While playing
Final Fantasy VII (FF7), I began to notice a number of things. One, the
monsters are very strange and varied and two, they seem to work in teams. When I considered the biological basis of this, I realized that one of the forces acting in our world is also acting in the FF7 world:
adaptation and
evolution. These monsters you so regularly come across seem very specifically tailored to
coexist and function in an almost
symbiotic relationship with one another.
There must be a reason for these odd alliances and I propose that over time, some species evolved to work together against a common enemy that
one or the other could not deal with alone. For instance, it is quite common to run into a team of creatures, some of whom use magic and are resistant to it, and others who use purely physical attacks. Could this team up be an attempt by the creatures to deal with predators of both magical and physical nature at the same time? Whatever they encountered, together, they could deal with. Apart, they would only be able to defend themselves against one type of attack.
This strategy is seen throughout the continents and islands of FF7 in one form or another: ice and fire creatures working together, earth and
water creatures working together, etc. It would be logical to assume that through time, the ancestors of these creatures must have begun living in close proximity to one another, and that the closer together
they lived, the safer they would be from any predator. Those creatures that did not directly prey on one another would through Darwinian evolution prove to be more successful at producing offspring. Gradually individuals who worked best in a team would become dominant, and their offspring, sharing their abilities, would survive longer and be more successful then any single species would be by themselves.