Every creatable thing is described by data, not code. There's a crazy-big database of all the traits everything has. On the graphics side, this game would have been impossible were it not for the flat 3D 'sprites', which enable the minimization of the amount of graphical assets required.

That's only a partial answer.

Jesus did it.

It has something to do with stencil buffers.

BiggerJ, I get that, I'm wondering more how they came up with data and illustrations for basically anything you can think of. It looks like your answer that didn't thread into this confirms my suspicion that it was someone just powering through a dictionary. It just seems like a crazy amount of effort to make sprites, animations, stats, etc for everything and that doesn't even necessarily address the interactions between different items.

Shit, that was supposed to be another reply to the above.

I'm going to have to find my DS to play it.

and Einstein is unreliable in a fight against creatures of mythological preportions.

Are you calling god mythological or kraken? Cuz god is real.