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  OP, you must understand that most of gen 1 was Dragon Quest inspired.
They simply picked Dracky, and mixed it up a bit merging the legs and the tail into a single concept. Its both legs and tail, no much more though went into it.
The more I play the early DQ games the more I see how all jRPG are just fanboy subproducts of this series. Jap devs change the core of what excited them the most and the rest is just a barely disguised carbon copy of DQ content.