The walking corpse is a reanimated corpse, part of the Zombie family. They have wild, unkempt grey hair, rotting clothes, and have a trail of drool from their open mouths. Their right eyes are closed, while the left is bulging slightly. The walking corpses also have their hands up in a stereotypical zombie pose. It is usually the first undead monster fought in the game. In some games, the walking corpse has a poison attack, poisoning one party member when it hits.
Typically, the walking corpse will high much higher HP than the other monsters in it's area but also paltry defence. This is a reference to how difficult it is to incapacitate a zombie in horror fiction, despite the body being as soft and vulnerable as rotting flesh can be.
Walking corpses have a ghastly speech quirk wherein they wail, elongating certain vowel sounds as they maintain an inconsistent pitch and tone, represented by randomly mixed majuscule and minuscule letters in dialogue. They also have genders despite appearing as male, as each member of the Delmorgue family demonstrates in Dragon Quest XI with one of the female members even lampshading it by saying that she is obviously a girl despite it clearly being not obvious.
The Walking corpse in Dragon Quest VI and its remakes has a slightly different visual design and pose than their appearances in other Dragon Quest games, despite sharing the same name, which is actually a rather uncommon occurrence for a recurring monster in the DQ series.
It's speculated this was done to facilitate creating animations for him, as Dragon Quest VI was the first game in the series to give monsters animations. With the new pose appearing somewhat more aggressive it was probably easier to display the monster attacking than it would have been with the more eccentrically posed classic design.
However, starting with the Super Famicom remake of Dragon Quest III and all later games, he returned to his original pose from Dragon Quest II. Animations became much more detailed starting with the remake of III, so its likely the developers became more comfortable and proficient at the task of developing unique animations for each monster, shedding the need to recklessly modify classic monster designs, which could disappoint their loyal fans. However, the remakes of VI kept his unique pose, going so far as to give it brand new animations and official artwork, even though they could have simply reused his appearance and animations from the DS remake of V, probably out of faithfulness and respect to the original version of VI and its fans.
Creepy corpses made to move by the sinister spooks inside them. Beware the foetid fluids they fling! Being dead, these creatures don't know when they're beaten, and won't rest in peace until they're left in pieces.
Creepy corpses made to move by the sinister spooks inside them. Beware the foetid fluids they fling! Being dead, these creatures don't know when they're beaten, and won't rest in peace until they're left in pieces.
Walking corpse appears as a D-rank monster of the Undead family. It can be recruited from Chapters 7-1, 9-1, 13-4, and 14-2 of the main storyline and can participate in the Battle Roads of Majellan and Slon the Rook as a party member. It also stars in its own Battle Road.
Famicom art
VI DS art
A walking corpse in X
XI polygon model
DQM 1-2 sprite
Caravan sprite
Battle Road Victory cut-in
Joker polygon model
Joker 2 polygon model
Rivals card
