Raimdelle Reborn: The Neverending Bestiary

[Anonymoose]

I am certain there is a leve/FATE/npc that informs you that microchu are technically "baby ochu" and thus not really being two separate things.

That sounded like a good place to get some perspective, so I went looking.

In one season, a single ochu can produce over a hundred seeds, which, as the creature makes its way through the forest, are oft caught on the moss growing on tree trunks. If left to germinate, the seeds give rise to microchus─a vile plant which has the tendency to sap the soil of its nutrients, leaving little to none for the other foliage. To keep the microchu population in check, the Greatloam Growery seeks botanists to search mossy trees for these seeds and bring them back to the guild for proper disposal.

That's indeed one way to interpret it. To play devil's advocate, if the "ochu" in question is the genus, another interpretation might be "[Ochu & Microchu] can produce over a hundred seeds and there are microchu seeds everywhere. Go pick them up." Funny enough, as you pick them up during the quest, they're called Ochu Seeds. Perhaps the idea is that the ochu genus has a tendency to do this, and right now the microchu species is actively doing it?

It can sometimes be hard to tell which mobs are actually cousins, which are just at different stages of the life cycle, and which are just exhibiting sexual dimorphism. To save time for now, I've been treating all different visual archetypes as species and making it clear that "species" is a game mechanic term, not a biology term.

Perhaps if we finish the chart, we can convince the Lore Gods to throw some confirmation/correction/clarification/expansion at it over time.

Can we not all pool our crystals and wish really hard for Raimdelle to return to Eorzea - if not for a little while?

I can't help but imagine he'd be frustrated by what the Calamity did to his life's work, if for no other reason because we have way more voidsent now.

WHAT THE FACHAN IS THAT!?

EDIT:
Update: Up to S.

Here's an annoying one: Death Gaze. There's only one Genus/Species and it's plainly named Death Gaze, but the Simurgh FATE refers to it as a Cloudkin, in The Voidgate Breathes Gloomy (BLM), it comes out of a hole to the Void (which I thought was Ashkin, but hey maybe not), and it shares a lot of visual features with the Aevis, because Aevis and Deathgaze were both plate wyrms in FFXII.