HOW COOL IS THIS LITTLE CREEP!?! Its flat, two dimensional body is like an elongated, living shadow with a flame-like outline, and actually reminds me a lot of some kind of flatworm. Its eerie eyes are situated in the two forks of its head, it has a nasty little toothy mouth and it has cool, twiggy little arms like chicken claws - all superb design choices! This is another that would be an ideal "child stage" Digimon in my book, but there's a catch here I have some mixed feelings about: this isn't an unevolved form, child level or otherwise, but what's known as the "scatter mode" of this Digimon, which can split apart into a whole horde of these nasty little shades! So what does the whole thing look like, then?

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The true "Eyesmon" is an Adult-stage Digimon that I find just as lovable as its scatter mode depending on how you visually interpret it. Now completely coated in those delightfully creepy eyes, its oversized head now forms a long, sharply pointed muzzle with a mouth full of needly little teeth that many interpret as dog-like, but it puts me a bit more in mind of an opossum, to be honest. I love how the eyes on its face are peeling away in rows of leafy flaps, and I especially love how the mammalian "ears" in its silhouette are just an especially large, stalked pair of vertically-oriented eyes, and that's what I mean about the "visual interpretation" thing, because you can see this creature as a many-eyed shadowy demon with an extra pair of eyes for ears, or you can take those as its "main" eyes and have yourself a much wackier, more maniacal, almost Burtonesque shadow-slug-worm I'm an even bigger fan of.

What some have also noted, however, is how much this creature has in common with the more obscure Shademon, even having almost the same style of eyes. If Shademon were a Perfect level Digimon, you would expect Eyesmon to be its official Adult stage, but both are Adult, and Shademon remains a sort of just quasi-canon manga addition, so it feels rather more like Eyesmon is a reimagining and "canonization" of Shademon.

What's rather unexpected is that Eyesmon was introduced in the anime as an Adult stage for the classic Perfect-level Digimon, Orochimon. An eye-themed shadow creature thus evolves into a many-headed cybernetic snake, and it's cool, but not all that aesthetically thematic. You may know however that Orochimon is an ancient, legendary evil digimon named after a similarly ancient, legendary and evil many-headed serpent in Japanese folklore.

As a Perfect stage, Orochimon still has room for a higher evolution, and it has been given just about the only one that would make sense for an almost-godly demonic serpent.

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Switching nationality from Japan to Scandinavia, Orochimon now officially evolves into Nidhoggmon, named after the Norse figure that gnaws the roots of Yggdrasil, the world tree, and it is an appropriately EPIC creature design!

In Digimon's interpretation, the great serpent itself looks twined together from grey, gnarled tree roots, fiery energy glowing between the twisted branches like demonic eyes, though the monster's actual beady red eyes are in a spider-like row along its skull and grotesquely dotting its fat, purple tongue. Its four wings, glowing with more heat, look equally like massive fish fins and insect-like wings, and while it does have snake-like fangs, its big wide mouth and boomerang-shaped skull look a very great deal more amphibian than reptilian; a cross between a modern giant salamander and diplocaulus!

Nidhoggmon's lore is fairly straightforward; it's just a very big, very destructive eating machine, absorbing everything in its path and burning it up into energy that can cause it to overheat, which also feels like a reference to Godzilla's radioactive properties, and there's definitely some zilla in the design's overall feel! But you know what's GREAT about this Digimon's existence??

It's just what we were saying earlier about how these new Digimon hypothetically "fill in the gaps" of so many other Digimon lines. Nidhoggmon's alien appearance and apocalyptic god-beast themes actually had me thinking at first sight that it would make the perfect Ultimate for Cthulhu-based Dagomon, and I now also realize that I spoke too soon about Toropiamon, because while Nidhoggmon isn't extremely plant-like, a root-like tree-gnawing snake does feel like a solid ending note for any monstrous botanical line!

This also makes Nidhoggmon an excellent choice for the perfect-level Petaldramon, and the transition even visually works quite well in my opinion. The Digimon adventure reboot, which introduced Nidhoggmon and ties in with the Pendulum Z, even brings back Petaldramon as a legendary forest guardian, and I could easily see Nidhoggmon as its sort of "dark" or "undead" evolution, now representing a forest that's been razed to the ground!

...Which, also ties Nidhoggmon in with another Digimon I'll be reviewing soon.

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