Berzerker Lord — Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
The Metroid Prime trilogy has a lot of pretty wild alien designs, and these designs usually emphasize form over function. To do the initial thumbnail sketches, designer Andrew ‘Android’ Jones claims that he would sometimes lie down on a couch in the dark with coloured pencils and a pad of newsprint and “just feel out some strokes”. Then he would turn the lights on, see what he had drawn, and build off of the shapes. Android Jones designed most of the creatures in the trilogy, but left the concept art field afterwards and is now much better known for his newer, more psychedelic/spiritual works.
Many elements of the Berzerker Lord’s design are definitely strange and impractical (such as the floor-less lower jaw, or the external muscles/tubes on the lower legs), but they look neat and can be justified here because this creature is supposed to look like a messed-up mutant. The Berzerker’s width makes it look not just big but also very sturdy, perfectly conveying that it is the ‘tank’ of the space pirate forces.
The only part of the base 'space pirate' creature design visible here is the reddish part of the head, behind the mouthparts. The rest is implied to be some kind of grafted-on biomechanical exoskeleton. When looking closely at the pirate militia in Metroid Prime 3, you can see that all of their limbs are robotic and that the space pirate creature in this game is basically just a reddish-brown, eel-like alien. That's pretty great.
The Metroid Prime aesthetic is colourful, but messy. The Berzerker Lord is covered in a webbing of symbiotic Phazon, but it's a lovely bioluminescent blue. Its armoured 'crown' is also a bright blue, but it looks like it has somehow grown too big and started to split and tear toward the back. These blues compliment the redder tones present in the Berzerker's face, claws, and (very arcade-y) glowing shoulder weakpoints. The rest of its armour is mostly grey, which helps to keep things from looking too garish and allows the colourful areas to 'pop' more.
You can find my fan art of this creature HERE
