Metal Slime / Role-Playing Game

Metal Slimes are most common in the RPG genre, so it's no surprising that there would be enough examples to warrant its own page.

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• The Dododo from Dragon Ball Z: Attack of the Saiyans. A variant of the previous flightless bird enemies, however it will only pick the attack that causes it to leave the fight. It also has quite a high speed stat, so even late in the game, when you'll encounter these birds, they'll likely just do a sliver of damage and run away before anything else happens. Their HP is so low as to be comparable to the enemies in the first dungeon, though they resist all damage types to make up for it. For beating them, they drop a lot of XP, AP and the HEAD-CHA-LA item. The only other way of getting one of these is to backtrack to the Break Wastelands after having unlocked level 3 ki blasts outside of battle, so it's quite a rare item.
• The Trope Namer is the Metal Slime, from the Dragon Quest series. On the surface, it's a silver Palette Swap of the regular Slimes with low HP, but its defense is so high that some attacks outright fail; it's completely immune to magic; and it has absurd amounts of Agility, most of which it usually spends running from battle. It's not uncommon to encounter a large group of Metal Slimes and have all of them flee before the party can kill one or even act.
  
  Several Dragon Quest games offer countermeasures against Metal Slimes, including specialized weapons or abilities; but they still take full damage from critical hits, which makes them prime fodder for "critical hit or miss" abilities.
  • The Platinum King Jewel (formerly PlatKing) deserves a special mention here- not only does it have the highest HP, attack, defense, agility, and XP of the Metal Slime family, it also can use Dazzle to blind your party, making them miss so much that doing any damage to it is virtually impossible.
  • Amusingly, the Metal King Helmet is so strong that it's even better than the Legendary Hero's helmet, which is part of the armor you spent the better part of the game looking for. Many of the games have Liquid Metal/Metal King equipment as infinity-plus-one equipment, aptly named after the creatures with enough durability to take only 1 damage from most attacks.
  • Then we have the Gem Slime (formerly Gold Slime), a relative of the Metal Slime who acts much like any other Metal Slime. However, the Gem Slime can also use Magic Burst, which is the deadliest spell in the game, so if it doesn't flee immediately, it can deal serious damage to your party.
  • The Dragon Quest games also feature, at least in one game, a Metal Slime with an incredibly rare random drop: In Dragon Quest III, the Metal Babble (or Liquid Metal Slime, a palette swapped Bubble Slime, "Babble"), which has a 90% chance of running every round, an agility high enough that it almost always gets first attack, and a defense so staggeringly high that often nothing but a "tremendous hit" will take it out, has between a 1 and 5% chance of dropping the Happy Shoes, extremely valuable footwear that gives the wearer XP for every step in the field, which makes leveling in towns entirely possible. Needless to say, hours upon hours upon hours can be invested trying to get those shoes.
  • In Dragon Quest III there's a magma cave area where Metal Slimes are so common it is possible to find yourself swarmed by up to seven of them at the same time. You probably won't be able to kill all of them, mind, but with so many of them, its very easy to off at least one or two before they all run away. The spell "BeDragon" (which will turn the caster into a dragon,) still does normal damage. So while it takes two turns to do any damage (and several slimes will have run by then,) the rest get totally burninated. Lastly, if your other caster in the party casts the agility spell on the bedragoned character it will be fast enough to act first before any of the metal slimes, torching up any of those who did not flee in the first turn with 100% certainty.
  • Dragon Quest IV had the Royal Crypt, where you could get swarmed by Metal Babbles (which gave 7.5x the XP of Metal Slimes). However, in this game you had the lovely BeDragon spell, which could hit all enemies with a never-miss, defense-ignoring flame attack. So, while you had to spend a round casting it, the next turn any Metals that were still around were dead. Nothing like getting 50k+ experience from a random encounter. Unfortunately, the DS remake nerfs the now-named spell Puff (not to be confused with Puff-Puff) so that the metal blobs are immune. This game also introduced the Metal King Slime (formerly King Metal) which was the biggest source of experience in the game (but lost this trait in the remakes to the Platinum King Jewel), but they do not appear until the end tail of the game. Torneko could randomly steal a Liquid Metal Helm from one which meant no longer spending 100,000 tokens on one if you were lucky enough (though the chances were pretty low), and had more HP than other metal monsters so Alena was the best option to fight them.
  • Dragon Quest also has the Goldman/Gold Golem, a stronger version of the regular Golem which gives a lot of experience and wealth upon defeat.
  • Dragon Quest Monsters:
    • Most Metalys encountered in the first game have an attack which deals heavy defense-piercing damage to a random Mon on the field. Including the Metaly using said attack. Suddenly they're not so hard to kill.
    • Two breed together got you a Metabble (Liquid Metal Slime), and breeding two of those got you a Metal King, breeding two of those got you a Gold Slime. Now, doing this breeding the normal way meant your Gold Slime has all of 1 hit point (parents stats averaged, starting with a maximum of 8 HP), but there was another way to get a Metal King (breeding MetalDrak—a mechanical dragon—and King Slime) which could result in a 400 hit point monstrosity that could never take more than 1 damage. And then you feed it the +max HP food items. Being a 14th (or higher) generation Mon it tended to learn every special move in the game, of which you got your pick of 8.
  • In Dragon Quest VI, there is a hidden job class that allows the player to take on the characteristics of a Metal Slime, i.e low HP, high spell resistance, etc. Absurdly enough, it's even possible to teach your tamed Metal Slimes the Metal Slime job class, reducing their already low HP but making their defense so strong that even a critical hit isn't a sure thing to kill them.
  • In Dragon Quest VII, the aforementioned Platinum King Jewel is the strongest monster class. It offers some extremely powerful moves, and causes the job holder's defense to skyrocket massively.
  • Dragon Quest IX introduces the Metal Medley; Three Metal Slimes stacked on top of each other. This particular flavor serves as the step between the Metal Slime and the Liquid Metal Slime. Getting the right treasure map will result in finding endless metal slimes, especially the higher-tier slimes. For a while, there were several people who became local celebrities for being generous enough to share these exceedingly rare maps over the wi-fi connection.
  • Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime has a few metal slimes that you have to save, but you don't fight them. There is, however, a monster called the Goody Bag. It appears in every level, albeit in very specific locations, very rarely. (There is a mid-game level where it is the only monster that appears.) It runs from you when you see it, and Elasto Blasting into it will cause it to drop money. If you can catch it and throw it back to town before it casts Zoom and warps away, do this 30 times, and go see it in front of its statue in the Museum, then you will have a Disc-One Nuke that warps right into the enemy tank, steals the ammo, and walks back to your tank. There are other characters that do this, but this one is the best because not only is it available early, it also has the most HP of these characters and is fast. (Also, if you go to the enemy tank at the very beginning, you can sneak in as the Goody Bag sneaks out with the enemy's ammo and break the machine keeping you out, saving the trouble of bashing the barrier over and over for a few minutes.)
• The Brief and Meaningless Adventure of Hero Man: The Diamond Oozie is a rare enemy that is impervious to all forms of damage and will run away, but it can be tamed with a Marble and sold for money.
• The Great Gaias: Hedron type enemies are rare encounters that tend to flee, but will drop a lot of EXP if slain. They also take only one damage per hit, making it hard to kill them without multihit attacks. However, the Celestium Sword can kill even the strongest Hedron in one blow.
• Shining in the Darkness features the closely related "ooze" family of monsters, the last of which is the oh-so-shiny crystal ooze. Satisfies virtually all of the listed criteria for this trope at the same time; appears only on the final level (and even then, is rather uncommon), inflicts heavy damage and attacks quickly (and can call other monsters for assistance), is prone to flee from battle about 25% of the time, and has only a few HP, but also extremely high defense; high-level magic typically inflicts no more than one point of damage (if any), and physical attacks usually do no damage at all. The game offsets this by providing a number of "instant kill" items which the oozes cannot avoid, but these items themselves are "secret" and difficult to find. The reward for killing a single ooze is a whopping thirty thousand EXP, and they can appear in groups of half-a-dozen or more, resulting in the potential for multiple level-ups for even experienced adventurers; the sheer numbers involved reportedly cause the game to become unstable for players who even encounter the monsters.
• Heracles no Eikou — Ugokidashita Kamigami, the 1993 Game Boy chapter of the Japan-only Glory of Heracles RPG series, has Drain Eyes. In a moment when the best you can get after beating a monster is 40-50 exp, there comes these little tiny walking eyes: they tend to flees and, when they hit you, they take 6 exp OFF of your current level. But if you beat them? There come 250 xp FOR EACH ONE.
• Mega Man Battle Network:
  • The first game has the Rush virus, which has low HP, only takes one damage per hit, and will flee if not defeated in time. It pops out of the ground, and needs to quickly be struck before it submerges again, much like a game of whack-a-mole. If you do beat it, you get PopUp, a useful chip that makes you invincible as long as you aren't attacking, which lasts much longer then the standard form of invincibility from the Invis chip.
  • Battle Network 2 has Serious Rush, the polar opposite of Rush- an angry, magenta Rush with a whopping 800 HP that you have to repeatedly hit with devastating attacks each time it comes up to defeat it. After about ten turns, it uses Escape and you're outta luck. However, if you can whittle its HP down and delete it, you get the completely unexpected Meteor15 chip- a 15-meteor spam attack that does 150 damage per hit- which can actually rip right through Bass's aura.
  • A lot of the tougher viruses, such as the Popper (bagworm) and Megalian (Sphinx heads) have chips that require an ultra-high busting level to obtain, with very beneficial powers or ability to trigger a Program Advance, but because of their evasive nature or defensive abilities, you have to hope for the right chip on the first go-around to take everyone out- and then worry about actually getting the chip and not Zenny. Made worse with BN3's Custom Style, which causes unique chips to appear after battle under special circumstances.
  • Facing off against the ghost data of Navis when they reach V3 or Omega form- they show up completely unannounced, and you have to waste them in 30 seconds or less without flinching from attack to get their chips, requiring use of Fast Gauge and extra chip slots. Then, you have to worry about how well you did against the Navi- you'll either get a slightly improved version of their chip or a super-strong version that can get ever-stronger by beating the Navi again in record time.
• The Omega bosses in the third Mega Man Star Force game are extremely rare and can show up virtually anywhere in the game. They yield high quality illegal data if you can beat them, and defeating a certain number of them is also required to open some doors. While they don't flee from battle, it's rather likely they'll defeat you if you're not ready for them, but you won't be given a game over as with the other bosses in the game. Fortunately, for those hunting them or those not wanting to be surprised by them, the Omega bosses are telegraphed by a Background Music Override that persists through random battles, and de-spawn by leaving the area.
• Final Fantasy
  • Final Fantasy II: Iron Giant. Only appears on the upper floors of Pandaemonium and can run away if you take too long to finish it off. They can drop: Aegis Shield (Blocks Ailments), Genji gear, and Excalibur. The remakes add the Steel Giant for Soul of Rebirth which is a souped up version of Iron Giant.
  • In Final Fantasy IV, the Flan Princesss enemy (PinkPuff in the SNES translation) appears very infrequently in the final dungeon, and is very hard to beat before it runs away. If you succeed, you MIGHT get a Pink Tail, which you can trade for a set of armor so strong it'll make the equipped character practically invincible.
    • Meeting the Flan Princess is a 1 in 64 chance in a dungeon with reasonably strong monsters. It will also only show up in a specific room, making this, from the get-go, a Guide Dang It!. Once you actually meet and manage to kill a Flan Princess, the drop rate of the Pink Tail is, again, 1 in 64, multiplied by the 1 in 20 chance that they will drop anything at all. Admittedly, they attack in groups of five, and each one has a 1 in 1280 chance of dropping the Pink Tail, but the laws of probability work in such a way that the odds of getting a Pink Tail from a fight against the Flan Princesses are around 1 in 256.4, so for every battle in the specific room in which you can encounter Flan Princesses, the chance of getting a Pink Tail is roughly 1 in 16,410. Needless to say, even if you know about it, it's usually much easier to just level grind to the point where your characters are practically invincible anyway.
    • This is made slightly easier in versions where the Siren item (or the Alarm item, depending on the translation) was not Dummied Out, as it can summon a group of Flan Princesses in the single room where they can appear. They still have a very low chance of dropping the Pink Tail, though. In some of the earlier versions of the game, by the time you reach the Flan Princesses room, the Sirens can no longer be bought or stolen from enemies. You have to stock up beforehand.
    • In the original SNES version and some of the early remakes, since each enemy has a 1 in 20 chance of dropping an item and therefore a fight against multiple enemies can result in multiple item drops, it is technically possible to get two or more Pink Tails in the same battle (the odds of this are nearly 1 in 82,000). But not in the DS remake, where the item drop slots for Flan Princesses is exactly 1 — so you will never get more than one Pink Tail from any set of Flan Princesses. Worse, they can possibly drop several items (including the Pink Tail) and if a lower probability drop is given by another Flan Princess, it'll override the rare Pink Tail. So, the only way to get a Pink Tail is to defeat all five Flan Princesses and hope only Pink Tails are dropped (one or more, it makes no difference).
  • Final Fantasy IV: The After Years also introduces a new type of Metal Slime into the series: encountered only in a specific floor of Palom's Bonus Dungeon, Gil Birds are a golden version of the usual bird enemy with high speed, third-highest HP out of any enemy or boss in the chapter, the usual tendency to run away often, and a large variety of attacks, and as can be expected from the name, they drop either 999 or 9999 Gil when defeated depending on the moon phase. They're not particularly deadly though, but hunting for them is worthwhile due to the large amount of items that will become unobtainable if you don't buy them during this chapter. To say nothing of the various "Clubs" that Palom can go to if he has the obscene amount of Gil necessary.
  • In Final Fantasy V, there is a silver squirrel, named "Skull Eater", in the Jachol Caves. Despite having only 1 HP, it has a very high defense, and its attacks can be very damaging if your party is at a low level. Also, if you cast magic on the Skull Eater, five more Skull Eaters will appear. If you defeat it (or it runs away), your party will receive 5 AP. The strategy for killing Skull Eaters is to use the Beastmaster's Control skill, where you can command it to eat its own skull.
    • Once you get the Blue Magic spell 1000 Needles, you can use that instead.
    • The Geomancer's unique skill is also very effective, though slightly luck based.
    • The Excalipoor is a unique weapon that only does 1 damage per attack. However, it always does 1 damage and never misses. This Joke Weapon can actually be very useful against this enemy.
  • The Cactrot/Cactuar from Final Fantasy VI onward. They're generally rare, prone to running away, extremely difficult to hit through conventional means, and will reward tons of EXP, AP, gil, and/or valuable items if defeated. There's also Intangir, they spawn invisible, absorb every single element, and are immune to every status effect in the game save for Stop. If you manage to hit them, they become visible, and hit your entire party with a Meteor spell, doing about 1200 HP worth of damage to the entire party, and then become invisible again. At the time you can first encounter them, this spell will one-shot your entire party unless you have done level grinding. They have 32,000 HP, more than many enemies and even bosses in the World of Ruin. If their HP drops too low, they flee. They also cast Meteor when they die. Your reward for killing this monstrosity is 10 AP, the most AP you can get from any encounter in the game. Thanks to the Vanish-Doom Bug in the original version, these enemies could be farmed all day and night with Gau's Mu Rage without fear of them killing your party since it kills targets and denies them a dying action. However, with the Game Boy Advance port, this bug has been fixed.
  • In Final Fantasy VIII, the Cactaurs inhabit a tiny island you can't access without a plane and wouldn't think of landing on without a guide. They are also incredibly fast and hard to hit and would just as soon run as look at you: fortunately enough, all of Squall's gunblades have maxed out accuracy and thus never miss, as does Selphie's best weapon, and with the Initative passive skill, you can always be more or less guaranteed to kill at least one. For doing so, you get a whopping 20 AP in a game where more than a few bosses give just 5 or 10 AP. This is essential if you're trying to keep your levels low because they only give a tiiiiny amount of EXP.
  • Flowering Cactuars in Final Fantasy XIII fit this trope perfectly: they're only encountered in a relatively out-of-the-way location, (one only accessible during a certain sidequest, and even then, you have to take a specific path) flee from battle at the first opportunity and give 15000 CP when killed. (And bearing in mind they always come in groups of 3 or more, that's a pretty big deal.) However, if they don't flee, they'll bombard you with devastating "-Ga" magic, quite capable of a Total Party Kill. What makes them unique among other examples of this trope is that they're actually very easy to kill (they have one of the lowest stagger thresholds in the game), it's just that it needs to be done VERY quickly: in literally 5 seconds either they'll have fled, or you'll be dead.
    • Cactuars aren't the only ones: 5, 6, 7, and 9 at least feature movers—tiny, fast, absurdly evasive, and prone to escape at the drop of a hat, but if you can kill them they're worth the AP; then of course there are magic urns, with a trick.
  • Some games also have treasure chests appear in battle. Not strictly Metal Slimes, but they certainly are rarer than most enemies.
  • Dissidia Final Fantasy and Dissidia 012: There are "Strange Battle Pieces", which are golden and gnarled. These particular pieces tend to have incredibly low HP, but incredibly high Bravery (which means that they can hit hard if they land an HP attack and are difficult to break) or summonstones that affect your bravery, and tend to be somewhat evasive. However, beating them yields significant amounts of experience.
• Minecraft Dungeons: The Piggy Bank is a pig that carries around a chest on its back. They rarely appear in levels and run away when they see players, but always drop emeralds and equipment on death.
• Monster Hunter: Stories has the Barrel Felyne. They appear rarely, have high defense paired with low HP, and only have two moves: Wait 'n' See and Flee. If you can beat them before they escape, though, you'll free them from the barrel and get rewarded with a massive amount of experience and a rare Pawprint Stamp.
• Odin Sphere: Fittingly enough, a normal slime miniboss in the remake is probably one of the more convenient ways to amass a large amount of Phozons for the purpose of leveling up your skills: since it's an Asteroids Monster that creates smaller slimes as you keep hitting it and each of those smaller slimes releases Phozons when killed, you'll gain around 150-200 Phozons on average every time you fight it. It's also one of the best places to use Gold potions that increase coin drop rate from killed enemies, including the rare Valentinian coins if the potion has high enough of a rank. Unfortunately Gwendolyn can't fight it and has to use other methods to get enough Phozons to level up her skills.
• Pokémon: The series has a few Metal Slimes:
  • The Abra species are commonly encountered and have fairly high catch rates (comparable to Com Mons, in fact), but their sole combat skill is to Teleport out, ending the battle on turn one. Unless you can put it to Sleep before this or use a skill or ability to block its escape attempts (Mean Look, Arena Trap, etc.), you can only attempt to catch it at full health before it runs off. Abra also comes with a lesser extent of Magikarp Power, learning no actual attacks without the aid of a TM (Teleport being their only naturally learned move) until it evolves into Kadabra at Level 16.
  • All Pokémon encountered in the Safari Zone can flee from battle at any time, and your only options besides attempting to snag them at full health are to throw bait (making them stick around, but more difficult to catch) or rocks/mud (making them easier to catch, but more likely to flee). This goes double for ones like Chansey, which are rare encounters even in the Safari Zone, and have a low base catch rate — just like the Pokédex entry says, catching one successfully is a Luck-Based Mission. At least some of them can be caught in non-Safari areas, where you can wear them down and capture them normally. The first generation's Missingno. glitch could also be exploited to encounter Safari Pokémon in normal battles.
    • Although probably unintentional on the developers' part, the Gen 1 Pokémon generally regarded to be the most powerful (except for Mewtwo and Mew), Tauros, is exclusive to the Safari Zone.
    • On the note of Chansey, wild ones have a chance of holding the extremely useful Lucky Egg item which grants bonus EXP to anyone who holds it. That, however, is the only way to obtain it in Generation III, and if the standard rules of the Safari Zone aren't bad enough already, the chance of finding a Chansey in the Safari Zone is 1% at worst and 4% at best, depending on the area of the Safari Zone that you search in, and on top of that, they only have a 5% chance of holding the Lucky Egg. Chansey meets all the requirements!
  • Starting in Generation II, some legendary Pokémon roam the region, and when encountered, they immediately flee from battle. However, their HP doesn't regenerate between battles, so catching one involves wearing them down through repeated encounters.
    • When hunting for Entei, Raikou, or Suicune, even if you do use Mean Look to prevent them from escaping, they can just blow you out of battle with their Roar. In FireRed and LeafGreen, that's not just annoying, it's dangerous; if the Beast you encounter uses Roar, it counts as you having left the battle, not the Pokémon that used it, meaning that it's gone for good. You don't have to worry about that if you chose Charmander, since Suicune doesn't know Roar, but no such luck if you chose Squirtle or Bulbasaur.
  • Shiny Pokémon of any species that learns moves like Roar, Whirlwind, or Explosion. Because, yes, they will invariably use the battle-ending move. Especially frustrating are shiny Pokémon encountered in the Safari Zone, as they combine two forms of rarity at the same time.
  • Beldum in Generation IV. It can only be found as a swarm Pokémon, meaning it can only be encountered for one day at a time after beating the game and it can potentially take weeks before a Beldum swarm shows up. Beldum has a catch rate on par with most legendaries, which means an extremely low likelihood of catching it even if it's at 1 HP and asleep/paralyzed. It also only appears in a route with a perpetual sandstorm that whittles down your Pokémon's HP unless it's a Steel, Rock, or Ground-type. If that's not all, Beldum's only move learned naturally is Take Down, which damages the user every time it's used. You can block Take Down with a Ghost-type, but there are no Ghost-types immune to sandstorm damage in those games, meaning you have to waste a turn healing every now and then. And if you don't catch it before it runs out of uses for Take Down, it can damage itself with Struggle, which not even Ghosts are immune to. In the end, though, it's all worth it — Beldum eventually evolves into the pseudo-Legendary Metagross.
• Crowned Monsters in Romancing SaGa (only appears after long rounds of trading with a specific class of monster).
• Loopers from Skies of Arcadia. They actually mildly subvert this in that you'll encounter them anywhere in numbers of about one or two per battle, but the location where you encounter nothing but them (usually in groups of five to seven) is near-inaccessible. Also, they have a good chance of dropping Moonberries and will occasionally drop an item that, when equipped, permanently stops enemies from being able to run away from you ever again. The obvious problem is that you have to beat some of these guys first before you can get a hold of that. Magic of the appropriate element, Rain of Swords, Cutlass Fury and the Skull Shield's counterattack are all options. There are 2 other versions; The Giant Looper and Elcian.
• Breath of Fire III
  • The Gold Eggs— you can steal Diamond Rings from them, increasing your defense against Death Attacks.
  • The Goo King has a very small chance of being encountered in one specific area of the final dungeon, always run away (unless you steal the apple they're carrying, and if you do they start casting Ragnarok every round), and drop the Goo King Sword.
• All Shin Megami Tensei games had a group of monsters known now as Fiends. Exceedingly rare, exceedingly powerful, they could show up at any time in certain dungeons and wipe out a party. Subverted Guide Dang It! because, despite the hidden nature, they were purposely left out of guides for the longest time, to fuel the mystery. (Ironically, they throw themselves at you in Nocturne.) In Shin Megami Tensei I, three appear, each with a slim chance of dropping the most powerful weaponry for each path. In Shin Megami Tensei IV, there are seven outside of Challenge Quests, all drop massive rewards, and are ungodly strong. Moreover, if their favorite attacks are reflected, voided or absorbed, they will stop playing nice and just break out Antichthon to blast you and your team into oblivion.
  • Three DLC missions in Shin Megami Tensei IV turn the Mitamas into metal slimes. They take little damage from most attacks, completely null demons' Almighty attacks (Flynn's can hurt them, but still require multiple Whisper powerups to be even remotely useful), and are quick to run from battle. Defeating Saki and Kusi Mitamas grants grimoires, defeating Ara Mitamas grants valuable Shop Fodder, and defeating Nigi Mitamas grants App Cards. Much more rarely, in all DLC missions, groups of all four Mitamas will appear.
  • Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse once again turns Mitamas into metal slimes in DLC maps, though their weaknesses and drops have changed. Ara Mitamas take more damage from elemental attacks (except fire) and drop grimoires, Saki Mitamas take more damage from Almighty attacks and drop valuable Shop Fodder, Kusi Mitamas take more damage from physical attacks and drop stat-boosting incense, and Nigi Mitamas take more damage from Light and Dark attacks and drop App Cards.
  • Shin Megami Tensei V once again has Mitamas serve as metal slimes. They rarely appear on the map unless you have the DLC that boosts their encounter rate, and they have a tendency to flee as their first combat action. They do not have a lot of health, but each individual Mitama has one random weakness while nulling every other attack type. Depending on the Mitama type, defeating one will net you items to be sold for a pretty price, items that help level you and your demons up, or gems that give you Glory to spend on Miracles.
  • The Kudan in Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army. It not only runs away, but it randomly switches what types of attacks it is weak and immune against, making the act of defeating it very frustrating. It also ABSORBS gun attacks (i.e. Raidou's revolver) and can fully heal itself with the best single-target healing spell available in the game)...and Raidou has to be Level 66 to be able to fuse and summon him.
  • Persona:
    • In the first Persona, there's an incredibly small chance you'll run into series staple Alice in dungeons. She lacks real offensive capabilities, but has the best stats of most enemies and bosses... she'll usually run away instead of using any magic. If you manage to defeat her, she'll drop a Pagan Idol, which is used to fuse Beelzebub.
    • Gold-plated enemies such as the "Wealth Hand" and "Treasure Hand" pop up at certain intervals in Persona 3. They always get first strike, run away at the drop of a hat, are immune to all magic and have impossibly high dodge abilities and defense. The only way to kill them is to use a physical attack they're weak against — they switch weaknesses every round and analyze never works on them. You'd also need to sneak up on them; otherwise, they will flee or vanish.
    • In FES, they also did away with their immunities, which makes hunting them marginally less irritating. They're horribly annoying to hunt, though, because of their tendency to run away at the slightest provocation. After failing to track down and murder these critters, the one you finally manage to kill drops a Treasure Coin. There will also be floors of nothing but these, with the Reaper being quick to appear in this case. They'll also drop empty weapons to use in forging.
    • They return in Persona 4, where the rules have changed a bit. Now they're only vulnerable to physical attacks (but they have ludicrously high Endurance and Agility), Almighty attacks, and one element per dungeon (which they resist, but will not block). They're also fond of causing status effects, casting Sukukaja on themselves to make them even harder to hit, and landing critical hits followed by running away. All-Out Attacks will still steamroll them if you can get them to launch, and on lower-level dungeons, Smart Bombs (items that deal Almighty damage) will annihilate them. Unlike in 3, they drop no items, but always cough up ridiculous amounts of experience and money. Also unlike 3, if you chase one, there's a good chance it will trip, allowing you to immediately catch it.
    • They're a little better in Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth, where if you manage to bind their Agility with a spell like Scarecrow they'll be unable to flee or dodge attacks.
    • Possibly due going back to using demons as enemies like the older games, Persona 5 instead has the rare Treasure Demons, which like the Golden Hands from previous games drop tons of experience and money, but are extremely resistant to damage in all except one element, and flee from battle if the player takes too long to beat them (generally on their third turn). Their weaknesses are a bit difficult to exploit, often relying on the player's own spread of skills, and later on they lack weaknesses entirely, forcing the player to use a Critical Hit to knock them down for negotiation (or using rare Almighty spells to bypass their defenses). If you do successfully down them, you can recruit Treasure Demons with no hassle, and they're added to your compendium. Although they can't be used in battle, they have a plethora of useful skills making them great fusion fodder (on top of causing rank-up/rank-down fusions), and also give a great experience bonus if used in a sacrifice fusion. You'll also only find a handful in any dungeon, as they're randomly hidden in various receptacles throughout a given dungeon, though a creatable tool, Treasure Trap, can increase their spawn chances. In addition, they can be turned into surprisingly good accessories.
  • 5's Updated Re-release, Royal, changed the Treasure Demons up. While they are resistant to Physical and Gun skills (minus one which is weak to Gun), they have lost their other resistances and now each have a single weakness to exploit. Said weaknesses have also changed from how vanilla Persona 5 had them.
    • Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth has golden enemies, which are usually weak against the opposite of the element in their name- for example, a Firebane Lexy is weak against Ice. They don't have much HP, but take one or two damage from most attacks apart from their weakness. However, if you down all the enemies, they probably won't survive the All-Out Attack. That said, they do flee if they aren't defeated after a few turns. There are also large golden enemies that resist all attacks but give money each time they're damaged, and after taking enough damage, lose the resistance shield and have their weaknesses exposed.
  • The Digital Devil Saga games on PlayStation 2 both have highly annoying Metal Slimes in the form of Omoikane. In the first game, it has sickeningly high HP and immediately will either run away or cast Debilitate. They are highly resistant to everything except Gun. They drop loads of money, but if successfully frightened, they are incredible sources of Atma. The catch is you can only use guns in human form, wasting turns by leaving demon form more often than not, giving them the chance to escape. The second has them showing up in groups of five, each one weak to a single magic element which the others are immune to, and will self-destruct for huge rewards if you hit the weakness; unfortunately, since they still have positively nauseating HP, and they just call you a cheater and flee if you take the obvious route of using multi-target spells, your only option is trial and error — which you only get two shots at unless one is the right guess, thanks to the game's Press Turn System. Both of these are made much less egregious by having a chance of showing up everywhere, even in the interior of the Black Sun.
• This trope is parodied in Mother 3, the sequel to EarthBound (1994). At one point, you have the chance to fight the rare Mystery Metal Monkey. It's got stupid high defense in order to compensate for its low HP, but instead of giving the player a lot of experience upon its defeat, the game instead tells the player that "It was a good experience."
  • There are regular Metal Slimes in Mother 3 as well. Chapter 1 has the Soot Dumpling, an enemy with very high defense that can only be beaten with two 16-hit combo.^note This challenge can be alleviated with the use of an ancient banana or bomb, if you're lucky enough to find them at Thomas's bazaar. If you don't kill it quickly enough, it blows away in the wind. Later on, you'll find the Black Beanling, which has powerful PK Fire attacks and can run away to boot. Beating it gives you a whopping 16,000 experience points. There's also the Top Dogfish, which gives 800 DP and always drops Meteotite which can be sold for 2500 DP, effectively making it the richest enemy in the game. It's very rare like the others, but it's very tough and hits hard, so it blurs the line between this and Boss in Mook Clothing.
  • The Bright Smile, a rare enemy which drops 2,000 DP, can only be found in the tunnels of the Highway area. Many hairs have been pulled out by gamers spending dozens of minutes trying to find the Bright Smile, only to accidentally hit it with their Pork Bean.
  • Also, in EarthBound (1994) itself you can wander through either of the two deserts present in the game and beat the Criminal Caterpillar or the Master Criminal Worm (two randomly encountered enemies) in order to get A LOT of experience points. Even though they can easily defeat your party if they get to fight, most of the time you'll end up catching them from behind, getting an automatic victory.
  • Earthbound Beginnings has the Red Snake, which usually runs away the first chance it gets.
  • The Starmen Super in Earthbound appear only in one location, have the ability to teleport, are stronger than usual enemies and are indistinguishable from normal Starmen without entering the battle. To make matters worse, they're the only chance for Poo to get a weapon and they drop it extremely rarely... and they're impossible to encounter after defeating the area boss.
• Chrono Trigger has a few of these. The one thing they have in common is 1) very high evade, 2) they start the fight by casting "Omnilock" ("Lock All" in the SNES) which prevents you from doing anything besides attacking, and 3) if you don't defeat them quickly they run away.
  • Rubbles appear on the Mountain of Woe. They don't fight back at all, and are worth 1000 EXP (above average for that part of the game) and 100 Tech Points (awesome, and worth Save Scumming to make sure you get them).
  • Turrets appear on the Blackbird. Unlike Rubbles, they do fight back. And they seem to be even harder to hit and tougher to kill. They're worth 1500 EXP and 200 Tech Points, but so difficult to kill you might only beat one or two of them before reaching the boss.
  • Nomads (Sidekicks in the SNES) on the Black Omen. Each battle consists of a Watcher (Boss Orb in the SNES) and two Nomads. The Watcher doesn't have high evade, and it uses a fire elemental attack that hits the entire party, and so the problem is if you kill the Watcher first you won't have time to kill the Nomads before they run, but if you focus on the Nomads the Watcher can do enough damage to kill the party. Luckily, armor that resists or even absorbs fire elemental attacks is plentiful by that point in the game.
  • The expanded DS version adds another. Instead of using Lock All/Omnilock, it fights back instead, but it still runs on a whim and pisses you off royally. It also appears totally randomly, instead of being a set spawn that never comes back. They're also the only things that can drop a certain material for having an item crafted.
• The Legend of Dragoon has a whole series of these monsters. Each of them has only 4-6 HP, and defeating them will earn you a large amount of gold, XP, or even rare equipment. The catch? These monsters all have insanely high speed (ensuring multiple turns in a row, often before you can even react), high evasion to make sure that your attacks don't hit, and they never take more than 1 point of damage... all on top of running away at the drop of a hat. To make matters worse, some of them can only be damaged by either magical or physical damage, some can only be harmed by poison or making them hit themselves with the confusion status, and the 00PARTS monster from Disc 1 has an attack that can instantly kill a character (sometimes two, thanks to its high speed). While there are ways to make them easier to kill, most of them still rely on being lucky enough to actually hit them enough before they run away, and the Sachet item that can instantly kill them is only available in a very limited supply if you don't want to spend hours grinding for their 1% drop rate.
• Cores in the Lufia series. While their defense is certainly above average, a character with a solid attack stat can manage a fair amount of damage to them.
  • Mimics serve as lower-tier Metal Slimes in the first game. Their "Thor" attack is quite dangerous early on, but later Mimickers and low-tier Cores use the same attack, which will likely deal Scratch Damage to the party.
  • The second game has cores, and separate from them, it also manages to mix this trope with the Puzzle Boss trope for one of the optional bosses. The Master Jelly, the final opponent in the grueling marathon that is the Ancient Cave, guards the reward for completing this optional dungeon. You may have expected a long and drawn-out battle, but while it has a very high amount of HP, it is also guaranteed to run after three turns...and it doesn't even damage you. Instead, you have to plan your strategy very carefully in order to deplete its HP that very short timeframe.
  • Cores in Lufia: The Ruins of Lore tend to flee your party in dungeons...which leaves them wide-open to being ambushed, and Fixed Damage Attacks or magic will dispatch them very easily. The exception is the Anti-Core, which you'll typically ambush...and then watch escape before you even get the chance to act. By using another monster with a confuse ability, it is possible to capture one, gaining a valuable ally (especially if you boost its dismal attack with power sources).
  • Cores in Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals are quite simple to kill—they'll try to escape, but only after you first hit them. The main challenge of a Core is doing enough Overkill damage to milk as much EXP out of them as you can.
• Many of the later Wild ARMs games offer the creature Grow Apple. Grow Apples have 1 Hp, don't have any attack, and run from battle as soon as possible. However, if you kill them, you gain experience points equal to the overkill damage. If you hit it with a 1,000 point blast, you gain 999 experience (-1 for its 1Hp). The creature Mega Apple (not to be confused with the game's curative item Mega Apple) is similar, but much harder to hit and offers 10x the overkill damage.
  • For the gamer looking for money, the games also provide Melchom. Elemental magic heals the creature, and in doing so, increases the money it drops by that amount x3. And unlike the aforementioned Apples, it isn't nearly as fond of running away. Or, if you want to make money much easier, just steal from Rat Monkey. The loot you pilfer off of him can be sold for 999,999 gella. However, a character who can steal is only available late-game, so the Melchom method is usually used before then.
  • There's also the Creeping Chaos enemies; while they're generally very difficult to defeat and don't run away, they appear very randomly and generally drop a ton of experience and/or Duplicators.
• Kingdom Hearts: Most commonly mycological beings.
  • The White Mushrooms, Black Fungi and Rare Truffles from Kingdom Hearts game. All three appear only at a few set locations... maybe. All three have a chance of dropping extremely rare items if you defeat them in exactly the right way. That's it for the White Mushrooms and Rare Truffles, which are completely harmless. The Black Fungi, on the other hand...
    • White Mushrooms aren't too bad. Just cast a spell on it that matches whatever signal it gives (e.g. if it's shivering, shoot a fireball at it); do this three times, and it might drop something good. It gets trickier if you want the Arts, all of which you have to collect (Fire Arts, Blizzard Arts, etc.) to get Goofy's Dream Shield from Merlin; you have to hit it all three times with the associated spell. It can take a while for it to give the necessary signal three times, and it disappears if you use the wrong spell. Also, all of the White Mushrooms in an area will disappear after a set amount of time.
    • Rare Truffles desire to stay in the air as long as they can, and once you get one airborne, it will disappear if it touches the ground even once. In theory, you can accomplish this by whacking it with your Keyblade and whacking it again before it can drop. In practice, this is incredibly difficult, not least because it often goes off-camera whilst in the air, so your best bet is to use a wind spell and get it in a corner so it comes down in the same spot every time. And don't forget to recast your spell periodically. And hope Donald and Goofy don't foul you up. If you manage to bop it a hundred times, you get 5,050 experience, which is quite a bit, and a good chance of getting a Mystery Goo, maybe more than one.
    • The Black Fungus gushes poison at you and periodically turns completely invulnerable. It's closer to being a regular enemy, though, because it doesn't disappear and isn't a major threat. It drops the Mystery Mold, which can be sold for 9,999 munny.
  • Kingdom Hearts I Final Mix, a Re-Cut of Kingdom Hearts I released for PlayStation 3 (and many years earlier in Japan), adds not one, not two, but ten more of these, one for each world except for Olympus Coliseum (and the Hundred Acre Wood), each with its own trick. A common theme with all of them is the usefulness of the Aeroga and Stop spells.
    • Traverse Town features the Sniperwild, holder of the Power Stone item, which will try to call for help as soon as it sees Sora; if it succeeds, a whole swarm of them will begin endlessly spawning with no way to defeat them, requiring the player to exit the area or get a guaranteed game over. Additionally, if you do defeat one before it calls for help, two more spawn, and then three more after that if those two are defeated before calling for help. Then the pattern repeats four times. Did I mention that the only one that drops the rare item is the very last one in each set of six?
    • Wonderland features the Gigas Shadows, holders of the Fury Stone item. Not hard enemies, really; just giant versions of Shadows, minus the ability to flatten themselves against the ground for temporary invulnerability. But it's a real pain to get their rare items; if one lands just one hit on Sora, it vanishes. They're a joke if you use Dumbo, but otherwise it's rather difficult.
    • Deep Jungle features the Black Ballade, holder of the Thunder Stone item. This one requires you to have good sight; when you approach it, it clones itself into five, the real one moves, and then the five of them shuffle and line up in a row. Strike the real one, and its health goes down and it drops some Munny. Strike a clone, and you get zapped. Also, you only get a handful of tries to strike it before it vanishes.
    • Agrabah features the Pot Scorpion, holder of the Mythril Stone item. This one is interesting to start with: when you enter the arena, you find twelve pots neatly lined up in a 4x3 rectangle. You can push eleven of them; the one that you cannot hides the Heartless. For each pot that is not the Pot Scorpion that you hit, you get experience points and Munny, AND increase the likelihood of the Pot Scorpion dropping its rare item. Heck, sometimes the eleventh pot will yield a Mythril Stone on its own. Once you strike the pot that hides the Heartless, however, all remaining pots vanish, and it begins to attack. The difficulty here is landing a hit; the only way to make it vulnerable is to parry its attack when it charges; the Aeroga spell will automatically parry it, but if you don't have that, then you need good timing. Once it's on its back, you can attack it…but it gets back up rather quickly. And did I mention that it attacks with globs of poison, which linger as harmful puddles in the area?
    • Monstro features the Grand Ghost, holder of the Frost Stone item. Not the strongest Heartless, but it's completely immune to attacks and magic. How do you defeat it? You use restoration items on it. Yeah, you have to get close to the ghost, and then target it with a Potion, Ether, Elixer, or other such thing. The better the items used on it, the more likely it is that it will drop its rare item; for instance, a Megalixer will always make it drop at least two.
    • Atlantica features the Pink Agaricus, holder of the Serenity Power and Prime Cap items, the least harmful but perhaps most annoying of the ten. Entering the area, you'll find three White Mushrooms upon which you need to cast Stop. Once you've done that, the Agaricus will appear and begin to dance. What you need to do is cast Stop on it, and then pummel the heck out of it. The catch? You must hit it no less than 40 times before Stop wears off for it to have a chance of dropping its rare item, and 100 times to drop its other rare item. Stop's duration in seconds is equal to Sora's maximum MP +2, so that's not a lot of time, at all, especially considering that after Stop wears off and the hits are registered, it vanishes; you only get one shot. And as the final piece of difficulty, every hit that Donald or Goofy lands on it will decrease the total number of registered hits. On a side note, the Pink Agaricus also appears in Deep Jungle.
    • Halloween Town features the Chimera, holder of the Blaze Stone item. First you have to deplete its health bar to nothing, and then its three heads come off. You have to strike them back at the body; the more successful hits to the heads, the more likely it is that it will drop its rare item. Like with the Pot Scorpion, the Aeroga spell will likely make things easier. After a short while, its first health bar will regenerate, and you'll need to repeat the process. Also, it can call a couple of Gargoyles to help it if its HP gets low.
    • Neverland features the Jet Balloon, holder of the Dazzling Stone item. It resembles the Aquatank from Atlantica, except that it can fly. Very fast. And it steals your Munny if it hits you. And it can launch Missile Divers at you (essentially identical to Screwdivers, except they vanish after being launched). It's hard to land a single hit on this thing without using Stop, which it has particular resistance to.
    • Hollow Bastion features the Stealth Soldier, holder of the Energy Stone item. It's similar to the Soldier Heartless, but it's stronger and faster. And it only appears with other Heartless, and is likely to vanish if it becomes alone. Oh, yes, and it's typically invisible. Stop is very useful with this one, too.
    • End of the World features Neoshadows, holder of the Stormy Stone item. These may be the most intelligent Heartless in the game besides the Big Bad, and are consequently rather difficult; seven of them appear at once, and they attack Sora as a team. First, they attack with basic melee tactics, then sink into the ground. When three are killed, they start using shadowy portals to attack Sora, who has a small window to hit them between their attacks…and they become immune to Stop at this point. When two more are killed, one starts using combined strategies of the previous two stages of the fight, while the other one will appear beneath Sora to temporarily immobilize him, leaving him vulnerable; timing jumping well will avoid this. When there's only one left, it will attempt to spawn six more Neoshadows out of shadowy portals. If Sora doesn't destroy the emerging Neoshadows quickly, then they will emerge at full health, and the fight will reset to a stage appropriate for the number of Neoshadows.
  • Kingdom Hearts II features Bulky Vendors: a variant of Metal Slime. While they appear randomly, run away, and can't be killed by conventional means, they are killed extremely easy with Reaction Commands. Rather than giving large amounts of experience, they drop rare items. The rarity of the item is directly related to its health, which is constantly depleting as soon as it spawns. But there's a catch: it's relatively slow when it first spawns, but as its health goes down, its speed goes up, and this thing almost literally bounces all over the place. So you're better off looking for Orichalcum than actively trying to get one from a Bulky Vendor. Regardless, when you smack them with a Reaction Command they drop a crap ton of materials used for synthesis with their rarity depending on how much health they had when you used a Reaction Command. Also, good luck trying to hit one with the Reaction Command when it's got a sliver of health left; when they've got next to no health left, they are probably the fastest enemy in the game.
  • Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix+, another Re-Cut that was released in Japan years ago, but only recently for the PS3, adds not one, not two, not ten, but TWELVE more of these in the form of the Mushroom XIII. Once you've beaten the game, there are three challenges you can go for that are miles above everything else in the game in difficulty, and while defeating the Mushroom XIII is the easiest of the three, it's still a ridiculous pain that requires having mastered use of all of the drive forms in the game. Your prize? A special Keyblade and a little crown for your head (or an upgrade of the crown you already have for beating the other ridiculous challenges).
  • Bulky Vendors return in 358/2 Days, only without the reaction commands. This time, they have to be defeated quickly before they escape— which is much harder.
  • Re: coded has Gold Tricholomas, a gold variant of the other mushroom Heartless that only appears in System Sectors. They love to teleport away from you when you're trying to attack, can spew a poison cloud that can blind you on top of doing damage, and they'll flee the battle if you can't kill them quickly enough, but they drop tons of SP, which you can redeem for goodies like stat upgrades and equipment.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Super Mario RPG has Shy Guys in camo called Shy Rangers, which appear in one area of the game. Unless you have enough speed from armor and accessories, they'll escape before you can even act, and will still escape the moment their turn comes up (unless they're poisoned, which makes them fight to the death for some reason). They don't even drop anything or give enough EXP to make it worth going through the trouble— unless you throw a Yoshi Cookie to make Yoshi consume them; then you get a KeroKeroCola, the most powerful healing item in the game. If you can defeat them early on in the game, the experience points gained make it worth it, but after several levels, fighting Shy Rangers is a waste of time.
  • Paper Mario 64 and its sequel Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door have Amazy Dayzees, gold Palette Swapped versions of the more normal Crazee Dayzees. They have ridiculously high HP, the most damaging single attack of any Mook (20 points in a game where your max HP is unlikely to exceed 50 by endgame), high defense, they tend to run away, and to top it all off, they put you to sleep. Luckily, in the second game, a skilled player can defeat them in one hit by effectively utilizing the Art Attack move—and they drop gobs of experience points; this is especially helpful in the later levels of the Bonus Dungeon, which is full of them. And you heal on leveling up! On the other hand, in the second game, it is quite possible to run into Amazy Dayzees at a point in the game where Mario's partners have briefly abandoned him. Thanks, Nintendo!
  • In the first Paper Mario game, equipping the Dizzy Badge (a badge that causes Dizziness if you press the Dash button and collide with an enemy while dashing) and using it on Amazy Dayzee will make it dizzy, giving you a free turn— it can't run and it can't attack. This makes them easy to the point where the only real challenge is finding more to milk for all the experience they're worth.
  • Amazy Dayzees also show up in Super Paper Mario. Due to the mechanics of the game, they work differently, but they still fulfill the role; they have a powerful attack that puts you to sleep, but more often they'll turn tail and run at stupidly fast speeds as soon as they spot you, then flip between dimensions, forcing the player to flip as well if they want to pursue them. They give a lot of points, and drop Golden Leaves, which can be turned into Gold Bars, which can be sold for 100 coins, in a game where 999 coins is the maximum you can carry. They can also be turned into cards and sold for a 200 coin profit.
  • The origami Mechakoopas in Paper Mario: The Origami King take this role: they cannot spawn in the overworld, appearing randomly in battles instead, and will flee if not defeated quickly enough. However, if beaten, they drop a rather hefty amount of coins.
  • In Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, the Gold Beanies only appear in one early area of the game and actually appear to be an entirely different enemy at first. They appear rarely after defeating a certain enemy covered in spikes, then run away almost immediately after their guise is destroyed. They also drop a badge that, while seeming fairly useless at first, makes a later area of the game much easier. This enemy can also be encountered in the ocean, but they cannot be defeated; they just float away as soon as their spikes are removed.
  • Gold Koopeleons in Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time fit this trope to a tee. They are so fast that you are unlikely to get a turn before they do without either massive level grinding or the Para Slacks, and their first action is to run away 90% of the time. Their defense is so high that most attacks do between 1 and 2 damage. However, their HP is only 10, and they give 100 coins when killed, which is more than any other enemy in the game.
  • Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story has the Trashures and Dark Trashures as minor versions of this trope. They have a habit of running away, but if you can damage them enough to get them to low health, they open up, and Bowser can use his inhale move to suck decent amounts of coins from them. They also drop good equipment, the former dropping something that can help with money grinding, and the latter dropping an SP-regenerating band for Bowser. There's also the two Lakitu enemies, Lakitu Kings and Glam Lakitus. They don't appear on the field, only randomly showing up in battles with other enemies as Bowser. Bowser needs to inhale them so the Bros. can fight them, and if they can't kill them in time, they'll fly away. However, they toss large amounts of coins when they attack, and they have a chance to drop some nice Shop Fodder or special boots that give money when jumping on an enemy.
  • Gold Beanies return in Mario & Luigi: Dream Team. This time they have a ton of health (more than some bosses), may run away unless perfectly countered, have damaging attacks that are sometimes hard to dodge and give you an absolute ton of experience points and a rare stat boosting bean upon being defeated. They appear at random in the different dream worlds. However, they are much more forgiving than most metal slimes, since you can save anywhere and they'll still be there when you reload; if you like you can even keep reloading until you get the Bean you want.
• The World Ends with You's Pig Noise. The pigs have high defense, and run after about ten seconds. Later variants can be invisible, invulnerable to all but one specific pin, or need to be erased in a specific order. The pins they drop can range from high-value yen pins to pins you literally cannot acquire in any other way. At least they're easy to find. One of them even requires you to put your DS into sleep mode. This is considered the hardest one by many. Also, there's a Bonus Dungeon filled with them, Pork City.
• In Golden Sun: The Lost Age:
  • Phoenix-type enemies fall into this trope. They're not too difficult to kill, but they're fast, have very powerful fire magic, and tend to run away. They also give many times as much experience points as other enemies in the area, and some will rarely drop Dark Matter. Oh and they move two to three times per turn depending on the species so three chances for it to run. On the plus side, finding two of them at once lets you get experience point totals in the five- to six-digit range if you let them keep resurrecting each other.
  • The Djinn; About half of them join without a fight. The other half either require you completing a puzzle or finding them in random encounters on certain areas of the world map. Each of these creatures is the embodiment of one of the four elements, meaning they have some of the strongest abilities of that element (fire blasts for the fire ones, extreme healing for the waters, etc.) and, of course, can also run, requiring you to do the puzzle again or keep searching the map. However, defeating them is definitely worth it, as you keep them permanently, they give you stat boosts when activated, allow you to use a unique attack, and can combine with others to unleash powerful summons. You need all of them anyway if you plan to access the Bonus Dungeon, fight the Superboss and receive the Bragging Rights Reward.
• River City Ransom EX has the Entrees gang, who are all named after food items, and come rushing into battle with weird, unique weapons (ladders and mops). They give out about five times more money than the game's most powerful gang, the Plague, but are also the quickest to run away.
• Wizardry:
  • Murphy's Ghost is a recurrent monster in the series and could easily be the inspiration of the Trope Namer given how much Dragon Quest takes after Wizardry. Murphy's Ghost possesses high defense and hit points but little in the way of offensive prowess and gives way more experience points than anything encountered up to that point. Unlike most examples on this page, he's a fixed encounter (Usually, he appears when investigating a gem-encrusted statue of a hooded man) and can be fought as many times as wished.
  • Present in Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land. Called silver slimes they are hard to hit, quick to run, and give lots of experience. They are also pretty strong able to deal high double digit damage at a point where frontline fighters might not have reached two hundred health yet.
  • Ghosts and spirits in Wizardry VII toe the line between this and more conventional Demonic Spiders, being very resistant to damage of all kinds, wielding the most devastating Status Effects, vanishing at the drop of a hat, and late in the game, dropping Gorror Keys, necessary for challenging the Superbosses... and thus getting the best loot in the game.
• Lost Odyssey:
  • The Silver Kelolons. Give out huge amounts of XP & some fairly rare pieces for the game's Item Crafting system, but nearly always run away & have tremendous defense. Fortunately there's a trick involving the defense-ignoring spell Gamble & the Casting Support skill that allows you to waste the little fuckers just about every single time. Coupled with the fact that there's an area where the only enemies that appear are Silver Kelolons & one other type of monster and you get a relatively painless way to level your party up to obscene heights in fairly short order.
  • The Diamond Kelolons in the DLC only Experimental Staff Remains. They don't run away 100% of the time, as they may choose to cast Death with a 3-turn charge-up first. However, that 3 turns window isn't much when they're immune to all magic and items, and complement their expected high evasion rate with a high chance to counter physical attacks, negating the damage. You can increase your chances with the Counter Seal skill, which allows a character to strike an enemy once without activating its counterattack but it remains a Luck-Based Mission trying to kill one. They're a guaranteed level up until about the mid 90's, and give the most SP in the game.
• The Lucky Minks from the last 3 Grandia games. Each one has an average of 15 HP, insanely high defense and evasion and a tendency to run from the drop of a hat. Grandia Xtreme had the coercion skill which prevented them from running, but killing them is still a challenge. Your reward? INSANE exp. There's one time where, near the end of the game, they refuse to run, and instead fight back, and continuously call for reinforcements (they call up at least 10 of them), and it turns out they can hit for pretty decent damage, and with their high attack speed, this makes them adorable little nightmares. Suddenly, the EXP extravaganza turns into one of the most insanely dangerous battles in the game, as the very stats that make them difficult to kill turn them into an army of insanely powerful killing machines worthy of a bonus boss battle.
• The Shiro Tail, a fluffy critter inhabiting the White Dragon Cave in Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete. Runs away a lot, drops a rare item and a ton of EXP.
• Lunar: Eternal Blue has Ice Mongrels: two variants with each specific to a single location. Both have high dodge rates, a high tendency to run away and defense that rendered it near invulnerable to anything except the main character's sword skill attacks. The second type encountered actually gives 65534 XP divided amongst the party; if only the main character is in the party at the time (possible during the Playable Epilogue), any monsters defeated in addition to the Ice Mongrel can cause an overflow, and actually LOWER the total XP given for the battle (essentially negating all of the XP from the Mongrel). Since levelling up never requires more than 65534 XP, fighting them once powered up enough to defeat them reliably is a very efficient way to level grind.
• Dungeon Siege II has the "???" (sic), basically a high-level thief who'll teleport in when your party has acquired some great items. He'll try to steal items from you, but if you attack him quickly enough he'll drop some good items himself, and rapidly disappear. It is possible to actually kill the thief (or rather, "defeat" him by getting his hit points down near 0) several times during the campaign, in which case he'll drop a series of items required to unlock the Developer's Room, which further gives access to some powerful ass-kicking gear.
• Tales of... Series
  • Tales of Eternia combines this with a Chest Monster in form of Fakes, which are, as the name suggests, fake treasure chests. They're extremely resistant to all attacks but they start off the battle poisoned, meaning that if you survive long enough, you can eventually kill them even if you're underleveled. While they themselves don't give that much experience per kill, they're the only refightable enemy (a conveyer belt in a specific dungeon spawns an unlimited number of them when you flip a switch) in the game that're durable enough to survive a full set of Maxwell extensions, which awards the party 100,000 experience whenever you successfully pull one off.
  • Tales of Hearts have Apple, Peach, and Grape Gela. Found on one island in the game. Their HP is paltry, but they have 9999 defense and tech defense. They drop perfectly normal Apple, Peach, and Grape Gels, but their steal items are stat-boosting herbs.
  • Tales of Symphonia has the Bacura. "Hey, you can't fight the block thing in the mines!" Well, no, you can't fight it... in the mines. Instead, you have to fight it on the path by the SE Abbey, and due to their low spawn rate it helps to have a Dark Bottle active. It takes 1 damage from every single attack and runs away after a set amount of time. For defeating it, you get 11 to 35 Grade (depending on various things). For comparison, most enemies give you no Grade for merely defeating them (as the name implies, Grade is awarded for fighting well), most bosses give you 10, and beating the game gives you a whopping 1000.
  • Bacuras reappear in Tales of Xillia in normal, bronze, silver, and golden varieties. They can take the place of seemingly any enemy in certain areas starting early on in the game, and give a healthy sum of EXP. They only attempt to flee prior to engaging them in battle, but they have sky high defense, resist every element, and are surprisingly capable fighters for featureless blocks.
• Demon's Souls has Crystal Geckos. These shiny blue lizards don't attack you at all, and will immediately run away once they're aware of your presence. If you're not quick enough, they'll run themselves straight off a ledge, or run into a wall and then burrow into it to escape. If you can kill one and loot its corpse, you'll get at least two different kinds of ores, the type depending on the level where you found the gecko. Whether you kill it or it gets away, it'll respawn exactly once for each boss killed in that world. The best way to kill them is to use the Thief's Ring to make yourself harder to detect, be in soul form so your footsteps don't make noise, and rush them with a weapon that can strike downward. (Sniping with a bow is also an option, but they'll often run away after the first hit and be out of auto-targeting range by the time you reload.)
• The Crystal Lizards return in Dark Souls, but they're much more manageable compared to their Demon's Souls counterparts. While in Demon's Souls there are multiple limited spawns, Dark Souls only has one spawn for each Lizard. However, if they burrow away, dying, returning to the area later, or restarting the game will make them respawn until they are killed. If they DO run off a cliff and die, you'll gain their drops anyway so long as you're patched up.
  • The Vagrant enemy in Dark Souls is a special case that is directed by the actions of other players. If a player drops certain items, these will be loaded into random players' worlds as Item Drift Bags. However, if these are not collected, they are passed on, and after 10 unsuccessful passes of the drift bag, they turn into a Good Vagrant. They react similarly to Crystal Lizards, running from the player and vanishing if not killed fast enough, and unlike them they will not respawn on a reload, instead appearing in another random player's world. They can drop some fairly hard to find items and upgrade materials, depending on what item was abandoned as a Drift Bag.
  • A similar enemy, the Evil Vagrant, is generated in a random player's world when another player dies with a large amount of humanity, then dies again without collecting their bloodstain. Unlike the Good Vagrant, these will attack the player with a unique attack similar to a Homing Soulmass, but can deal enormous damage to unsuspecting players. And many players are unsuspecting, as they will likely never even come across one of these enemies, they spawn in unfamiliar locations, and when a player takes their ranged attack to the face they will disappear to torment some other player instead. At least if a player does kill one, they are rewarded with a Humanity or a Twin Humanity, depending on whether the Vagrant appears as a white or a red version.
• They return in Bloodborne as the Wandering Madness, a suitably-elddritch looking... thing that behaves exactly the same way.
• Star Ocean: Till the End of Time has Mecha Scumbag, a more powerful version of the common Scumbag enemy that runs away when low on HP. Defeating one earns you a Battle Trophy.
• They return in Star Ocean: The Last Hope as the Metal Scumbag, who can only be found once on a single floor of a single dungeon, and possibly appearing as an unexpected fifth wheel beside a group of normal enemies (there are about 30 of these on the floor and no way to guarantee which group he'll appear in)). Upon being seen, he immediately runs away. Killing him nets a boss-sized EXP increase, his Monster Jewel is capable of increasing Fol spoils by 25%, and Lymle has a Battle Trophy for killing 99 of them.
• In A Witch's Tale, all card monsters love to run away, and any attack (including ancient game breaking magic) will do 1 point of damage on them. Hope you score a critical hit. Or use one spell from March Hare doll.
• The Forbiddens in Xenogears fit this trope nicely. They appear in a location that's accessible only temporarily, give you 2 turns to beat them before they break loose, and will drop Gold Nuggets or Gold Bullion if you beat them before they break loose. Oh, and they take a ton of hits to kill. About the only way they differ from a traditional Metal Slime is that once they break loose, they're actually pretty deadly.
• In the game Boktai 2: The Sun Is In Your Hand, there is a rare chance that one of the enemies will be replaced by a crimson version of itself. While not particularly nasty, even sporting the same movement patterns as the generic version, the first time you meet one your damage to it will probably be 1 damage, regardless of weapon, it will kill you in one hit and make you restart the area. It also drops a weapon that is several times stronger than anything you can find (or make) at the time, with its rare drop being a (potentially) Game-Breaker item
• The Legend of Heroes - Trails have Shining Poms, which net enormous amounts of both EXP and sepith per kill. Due to the series' harsh Anti-Grinding measures, killing most enemies near your current level will quickly reduce experience gained, making Shining Poms the only reliable way to get any Level Grinding done. However, their agility is so enormous that only S-Crafts can hit them, they tend to run away whenever they get a turn, and sometimes even S-Crafts will do insufficient damage to actually kill them with their increasingly enormous HP counts. Fortunately, they're vulnerable to One-Hit Kill Arts like Shadow Spear and Time, Space, and Mirage Arts in general, which quickly becomes the preferred tool for killing them.
  • In Trails in the Sky the 3rd, there's even a Superboss that consists of several Shining Poms and an even stronger Pom at their head, a Tempest Pom. Unfortunately, this requires you to trek through a long Bonus Dungeon in one go in order for it to spawn. Hitting them in general is a major Guide Dang It!, not even S-Breaks will kill them, unless your character's STR is above 3000, a feat that'll take an Infinity +1 Sword and some character tweaks to reach.
  • In the Sky and Crossbell arcs, while they give a fair amount of EXP on defeat, the amount of sepith given will be enough to unlock slots to improve your EP.
  • In The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel, they've undergone Badass Decay, having no longer the high Agility or invulnerabilities that made them hard to kill. What's more, with Cold Steel's easing up on the Experience drops, their rewards aren't as useful, on top of only being available in a limited quantity through DLC.
• Diablo III:
  • Treasure Goblins fill this role. If you hit them, they run away while gold spills out of the sacks they carry. If left alone for too long (while the player is fighting other monsters, for instance), it will summon a portal and vanish. Each time they pause and are hit, they run away even faster. If killed they explode into a massive pile of gold and items, rivaled only by bosses. Later patches introduced additional variants. Some function the same as the original but drop gems, crafting materials, or have a better chance at a legendary item instead. Others behave differently, such as the Malevolent Tormentor who can teleport short distances and the Insufferable Miscreant who summons mobs to delay you.
  • The Metal Slime King of the game is the Gelatinous Sire which on death spawns two smaller goblins. Those goblins each spawn three goblins on death, each of which will drop double the amount of loot from a normal Goblin, making for potentially twelve times the reward. Their tendency to scatter and create portals at different times makes killing them all difficult.
  • Goblins will rarely spawn a portal into Greed's domain, a treasure room worth several million gold leading up to a bonus boss.
  • A rare shrine spawns multiple goblins simultaneously, offering potentially more loot but also making a complete clear of the goblins difficult.
• Hyperdimension Neptunia:
  • The Metal Dogoo is the obvious parody. It does not drop any rare items and does not have as much HP (due to it being based on a variant of one of the game's Mooks), though it does drop a rather generous 10,000 Credits.
  • Played straight with the Cliones, which appear in summoning circles within every sidequest dungeon. They can take ridiculous amounts of damage, but also give out ridiculous amounts of experience, which increases the further along you get in the game.
  • While the Metal Dogoo is common across Neptunia games, both the main games and spin-offs, it is taken up to eleven in Megadimension Neptunia VII. With a dungeon modifier, the post-game dungeon Senmuu Labyrinth houses an enemy called "Big Metal Dogoo", and is only found in a specific location that is challenging to even reach. While this monster also exists in other Neptunia games, it has the most Metal Slime qualities in this game. First, almost all attacks thrown at it deal 0-1 damage, high evasion, very fast and tends to run away a lot. However, it is the only enemy to give out 10 million experience, and with the modifier mechanics, you can receive even more. This gets characters to level 100 very quickly. However, players also lament the fact that this is the only Metal Slime in the game; post-game content may demand characters of level 999 at max, but after around level 200, you need to kill at least several Big Metal Dogoos (with maximum bonuses) to even increase a level.
• The Tokos (Who resemble a certain Studio Ghibli movie character) in Ni no Kuni give an absolutely huge amount of EXP or gold if you can defeat them, often much more then the bosses of a similar level, and also make good Imagen if you can capture them. However, they only show up occasionally, run away from you in the field, and will disappear if not caught quickly. Even after you catch them, you still have defeat them before they escape in battle, and the evolved forms of them frequently will use some manner of debilitating spell on the entire party to keep you from doing this.
• Opoona has the Star Human. In addition to being run-happy, it has both extremely high defense and high evasion, meaning that even if you can hit it with a physical attack, it's not likely to do much damage. The best way to defeat it is to spam it with Armagebbon, and pray to all that's good that it doesn't flee. To add insult to injury, it has a one-of-a-kind drop attached to it that lets you gain bonus EXP off every battle (as well as a Rare Candy to it).
• Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City:
  • There is an entire class of enemies that play this trope straight. They appear on the dungeon map just like the F.O.E.'s do so you can find them (but if you don't reach them in time they disappear), and while each variation has a somewhat different gimmick they all share the tendency to run away at the drop of a hat, and if you manage to kill them they're worth a metric buttload of experience.
  • On the ocean, you can find tanniyn, massive whale-like fish. They take several strikes to take down, can potentially damage your ship (forcing you to return to Armoroad and spend money on repairs), and drop items worth a mint.
• Etrian Odyssey IV: Legends of the Titan:
  • The game introduces the "Rare Breed" system, which gives all (non-boss) enemies a (very small) chance of appearing as this trope. Rare breed monsters are recognized by their shiny, golden color and give additional experience when they're killed. On each round that they remain in battle they give the message that their "glow intensifies" meaning you'll get even more bonus exp for killing them. Like all Metal Slimes there's a chance they'll run away each turn they're in combat, but you also can use ailments like leg binds to prevent their escape and keep them in the battle for longer. Rare Breeds also have an increased Action Initiative, letting them wreak havoc (or flee) before your party even gets to act. This system will see itself get reused for every subsequent 3DS entry in the franchise.
    
    F.O.E.s also have a small chance of spawning as a Rare Breed, and they can become incredible sources of experience once defeated. For overworld F.O.E.s, feeding them a rare version of their favorite food will also turn them into a Rare Breed. While Rare Breed F.O.E.s will never flee from battle, they get a stacking power boost each turn; with the innate speed bonus of the Rare Breed, they can easily cause a Total Party Kill if you don't pick your fights properly.
  • Across the overworld, you may see Pookas, who flee extremely fast before you can intercept them. Understandable, as they have only 1 HP and will go down at the first blow; when they die, they become Books, which increase a single stat for one character, depending on the type of Pooka you killed. You'll have to outright guess and second guess if you want to teleport to the correct cave to ambush them.
• MS Saga: A New Dawn has Gold and Metal variants of several mobile suits, who give out large amounts of Gold and EXP respectively, but don't appear very often, require attacks that ignore defense in order to kill, and will use the "Smoke" instant escape ability at the drop of a hat, and if they don't, instead they'll hit the party for massive damage.
• Unlucky Hero has Roaches, who are faster than your characters most of the time, have a powerful attack, take no more than 1HP from your attacks, have a high tendency to flee, and give off ridiculous amounts of EXP. There are tools which can paralyze them and make killing them easier, though.
• The Denpa Men:
  • The game has the rare tooth-like enemies. Some, such as the Incisor, give out lots of experience points, while a few others give out tons of gold, like Golden Fangs. They have insanely high Defense and Speed, decent evasion, are completely unaffected by magic attacks and status effects, and have a chance of running away every turn. However, if you manage to land a critical hit on them, they will likely die in one hit thanks to their low HP.
  • The sequel adds Rotten Molars. They give the most experience of any normal enemy in the game, and they can spawn in groups of up to seven. The problem? They only spawn in the Inferno, and are ghosts, meaning they are completely unaffected by any physical attack.
  • The third game in the series adds some of the most infuriating Metal Slimes yet: Queen Molars and Crowns. Both give out insane amounts of experience/gold, respectively, but they are even harder to hit than normal, run away more often, and have Charm naturally, which can cause your Denpa Men to not be able to move for that turn. There's also the Jewel Molars: They function much like Molars or Golden Fangs, but instead of giving out gold or experience, they have Jewels as a rare drop, a rare currency that is difficult to get after you've exhausted the treasure chests/Coliseum/Boss Rematch Hall.
• Gold and Silver Mets in Mega Man X: Command Mission are spectacular little Zenny mines, worth 7000 and 2500 Zenny each respectively. The main catch is that they're only found in the Gimialla Mines, and even then only rarely. Other catches include their tendency to run away, as well as the fact that every time they're damaged without being destroyed, they're "worn down" and worth less Zenny when finally defeated, forcing you to come up some kind of one-turn kill if you want to reap the full rewards. A relative found in the same area, the Giant Met, is a rare, ridiculously fast and powerful Met that instead of money gives up a tidy 4000 Experience Points when destroyed... good luck finding it and killing it before it decides to run away (or, alternately, pressing its Berserk Button, which turns it into a mini-boss-level fight).
• Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass has Rad Ghosts, encountered in the Wilted Lands. They're worth an amazing 200 experience, but they only take three actions: nullifying all damage for the turn, inflicting a status effect that prevents someone from gaining experience, and running away. They're also incorporeal, making them resistant to most attacks. Defeating one requires careful use of Buck's stunning ability and the Happy Little Sunflower's light spell.
• Dragonsbane Seeds, Queen Rabi, and Gold Rabi in 7th Dragon III drop lots of SP, EXP, and money respectively, but all of them like to run away. The Seeds match the archetype even more closely by only taking 1 damage from any attack.
• Brave Hero Yuusha: Oozie Prince and Slick Oozie, they have a high EXP payout but they run away often and can only be hit for 1 damage unless using a Fixed Damage Attack.
• Tokyo Mirage Sessions ♯FE: Golden Mirages are these, as opposed to regular red ones or more-powerful-than-normal black ones. They're extremely rare and run away at the sight of you, so you have to approach them from behind. Should you engage one, you'll find yourself fighting a Sixth Element, which has low HP but resists almost everything, so you're better off using a Special Performance. The only real reward you get from them is the Macca Converter, but it's an item no other Mirage drops and it's needed to make certain Carnages.
• In Miitopia, the Rare and Very Rare Snurps fill in this trope. In both of their cases, they take only one point of damage (3 at most using defense debuffs). They both have a high chance of escaping the battle too, leading to a lot of grief.
• Forever Home has the mushroom-like Apex and Apextu, who yield high EXP and PP respectively. They also tend to run away a lot and will always run away before the party can move if the player attempts to fight them via the Ray Stadium.
• In Octopath Traveler and Octopath Traveler II, there is the Cait enemy, which will rarely appear at random anywhere in the world. It only has a handful of HP and two shield points. Breaking its shields will incapacitate it until the end of the next round, same as every other enemy, but it's extremely hard to land those two hits before it runs away. The EXP is well worth the effort when you can take one down, though.
• In Fallout 4, if you can kill a Super Mutant Suicider before it can blow itself up^note keeping in mind that it has decently high health and will run toward you to explode as soon as it notices you, you can loot a rare Mini Nuke off its corpse. Fail to do so and you just wind up with two units of Nuclear Material (assuming you survive), which is admittedly a rare and useful crafting ingredient, but nowhere near as rare or useful as the Mini Nuke, which is the ammunition that fuels the Fat Man.
• Noko in Yo-kai Watch rarely shows up but gives tons of experience if you find and defeat him. Not the case in the sequel as he's turned into an Old Save Bonus, but it is applicable in the spin-off Yo-kai Watch Blasters where his appearances are even rarer and defeating him drops large numbers of Oni Orbs (an all-on-one currency that works as experience and money).
• Another Eden has glowing "Alarmed" enemies that appear in certain postgame dungeons. They take more punishment to defeat, run away at the drop of a hat, and also drop rare materials needed for weapon upgrades. This is one of the few situations where the player is encouraged to use their Another Force on a random encounter.
• Ring Fit Adventure has Rare and Gold monsters that occasionally appear on the world map. They drop a large amount of experience and money respectively, but run away if not defeated quickly.
• Bug Fables has Golden Seedlings, who are extremely rare, receive only one damage from attacks (and if you use multi-hit attacks, only the first hit will register), deal a lot of damage, have a tendency to flee the fight, but they give a lot of experience and drop the rare Tangy Berry, which can be cooked to create powerful health-restoring items.
• Yakuza: Like a Dragon has the Invested Vagabonds. They appear in a few scripted places in dungeons, tend to run from battle quickly and also take 1 damage from most attacks that don't crit. However, the XP that they drop when defeated will often be enough for everyone in the party to level up both their character and current job at least once.

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