FF7 : monster damage drops dramatically after you leave Midgar?

[Question]

Up till the Shinra Headquarters, monster damage is actually decent and a potential threat to the party. Soldier 3rd class was hitting me for about 80 damage per flying sickle which is pretty significant given that your characters have about 500 hp at the time.

Right after leaving Midgar though, monster damage drops dramatically to the point where they dont pose any threat at all to your party barring some special encounters like the Midgar Zolom. Mandragora do less than 20 damage to chaacters in the front row for example, and your defense hasn't increased much since the Shinra HQ portion of the game (plus, defense only reduces damage via a % so a few points of defense doesnt matter much anyway).

Part of the problem seems to be that some monsters have suspiciously low levels for that portion of the game (kalm fangs and mandragora are both level 10, while the other monsters are about level 14 and the party is probably at least level 15 by now). But it seems like a rather strange decision to have monsters so much weaker after the early portion of the game, rather than the reverse.

 

[DLPB_]

I think they just ran out of time. Other parts of the game bear out that they were unfinished.

 

[Question]

It looks like monster magical attacks do decent damage, but anything physical seems to do very little damage.

Do monsters use a different physical damage formulae? Im looking at jenova-birth in the proud clod editor, and the damage isnt matching up with what its doing in game. It's level 25 with a strength of 38 which gives it a base damage of about 96. All of its attacks are listed as having an attack strength of 48, so they should all do 48/16 * 96 = 288 damage or so.

But tail laser only does about 110 damage or so to my characters, and my DEF can't reduce it by more than 50%. Its not a range attack, and its listed as a "starts as multiple" attack so it shouldnt suffer any damage penalties for attacking more than one character at once. Either proud clod isnt showing the correct stats, or there are some other modifiers in play that its not showing.

The only way those numbes make sense would be if Jenova-birth uses it's "back attack" value of 16 instead of its strength value of 38, but that doesnt make sense because its not a back attack fight....

Edit : Interestingly, Jenova-birth's standard laser attack does about 175 damage to characters in the front row and half that to characters in the backrow, even though it is NOT listed as a short range attack and should not be affected by the row modifiers...the tail laser attack also suffers a half damage penalty vs characters in the back row, and it does suffer the 1/3rd damage penalty you get when you linked an all materia to single target magic materia. But the attack is flagged as "start as multiple" so it shouldnt be getting a damage penalty for that...

 

[Bosola]

FFVII's monsters are probably the weakest element of its design. Now, I have an interest in saying that - I've worked on a mod for several years (on and off) that drastically modifies enemy stats and formations - but the world map encounters are the most clearly insipid of the bunch. Enemies are slow, hit for trivial amounts of damage, rarely inflict status effects and are essentially interchangeable. Their graphic design is vibrant and varied, but that becomes a problem in itself when that creature design itself is so random and arbitrary.

Enemies are rarely explained or have much to do with their surroundings. They generally do not follow any consistent rules for status or elemental vulnerabilities, and their statistics are mostly interchangeable. We can all remember what a Zuu looked like, or a Yin-Yang, or even a Vlakorados, but can you remember what their attacks were? Any special tactics they demanded? Even the bosses were mostly copy-pastes of each other with incremental stat raises.

Edit : Interestingly, Jenova-birth's standard laser attack does about 175 damage to characters in the front row and half that to characters in the backrow, even though it is NOT listed as a short range attack and should not be affected by the row modifiers

All enemy attacks are treated as short-range. See here: https://www.ff7catalog.com/threads/10206/