REVISITING DEMON'S CREST
Written by Jonathan Wojcik
August 1st (HALLOWEEN TIME), 2026
IMAGES COURTESY THE VIDEO GAME ART ARCHIVE!
Demon's Crest was a Super Nintendo game whose existence completely passed me by when I was a child, which still makes me feel a bit robbed, but there was certainly something special to discovering it through the early-2000's internet scene. Archives of video game enemies were the very first thing I ever even tried to look up on the internet, so I was fairly thrilled to discover I could play almost any classic game on my own computer, screenshot anything I wanted and make my own such galleries.
Thus, my Demon's Crest Sprite Gallery became one of the first few pages in bogleech.com's history, and playing through the game just to gather all its images is still one of my fonder memories of building this website.
But in the 2020's, I would finally encounter something "new" from the title: official ART for each and every enemy creature in the game, including enemy names, scanned to the internet for the very first time courtesy THE VIDEO GAME ART ARCHIVE, a massive ongoing project you can also support on their patreon!
So, over twenty years after I first reviewed one of my all-time favorite video game bestiaries, I now get to do so from an entirely new perspective...
DEMGOOSE
..."Demgoose?!" Already these new-to-me names are off to an EXQUISITE start! What the hell is a Demgoose?! What does that MEAN?! Well, apparently, it's what the demon world calls these giant stone ogre faces that float around and vomit spiky spheres at intruders. Their organic eyes and tongues would indicate that only their outer skin is made of rock, and the artwork even shows the projectile covered in spit. But are they an "evolved" creature of the demon world, or an animate construct? The platform on top of their heads certainly looks artificial, but maybe that's something added on to "domesticated" or "employed" Demgoose? I'm just not sure why something assigned to keep out intruders would also be provided a convenient means of carrying intruders over otherwise impassable chasms. Kinda seems like you'd be better protected without any Demgeese at all.
DOLYN
I kinda thought this was more like an "obstacle" or "trap," since it looks like only a stone carving of two muscular gargoyles holding up a burning brazier, but they do spit little fireballs from their mouths if I recall correctly, and they've got a name, so I guess they're at least as alive as Demgeese! The two figures are also much, much cooler looking than I ever realized. They seem like more generic humanoids with snarling monster faces in the pixel sprite, but they're apparently meant to have a much more alien-looking appearance. The long, knobbly, hunched over necks, large glaring pupil-less eyes and four-fanged jaws feel a lot like they'd be knockoff xenomorphs in a direct-to-video horror movie.
BAT
Alright, it's just a bat, but I didn't want to OPEN on just a bat, even if it's only here for completion's sake. It's a cute one though, right? Classic red-winged "Dracula Castle" sort of bat.
GULLTAV
These delightfully annoying little hunch-backed ghouls not only attack with axes, but leap around like maniacs when you get too close. For some reason, they used to give me the impression of an almost bird-like face from the sprites, and I was sure they had both pointed ears and drooping "hair," but apparently they're supposed to be completely bald, with one-horned skull-like faces?! Actually, no, that sprite DEFINITELY has pointy ears, right? But I think what I took to be hair was just the shadow of Gulltav's shirt collar.
MUNGLE
MUNGLES are goat-horned green goblins who do nothing but stand in place on heaps of skulls, which they throw. Is that a job they're assigned, or do they just like doing it? In either case, they're dedicated enough that they don't do anything else to defend themselves or flee. You live by the sword you die by the sword, I guess! The sprite always made them look nervous and sad, kind of just resigned to their lot in life, but the art paints an entirely new picture of the Mungle as a total freak so RABID about skull-throwing that it just wouldn't even mentally register anything else. Throwing that skull is that thing's WORLD. Look at that face.
RORM
Simple, wispy white ghosts with hollow dark eye sockets and moaning mouths. Eerily off-human in the sprite, but with more menacing skull-like features and jagged teeth in the art.
SHADO
Rising out of the ground like zombies, these white-robed figures bear an unfortunate resemblance to a North American hate group. There does seem to be a common presumption in japan that these pointy white hoods are connected to "demon worship" or "the occult," so here it was probably just appropriated to look more "creepy" on these ghouls, who rise from the ground like zombies and appear to have rotten, blue-tinged flesh.
REMWRAITH
I can't begin to guess what these are actually supposed to be. They hover around and slam downward in an attempt to crush you, so they just kind of come across as gravity-defying rock formations, but I guess they DO move with apparent intelligence, and it turns out they're some sort of entity called a "Remwraith!"
Multiple, humanoid skeletons embedded in the same jagged chunk of translucent, yellow-brown rock, almost like fossilized amber. I found them forgettable back in the day, but now I'm fairly intrigued.
COLM
The Colm is only visible as a "head" that protrudes from stone walls, assuming there's actually any more of it at all. Maybe it's like a goose barnacle, just glued to a surface by its "stem?" What we can see is a sort of eel-like or lizardish head and neck with a covering of interlocking armor plates, its face basically a bare skull with serrated edges for teeth, but there's also bright pink flesh visible between the seams, and it attacks by abruptly protruding a long, pointed, dripping pink tongue! Or is that actually just the "real body," inside a jointed shell???
DRAGKYTE
Very cool looking enemies, basically like little vulture-size dragons with wings, but no legs, and completely decayed all over. Their heads, necks, tails, and wing bones are fully skeletal, with tattered red wing membranes and really rancid looking brown flesh. As they fly, they drop little pellets of rotten goo, which in the game kind of comes across like they're just pooping basically, but the art makes clear that they're raining putrescence from their open rib cage.That doesn't mean it's not still poop, to be honest.
FLYING ZOMBIE
Exactly what they sound like; humanoid corpses that float through the air. Their legs are gone, as is most of their skin from the chest down, leaving their guts to dangle loose in a hideously gooey clump! They have the added gimmick of wearing knight armor, which you have to destroy first. I love the whole visual idea of a legless metal suit flying around with its intestines hanging out.
GREMLIN
Straight up just an evil clown. Barely even monster-like, passable as just a really nasty regular guy who lives in the demon world, wears a jester's costume and has access to dark magic. Okay, I guess that's not a regular guy, but you know what I mean. BIOLOGICALLY a regular guy. It never would have crossed my mind this was a "gremlin" in this setting.
WORN
A scaly blue fish with a ghastly skull-like face. I'm a big fan of what I now know is called a WORN, but there's tragically very little else I can think of to say about it, except that this exact sort of skull face is remarkably common in this world.
OLVA
So now we have a fish *person,* which is always a treat. Olva is a pretty typical specimen of such, a scaly green guy with orange fins and a fishy face. Fish people were actually my very favorite of all monster archetypes when I was between six and eight years old. Still high on my list, but for a couple years I was OBSESSED. In first grade I liked to "pretend" I was a spooky weirdo and tell other children that when I grew up, my dream would be to "make" a "fish man." I remember them asking what I meant by that, but I hadn't really thought that far.There's still time. They're doing pretty crazy stuff with 3d printing lately.
PERIMAIL
There's a lot of personality in this one, just a giant crossbow manned by two adorable little green goblins! They even visibly sweat and freak out a little as they adorably rush to reload. The artwork makes them look a little more like SAIBAMEN. You know, the greatest of all Dragonball continuity characters??
EYEBAT
Everybody loves an eyeball bat creature! You can never go wrong! My favorite kind of eyeball bat is just wings attached directly to a naked eyeball, but I do like the scaly flesh of this one, and the three clawed fingers gripping either corner of the eye, like a pair of hands that evolved into a secondary eyelid, or something.
FIRE EATER
These floating ghosts drift around a maze beneath a graveyard and literally just....eat fire. They head toward the lanterns you depend on to light the area and snuff them right out! They're probably one of the coolest enemy designs in the game, too. Their oversized skull heads are just a little elongated, xenomorph-esque, with eye sockets at the front and a big, wide set of jaws like a deep sea fish! The art is actually spot-on to what I'd expect, and I love the pose its in, gleefully slobbering as it eyes, presumably, its next meal. 
IRON MAIDEN
The "Iron Maiden" itself isn't really the enemy here, exactly, but opens to release an extremely mangled, rotten humanoid monster-corpse. Like the Flying Zombies, they're legless and their guts hang out, but these have much saggier, looser flesh and have to drag themselves on the ground. They also have a spitting attack, with a bit of a throat sack that puffs up before hocking their death-phlegm. Delightful! Both the art and the sprite communicate so much misery on these poor things.
MELTED IRON
These are quite creepy looking little skulls, perpetually burning, that can stretch up on a loooooong retractable neck, which is just about the creepiest thing a bodiless head or skull can do. It wasn't until seeing the official art, however, that I ever realized these are *cyclops* skulls, and then there's that name. Just what on Earth is implied by calling these things "Melted Iron?!" Are they made of metal?!
HAND
One of the weirdest and most unsettling inhabitants of the whole demon realm! Encountered in the graveyard, they appear in-game to just be the half-skinless, unnaturally stretchy arms of buried corpses. If they manage to pull you down, a single ghoulish head will emerge from the soil on a similarly stretchy, skinless neck, and start gnawing on you! I always thought this was cool, creepy and interesting enough, but the artwork really seems to imply that this is all ONE monster, rather than a bunch of bodies. One stretchy, many-limbed, burrowing undead horror, not unlike Hyrule's notorious Dead Hand! AWESOME. It even occurs to me now that it functions the exact same way, and might very well be an intentional reference, or perhaps it just shared a designer? If I came up with this concept, I couldn't resist using it more than once either.
VARRANT
Pretty cool sounding name for what's little more than a creeping mass of tar-like black sludge, and can be lit on fire! The art shows there are lots of bones and skulls floating inside, like any proper "slime" or "blob" style monster.
STABROTH
Another cool name! A STABROTH is just a roundish, eyeless little ball of a creature with a gaping, many-fanged maw, like the head of a piranha plant, and four hairy, spidery legs ending in knife-like blades. Simple and straight to the point! Just a skittering, snappy mouth! One that's also mostly encountered running up and down vertical walls.
WLKA
Only encountered slithering along tree branches, the WLKA is a short-bodied worm covered in thick, greenish shaggy fur, actually a lot like a sloth's fur from the look of it, with a gaping, lipless, toothy mouth in front. The sprite also makes it look like it has a single cyclops eye above the jaws, but in the artwork, there's just a pitch black recess beneath the brow ridge of a warty forehead, so it's hard to say how many eyes are in there, if any at all! Its body also tapers to a complete point in the artwork, like a slug, but it has a blunter posterior in the game, more like a woolly caterpillar.
SYARD
An *awesome* multi-purpose water enemy, combining SO MANY things that I love into one perfect package! It's a sessile, barrel-shaped creature, like a sea anemone, but with a ring of long fangs or claws at the top instead of tentacles, and many segmented, reddish siphon-like tubes of various sizes bursting from between the fleshy bars of its body walls. The largest siphon spits forth thorny wads of jelly that seem to be some other organism, while the top of the thing hurls tiny leeches into the air! I obviously already loved everything about this, but the artwork still manages to make Syard TWICE as wonderful, because we can now see there's a giant veiny EYEBALL on top, between all the teeth, and the leeches explode right out of the pupil! Why, that's the best thing either leeches OR eyeballs could have done! I'd take a million of these! I'd put them everywhere!
SHEIBRAH
One of the last non-bosses we're looking at is a brand new favorite. Fool that I was, I assumed these were just something like "animate tree roots," since they just look like pointed ropes that reach out of the ground, and appear anchored to one spot. Now, at long last, I have the context to understand that these are actually long, ropy, veiny worm-creatures with bird beaks, which is awesome, and the fact that they're anchored to one spot makes them all the more fascinating, like some sort of terrestrial carnivorous tube-worm!
ARMA
So now we're into the bosses, and these I'll also go through building up to my top favorites. Arma is a jerk you fight near the start of the game, and seems to be an old rival of yours, a demon with birdlike wings and a vaguely batlike head. I love his accusatory pose in the art, which definitely captures the personality I would have imagined him with.
PHALANX
This guy is the main villain, but not all that memorable if we're being honest. His design is a typical gargoyle in every way; a grey, clawed humanoid with reptilian jaws and goat horns. I do like that he has pterosaur-style wings, each attached to just one elongated phalange, and the way he's mostly shadowed in his artwork is cool, but he's otherwise a by-the-numbers antagonist who wants to take over the world and stuff.
ULTIMATE PHALANX
The big bad guy is more interesting when he enters a secondary battle phase, transforming into a huge, towering reptilian form with more of those sort of "xenomorph-adjacent" features that keep cropping up. His body head, on a thick tubular neck, is surrounded by four massive arms with crustacean-like exoskeletal detail to them. You can even see some smaller shrimp-like appendages in the artwork, tucked between the arms and head. The art also makes it clearer that the whole thing is sort of shaped like a cobra, with the head and arms emerging from the center of the hood.
HIPPOGRIFF
A miniboss I believe is encountered at least twice?
Another Gargoyley design, but just slightly beastlier, slightly less
humanoid than Alma, Phalanx or yourself, with forward-curving horns on a
head that's both mammalian and avian, its toothed jaws coming to a
beaky point. It also has fairly large feathered wings, and can hurl
razor-sharp feathers as an attack, which is always fun.
GREWON
The ice world and ice monsters are often fairly
predictable, pretty much everywhere they appear, so I can't say I have
many thoughts about Grewon, a sort of white-furred lion-wolf boss with a
purpleish mane down its back. It is reasonably cool, and it has a
nicely spooky howl, but it's kind of a generic mammal that could have
easily existed on Earth at some point, so it's objectively the most
mundane thing you encounter in this whole game. Sorry, Grewon!
SOMULO
The game actually opens on this battle, in a public arena where you've apparently been forced to fight for a crowd. Somulo is a typical Western style dragon, four legs, bat wings, long neck, horned head, but it's also *undead,* with drippy, melted rotten flesh and exposed viscera!
BELTH
This extremely badass boss is a humanoid skeleton with an enlarged, bulky ribcage and a huge, jagged bone blade for a right arm, which it uses both as a weapon and like a walkingstick! The artwork clarifies that the blade arm still has all its fingers, but that they're kind of fused together into the "hilt" of the "sword." We can also now see that what I once took to be flesh or organs in the ribs are just lots and lots of tinier skulls. Are those possibly the skulls of normal humans? They're the only ones we see that have no monstrous features to them, and we know the denizens of the demon world regularly cross over into our own, since this game is in the same continuity as Ghosts n' Goblins.
FLIER
I have mixed opinions on Flier. It's a very cool insectoid boss, like a spiny dragonfly or scorpionfly with an extra long, extra flexible stinger-tipped tail and thorny, mantis-like forelimbs, but I'm not sure if I like its little blue human-like head or not. It's aesthetically less cool and charming than any insectlike head could have been, but it's also objectively the weirder and less obvious choice. I guess I like it. It's kind of a bug-manticore, or maybe like the human headed locusts from the bible? From the end times stuff. There's supposed to be human-headed giant locusts, with scorpion tails. Actually, you encounter Flier in a church cathedral sort of stage, maybe it's a deliberate reference!
FLAMELORD
Fire bosses seldom impress me any more than ice bosses, and flamelord is no exception, even if it IS very nicely animated in action. A skull-faced humanoid made of fire, able to generate little birds made of fire, turn into a bigger multi-faced skull made of fire, or turn into a flying smilodon skeleton made of fire. That last one is the coolest part, but loses points for not being the default form.
HOLOTHURION
A huge massive sea snail, named after a group of sea cucumbers! Holothurion has a conch-like shell, but with the multiple respiratory holes of an abalone shell. Its real body is electric blue, with an anemone-like tentacled rear and a huge, gaping tubular mouth. It has a very fun and creative battle gimmick, siphoning water through one end and out the other to create a whirling current around the stage, and it releases clumps of toxic goo from its shell-holes to make the vortex even more hazardous!Obviously I found it adorable to begin with, but I love it even more now that we can see the humanlike eyeballs on the ends of its tentacles. Holothurion as it was meant to be appreciated. Here at last. What you've waited for your whole entire MISERABLE lives I'll bet!!!!!!!! Sorry, I'm excited. I am looking at a drawing of a big snail after all.
SCULA
Objectively the most original boss design in the game, and one of the coolest bosses on the SNES in general! SCULA appears at first to be some sort of centaur-shaped crustacean covered in a colony of barnacles, but it actually has two bodies. The "head" is a little round shrimp with a pair of large crablike claws, while the "torso" is the elongated cranium of a bony four-limbed creature that rolls the "head" creature like a bowling ball! Such a fun, original take on a monster that can "decapitate" itself, and remarkably enough, it wouldn't be the last time a barnacle monster would really be two monsters stuck together.You still have to wonder what exactly their relationship is, though I think it's become clearer here that we may be looking at a symbiotic relationship between two distinct species. The artwork confirms that what looked like barnacles were, in fact, precisely just barnacles, and on closer inspection, the barnacles are the only detail actually shared by the two bodies. They're otherwise entirely different creatures in every detail, even differently colored, except for the fact that they both happen to be chitinous!
CRAWLER
I really am torn for which boss is my top favorite of this game. Scula positively rocks, and our next one is also straight up the alley behind my wheelhouse or whatever the kids say, but just LOOK at CRAWLER! A huge, gooey, oozing, dripping pile of rotten meat, dragging its sluglike lower body around on its massive forearms, with a face that's almost entirely a grotesque set jaws with dozens and dozens of teeth in its raw, lipless gums, bearing quite a bit in common with my favorite Digimon. It also appears to be eyeless, at first, because flaps of putrid skin droop down over its eyes like the bangs of a big shaggy puppy-dog, but it exposes big red eyeballs before attacking, which appear lidless and bloodshot in the sprite, but in the art, they're just covered over in skin like a baby bird.But what, you ask, DOES Crawler do to attack? The hump of its upper back is also covered in weird, pulsing holes, you see, like a pipa toad, and it can pluck little nuggets of flesh out of these holes. Some of these "hatch" into yet another subspecies of legless, floating zombies, while others "hatch" into yet another species of legless crawling zombies. The green-skinned flyers are a bit more human, with long messy hair, and are even wearing shirts for some reason, while the crawling guys are more disturbingly stunted in appearance. Like a baby that instantly aged to 100. WHY is this huge blob of corpsiness full of infinite littler corpse-creatures? What is Crawler?? It's so incredibly horrifying, but so charmingly goofy at the same time. Look at that contented smile! Crawler is always happy!! As it should be!!!!!!
OVNUNU
Finally, the specialest baby boy in the game, at least according to my early 2000's lolrandom idea of humor, since I gave Ovnunu its own separate "secret" fan page on the original sprite review, written from Ovnunu's perspective, which should still be easy enough to find (or just add /ovnunu onto "bogleech.com"...)Ovnunu is virtually the same exact design as the "Vitreous" boss from Zelda III: A Link to the Past, so again I wonder if the two series share any monster design blood. Like Vitreous, Ovnunu is a mass of many eyeballs suspended in a dome of green jelly, with one giant-size eyeball as its nucleus. The only visual difference is that Ovnunu's central eyeball has an eyelid and tentacles, and when it emerges from the jelly, it can also attack by squirting acid from its pupil!
We also get one last new insight from the concept artwork: some of the central eye's tentacles have spherical bulges mid-way down their length, exactly the same size as the smaller eyeballs, implying this is where those are "birthed" from! Cool!! Is Ovnunu basically a colonial organism, kind of eusocial? Is the big eye the "queen" and the little eyes "workers?" Or are they plain old juveniles, destined to grow up into entire Ovnunus themselves someday? It's also interesting that Ovnunu was conceived of with so MANY tentacles, which is the more striking option, all those rootlike tendrils throughout the slime, but the four-tentacled eyeball still feels most iconic to me.
But what do YOU think? How many tentacles SHOULD a proper Ovnunu have? What's the coolest creature in this game? What's the cutest? The scariest?? Do you mind me revisiting something like this?
...This is also, I do believe, the first time I have ever featured artwork in a bogleech article with white backgrounds that I didn't meticulously strip away. I usually prefer a transparent image SO strongly, there were times I'd spend literal hours cleaning up transparent PNG's for these posts, because sometimes it's a simple matter of selecting and deleting all the white space in two little clicks, but sometimes, that tears a bunch of chunks out of the illustration because it didn't have solid enough outlines. You know what I mean if you mess with image editing at all, ever, but a lot of you actually never have, so here's what happens when you try to take the white out of most of these drawings:
....And, I shit you not, I used to just re-paint the white areas of countless images like this, just so I could have articles where every monster is just floating in the darkness of my nice blackish backgrounds, you know, like monsters are meant to look chilling in their natural sort of habitat, like they were really actually there on the other side of the screen looking at you. Why did I do that?? I mean, it looks nicer, objectively, yeah, but I don't even want to think about the total amount of time in my life I spent editing images to just synergize a little better with one website's aesthetic. I feel like it would add up to at least a year of my time on Earth. I don't want it to be two. I'm sorry there are hideous white squares surrounding these beautiful works of art. We had a good run without them, didn't we??? We spent so much of our physical lives surrounded by the hideous white squares of modern suburban architecture, it was nice that I could provide a virtual escape from such a ghastly reality, but beautiful things can't last forever. They just can't!!!!!!!!! THEY CANT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I forgot to talk about the plot of this game or the main character even once, didn't I. Whatever guys! You get the gist of it!!! OVNUNU.
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