SEIROMEM'S PROFILE

author=LockeZ
Flanatos, the flan necromancer, is my own personal creation that you are free to steal

I'd say that's the best one and to pack it in, but the point is quantity, quality such as this is a miraculous byproduct.

I'm gonna dump some I came up with here, maybe it'll inspire anyone else happening across here;
Drohl Dumbs (Sounds like Doldrums, riff off of Drohl Drone's name)
Lunaticked, a crazy tick monster
The Gold Standard, a banner-bearing humanoid monster
Drat Bat (no pun, just fun to say)
Armed Mageddon (Armageddon, but armed whether weapons or multiple arms idunno; maybe have it be a mage dinosaur too)

You know the ones- most specifically like DQ 8's special monsters you recruit for your monster team: A Slime Knight named "One Knight Stand", a raging rooster named "Foul Fowl", the Funghoul known as "Bo Lete", the pair of Giant Cyclops names "Arges" and "Brontes", etc.

They don't even have to be inspired/based off monsters from a DQ catalogue (though that's the main inspiration I'm looking for). Just clever monster names with that in mind. Additionally, if you have some one-word descriptors in mind for the monster like "Robot", "Elemental", "Lonely", "Trickster", "Chaotic" or "Loyal" feel free to include them.

I just had a nightmare in the hour between waking and sleep where I was playing a hard-ass Starbound biome with MTG Myr-like robots chasing me and helicopters of all shapes and sizes whose propellor blades hurt like hell. As I progressed the level started glitching with backgrounds turning completely black and odd text with red drop shadow MURDER/MURDERER text shifting about and a pitched-down Flowey laugh growing ever louder as the text filled the screen and grew in size. I went to my brother, who was in my sister's room, holding my head in my hands repeatedly thinking to myself "help me (brother)" until the laughter faded.

So good morning.

Oh my, how nostalgic.
Also flattering that it's remembered even after all these years! 6 of them! Years. 6 years.

dear lord

To me an open-world game isn't about there being a huge (padded) world to explore, it's about being relatively non-linear: you go where you want to because you want to, not because anything is telling you it needs to be done. Obviously, without direction people are more than likely to get bored, but setting general or even vague goals could be all that's needed to fix that. Like with BotW, you're told in the beginning "Defeat Ganon", that "Going to Kakariko Village will help you do so.", and you're also shown that shrines give you power, and that finding more of them will help you defeat Ganon. From there, you decide the actions you take 1: Search for shrines, 2: Pursue Ganon 3: Seek help in Kakariko, and doing any one of those three will eventually lead to you doing the other things.

One game I'd love to see get an open-world type treatment is a Pokemon game. You're given a Pokemon of your choice (and from a much wider selection than just 3 "Starter" Pokemon) and told about two things you can do.
1: Record all Pokemon in the Pokedex, 2: Train your Pokemon to defeat Gyms and Win the Pokemon League
Both of which lead you to pursue each goal interchangeably, or focus on one or the other. Find Pokemon to battle gyms with, train your Pokemon to go to more dangerous areas where the wild Pokemon's levels are higher to find newer Pokemon, use those newer Pokemon to fight the other gyms, and so on.
The gyms aren't in any set order, with difficulty scaling with the number of badges you have, you explore the routes to find dungeons where you can get rare Pokemon and rare items, and perhaps even fight mini-boss "Totem Pokemon" type battles if you decide not to do Gyms so you are still challenged while searching for Pokemon. Along your journey, you might encounter events with Pokemon thieves, rampaging wild Pokemon, or other storyline/quests, but they're not mandatory- you don't need to do it to get an HM to be able to pass through this checkpoint to do baddie fight #2 to get Key Item X to get past this checkpoint, etc. etc.
One example of this is the Crystal Clear Rom-Hack, where no HMs are needed and you can do each gym in any order. The world itself just needs to be built around this concept with many more dungeons and such.