We're still not done with the V-tamer manga and its mutant weirdos! Arkadimon is an artificial digimon that gets a lot of build-up, and when it at last hatches from its digi-egg, even this little bug-alien baby stage is capable of killing a Piedmon in a single strike! A toothy mouth can split open vertically along it back, and a single insect-like limb can emerge from the orifice to absorb an opponent's data.

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Unlike any other digimon, every evolution of Arkadimon is still named Arkadimon, for some reason, but I guess that in itself is pretty ominous. Most digimon are more or less "different characters" when they evolve, in a weird way, but I guess Arkadimon is truly the same being with different bodies.

There's a nice visual "wrongness" to this digimon, like you can tell by looking that it's supposed to be something exceptionally deadly and a bit unnatural even for this setting, in kind of the same way that Mewtwo immediately looks like a genetic experiment among other Pokemon.

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The adult level continues to just look like a very powerful genetic abomination, the kind of thing that might have been an alternate end boss in a game like Parasite Eve. The long arms and huge hands are even scarier without claws on them, though apparently what they do is grab you tightly while those purple "tendrils" on the forearms shoot out and impale you to death. Wow. That is pretty terrifying! The dog-like head with the huge, slitlike third eye is just about the most unsettling head they could have put on this particular body, and the scrappy wing things, more like tufts of gross hair, give it a sort of vestigial angel vibe.

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Perfect Arkadimon is actually a little less interesting to me than the weird, naked dog thing it once was, taking on a burly demon-guy sort of shape, but the tentacle fingers are at least interesting. Its descriptions say that its main attack "opens the mouth on its chest," but I have no idea what that looks like.

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The Ultimate stage is unfortunately more of the same, visually just a very upgraded and slightly scarier version of the Perfect stage. This one DOES look more like it has a mouth in its chest, but it's not the alien monster maw that would have better suited this line. It does appar to be mostly tentacles inside that armor, and those seem to be eyes on its arms and legs, so props for all that at least.

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Fortunately, this line spikes straight back up in quality with its Super Ultimate stage, now an absolutely GARGANTUAN collection of tentacles held together by an only semi-humanoid arrangement of armor, lacking complete arms or legs. The arms it does have are even more explicitly its eyes, and that tiny, menacing robot-bug head has a classic Anime Big Bad feel to it. Take one look at this design and you already know it's a final boss.

Digimon has, perhaps, had so many End-Of-The-World interdimensional supermutant villains that they really have lost all meaning, but it's a routine through which they've continuously offered up some of their coolest and scariest monster designs.

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