How Garuda Has Evolved From Final Fantasy 3 to FF16
An enduring part of the Final Fantasy franchise has been its monster designs. Any fan can pick out the latest iteration of a Chocobo or a Cactaur, and plenty of other beasts like goblins, ghosts, skeletons, and iron giants have cycled in and out of various games. Thanks to the strong art direction provided by Yoshitaka Amano and the efforts of later artists and animators, Final Fantasy has no shortage of great and terrible beasts to slay. Needing to exclude classic foes from each entry to make room for new monsters isn't a bad problem to have.
Accompanying these iconic enemies are some monsters that can be compelled to fight on the player's side. These beasts are commonly known as summons, and they have a history stretching back to Final Fantasy 3. Although Bahamut was in Final Fantasy 1, he was no more than a quest NPC before FF3 introduced the summoning system. Familiar faces like Ifrit, Shiva, Ramuh, Leviathan, Titan, and more have appeared in many Final Fantasy titles since then as both friends and foes. Final Fantasy 16 is bringing the focus back to summons as a core plot point, and among these is Garuda: the Eikon of Wind and one of the most recent additions to Final Fantasy's core summon catalog.
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Garuda has had the strangest journey through Final Fantasy of all the summons. The summoned Garuda is always depicted as female, but the first Garuda of the series is a male beast born of an evil human wizard. Sharing its name with a large bird-like creature that appears in both Hinduism as Lord Vishnu's mount and Buddhism as massive predatory birds, Final Fantasy 3's Garuda is the monstrous form of Gigametz. This malicious advisor serves King Gorn of Saronia,
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