Game-Art-HQ

“You might recognize this guy as one of the trophies from Smash 4. Sadly, I think that’s where everyone remembers him from because I doubt people remember Spirit Tracks. Pfff. _{At least he GOT a trophy, unlike Chancellor Cole.}

Spirit Tracks barely enters the top ten in my favorite Zelda game list (even though I really like the story and the characters in it; the game itself is a pain to play), but it has one of my favorite final bosses in the franchise. This fight gets a lot of flack but I always really liked it.

I liked that Link is essentially monster bait while Zelda does most of the leg work, so then we have this little kid swatting ineffectively at what is basically an invincible but unstable boar monster so that it’d get distracted enough to get pincushioned by light arrows.

This fight has the best music ever too:

It’s funny how the final boss song with the most triumphant, heroic sound is the one with the silly mustache.

Malladus was always something I’ve been meaning to draw my own interpretation because his design falls in the weird character design hinterland of always ending up looking really silly in fanart when it looked really intimidating in the actual game.
And disturbing. Can’t forget disturbing, The Malladus-Cole beast is a giant meat puppet being unwillingly piloted by a vengeful ghost and the coloration really reflects that, the way Malladus isn’t possessing all of Cole’s body, but just enough for complete and utter control.

The creature is completely human-shaped, just with monstrous proportions. They make a point to tell you that Chancellor Cole is physically rejecting the demonic possession to the point where the hideous chimera is gasping for air. That’s just…man, what the hell, Nintendo.

He also originally had the silly bright orange chest hair that the actual game had but I got rid of it because it made that area of the picture just weird color wise due to the position of Malladus’s head and the trail of vapor. And plus it looked silly.”

~

This illustration of Malladus was actually not made directly for Link’s Blacklist but drawn while we were at the LB2015 Update and I asked the artist Turquoisephoenix if she likes the idea of seeing her Malladus in Link’s Blacklist. The answer was positive and I hope we might see her participating directly in our project next year!