Something I neglected to show during my first post about Experiment Z-57 is the concept art for its environmental body double in Dairon. I couldn't fit it into the post due to Tumblr's image limit only being 10 pictures per post, but here it is: Pages 114 and 115 from the Metroid Mission Logs.
While I'm here, I'd like to share a few frames from Z-57's animation set that I took screenshots of for reference purposes. Now that Tumblr allows us to put 30 images into one post, I can make posts as long as I want! More images for everyone!
Z-57 is firing a beam in these shots.
Here are some extra screenshots of the Dissected Corpse for good measure. This particular view of the creature's face never made it into the original post because of the old image limit.
Ever notice how Z-57's eyes are smaller and rounder than Corpius'? Corpius has these sort of elongated, oblong-form eyes (perhaps indicating that it's a wild type or unaltered specimen?), while the Experiment looks… domesticated somehow? Corpius' eyes look like they've grown into those uneven, craggy grooves it has for a skull-face, but the Experiment gives me different vibes. Round, calculated eyes that look like the face was carved specifically for them. Corpius' eyes bulge from its face in a particular way, and they're arranged unevenly.
If these two met face-to-face, would Corpius mistake the Experiment for a different animal altogether? Or if it were capable of sapient thought, would it consider the Experiment some ghoulish freak of nature, like a simulacrum of its kind? Like "I don't know when that thing went into that big building, but whatever it is, it came back wrong".
Maybe round eyes are a characteristic of younger specimens, who knows: I'm just spitballing here. I'm not sure I ever got around to talking about the eyes in the original set of posts, but they were featured in my venn diagram.
More Z-57 under the cut! I took all these screenshots, why not share them with other artists?
It's roaring in this set.
Best quality: its wiggles.
Experiment Z-57 is preparing to fire a counterable beam in this next round of screenshots.
When I made the original posts, I had to combine a few images to save space: There's one image that combines two in-game screenshots of the Dissected Corpse's room before and after the X are released with a shot of the boss, showing that they're the same monster. I'll deliver them here separately. As a treat.
Bonus: Corpius T-pose
I'm gonna go back to taking screenshots now: have a nice day.
I told you I would info dump about Experiment Z-57, and I'm making good on that vow. Metroid Dread spoilers beneath the cut.
Navigation:
Dissected Creature
Experiment Z-57
Corpius
Comparisons, Part 1: Let's Talk About Legs
Comparisons, Part 2
2023 update: extras
Experiment Z-57 is referred to as "cooldown x boss" in the files. Before we begin, I'd like to note that the gooey, undulating bumpiness you're used to seeing on Experiment Z-57 is the work of an effect that I haven't yet replicated in Blender. There's probably a shader, a script, or some other file somewhere in the game that I haven't toyed with yet to apply it.
Top left: Z-57's corpse, top right: the corpse is missing after the X are released, bottom center: Experiment Z-57's X form. You can see the lumps in the black X goo covering its body.
In stark contrast to its previous appearance, the beast's skull is bleached white, as are the other bony protrusions jutting out from its body. Whatever rot or imperfection was present on its skull before the X were released was eaten away when one of the gelatinous parasites made a snack of the experiment. Additionally, its eyes almost glow a vibrant yellow, where they were dull orange before.
Its body is long and tubular, tapering off into a tail with no extra flourishes. It's like a worm, if worms ate people and had arms. Jagged ribs are situated on the creature's underbelly. They're exposed in much the same way Corpius' are.
Four of its arms terminate in hands that have four talons.
There are bony scutes on each wrist.
Beneath the armored plating, you'll find a tumorous yellow mass: the mesh for each of these is labeled "Arm_Hand_WeakPoint" with indicators that correspond to which side of the body its parent arm is on, and whether the weak point is on the upper or lower arm on that side. In the image below, I've hidden the mesh for the scales to make the mass more visible.
On each of these four-toed arms, you'll notice the elbows have three spines jutting out from the flesh. In this shot, the arm is bent, and the camera is positioned at the elbow.
The arms situated between these handsy limbs are longer and more noodle-like. Unlike the other two pairs of legs, the scutes lining these prehensile appendages start above the wrist and crawl up the forearm, stopping in the vicinity of the elbow. These arms end in three claws that get progressively larger as you near the end of the limb (the smallest one is hidden behind the wrist in this image, but I'll talk more about the middle pair of arms in another post).
Let's step back for a moment and look at the experiment's head again.
The boss has two short spikes situated around the perimeter of the mask. One could wonder if these are misplaced teeth (genetic modification says "oops"). It has round eyes that are fairly uniform in size. Each plane of the lower jaw has two eyes. The experiment's teeth, while not completely identical, don't vary too much in length. They all have about the same curve; not exactly, but approximately. The beast also doesn't have much of a chin, its neck kind of just starts at the end of the skull.
There's a lot of interesting stuff to talk about, but most of it involves comparing Experiment Z-57 to its undefiled body double and Corpius. We'll get to that.
I'm going to be making several posts about Experiment Z-57. In this first post, we'll be taking a good look at its corpse. In the next post, we'll look at the boss, and an entirely different boss will be covered after that. I'll analyze things even further in a fourth post (Edit: Five posts. I'm writing five posts). I'm going to add a little list for navigation down below and update the links as things are posted:
Dissected Creature
Experiment Z-57
Corpius
Comparisons, Part 1: Let's Talk About Legs
Comparisons, Part 2
2023 Update: extras
Metroid Dread spoilers beneath the cut.
The first time you see this thing, it's being prodded by lasers in Dairon. If you come back after the X have been released, you'll find that its corpse is missing, and that Experiment Z-57 has freed itself with a good deal of force. You need to fight it in Cataris during a story event. I was going to provide screenshots to demonstrate this, but I'll have to put that off because Tumblr only allows you to attach ten images to a single post.
Something fun to note is that the lasers are included in this creature's .bcmdl file. The textures for the lasers are not, at least in the version of the file I exported. You could probably bundle them with it using a script or a slightly different exporting method than I did. In any case, I know where the textures for these lasers are located, and I did not bother exporting them with the dissected creature. We won't even be looking at the lasers.
Onto the good stuff! I should preface this by reporting that the dead experiment is labeled "Dissected Creature" in the files. This becomes very apparent if we peer into its open chest cavity.
I can't say for sure exactly what any of this mushy stuff is. This is an alien organism, so resemblance to any Earthly organs may or may not be superficial. In any case, we can see a cyan twisty tube towards the abdomen that looks like real world intestines, a pair of blue discs that form a heart-shape in their adjacent position (possibly lungs?), and above those lies a bright red bulb.
Here I've flipped the creature over to get a better angle for screenshots.
Here's a shot of its ribs and its right hind leg. Z-57 has six legs, with three on each side. The front legs are connected at the base of the neck, the middle legs are on top of the open ribcage, and the hind legs are located at the junction between the creature's torso and abdomen. Below, we can see the segments where each leg is connected to the torso.
The front and back legs each have four toes armed with curved, bony talons, while the legs in the midsection each have one toe. Close to the body, the legs are almost purple, but their pink hue becomes more apparent in the middle of the limb. The further back you go towards the abdomen, the more orange pigmentation we can see in Experiment Z-57's legs. The front legs are almost devoid of yellow. Its legs grow darker as we get further away from the body: the hard scales on its feet are black.
And this is the head. Its eyes are small and round, and its skull becomes dark and discolored the closer it gets to the flesh of its neck. The neck doesn't appear to be in good shape; this may be an indicator of how long Z-57 has been dead, but I'm also not an expert in the changes in color (and other physical traits) that occur in flesh as it decomposes, so I couldn't say for certain. Large lumps appear to have formed in scattered clusters, and its veins are quite prominent. The eyes are a dull yellow-orange.
The bottom half of its jaw is split down the middle.
(It's very tempting to make comparisons between this thing and Corpius, but I'll get to that after I've expended this post's image limit.)
Its back is protected by a hard, black carapace. Z-57's spine is arched. It's positioned as though it's curled up like a dead bug, and the fat abdomen paired with the six legs and the stinger makes it look kind of like a wingless wasp.
Did I mention it has a stinger on the end of its abdomen?
The soft underside of its abdomen is orange, and grows redder as the flesh draws closer to the shell.
That concludes the bulk of our initial exploration into Experiment Z-57's corpse. I'll write about its modifications and the differences between its corpse and its X-form later. I might have to make a fifth post just to compare and contrast corpse-57 and X-57.
With a good chunk of comparisons out of the way, I'd like to dive even deeper.
Navigation:
Dissected Creature
Experiment Z-57
Corpius
Comparisons, Part 1: Let's Talk About Legs
Comparisons, Part 2
2023 update: extras
The point of this post is to examine the similarities and differences between a few anatomical elements from the beasts we've covered so far. I'm presenting observations on things that people may or may not bother to compare otherwise, because I'm a nerd who enjoys examining every last detail on 3D models. Maybe somebody will find my brain spew interesting, or perhaps the information would be useful in some sort of fanwork.
I wanted to start off by looking at the Chozo Archives gallery rewards. Particularly, the 100% completion reward for Dairon. In this image, we see Quiet Robe standing before a smattering of screens in front of a tube. The tube is filled with a pink substance, and Experiment Z-57 is wriggling about as it floats within. The creature appears to be a juvenile in this image, with a long, wriggly body and lanky limbs. Its carapace appears underdeveloped and not nearly as noticeable as it is on the adult that we see in-game.
I wanted to use this post to compare the baby to Corpius and the experiment as we see it in-game (there's new information unrelated to the baby as well, but for this first part, we'll focus on the baby).
Something interesting to note is that at first glance, Experiment Z-57's X form more closely resembles the juvenile in the tank than the corpse we see in Dairon. The infant has a long, wriggly tail and its abdomen doesn't appear to be obscured and encumbered by its carapace. It has a snake-like body with two sets of legs attached.
Also of note is the fact that boss-57 has bony spines sticking out of its back just like the infant.
If you look very closely at its thick lower body (above the length of the tail), the infant Z-57 in the gallery image has a carapace, but the edges of the shell's segments are shaped more like the pointed plates on Corpius' tail than the plates on corpse-57's rounded shell. The infant's tail also ends in two points, a bit more reminiscent of Corpius' clubbed scorpion barb than than the corpse's single-pointed stinger.
The baby also has stripes, which may be either body markings or representative of the segments of its growing carapace, which could possibly have been very soft at that life stage. The spikes on the baby's elbows are also consistent with boss Z-57's anatomy, as are the scutes on its wrists.
Also curious is the fact that the juvenile appears to lack the stilted pair of legs present on both other iterations of Experiment Z-57 and Corpius, but they could just be hidden from our view in the gallery image. Maybe the pup's third pair of legs is tucked beneath its chest? Below is an image of Experiment Z-57 with the wiggly pair of noodle arms hidden.
In any case, Experiment Z-57's X-form more closely resembles the infant in the gallery image in terms of body shape. They've both got that spaghetti noodle body type, like a worm with legs.
Something else I'd like to mention is the 100% completion reward for Ghavoran. The image shows a group of Chozo warriors surrounding the corpse of a beast that appears to be the same species as Corpius. A shirtless warrior stands triumphant atop the kill wearing a Chozo power suit from the waist down (leg greaves and talon caps; note how the unarmored talons are black and curved, but the armored talons of the feet and the fully armored soldiers are thicker and white with a curved pyramid shape).
This could be a hunting expedition, or the shirtless individual could be undergoing a trial of some kind. We could say a lot about this image, but I'd like to focus on the dead animal.
The hunted specimen in this image bears an obvious resemblance to Corpius. The setting leads me to believe this is another wild specimen of the same species. It has stilt legs with dewclaws, the bright blue line running from the middle of its jaw to its torso is consistent with the line on Corpius' side, the amount of teeth and their arrangement is consistent, so is the shape of the tail and the flesh at the base of the tail. Additionally, the creature appears to have a set of exposed ribs beneath its torso, hidden as they are behind its limp foreleg and the soldier in the foreground.
There are a few differences between Corpius and this specimen, but nothing too significant. For example, the beast above appears to have bioluminescent blue spots and stripes in some places on its body. If the Chozo hunted these in Ghavoran, a location that has largely been left untouched by civilization, it's probably safe to assume the beast in the gallery painting is at least unmodified.
Corpius has a teal stripe going down its body from the corner of its jaw in the same place the gallery beast's luminescent stripe trails out from. However, Corpius' stripe is less visible because the color difference between its body and the stripe isn't quite as drastic as the difference in hue on the concept art.
Now that we've introduced the tertiary gallery elements, I'd like to compare them to the models we've covered. Corpius and the specimen in the Ghavoran gallery image both have those two-toed stilts. The juvenile in Dairon's gallery image appears to be lacking them, but the Dissected Creature's second (middle) pair of legs consists of one-toed stilts.
One trait Experiment Z-57's X-Form shares with the Ghavoran gallery beast is scuted legs. The Ghavoran beast's legs differ from Corpius' in that there are overlapping scales covering the length of the leg leading up to its claws. Experiment Z-57's boss form shares this quality.
I find the resemblance between Z-57's X-form and the juvenile in the Archives fascinating. The immense physical differences between the experiment's corpse and the X parasite that eats it makes a show of the fact that the X don't just copy their prey's appearance, they absorb its DNA. In Cataris, Experiment Z-57 is displaying the physical traits of its host at an earlier life stage.
This brings up a few more questions: does the X parasite actively choose which traits to express based on preference, or is it a matter of what is more functionally advantageous?
Regardless, I'd like to call something else to your attention. It's been a good, long month since my last Z-57 post, and I've finally found the asset I've been looking for to complete my comparisons.
Meet this bug, who is part of an object called "chozobaseasset04".
This bug has purple eyes, quite the opposite of our Corpius and Corpius-adjacent beasts' ocular organs. But there are several traits here that I want to really focus on. Specifically, the rest of the bug.
I posit that this bug's DNA was spliced with a member of Corpius' species (and perhaps another animal) to create Experiment Z-57.
Everything is there: the shell, the color of the shell, the stinger, everything. The singular pair of stilt legs on the dissected corpse is nigh-identical to the bug's, but adapted with the Corpius monster's traits. The stealth hunter's genes are expressed in the stilt legs with the singular knee horn and the lack of a complete exoskeletal covering.
I can't pretend to understand how genetic mix 'n match operations work, but it makes sense to me from an aesthetic and contextual standpoint. The Dissected Creature's second pair of legs resembles bug legs because they are bug legs. This abomination to the laws of nature is a mish-mash of genetic traits that shouldn't exist in conjunction with each other.
I don't have anything smart to say about the Experiment's construction, I just want to put forth the similarities between Bug On Table and the Dissected Creature.
Here's the concept art for Table With Bug to drive home the idea it had some involvement in genetic experiments.
I've been looking for Table With Bug for ages under the assumption that at least one of its contents was going to make it into the name, and now that I've found it under a generic name, I'm foaming at the mouth. Everything in this post before the bug shows up was written on May 7th, 2022, and then I got sick for a week.
I can't remember half the things I was gonna say about eyes and teeth a month ago. Frankly, I'm just glad I could bring Table With Bug to the discussion.
Now that we've covered the basics, it's time for me to destroy your dashboard by comparing Experiment Z-57 to Corpius and the X Parasite.
Dissected Creature
Experiment Z-57
Corpius
Comparisons, Part 1: Let's Talk About Legs
Comparisons, Part 2
2023 update: extras
I've kept you waiting long enough: our first order of business is the legs. I'm calling the legs where one big claw bears the load "stilts" for ease of flow. There are a few notable similarities and differences between the three creatures and their stilt-legs.
The Dissected Corpse has white claws and no dewclaws. Its stilt leg has one white horn at the elbow. Its muscles are visible, but they're rather thin. Whether this is due to a lack of exercise (possibly the product of a life confined to a laboratory?) or a genetic quirk that comes packaged along with the rest of its more insectile features is unknown. The leg darkens at the exterior portion of the elbow, as with the rest of the corpse's limbs. The flesh covering the wrist/finger/toe at the end of the limb is scaly and black.
Corpius has thick, strong, muscular arms. It has a cluster of six thick black spikes on its elbow: three of them are quite large and positioned on the outer elbow, while the 3 smaller spikes are grouped more towards the center of the arm. The Dissected Creature's deltoids (the muscle that wraps over your shoulder) are visible, but not very prominent. Corpius, on the other hand, has obviously worked them quite a bit. All three portions of the shoulder are positively bulging. This is a creature that ambulates by dragging itself across the terrain with its arms, of course these things are going to be jacked. Instead of scales, the skin leading up to Corpius' claws is consistent with the rest of its hide: covered in thick, rough skin. Its claws are black, matching the spikes on its elbows. Corpius has two small dewclaws situated above its little finger, which is vastly overshadowed by the large claw on the torso-facing side of the foot. This larger claw is what it stabs into the dirt to pull itself around.
Experiment Z-57 also has a pair of stilted legs in boss form. The musculature near the shoulder has been almost completely eaten away; you can see the bone. Beyond this, its stilt is long, thin, and wiggly. Its arms are very flexible, like spaghetti. The claws and bony protrustions adorning its arm are white like the Dissected Creature prior to being devoured, but while the corpse's claw was yellowing, the boss' claws seem to have a bleached-white quality. Like Corpius, the boss has six spikes jutting out near its elbow, but not all of them of facing the same direction. Three of them are pointed back towards the torso, and the rest are pointed out towards the forearm. The length of the outer forearm beyond the "elbow" spike cluster is covered in overlapping scutes. At the end of the limb, Experiment Z-57 has one large primary claw, a shorter secondary claw, and an even shorter dewclaw (just one, though).
The corpse's one-toed legs might be positioned further back on the torso than Corpius'. These legs shift on Experiment Z-57 in Cataris: instead of being aligned horizontally along the length of the body beneath a shell, the arms are positioned vertically up the side of the body behind the neck.
The Dissected Creature's horizontal layout.
Its legs are arranged in a row.
Z-57's vertical layout.
Its legs are stacked on top of each other.
Experiment Z-57's X-form shares a few things in common with Corpius with regards to the legs. The Dissected Creature has one-clawed stilts with no dewclaws, but the X Parasite and Corpius both have multi-clawed stilts with smaller dewclaws.
Experiment Z-57 has a large claw, a smaller claw, and a singular dewclaw. Corpius shares the two-toed setup, but has two stub claws instead of one.
The Dissected Creature appears to be the odd one out where legs are concerned. Its stilts are perhaps more insectile than the other two specimens'. The corpse has more in common with the X-Form than it does with Corpius because the X and the corpse are the same creature under different circumstances.
There's a lot more to look at, but I'd hit the image limit in the middle of my spiel if I continued now. Tune in next time when we talk about heads and other fun things.
