Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sapling Enemy Sheets

The enemies from the brilliant indie game and spiritual Paper Mario sequel, Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sapling. As you might expect, these enemies are mostly bugs, or creatures of comparable size; they could be used for a game where the players are naturally tiny or have been shrunken as part of the plot, but honestly it's fine to use them alongside bigger creatures and just assume a difference of scale between the fictional worlds, or whatever.

One thing you'll quickly notice is that every enemy here has an alternate "Hard Mode" version. Bug Fables had two difficulty settings via a badge (or, as they called it, a "medal") that could be toggled on and off, with the only difference between normal and hard modes being enemy stats. However, Hard Mode usually only gives enemies a small boost, typically consisting of a few more points of HP and one more of Attack, along with possible Defense alterations. According to the developers, the game "was balanced around Hard Mode," meaning that it's fair to think of the Hard versions of these enemies as their true identities, but both versions are provided here for greater variety, and could even appear alongside each other if you so desire. Technically, there are additional, harder difficulty settings via special codes, but these give enemies equal boosts across the board, being more of an obvious, inelegant bump-up than a proper alternate form, and so they aren't accounted for here, but can be replicated relatively easily.

In terms of stats, these enemies function very similarly to Paper Mario ones, most often using inherent abilities as opposed to weapons or armor; the player characters in Bug Fables receive much smaller incremental HP increases than Mario does in PM, and base Attack Power increases are entirely optional and only available late-game, meaning that both enemy HP and Attack did not need to increase as much over the course of the game. That being said, Bug Fables was clearly designed to be a bit harder than Paper Mario, so these enemies are often a bit stronger, if not exactly by raw Attack Power.

Since Bug Fables pioneered the "enemies burrowing underground" concept that Arpeggio runs with, you'll find the most, and most varied, examples of that utilized here. In the game, these foes had to be unearthed by Leif's ice magic, and that being one of the players' main attacks, there were naturally enemies with an Elemental weakness to ice, but in BF this was only a +1; I've gone with Arpeggio's standard of +2 on these sheets, but in most other respects they are as accurate to the game as possible (as opposed to the Paper Mario enemy sheets where I've sometimes taken liberties). This is mainly because there's only one Bug Fables game, so I didn't have to choose between different presentations of the same enemy.

Bug Fables did occasionally present the same enemy differently in the sense that enemies summoned as minions during boss battles often had reduced max HP to allow them to be taken out more quickly, and on the flipside, sometimes a regular enemy with greater than usual max HP would act as a sort of miniboss. In these situations, max HP is the only stat altered on the enemy, so it otherwise functioned exactly like any other of its type. I therefore haven't bothered to make alternate sheets for these special cases, as you can just treat them as having different HP during play and otherwise refer to the existing sheet.