Revisiting VOLFOSS...PART 2!!!

Written by Jonathan Wojcik, scans provided by Gelgelada

So you've hopefully seen part one, and maybe you think you've already picked out some favorites to do the shipping of yourselves with on your interblogs, but NOT SO FAST PAL! Don't go rushing into anything when you haven't even seen some of these other depraved freaks!


SHURIN: every Volfoss monster is goth as hell, but Shurin is goth as hell as hell. A corpse-blue bald man stapled together all the way up his front, his face hidden completely by black wrappings and these horned, spiny, black accordian things encasing his arms like the sleeves of an excessively bulky leather jacket, and then instead of hands, he has multiple sword and knifelike blades dangling off metal rings, like giant deadly keychains, I guess?? The tight leather pants really bring it all together.

BEAT ROCK: I get an impression this guy and Shurin are definitely associated, though Beatrock is greener, beefer, more hunched over, and it's only his "hands" that are stapled together, though they're basically just huge fused fist-shaped lumps of flesh stapled into one giant bludgeon! Love his little face, too, noseless and lipless with so many long, thin teeth. Even weirder than his omnifist are all those tiny human skulls, though, some of them on the ends of metal bars that protrude from his flesh, some of them embedded in the flesh itself, or maybe they can extend and retract on bars of their own? What in the WORLD would that be for.


CHAINED: I know what you're thinking, that maybe this guy counts as even more goth, but I feel like he's way more "heavy metal," and it's not exactly the same thing! This pale white hyper-muscular dude has all his limbs tightly wrapped up in chains from the chest on down, ending in a spiked mace, but he's also got huge metal spikes built into his bulging upper torso to essentially turn his entire body into a mace! The chains for hair are also a great touch, and the strange band of nails hiding his mouth.

IDEA: splendidly creepy! A thin, nude humanoid with way too many fingers and at least six heads, its entire body translucent white with starkly visible red veins. There's also only one horrible, lidless red eyes and swollen red mouth per veiny head, not always aligned like the facial features of a human, and almost every head has a little tongue-like tentacle sticking out the top!

There's a "genre" of monster this design reminds me of, but it's hard to put into words, except this kind of pale veiny mutant is often associated with some kind of "accelerated evolution" experiment, or an attempt to create some "higher being" that goes awry.



FISHBONE: Love the idea of such a scary, dignified looking fiend who's just named "Fishbone." He's entirely black with cloak or dress all the way to the ground, except the glowing green upper half of his skull, and a matching glow-in-the-dark, biomechanical left arm that, indeed, has long spiny "ribs" like a fish skeleton.

CULDLA: This pale shirtless guys looks almost totally human, with a gloomy, sunken face, but his arms are encased in a couple of tremendous, thick greyish arthropod limbs that connect behind his back, basically a bunch of thorny beetle chitin, and I love the overall shape of these limbs; kind of like the claw of a mantis if most of the segments were a whole lot thicker and broader, more like a mole cricket's shoveling limbs, except for the long thin claw at the end of each. What would even BE this guy's story? Just a guy who has weird bug arms? Where did he get them and why?



BREAKER: Another This veiny, muscular, pumpkin-orange figure has shards of metal wrapped around what's evidently a fairly long neck, with his little orange skull head just barely peeking out the top. More shards encrust his lower arms, forming a clawed hand and a bludgeoning weapon, and then he's just got all these triangular shards stabbed into his flesh at random. Black leather shorts, too! I like his long two-toed feet, too, a little more alien than even the rest of him.

RIACH: This is...a chair? Is that what we're looking at? A finely detailed, sort of biomechanical, sort of insectoid hair with lots of curly spines, membranous chitin stretched across its purple cushions, legs and arms all ending in ornate spikes and some kind of little cyborg skull set into the back. Was someone so proud of their awesome furniture they decided to be furniture?



COFFIN JACK: Awesome. Coffin Jack is some kind of mutant zombie contained within a purple coffin, his torso, left arm and head completely hidden from us. But his rotten knife-wielding right arm, black leather-clad right leg and insect-like left leg are busting out of it, along with a weird tangle of bright green guts and spindly, crablike legs. Creatures with secret faces are always fun, especially when what we can see is this weird. Is his head also half-humanoid, half-arthropod, or something even stranger?

BEKS: Nirasawa really loved this body type, didn't he? Huge hulking back and shoulders, little tiny head in the front and long, thin limbs. This one is made entire of metal scraps bolted together, a crudely humanoid chunk of trash and rubble with an eyeless junk-metal head.



CHOPPED: Simple but NASTY! Basically just a naked humanoid figure that's been literally chopped up into pieces from head to toe, but they've been loosely and not-quite-correctly rearranged back into their original shape, lopsided and spurting blood.

PLAGUE: Hilarious. This guy is a humanoid, albino rat with big rabbit-like ears, a scythe blade on the end of his tail, a red jacket and a huge HUGE red top hat, basically a rat mad hatter!



SPLIT:This one's a muscular green ghoul that's been split down the middle, but only stitched back together from its head to its chest, so most of its torso is split wide apart, basically making its legs look even longer.

HOCHKISS: A beautifully scaly blue, black and purple insect-man, reminiscent of some of Nirasawa's designs for Kamen Rider monsters! The face tapers into a sharp proboscis that would obviously suck blood, and it walks around upside-down on its hands because its legs form this huge, elaborate set of spiny black graspers, like a massive pair of barbed tongs! I'm not sure where the "Hoch" comes from, but the "kiss" together with the sharp rostrum put me in mind of a Kissing Bug, the largest of all bloodsucking insects.



RIGHTAM: This Frankensteinian weirdo has been rearranged so his head is attached where a left arm should be. It's a pretty cool head, too; no nose, ears or hair, just drippy green flesh from its little red eyes on down, kinda swamp-thing style. Its only actual arm is of course ridiculously large and exaggerated, its bulging popeye-like forearm wrapped in bandages and covered in metal spikes.

SLOTH: This is one of my favorites, a really nasty looking mutant ghoul with mottled, blotchy green-brown skin, real "mossy" looking, a decrepit little noseless yellow skull-hed with long, pale hair, and arms that flare into huge, fleshy hooks with curled, black talons. It really does evoke a sloth, albeit everything that should be "creepy" about the beloved animals, and I love its asymmetrical eyes; both have glowing green pupils, but one has a huge black surrounding eyeball. Love the random strands of long white hair scattered around it, too, and its tail that kind of looks more like a long, curly, knobbly finger. Just gorgeous!



GUKYON: Another VERY "alien" looking creature! Kind of a thin, reptilian demon from the waist down, with clawed feet and long, bony spikes on both its knees and its crotch, but from the waist up it's this bulbous, blobby, armless and wrinkled mass, almost like a retracted leech, with a fantastically exaggerated set of teeth! They're so long that from a distance they look like a huge tuft of bladed grass bursting from its relatively small mouth. They're still set in pinkish gums, though, which are surrounded by thin purple lips, just barely human-like. This design would kick ass in any color scheme, but it's uniformly dark purple with all the teeth, claws and spines being bright radioactive green!

OBLOGG: Is this the NASTIEST in the game?! This figure seems to be formed entirely from veiny intestine-like guts with multiple ghoulish, vertical mouths between slimy "lips" of viscera, all held together by a few red leather straps. It has humanoid legs in matching red pants and also a set of arms, but all we see of the left arm are the fingers peeling open one of its big mouths. The right arm is more or less humanlike, but the thumb has a crescent talon on it long enough to encircle the other fingers...a lot of very strange details.



ALACURA: A nude woman with elongated limbs and four arms, her entire body a pale creamy white with bloody red blotches, arms ending in long spindly two-fingered hands, and two tassles of long red flesh instead of hair, covering all but half of her face. I can't even begin to guess the theme or concept here, she feels like another genetic experiment from the fairy-tale world.

DARK HORSE: Definitely one of the coolest equines I've ever seen, it's a pitch black monstrous horse that stands hunched on its back legs, and instead of its front legs it has eight short, pale skeletal fingers that wrap around its upper torso like ribs, then its horsey head is earless, with glowing red eyes radially encircling it, and its mouth is a fanged tube like some demonic seahorse!



IRON MEIDEN: are these two volfoss reviews now the most explicit nudity ever on this site? I'm not sure anymore. I remember when I was young enough that I thought a drawing of naked boobies was super scandalous to look at but nowadays everyone of all ages is on all of the social media and running across nakeder artwork no matter what, so I'm pretty sure none of you care. Besides, you technically can't see nipples if they're covered over by embedded metal skulls, and her pants are only PARTIALLY coming off. The design obviously draws way more attention to the fact that she carries a big metal iron maiden around with her, sort of forming her arms but with long spines skewering her whole body. Her little smirk says that she not only doesn't care, but she thinks this is the height of fashion.

POISONA: And, see, there's technically no naked nipples when they're a pair of long venomous barbs, right? This other naked lady monster has these amazing spiny red boots and gloves that become chitinous hands with ultra-long fingers, and similarly biological looking boots that extend into looong crescent toes she kind of stands on like a rocking chair. I think the coolest thing about her design, though, is her skin pattern; a minty green with blobby patches of purple and orange, kind of reminding me of mold or a petri dish. It definitely communicates "poisonousness," even if all the spines and claws more strongly suggest she injects venom. Or does she? Are her sharp bits actually, genuinely nonvenomous and you'll just die if you get any of her skin secretions in your mouth, like an arrow frog? Then again, there are select animals (even including a frog!) that are both venomous and poisonous.



CHAMELEON: While undeniably very cool, this is by far the most ordinary design of any Volfoss monster, literally a black ninja with red gloves and a red mask. Actually, the head looks a lot like Deadpool, if the front of Deadpool's mask extended into a long dangling red rectangle of fabric.

ANG: LOVABLE! Ang is a great big chunky purple froglike monster whose huge, gaping mouth contains a ton of little teeth in its pale green gums and a bunch of glassy eyeballs covering its intensely slime-green, drippy tongue! There's also a set of teeth in the back of the throat, little whispy feelers on the sides of the head - kind of like axolotl gills - and a single, adorable purple eyestalk attached to the back of the skull! The pudgy roundish hands and toes are also really cute, like the feet of a giant salamander. There's so much whimsical personality to this one! Even some of the eyeballs on the tongue have kind of a mischievous look.



SIDEDOWN: This is just an orange-skinned naked guy crab-waking towards us, with long lethal looking spikes on his albows, feet and all over his stomach. The head is covered over with a black mask that has a novel enough design; an identical orange "smile" both above and below the eyes, so the face looks more or less the same when flipped around.

ZZAP!: WHAT is this weirdo!? A slimy, wrinkly green critter with a big, spiky red ball protruding from the flesh of its swollen torso, which I'm going to guess is electrified or something. He's got smaller versions of this orb erupting from his elbows, knees, the ends of his feet (instead of having any toes), the end of his whiplike tail, and the tip of his delightfully goofy head, his entire head basically just a tapering green stalk with a pair of little eyes around the base. The way his wrinkled flesh is stretching open around the spiky spheres is quite grotesque, and I'm intrigued by the inorganic look of the spheres, too, more like rubber toys than something biological.




Voco:

Presented all alone in the book, rather than paired with another monster, so I assume there's something special about voco? They're a huge corpulent green-tinged ghoul, reminiscent of something from Warhammer's Nurgle armies, with an elaborate cenobite-like black leather outfit; lots of gratuitous straps and spikes and metal bolts. Voco carries baskets full of skulls on their back, and if those are human-sized skulls, Voco would be more than a hundred feet tall, but somehow also hovering above the ground with footless, metal spikes for legs.




Uchida:

I've always been intrigued by this one, included in the book with unique characters rather than monster types. Uchida seems to be a lawyer with his nice black suit and his briefcase, but his hands and head are big tumorous masses of greenish gooey flesh and purple brain tissue, with only one little eye in his lopsided cyst of a head.




Wall Knight:

A very unique design for a "knight!" The head and arms of the bulky armor are long, tapering and segmented, which fit together into one big impenetrable lump of metal scals! What's really interesting however are the number and arrangement of slots on the head; if those match up with the location of eyes, then this creature has a segmented worm-like head with eyes all the way up its length!




Dizy:

This is such an ominous and frightening beast, a headless and faceless blob of veiny, lumpy flesh with an unpleasantly sucked-in, knotlike center where its tissues look pinker and more inflamed. Its massively blubbery arms and legs have almost crocodilian scales, its hands are just clots of random talons and its feet are like cracked, broken-off bony hooves. Why is its name just "Dizy!?" Is it dizzy!? I don't want this to be dizzy. This is one of the worst things to be dizzy.



SYMPHONY: This might be one of the coolest, strangest and most otherworldly designs in the game! This purple entity consists of a chunky torso made from armored plates and rows of thin bones, really Gigeresque, with two skeletal limbs clutching (or fused to?) the sides of its head, which is sort of this eyeless, golden, elongated bird skull. Where its legs would be are six tiny little arthropod legs, and then this really long, curved, black bone-like stalk. On the end of this is a large, bony stinger with more of its own little crabby legs and a slimy orange sac we can ASSUME is full of venom.

This was genuinely hard to describe and I still know I didn't get it perfectly right. More importantly, why is it called "Symphony" but why do I understand anyway? Like, I don't know in what way this monster is musical, but somehow, it gives me a musical impression.

REQUIEM: Obviously a counterpart to Symphony, Requiem is a more reptilian, green-blue chitin-plated figure with long, clawed toes, hunched over with a pale, spiny eyeless little skull. Its arms, too, are grasping its own face, covering any chin and mouth it might have. Its bulging, prickly, armor plated back has a pair of bright orange sacs on the sides, like those venom glands, encased in a chitinous and thorny webbing, and the top of its hump tapers up into a long, gnarled, whispy spine.



CASE: Obviously "case" in the sense of "medical case!" An emaciated figured completely wrapped in tattered red bandages, except for the white-bandaged head with bloodstains only where the eyes would be. There are hypodermic needles left sticking out of the shoulders, and the thin mechanical arms end in hi-tech giant-size needles, more green fluid in their glass tubes and attached plastic hoses. Beautifully threatening, especially the very, very long legs, awkwardly bent knees-inward for a nice, tortured, shambling corpse-walk!

MATRONNA: Another medical fiend! Matronna is a sinister "sexy nurse" with bone-white skin and an outfit of entirely pink latex, ultra-long red nails on one hand and syringes forming the fingers of the other. Her pink latex nurse hat hides her face from the nose up, she carries a huge giant syringe with her on a strap - like it's just her version of a purse, almost. My favorite detail, however, is the little red medical journal carried under her arm. It's such a jarringly normal detail. I think I trust her. She wouldn't hang onto that if she wasn't serious about medicine, right?!

I didn't originally plan this to be the very last true Halloween post of the year; I still had a lot of article ideas I didn't quite get around to, and I still don't know what 2023 holds. All my work on "normal" articles pretty much got swallowed up into the Movie Monsters feature!



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