I don't know if the later games carried the concept forward, but there were rare monsters in the Phantasy Star Online games. If you weren't specifically running quests with large numbers of the common variants, it would take weeks or months of playtime until you spotted one.On FFXI Voluptuous Vilma comes to mind. It's rare enough that people weren't sure it actually existed for several years of the game until it was first seen.
In Final Fantasy XI, a lot of "Notorious Monsters" would be a chance of spawning instead of one specific enemy in the zone (I.e. there are 6 flies in this area, one of the six is the placeholder and Valkurm Emperor may spawn in its place). But there's no guarantee people will be killing the placeholder to even give it a chance to spawn, so it might become incredibly rare to actually see.
dark souls vagrantsI've never even heard of that...
dark souls vagrants
bloodborne labyrinth moles
rare drops
rare drops94% Sham in Borderlands 2
Rare enemies but also rare moves and rare drops/steals.
Larva Eater from FF XII satisfies both: you have to kill 256 enemies while remaining the Great Crystal area before one spawns, then it can reappear again after beating another 30-255 enemies. It rarely drops the Danjuro, the most powerful dagger in the game, and this is the only way to get it (I can't seem to find the actual drop rate percentage, and the game's chaining mechanic further complicates this).Yeah, as much as I enjoyed FF12, it has some really absurd methods for obtaining the strongest weapons. Like if you messed up and opened the wrong chests, the only way you could get the Zodiac Spear was from a chest with a 0.1% chance of spawning. I spent several hours trying to get that damn chest to spawn on PS2. Why are you like this SE?
Apparently the Zodiac version alters this by giving you other options for obtaining the weapon (and calls it by a different name). I only ever got the Danjuro once, and it was one of the luckiest drops I've ever gotten in gaming. I couldn't get any of the 'shortcut' techniques to work and was frustrated as hell after hours of grinding, and I told myself 'I'm gonna try one more time and then I'm done with this shit forever;' sure enough, the last Larva Eater dropped one. I cherished the hell out of that dagger and built Ashe around using it; pretty sure either it or Vaan w/ Yagyu Darkblade got the killing blow on Yiazmat that playthrough.
Flan Princess in FFIV had a 1/64 chance to appear in the last dungeon, and to get Adamant Armor you needed it to drop the Pink Tail, which itself had a 1/64 drop rate
Flan Princess in FFIV had a 1/64 chance to appear in the last dungeon, and to get Adamant Armor you needed it to drop the Pink Tail, which itself had a 1/64 drop rateAlso the pink tail had a far less than 1/64 drop rate. It was 1/256 but the way drop rates work in FF4 is first it checks to see if 1/32 drops. If it does then it stops dropping items. Then it repeats the process for 1/64, 1/128 and only then after failing those three checks does it get a chance to roll on the 1/256 drop table.
Feebas in pokeymans Ruby and Sapphire. It had some absurd hidden rules governing when it would spawn involving invisible mechanics and even when you got it right, other pokeymans could still spawn in its place.This is what I was going to say. I believe it could only spawn on like 4 tiles in the whole game or something like that.
As an aside, to evolve it, you needed to max out its beauty stat, which was impossible if it had the wrong nature or something like that. So if you caught one that couldn't evolve, you'd have to catch another one or breed it (assuming it was female since there weren't wild ditto in the game).
This is what I was going to say. I believe it could only spawn on like 4 tiles in the whole game or something like that.there was this one and some cicada one i remember needing a guide for as well
This is what I was going to say. I believe it could only spawn on like 4 tiles in the whole game or something like that.Yeah it was like one little section of a river and a few tiles there had a chance to spawn it and those tiles changed every day. I'm sure it's not the rarest encounter by far, even just within pokemon, but the rarity plus the specificity and obscurity made it a real pain in the ass to find.
WarMech in Final Fantasy was the OG.It's also only on two tiles so you have to walk back and forth on just those two tiles. It's kinda annoying tbh.
1/256 chance to spawn, but 100% chance within 256 battles so it's not that bad
Not quite the rarest out there, but Haniwa from FF Legend 2 popped into my mind when I saw the topic.Old gray brick had an easy rng exploit to encounter him but I could never get him to drop the seven sword.
Dunedigger in EverQuest
Old gray brick had an easy rng exploit to encounter him but I could never get him to drop the seven sword.I mostly played on a GBC where the RNG exploits didn't seem to work.
It wasn't really worth it anyway.
encounters are by domain in ff1.
This is what I was going to say. I believe it could only spawn on like 4 tiles in the whole game or something like that.