Vepar in all its glory!

Hiya, nice find there.

I feel that the mermaid body type still fits, even if the separation between what is human-like and what is not can't be defined here (there are no halves).
The same could be said about scales... There is nothing easy to define on this design, I am rather lost there, esp' when it comes to that belly demon face... urk.
Vepar has quite a cool seaweed scarf too, by the way.

As for the boss being retooled, I much am in favor of that, since everyone who played or watched the E3 demo knows how to tackle the boss with ease.
It would be quite a shame for that one to be reused the exact same way. I know there is common sense and good reflexes too, but these are normal cases.
First bosses are supposed to be easy in both health and predictability, but there it would mean "here is our throw-away boss, sorry, we didn't find a better part/place to put that one *shrug*".
May as well put such in practice mode (a.k.a Sandbag-kun) or bypass them in that case. Not good at all.

I'd even say, put new fighting patterns on Vepar to throw people off a little.
That should get amusing.

Oh, and you missed the golden opportunity to put a Vepar emote in your post. I shall do it, then.

: So you gamers thought you would get rid of me that easily. We will see about that.

Oh, a boss with a revenge mindset.

Hmm, after all, it's tough to find a home other than the wide sea for this boss after all.
I don't know, I feel that leaving things unchanged in state compared to the demo version feels... not so compelling to me. Even if an added battle would exist.

The idea of a boss wishing to invade a place back while making the protagonist think it's settled for good is something I like but... I think I lived it more than a few times in my gamer's career. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Mega Man franchise had plenty of these moments, the Megaman X series especially (Vile, the X-Hunters, Bit and Byte, Dynamo, High Max, etc. ...Sigma isn't the same as he kept the habit of stupidly waiting for the heroes at the endgame).

The same place with upgraded monsters and maybe different layout isn't so common and I certainly hope that if the basic monsters will not be encountered again, that they have been overfarmed for unique shards and drops, if not bestiary entries.
I have to say I'm annoyed about RPGs having peculiar monsters/special bosses only appearing once and for yours truly to permanently miss adding their data to the log.
Naturally, there is New Game + as a second chance, but not all games have this feature.

By the way, I feel that avoiding tropes and other events/mechanics/ideas/puzzles/music/character designs and personalities/others that have been implemented in other games will be impossible, given the colossal amount of them we got over the decades, but I guess we should reduce them to a minimum. I am still amazed creators still manage to design and implement something original.
(It is the very same for books, movies, TV series, anime and manga and so on)
My standpoint on suggestions is fated to be "Let's not do it this way or people will say, oh isn't it just like (other game), how uninspired".
I don't mind being disliked for this. It's a tough truth.

It's a lure, and Vepar is male. 

I have three main thoughts/observations on this.

1). After seeing the full model, I can see Vepar being a returning/revenge boss later on in the game and utilizing more of their body as an attack or part of the boss arena, And if not, that's okay as long as IGA gets to make the game he wants to make.

But as for what I'd like to see, I'd mix both of Pure Miriam's ideas- have the Galleon Minerva crash into the island Gebel's castle is on, it stays there and becomes part of the large overall game map instead of separate PoR or OoE-style maps, the room where you fought Vepar becomes a SOTN-style transition hallway between areas, but Vepar returns later on in the game in different area, such as a "beached" version on land or a vertical boss fight (like Gergoth in DoS or the giant crab in OoE) where the arena is filling up with water.

2). We finally get an answer on what Vepar's butt looks like, and it is a non-butt because the character model cuts off. I am satisfied with this.

3). Vepar is male? Or possibly female according to the wikipedia article mentioned the lack of pronouns? Do we have non-binary gender representation in Bloodstained? But Vepar as a female boss would've made Bloodstained pass the Bechdel test... I don't know what to believe anymore, other than however you roll, you go, Vepar. You beautiful, aquatic, demonic, eel-fish boss, you.

@goobsausage Another story of butts? Oh man.

...To return to the subject, game companies have pulled the gender-bending card many times.
For example, Square (now SquareEnix) relied on longtime summon Shiva, who's female in the different Final Fantasy games.
Turns out Shiva is male in the Hindu mythology.

Another would be Type Moon, famous for its Fate and Tsukihime series (and related ones), among others.
An obvious case of repeated genderswap on King Arthur, who became Saber (and there are quite a number of variations coming from that). Other characters went through it, too.

I encountered another case when I tried the demo of Chusingura 46+1 (man, that was quite the crazy long introduction story), which is basically about the 46 ronins, all turned female and a male time-traveler.

Now for Vepar to be male or female, got to ask the man himself. I do think he won't give a reply, to keep mystery alive.

 

Mind you. This game is being made by Japanese people. A giant impractical looking weapons (yet practical in function) is a given.

Hey, she just found it laying in the castle. She didn't ask questions.