Animated Sprite Bestiary

Jaseiken Nekuromansa- (Wicked Holy Sword Necromancer) is a 1988 Japanese PC Engine RPG (roleplaying game, which are similar to, and derivative of, tabletop Dungeons & Dragons products) developed and published by Hudson Soft. It's somewhat notable for being the first game of its type released on said console, its animated monsters (most RPGs used static sprites at the time), which all die with a burst of blood when they're defeated, and its representations of creatures/entities from H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos (especially the final five bosses). The game's creepy cover art was also done by H.R. Giger:


To make these animated GIFs, I took many screenshots from the game's battles, employing an emulator's layer filter to remove the background graphics, and then edited and animated the sprites using the GIMP software. Please note that, while the armored torso enemies float back-and-forth, in an arc, during fights with them in the game, they don't have any actual moving parts, which is why their sprites are immobile here, unlike all the others. For easier viewing, I increased the creatures' dimensions by 400% (i.e., something that was 32 pixels tall in the game is 128 pixels tall here).

To the best of my knowledge, all of the creatures are accounted for (101 of them by my count). While it's possible that I may have missed a monster or two, I played through the entire game (I picked Baron and Romina as my second and third party members, if you're curious), start-to-finish, and I was pretty thorough about exploring both the overworld and dungeons.

Hold your mouse arrow over a creature to make its' name(s) pop up. The first moniker is the Japanese hiragana/katakana spelling, the second name, in parenthesis, is my translation of that. As usual, please note that, while I have some knowledge of the language, I am not fluent in Japanese by any stretch of the imagination, so my interpretations may not be accurate.

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Any and all copyrighted imagery, terminology, etc., depicted on this page belongs to its respective holders/owners, namely Hudson Soft.

The repeating background graphic is from Jaseiken Nekuromansa-'s title screen.