the only aquatic animals that evolved from land-dwelling ancestors, though. The mosasaurs are an extinct genus of aquatic reptiles (which got momentarily more famous with their prominent inclusion in the 2015 film JURASSIC WORLD) who also descended from land-dwellers - but probably ones who, even on land, had a gait that involved more side-to-side motion than their analogs in the mammalian cetacean relatives. This makes sense: mosasaurs are part of the order Squamata, which includes modern snakes and lizards, the latter of which have limb patterns that are sprawled out sideways (unlike mammals) and thus end up with side-to-side undulation in their locomotion.
So, what to make of Ceadeus's tail, which seems to have it both ways?
Well, as is often the case when it comes to anatomical design decisions that were probably made primarily for aesthetic reasons, it probably wouldn't be very efficient or practical. There's a reason why whale tail flukes are so wide - it gives the whale better propulsion. Ceadeus's "flukes" are much narrower, and thus would be slower (or at least less energy-efficient) than modern cetaceans. The medial ridge under Ceadeus's flukes could allow it to be used for side-to-side undulation, unlike a whale, somewhat similar to how modern eels use their medial fins (i.e. the ones that run along their top and bottom, and converge at the tail). Full body caudal fin propulsion like the type used by eels, where their whole body undulates, is typically not very fast - and Ceadeus's fleshy "fin" ridge isn't that pronounced or long, either.
So, just for fun, can we come up with any reason why this sort of tail would actually work well for this totally fictional animal? Well, actually, yes (maybe (kind of)). Unlike whales, Ceadeus has a very long and serpentine body - one that's capable of coiling and bending much more tightly than any living cetacean. If it really does love exploring potentially tight underwater cave systems, a very flexible body could be a sensible adaptation (just forget about those horns). If it needs to make tight turns while twisting its body, a three-lobed tail that can switch between up-and-down undulation and side-to-side undulation might give it an easy way to change up how it moves as it rotates. Modern cetaceans manage that sort of thing primarily using their pectoral fins, but Ceadeus's pectoral fins are probably busy enough controlling the animal's roll, given those huge lateral horns, so some extra help from the tail might be appreciated.
And of course, Ceadeus ultimately just doesn't need to be that fast. It essentially has no predators (other than video game protagonists - and, according to a later game, another species of elder dragon, but only when the Ceadeus are pups), so it doesn't need speed for evasion. As for how it hunts, well, it can spit huge magical cannons of pressurized water, so it doesn't need to be fast to hunt, either.
Yeah, I'm not going to do the whole "plausible biology" rundown of that. That's just straight-up a video game thing. You sign off on that sort of shit when you put a disc labelled "Monster Hunter" into your Wii. (There's even an in-game explanation for this. It involves glowing organs that are, I believe, powered by photosynthesis(???) from the algae it traps in its beard. Oh, and they helpfully turn red when it's mad. This is all Very Stupid. Don't worry about it.)
Now, isn't this just all, ultimately, basically head-canon?
Yeah.
The underwater combat of MONSTER HUNTER TRI isn't based on actual underwater physics, so ultimately Ceadeus can just look and move any way its designers want it to. But I like to think there's a little nugget of some of that "head-canon" peeking through the design, though - for instance, in the battle, Ceadeus does indeed coil and spin constantly, and it often likes to flourish its tail in this cute little motion that really sticks out in my memory. Maybe it's coincidence, maybe it's some internalized understanding of aquatic locomotion in real animals that the designers were evoking here (consciously or otherwise), probably it's both. Like I said, I can't stop thinking about this tail.
Reflections
Putting it All Together
One of the things that makes the Monster Hunter games so cool is the amount of thought that goes into the look and feel of its monsters. Despite their fantastical elements, the monsters all have mannerisms and roles in their respective ecosystems and ways of moving that are clearly very intentional and designed with a strong eye towards plausibility (at least by the standards of verisimilitude for an action video game). For all I know, the dragons that are the star creatures of 2011's SKYRIM have just as many different animations as the much smaller Rathalos from Monster Hunter, but the latter feels much more real and living.
I’ve spent a lot of time ragging on the Indoraptor from JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM (2018) before, and how it had a bunch of unconnected elements in its design just intended to look cool. I think the creatures in Monster Hunter show you how much more compelling an effect your designs can evince, even when mashing random stuff together, if you earn that. And I think Ceadeus is a great example of that philosophy put into practice, and paying off well.
Plus, “Moonquake” - the soundtrack to the fight - is just wonderful. I still listen to it all the time.
It all comes together - the music, the epic battle, the creature design - to make a compelling and satisfying ending to what is ultimately a grindy RPG that makes you feel, for a moment, like you’re living a myth.
The single-player story of MONSTER HUNTER TRI ends when, in your climactic battle with Ceadeus, you manage to break off its overgrown horn - ending the immediate danger to the village and driving the beast away. The majestic creature leaves for calmer waters, and there is safety. In the game's final cutscene, your hunter and their impish companion return to the tiny village you call home, greeted by the smiling faces of the villagers whose lives and history you have saved.
The mighty Ceadeus, its overgrown horn now broken off, is silhouetted by the sunset as its breaches the waters outside your village one last time before leaving. You fought off a living myth, and earned peace for your home
Ceadeus was just one creature. You didn't drive off an ancient evil or save the world like in SKYRIM - you are only the hero of this one, puny little hamlet. But the thing you did was nonetheless nothing short of heroic - the sort of feat that will be passed down in tales from the villagers to their children, and from them to their children's children, and so on, the story of your accomplishment spinning into myth itself - both small and epic at once. And the ending cinematic where this all plays out is nothing short of charming, even when I watch it again as I write this, for the umpteenth time. The lives you saved are small, but they are real - and in this miniscule little corner of humanity, your mythical deed will be spoken of forever.
And then, because it's still a grindy RPG, you hunt Ceadeus over and over again a million more times until you get all the loot drops you need for its armor so you can do endgame content online.
