Virages

The Virages are a race of monsters encountered in the 1999 RPG The Legend Of Dragoon, having been supposedly created by the Winglies for use in the Dragon Campaign. In much the same way that Dragoons were used by the humans as trump cards against the Winglies, so to were the Virages cultivated as living weapons to counter the power of the Dragoons. Though the Dragon Campaign ended over eleven thousand years prior to the start of the game and Winglies no longer have it in their power to create new Virages, some of these ancient beasts still cling to life in the ruins of ancient battlefields, slumbering through the millennia in a state of deathlike hibernation - until disturbed by the protagonists. As such, they appear as recurring bosses throughout the game.

Appearance
The overwhelming majority of Virages are gigantic, grey-skinned, vaguely-humanoid creatures with distinctly arthropod traits - including carapace-like skin, insectoid mouthparts and spider-like eyes. Approximately twenty feet tall on average, their bipedal frames sport long arms and backwards-bending legs with claw-tipped digits capable of clinging to sheer ledges, and later events in the game reveal that Virages possess collapsible wings that allow them to fly for considerable distances - though most of the ancient bosses are too wounded or deteriorated to use their wings. Despite their height, Virages possess a somewhat compacted physiology, their faces sitting in the middle of their torsos, effectively cutting down on the number of weak points an enemy can attack. Virages possess seven eyes, with six lesser ones mounted around its seventh primary eyeball; in battle, these eyes can be used to launch devastating beams of energy, with all six eyes deploying on stalks as they charge up the main eye's blast.

However, there exists a rare subspecies of Super-Virage quite dissimilar to its lesser brethren in appearance: the elite of their kind, the Super-Virages were almost as tall as the more commonplace specimens, but tended to possess heavier physiques more reminiscent of tanks than human beings. Mounted on two massive pillar-like legs, their gargantuan bodies are heavily armored with exoskeleton, and usually sport two massive built-in weapons: a massive blade-shaped appendage on the right side of the body, and a multi-barreled biological cannon on the left. Lacking the dexterous limbs of their lesser fellows, the Super-Virages instead manipulate the surrounding environments through tentacles contained in their blades.