Did I mention not to attack the shell? You're not going to be able to take off 50,000 HP at the beginning of the game without a lot of patience, especially with that counterattack. The head (monster #308) dies much more quickly, with only 1,600 HP and no counter, and killing either part wins the battle.

If you really want to kill the shell anyway, it is possible. Survive six counters and it runs out of MP, leaving you free to spend all the time you need to take it down. The only gameplay advantage to killing the shell is that you win an Ether instead of a High Potion.

The head for this one has more hit points at 9,845 than the shell.

Considering that he's an early boss, you don't actually need to whittle away all of Vargas's 11,600 HP. An event occurs shortly after 720 damage, and one more move after that triggers another event that wins the battle. The massive HP total is only to ensure that the script kills him rather than damage.

One of only a handful of randomly encountered monsters that doesn't have a Rage or even appear on the Beast Plain.

Speculation on a Japanese Final Fantasy glossary wiki suggests that this name might have come from the kanji 堕達磨 (da daruma), which would be "fallen (Bodhi)dharma" in much the same way as 堕天使 (da tenshi) means "fallen angel", but it's anyone's guess whether that was intentional.

* Number 024 is initially neutral to all traits, but uses Barrier Change, which sets a single randomly selected element as a weakness while granting absorption of its opposite and immunity to all others.

This is the Crane that appears on the left side of the screen.

This is the Crane that appears on the right side of the screen.

This easier version of Umaro, presumably meant for a WoB encounter, never appears. He does have a combat script, though: Battle/Battle/Tackle and Battle/Battle/Blizzard normally, nothing/nothing/Battle as a counter when attacked, and nothing/Tackle/Blizzard when hit with Flame.

This is the unbeatable version. The combat script uses the immediate "action" to enable invincibility.

Nelapa is supposedly an angel of Wednesdays.

* Due to a bug, the changeover to monster #127 causes the game to use incorrect item drop data instead of the correct information listed here.

Killing this in unconventional ways that break the combat script (Vanish/Dejon, for instance) will prevent the undead version (monster #127) from appearing, which also means that one will never appear on the Beast Plain. Kill it the right way, or no unlimited Behemoth Suits for you.

The combat script indicates that this undisplayed untargetable monster switches the formation once all other monsters die, from the first tier of the final battle (Short Arm / Long Arm / Face) to the second (Tiger / Machine / Magic / Hit), the second to the third (Maria / Slumber), and the third to the fourth (Cefca). The final version of the game handles these formation changes using a different method, and so this guy was scrapped. Note, however, that its name is NOT hidden (unlike the targets in the first three tiers), so ケフカ or "Kefka" would have displayed in the name field for the first three tiers, instead of nothing at all as in the final release.

This is the tentacle that appears in the bottom right. Its Ice weakness should be easy to take advantage of.

Death Gaze likes to flee combat, but as a certain NPC notes, any damage you cause persists between encounters. Watch out for the Level 5 Death opener, and don't do anything to break the script (like Vanish/Dejon) unless you don't care about the special reward.

Speculation on a Japanese board suggests チャダルヌーク may be a corruption of ジャンヌダルク (Jeanne d'Arc). I'm not convinced, but I can't find any other meaning behind the name, either.

Rêve is "dream" in French.