Dark Moray

"Dark Gaia’s sinister influence joined with the freezing climate of the Holoska tundra to form this beast."

- The description of Dark Moray in Sonic Unleashed (PS3/Xbox 360)

Dark Moray (ダーク・モーレイ) is one of Dark Gaia's Minions, the second nighttime boss and the fourth boss overall to be fought in Sonic Unleashed (fifth if counting the Egg Cauldron from the Xbox 360/PS3 versions). After Dark Gaia broke apart in the beginning of the game, its energy fragments were scattered across the globe. In Holoska, these energies combined with the continent's cold climate to create Dark Moray, who became the guardian of Holoska's Gaia Temple. It is fought after completing Cool Edge Night Act III: The Temple of Ice in the Wii/PS2 version and Cool Edge Night Act I in the Xbox 360/PS3 version.

Physical Appearance
Dark Moray resembles a combination of an eel and a dragon. It has a very large mouth with thin, sharp teeth, though its jaw is a bit crooked. It has two sets of horns on his head; one set of more curved and split horns around his jaw joints and a set of more straight horns on his forehead. It also has a green abscess on its lower belly area, its upper back and on its forehead, which might act as central arteries. In the PS3/Xbox 360 version, it has blue skin, while in the PS2/Wii version, it has black skin with swirly red markings all over his body and cyan outlines.

In the PS3/Xbox 360 version, it has small extensions sticking out from the edge of the platform. These extensions look like miniature clones of Dark Moray itself, but without horns and abscesses, and they have flat teeth instead.

Powers and Abilities
Fitting with his location, Dark Moray possesses the ability to control frost and ice. Rather than controlling these elements directly, however, Dark Moray can take people's negative feelings such as grief and sorrow and molding it into ice and frost, which it can control. It can either shoot out large, slow-moving orbs that will create a small explosion, freezing everything within its radius, or launch an icy breath that will instantly create large spiky ice pillars. When not using its ice-related abilities, it can also fall and spin his body around to throw and damage enemies, though his range is limited to his platform.

With the aid of the platform he is stuck to, Dark Moray can generate a force field around him to protect itself. If Sonic the Werehog tries to make contact with it, he will be instantly frozen and immobilized (and his health will drop slowly). In the PS2/Wii version, this force field is generated using machinery on the platform (which might hint that Dark Moray has the ability to interact with machinery) while in the PS3/Xbox 360 version, it is generated by miniature extensions of itself that crawl out from the edge.

Wii/PS2
At the beginning of the fight, Dark Moray puts up a shield and the player's first task is to remove it. To do this, Sonic must destroy four pairs of shield generators while avoiding Red Nightmares and Deep Nightmares, and later on, its ice balls and Killer Bees. Once the shield goes down, Sonic can jump on it and attack Dark Moray itself. At this point, it will use several attacks, including ice breath, ice balls, and slamming its head down, whirling it in circles. To defeat it, the player must hit him several times, until he spits out three ice canisters. Sonic needs to pick up a canister and throw it at the Dark Moray, and it will become frozen. It can be attacked until it loses some of its life and the player takes down a third of his health bar, causing Sonic to fall off the platform. This must be done three times to defeat him. The time needed to "S" Rank is 5:00 any time greater than 5:00 yields a "C" Rank and no Sun Medal is awarded.

Xbox 360/PS3
At the beginning of the fight, Dark Moray puts up a shield to protect itself. If Sonic touches this shield, he will instantly be frozen and take damage. To remove it, Sonic must defeat smaller versions of Dark Moray using ice canisters (which is recommended to throw with because frozen Dark Moray minions will take more damage; therefore easier to defeat and to prevent it from retreating into the circular platform base), while Dark Moray shoots balls of ice at the player. After the shield is down, Sonic must grab the ledge of the platform, climb up on it, break open one of the ice shells, grab a canister and freeze him. Then the player has to hit one of his three glowing green abscesses to damage it. The first abscess (on its belly) is the easiest to hit. The second abscess (on its back) requires Sonic to attack it from mid-air. The third abscess (on its forehead) is a little harder, as Sonic must wait for it to slam its head down on the platform before freezing itself so the player can hit the back of his head. After destroying one of the abscesses, Sonic will be forced out of the arena while the shield is put back up, meaning the player has to repeat the above mentioned process two more times. After destroying all of its abscesses, Dark Moray is defeated.

Trivia

 * The miniature eels that appear in this battle are very similar to the Dark Eels.
 * In a way, the Dark Moray is similar to Chaos 6 from Sonic Adventure in the sense that, in both boss battles, the player throws icy containers at the boss to freeze it.
 * It is possible to attack the miniature eels without using the canisters, but doing so is very difficult and the eels may damage the player and can quickly retreat into the circular platform base.
 * The easiest way to to destroy them without damages is using the Spinning Needle Attack.
 * In the Wii/PS2 version, Dark Moray emits green blood whenever one of his abscesses is destroyed. This makes him the only boss in Sonic Unleashed to only bleed in one version of the game.