From the Lagoon to Interstellar Mythology, The Origins of Bahamut

No figure is more central to Final Fantasy lore than Bahamut, other than the crystals/ORBS perhaps. The dragon has appeared in nearly all the main numbered titles in several different roles; From the King of Dragons to the Eidolon God to a gigantic warship. Where did this figure even come from though?

The first place to check when doing any internet research is always going to be the fabled Wikipedia, home the biggest bulls**t factoid collection. Despite that, their entry on Bahamut seems fairly legit, according to them, Bahamut is originally a giant fish in pre-islamic Arabian mythology. Interestingly enough, the sheer size of the legendary fish is so vast that they say that if one would put all the oceans in the world in it's nose, they would only amount to the size of a mustard seed in the middle of a desert. Essentially, Bahamut would be a celestial fish the size of the Milky Way galaxy for the hyperbole to hold true. It gets a little more interesting after that, supposedly the fish is supposed to have a bull named Kujata(who would later appear himself as a summon in FFVII) on it's scaly head who himeself carries a mountain range made from ruby which houses an angel. I guess anything is possible in a world where space itself is a fish, so I won't go too much further into that. Anyways, over this angel lies the six hells, the Earth and seven heavens. It's safe to say that the fish Bahamut is an analogy for either space or god itself or maybe even some kind of crazy combination of the two.



While all that is good, it would make a whole lot more sense for our favorite Guardian Force to have it's origins in Dungeons and Dragons rather than the Arabian mythos. The original Final Fantasy was pretty much a blatant ripoff of the D&D world, most notably the four elemental fiends themselves were ripped right from the rulebooks of the roleplaying giant. Bahamut is a platinum dragon who lords over all the good dragons of the world. The dragon himself is the offspring of the Dragon God Io. Siding with Lawful Good, Bahamut is about as far as it gets on the good scale. During my minuscule research, I also found out that Bahamut has sort of a sibling rivalry with another Final Fantasy favorite, Tiamat. The multi headed Fiend plays as the antithesis to the Dragon Lord as the queen of all evil dragons.

Within the Final Fantasy games themselves, Bahamut has been seen mostly as a beckoned monster to help the heroes in their escapades. However, in the first game, Bahamut played a different role entirely. He wasn't some sort of special celestial monster, rather than he was just the leader of the dragons. Highly respected, all dragons and adventures would go to see him after facing some sort of peril and collecting the oddly valuable Rat's Tail. After handing him the tail, players were graced with what was pretty much coolest moment of the game, the class change. This granted the player to higher variety of magic, giving you spell charges to the 6th, 7th and 8th tier and even gave lucky Knights and Ninja's rudimentary white and black magic respectively. Now although all that is cool, this was the only purpose that Bahamut had in the game, and that in itself wasn't necessary to finish the game, as I'm sure many players completely skipped the whole sidequest without knowing anything about it.

Bahamut's next appearance would be in Final Fantasy III as both a boss, and one of the endgame summons. You first battle him in a unwinnable battle where you're forced to flee or risk being burned to cinders. Later, the player can make his way to the dragon's lair and challenge him to a rematch. The battle will be tough as he has 7500 HP and he'll bombard you with several Mega Flare attacks. It will easily be one of the more difficult battles in the game unless you use some interesting tactics. I myself have never played that far into the game, but supposedly having a Dragoon and a Devout is the way to go as the 'Jump' command and 'Aero' spell will do a lot more damage than anything else. Defeating the dragon will give you the 'Bahamur' summon which can either use 'Aura', 'Rend' or the almighty 'Mega Flare' depending on the class doing the summoning. Despite the difficulty of the boss and the usefulness of the spell, Bahamut doesn't have a great role in the story in this entry.

Final Fantasy IV is the first game in my opinion that gave Bahamut the role we've come to know him to play in subsequent titles. In this game, he plays as the god of all summoned monsters, or Eidolons in more recent translations. As a god, he lives in the only place that would make sense, the Moon. The battle with him is probably the toughest boss in the game aside from Zeromus unless you use my favorite strategy. Every time you battle him, he'll immediately start counting down from 5 to 1 giving you just a little while to prepare for the onslaught you're about to receive. The best thing to do really is to use the Lunar Curtain items you've been gaining throughout the game which will cast reflect on yourself. In theory, you could probably have Rosa get two or three reflect spells off before the blast and have Kain jump, but i find it a lot easier just to use the curtains and start pummeling. Once you defeat him, you'll get the summon as I'm sure you have guessed, and once again, you'll have the ability to use 'Mega Flare' at will.

This isn't the dragon's only appearance in the game however, in the Lunar Subterrane, after going through a few secret areas, you'll encounter a shrine for the Ragnarok sword. This mighty weapon is guarded by the dark version of Bahamut, or if you're playing an early translation, he'll be referred to as a generic Wyvern. He can also cast 'Mega Flare' but he isn't really nearly as tough, as he'll only cast the spell at the beginning of the battle and at random from there. Since his magic power is much lower than the regular Dragon Lord, you'll be able to survive the attacks fairly easily. I've also heard that the Gameboy Advance version also has the superfluously title Lunar Bahamut as a bonus boss, but I have to admit, the glitches in that version kept me from playing that far.


Bahamut wouldn't have another major role again until Final Fantasy VIII, but I'll briefly go over the next three games. In Final Fantasy V, Bahamut would awaken after getting the tablet in the Pyramid of Moore. Apparently in this game, he was condemned to live as the ground itself on a small peninsula on a northern continent. You'd later fight him on the Northern Mountain in a similar fashion as FFIV and obtain him as a summon after that.



In the next game, the Esper version of the dragon would be won from Doomgaze after defeating him in battle. Interestingly enough, if you try and do the "Vanish/Doom" trick on Doomgaze, you wouldn't trigger the magicite to drop, effectively screwing yourself out of the summon for the rest of the game. Once you netter Bahamut, you'd get some pretty sweet inherent bonuses. It teaches the equipped character 'Flare' at a rate of 2X AP and gave a mighty 50% HP gain upon each levelup.

With the advent of the Materia system, Square decided to give Bahamut a few more forms to increase his showtime. The first version you would find in the Temple of Ancients would summon the traditional Bahamut that we've come to know and love throughout the years. The next version we would find is Neo Bahamut. The animation for this form involves ripping out the ground that the enemy stands on and having Bahamut obliterate it with 'Giga Flare' which would crush the fiends with the force of the blast and the rubble itself. Bahamut ZERO is the final form that you get after gaining the other two and by far the most destructive. Once again, Bahamut resides in the outer depths of space and sends a 'Tera Flare' attack vaulting to Earth to decimate the baddies. As you would gain ability points in the game, you would get multiple summons per battle and this coupled with the 'Mime' ability could ensure you one Bahamutrific battle if you pleased.

It is heavily implied in VIII that Bahamut was one of the many Guardian Forces that was used to in experiments in the Deep Sea Research Center, which evidently met it's doom at the hands of either the Dragon itself or the mighty Ultima Weapon. When you finally find Bahamut there, he asks you a few questions;

"So you wish to challenge me?"
"It's not our will to fight"
"Begging me for mercy?"
"Damned imbeciles. Why do you wish to fight?"

Interestingly enough, the actual answer to the final question is hidden, making you go through the whole process over and over. I forgot to mention that every wrong answer equals a battle with the Ruby Dragon, one of the mightier enemies in the game.

When it comes down to the battle itself, Bahamut is very weak to blind, which will help negate at least some of the damage he'll inflict on the player. Using shell will help you lessen the impact of 'Mega Flare' as it actually ignores your Spirit stat. It also has a tendency to cast stop, so Esuna and Haste are going to be your good friends. Using Bahamut as a GF has quite a few benefits like auto protect and the 'Forbidden Magic' ability, which allows you to create things like Elixers.

I'm not going to go too much into the next four Bahamut appearances as I haven't played any of them in recent memory(in FFXI's case, not at all) but I figured it would be a appropriate to talk about his other appearances.




In 1996, Square released a new IP by the name of Bahamut Lagoon. This game was essentially a strategy game somewhat similar to Fire Emblem or Tactics Ogre, but mixed in Final Fantasy style battles on contact with the enemy. This brought in a whole new layer of strategy that hadn't been seen yet at that point. In a way, it's kind of a greater, more refined version of the decisive battles from Final Fantasy VI.

As one could assume by the title, Bahamut would have a fairly strong role in this game along with many other dragons and variations of other Final Fantasy Eidolons and monsters. Bahamut himself resides as the holy dragon of the kingdom of Kahna who has been in a state of eternal slumber. Emperor Sauza, after crushing Kahna, decided that he needed all of the holy dragons to wake up Bahamut, and as such, went to go do what all emperors do best. The world was spun into conflict and our heroes went to save the day. Eventually the heroes free the holy dragons and more or less save the day.

To be honest, I haven't given the game the time it probably deserves, so I can't go too into detail here.

Bahamut also appears in the Chocobo side series as either a guiding figure, or in the case of Chocobo racing, a playable character. I haven't played any of these games, but to my knowledge, Chocobo Racing is more of a Mario Kart clone while the Chocobo Dungeon games are more like the Mystery Dungeon games. I do have that cute picture of Bahamut though.





The last Bahamut appearance that I think merits a brief mention is the boss, Bahamutt in Super Mario RPG. In Bowser's keep, a few different magic enemies will summon Bahamutt to help them out in battle. This dragon has a fairly hefty amount of HP for a generic foe at 1200. He also has the ability to strike you with fear from his 'Iron Maiden' attack. Amusngly, if the character Mallow uses his 'Psychopath' ability and reads Bahamutt's mind, he appears rather timid and unsure of himself. There was also another version of Bahamutt planned, but never used called Boshumutt, who himself resembled the Boshi character seen in the Yoshi sidequest.



That's about all I got and about all I want to write about Bahamut for right now, perhaps I'll have more once I hear more about the Blood of Bahamut game that was announced for the Nintendo DS earlier this year. Who knows, I'm sure there's plenty of stuff I neglected to go over, but that's okay, someone else probably has a greater knowledge of these things than I.

(appologies to the D&D players about my incredibly limited knowledge, I'd love to play the game myself, but I've never met anyone willing to try it with me)