Underestimated/Overlooked Monsters?

I've said on about a bizillion threads that I like Chimaera a lot. I also like getting a Warhog specifically for the purpose of renaming him Andy. I would say Orc King on your list isn't one that's overlooked; along with Slime Knight, he's one of the ones that's pretty widely known to be viable all game long amongst the easy recruits. Possibly more overlooked than that is how good a regular old run-of-the-mill slime gets when you take the time to level one all the way up.

I have a completionist file that is missing exactly one recruitable monster: Barbatos. I finally caught a LMS on it not all that long ago. I have in mind to level up every one of the monsters to cap before I finally call that file done, though I don't play that file all that often, so that will take me a very long time to accomplish. I actually have two Old Men of the Sea sitting at Monty's on that (78 monsters total have been recruited; I have space for my Barbatos and one more duplicate). The second OMOTS was an accidental recruit, then I decided to keep him so I could rename one Ernest and the other H-Way because there aren't enough characters to fully spell out "Hemingway". I have yet to use those guys or start to level then up, but before all is said and done I'll have tried every monster in the game. Unfortunately, it'll take me long enough to do that that it won't necessarily help this thread.

I already have around 20 monsters maxed out, capped, and all finished, but these are all the ones that cap at the lowest experience totals, so I already have a good feel for a number of the utterly useless ones, like Funghoul, Ticking Timeburrm, Cross Eye, Mudraker, Walking Corpse, Fat Rat, Small Fry, and so on.

I, too, am interested in seeing if others have any opinions on some hidden gem monsters that they like using more than the popular consensus ones.
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Frazee uses the lunch!

Of those four you listed, BoFIIIFan, the only one I've ever used is Goodybag, and that was quite a while ago. If I recall, he mostly sat in the wagon just to get capped, so I may very well have overlooked something there if he's anything other than a total waste.

Whenever I play that file, I'm mostly in the bonus dungeon just to see if a Barbatos ever decides to stand up for me, and luckily that place has the wagon along. I can build all eight active characters as I do that, and the way I have my team arranged is hero at L99, Starkers and Rebjorn with Starkers walking and ReBjorn hidden in the wagon with them synchronized at roughly L30 right now, two humans rotating through building four levels at a time (all five of my other humans besides hero are between L56 and 60), and three other spots. Those three are for a dedicated healer character, one other L99 capper, and one that caps very low just to finish off.

I once took the Brady guide and transcribed all the max XP totals for each, and rewrote the list in order of least experience necessary to cap regardless of level to most. Right now that "lowmax" character is my Hyperanemon, and man, his level-up stat gains each time are fantastic. My current L99 capper building happens to be a pip fighter.

Alanna, that's very interesting about the goodybag and the seeds. Certain monsters have interesting patterns of leveling up; I wonder if this might have also been in play. For example, I ditched a Hulagan not long ago when she capped, but her last few levels gained zilch. No HP, no MP, and straight zeros for all five stats, so she was effectively capped with around three or four levels to go. Conversely, Starkers and ReBjorn, who you don't have yet, gain virtually nothing until L60 and it takes forever to get them there, but then their last 40 levels see ridiculous unbelieveable gains until they're amazing characters by L99. This is based solely on what I've read others post, because for me they're still down 30 levels to go before the rocket, and yes, ReBjorn would get killed by a stiff wind. Starkers starts out reasonably viable, but ReBjorn does not.

When I lumped Small Fry into the useless pile I was mainly thinking about long term and the endgame, but you're right about him early, same with Grudgerigar, for those very reasons. I actually quite like the Powie Yowie for early in gen 2 because the breath attacks are free and if you do enough casino grinding he can equip the gringham whip.

And, wow, what a nine (technically ten even though you do get Starkers and ReBjorn one right after the other) to still have left to collect. Four of the five 1/256, two conks, two 1/64 only found in very specific spots, and a necessary TNT win. You have a great deal of a grind left to get that list finished, if you care to get that list finished.
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Frazee uses the lunch!

That would be the test to do: give seeds of magic to an epipany or its equivalent conk cousin and see if that causes a higher MP total by level 99 than just 50, even above and beyond the natural growths plus the seeds. Those two monsters naturally cap with around 50 MP, which is indeed pathetic, and which total keeps them from being dominant spellcasters and must-use monsters. It's too bad seeds of magic are so hard to come by; the friendliest drop rate from any monster is 1/64 from quadrahead. To farm enough seeds to turn the pip and conk mages viable then dominant after viable would take forever.

I would want that idea empirically tested more on more monsters besides goodybag before I'd fully dive into believing it's universal, and the pip and conk spellcasters would be a good place to do it.
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Frazee uses the lunch!

I guess because of my penchant for thinking in terms of completionist finished products, that's why I gave so many of those early game low-cap monsters the short shrift. The Grudgerigar caps at level 20, while the slime keeps going, so in the long run that sheen spell is about it for why anybody would consider keeping him active. In the early going, rotten apple actually gains a pretty hard hitting direct damge shot and it takes very little time to get him to his L20 cap also, but then he gets outclassed by other monsters who last quite a bit longer.

Regarding the Slime Knight, the "easy to recruit" tier has two sets of odds: 1/2 and 1/4. Either way, they're very very easy, but it's mathematically feasible that a 1:4 recruit, which the SK indeed is, will not stand up to join even after 4 or 6 or 8 tries or more. It's starts to get increasingly unlikely the more chances you give, but it's not impossible. I bet if you just decided to go get him, it wouldn't take long.

I'll continue to pursue Barbatos on the one file, but once I get him (whenever that is) that file will become a seed of magic farming fest from Quadraheads and I'll work with the Epipany and the Conkuisitor (I think those are the correct names; the ones who hold up the crosses, whichever specific names go with those ones) to experiment with this idea also. That would be an amazing discovery that would save on tons of seeds.

The other active DQ5 file I have is a ridiculous completionism start, modeled after the one bwakel_ketsu posted a couple years ago. His is probably 10 or 12 pages down the GameFaqs board here, but essentially he wasn't satisfied until every single monster, recruitables and non-recruitables alike, was at 999 kills in the big book and every unlimited item was in the bag 99 times.

I started one like that myself and work it a little at a time, but it's still in Gen 1, and goes slowly because the few missable gen 1 monsters need to be done completely before I can move to the recruitment phase of the game. I need to get to 999 Screwball Pitchers, which takes forever because their encounter rate is low, then I'll need to fight 999 Eyelashers in the Ancient Ruins, so it'll still be a month or more before I'm even doing any recruiting on that file. I'm approaching 800 Screwball Pitchers now, but their encounter rate outside the ruins is low enough that I can play for 15 or 20 minutes and still only have fought 10 or 15 of them.

This is pretty much my favourite game, too. Gun to my head, I would say it's a tie between this one and GBC DW3.
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Frazee uses the lunch!

The seeds doing that in DQ3 is only the NES version; they fixed that in the GBC, to where there's no reason not to use them, and if you hyper-grow your INT by, say, 100 points using seeds, your MP will instantly grow by the corresponding approximately 200 points at the next level up.

My situation is I teach college part time, one or two days a week during the school year but the rest of the time I'm the primary stay-at-home caregiver to my son, who is five and has type I diabetes. So I have the time to grab a GBA SP or a DS Lite or, now, starting today, a DSi XL, and work on these absurd types of files for 10 or 15 or 30 minutes at a time a few times throughout the day when my son is otherwise engaged in amusing himself in various ways and his blood sugar is nice and stable and I don't feel like being real-life productive at that moment. That DQ5 999-99 file has been going on since last June off and on, and I'm still not out of Gen 1 with it, so it's not like it consumes my whole life.

The main thing I'm looking forward to with it is discovering if Harry caps at L50 like the Brady Guide makes it appear he does, or L99, as bwakel_ketsu said in his log. I've got 195 more Screwball Pitchers and 999 Eyelashers to bag before I can start worrying about Harry, though.
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Frazee uses the lunch!

Good. I certainly hope that's the case. I want to be able to defeat the Faux Dowager and get rid of him on that file and ride the ship over to the other continent sooner rather than an additional 49 levels later when the time comes. Also, if that turns out to be confirmed, it'll be yet another catching of a big time falsehood in that completionism log. There are already a couple biggies in it.
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Frazee uses the lunch!

Whether or not the entire log is faked only he knows, or if he actually did most of that but lied about some details, that's also possible. The main red flag about the log's veracity is the way he got minimedal drops to complete the minimedal gear x99 each but at a rate clearly orders of magnitude faster than would be actually feasible for them to drop. The times he stated translated to a 1:64 drop at almost one per minute, so the likeliest explanation for that was a math mistake while compiling his forgery rather than that being the actual truth of what happened, or it being a timing error, because he was so meticulous about his timings throughout the whole document. He also emphatically said Harry levels to 99, and he lumped buying 99 paring knives in Roundbeck into gen 1 even though they don't go on sale there until gen 2. So some circumstantial things point to the whole thing being a forgery, yes, or it could be that it's mostly true but with some lies in it.

I'm out to actually do it, so that I'll know it can be done. I already know it can be done, it'll just take a lot longer than what he stated. I can tell you this much: getting 999 Screwball Pitchers in gen 1 is drudgery, getting 999 Drackeemas in the Winter palace was drudgery but less so because at least they spawn a heck of a lot more often, and I'm not looking forward to the 999 Eyelashers either. But taking my time and going VERY slow with that file, just these short little 15-minute sessions where I don't spend but a tiny little bit of time on it each day, if I even get to it in a given day, is why I can keep it going.

The thing I'm very careful to make sure I do each and every day is at least one DW3 GBC monster medal, just because I have a streak going where I already have for almost 500 straight days so I sort of feel like I need to keep it going or I'll be letting myself down. Perhaps I'll voluntarily end that streak when it gets to 2,633 days.
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Frazee uses the lunch!