10 Scariest Enemies In Non-Horror Games
Horror games don't have an exclusive monopoly on terrifying enemies.
Fans of horror titles tend to spend a lot of their gaming time either hiding from horrific, slathering nightmare-beasts or engaging in dramatic and generally grisly battles against them. Some titles, such as Outlast, really only offer the former option, while the likes of Resident Evil 4 are all about the latter. However you’re interacting with the ghastly things that inhabit the world along with you, though, you might also find yourself doing the same things in games that really aren’t horror experiences at all.
As a wise man once said (possibly), an enemy doesn’t have to be a mutated, freakish abomination to be frightening.
Perhaps they’re just ludicrously powerful, or huge and intimidating in the extreme. Maybe they’re known to have committed some horrendous deeds and tangling with them isn’t at the very top of your Fun Way To Spend A Sunday Afternoon list. Whatever the case, though, they’re certainly scary.
Here are some of the scariest enemies ever to grace non-horror games.
10. Epitaph - Final Fantasy 9
The broader Final Fantasy series is home to a lot of rather frightening recurring monsters. The sneaky-sneaky stabby-stabby Tonberry is an excellent example, known for taking considerable punishment and slowly shuffling forward before instantly taking down a party member. These little pests, though, are at least up front about it, in here's a big knife. Guess where it’s going kind of way. Final Fantasy 9’s Epitath is rather more insidious than that.
There’s something tragically beautiful about these little stone memorials. At least, at first. They’re found only in Oeilvert, a magic-warding realm that Kuja, completely understandably, noped all the way out of. Coerced into going there in his stead, Zidane and his friends battle these little horrors, which can spawn copies of a party member on its own side. Disturbing as it is to be attacked by a doppelganger of a beloved team member, the truly horrifying thing happens when that random copy happens to be of a party member currently in the battle.
When this happens, that party member will be struck by a 9,999 damage attack, KOing them instantly. The copies even have battle dialogue, in which they announce “I’m the real [party member’s name]” before attacking. Epitaph and its horrifying friends, apparently, want to not only kill the party, but then proceed to assume their identities.