Although Godzilla was gone from cinema, he continued his legacy through video games, and later a comicbook series. For right now, I’ll just review the video games that were released during his decade long rest… all 2 of them.
Released in 2004, the same year Godzilla made his last movie, came Godzilla: Save the Earth. This game was part of a trilogy of Godzilla fighting games that featured Toho’s iconic kaiju. The first one was Destroy All Monsters Melee, released in 2002. I haven’t played that game, but it looks fun. As for Save the Earth, it was practically the same game, but with a few enhancements. By the way, check out the Japanese cover for the game!
Why can't we have THAT in America?
The objective of the game is simple: Beat your enemies into the ground. The story continues from the last game, where the alien race known as the Vortaak come back to take over the world, but now, their queen is targeting Godzilla specifically. She wants his cells so she can make the ultimate monster. I’m not sure how she goes about her plan, though. The only aliens she has to fight Godzilla are Gigan and King Ghidorah, but somehow every other kaiju and mech targets Godzilla. Maybe she takes control of their minds? Who knows? All I know is that you need to collect all the containers of G-cells… I think. I’ve played through the story mode without even collecting one of the G-cells, and I still won. So all you really need to do is defeat every kaiju in your way.
Every four or five rounds, there’s a challenge level. The types of challenges range from basketball, to city destruction, to tower defense, to killing clones, to flying in space, and swimming underwater. In the space challenge, you play as Moguera, flying through a giant asteroid field and fighting aliens. The big boss fight is Spacegodzilla. Defeat him, and you win. The undersea level, where you play as Godzilla 2000, is a clone of that level. Same controls, but different visuals. All you do is dodge mines, fight Ebirah, and destroy a Vortaak submarine. Both those levels are pretty fun, given their simplicity.
The other challenge levels are okay. Most levels, you need to score a certain amount of points in order to win. The destruction levels are fun, but the others are questionable. There’s one level where you need to throw rocks at the kaiju across the river from you. I don’t get it. I especially don’t get the basketball level. Why would Godzilla, Gigan, and Megalon ever get together to play basketball? And why would the aliens specifically target the Transamerica Pyramid building? In that level, you need to do anything to take those ships down. You could even throw other buildings at them. Huh.
The worst part of some of the challenges is the camera. In the normal one on one match, the camera is placed away from the kaiju to view from the side. In these challenges, the camera is placed directly behind the player, and that limits the line of sight. It also makes aiming the ranged weapon difficult. In order to lock on to any targets, you need to aim, click R3 (the right joystick), then charge up your fire breath, or whatever your character has, and blast it. The problem with using the ranged attack is the fact that it takes a few seconds to charge, and in that time, your locked on target could move out of range, or out of the frame, and your character just shoots its attack in as far of the direction its head can turn. It gets really frustrating, and when the enemy is another kaiju, it can attack you while your attack is charging. If anything interrupts you while you’re charging, you have to charge it up all over again… just to have the cycle repeat until you lose all your patience and turn off the game.
Other than that, the challenges are decent. I don’t normally play those stages, though. What I like to play are the versus and survival modes. These modes are as simple as pong. Just kill each other. Choose any kaiju you want, select a city, and brawl.
The choice of cities is alright. There’s Tokyo, Osaka, London, New York, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, Monster Island, and the Vortaak Mothership. There’s the option between night and day for each area, except for the mothership. The cities themselves are huge! They’re all properly scaled and detailed, much like some of the sets from the films. Every building can be destroyed, so that’s fun. All the military has to defend the place are tanks and puny attack choppers. They’re hardly noticeable.
I like pretty much every playable kaiju in the game. My favorite has to be Gigan. He has a crazy spin attack with his hooks, he can use his buzzsaw, and teleport. That’s one way to be unfair! Teleport behind the enemy and kick them into the dirt.
My second favorite is Kiryu. He has good firepower, looks as epic as he did in the movies, and really IS as epic as he was in the movies. Too bad he doesn’t have the arm laser guns or his shoulder mounted missile launchers. I guess that would have been too epic. My least favorite character in the game is Moguera.
Moguera isn’t fun to fight against at all. He’s the most frustrating enemy of the game due to his firepower. He doesn’t do so well with physical attacks, so he just blasts the crap out of your monster. He has his eye lasers, they don’t do much. His hand lasers are what you want to watch out for, since they’re so strong. He can shoot sparks out of his chest, and if you’re in a close enough range, his electric pulse can stun you. His strongest weapon is the hand rockets. If they hit you, which they most likely will, they send your kaiju flying to the other side of the city and take a good portion of your health bar.
But whenever I choose to play as Moguera, you’d think I would be able to harness his power and make my enemy’s day a living hell. Instead, I find myself trying to figure out how the heck he does it when controlled by the computer. I never figure out how to shoot the hand rockets! Whenever I do shoot them, I don’t know how I did it because I’m mashing the controller like crazy because I’m panicking because the other kaiju is kicking my @$$!
Bottom line: Moguera sucks. Just look at his face.
That look…. he knows he’s a troll.
In conclusion, this is a fun game, but it does have its frustrations. Stick to the versus mode, if anything. While it is a good game, I think it’s only worth a rental.
I give Godzilla: Save the Earth a 3 / 5.
Next up is Godzilla Unleashed, released in 2007. This was actually the first Godzilla game I ever played. I’m reviewing the PS2 version first, then it’s on to the Wii version.
The PS2 version of Unleashed is a clone of Save the Earth, in gameplay. It has new maps, and only two new kaiju. The new kaiju are Battra and Obsidius. Battra is literally a clone of Mothra, and Obsidius is a clone of Orga. Battra is exclusive to this version only, so if you want to recreate your favorite moments from the 90’s Godzilla vs Mothra, you’ll need this game.
Not much else to say about this one, really. There’s no challenge levels, no survival mode, either. The biggest problem with the game is the speed. The characters move amazingly slow, and it takes forever to do anything! In the time it takes me to punch, I could watch the Lord of the Rings trilogy extended editions 8 times over, become the queen of France and have a cup of coffee.
It may still be kinda fun, but looking back, it’s not too great.
Godzilla Unleashed PS2 version gets a 2 / 5. Shortest review ever.
The Wii version, on the other hand, is astronomically better. Better graphics, a wider selection of kaiju, and a pretty good story. Same story as the PS2 version, but this one has more content in it.
The story is about a bunch of super powerful space crystals that come to Earth and start screwing everything up. Why is it always crystals? Why are crystals always the most powerful things in existence in video games? Look at nearly any video game, and a crystal is sure to be either a power source, currency, or a McGuffin.
Anyway, the crystals have a form of energy that causes the environments they land in to go crazy. Sydney is a frozen wasteland, Osaka has toxic air, Tokyo is flooded (real creative, guys), and London has been caught in an anti gravity vortex. All the player needs to do is choose a kaiju, and run wild throughout the world. There are 4 different factions of kaiju now. Earth Defenders, Mutants, Aliens, and the mechs belong with the Global Defense Force. Each faction has a slightly different story to it, but in the end, no matter which faction you choose, you band together with the others to fight the big boss.
Unlike the last two games where it was just “Aliens are attacking! Defeat them!” It’s now “Holy crap, if we don’t fix this crystal problem soon, we will all be screwed!” The aliens do come in to play, but they aren’t the main villain. Throughout this crisis, there’s short cutscenes that explain what’s going on. There’s some crazy general guy who is obsessed with fighting Godzilla, and he does everything to try to stop him. He hires a scientist to make… basically, Biollante. That’s right, Biollante is in this game, and she’s the largest character in it! She really is humongous, and quite intimidating the first time I saw her. But when I found out all I needed to do was beat the crap out of her, she didn’t pose much of a threat. She’s just big.
The objective of this game is to destroy all the crystals in the areas, but again, I played through this game without ever knowing I had to do that, and still won. At some point, the Vortaak get enough crystals to make King Ghidorah the most powerful thing in existence… yeah right. Same thing as Biollante, he’s just big. No real threat there.
At some other point in the story, the crazy general guy pilots a big ship called the Atragon to fight the player. First off, that’s NOT the Atragon. That is the Gotengo from Godzilla: Final Wars, which is actually an updated version of the original Gotengo, which was another ship in an older Toho movie called… Atragon… huh.
Anyway, the fight with the ‘Atragon’ is a little annoying, for both Wii and PS2 versions. In the PS2 version, the ship is easy to take down, but the annoying part is the freeze missile. It freezes you again and again and again and again. In the Wii version, it’s easier to resist freezing, but it’s hard to aim the ranged attack and throw buildings, but I’ll get to the controls in a bit.
In the end, it is revealed that Spacegodzilla is behind this crisis, and he rises from the crater in New York. The player joins a couple of the other monsters to beat him up, and save the Earth. It’s a pretty good fight, but it’s not much different than any other fight in the game.
The story is okay, I guess. It has some interesting moments. The gameplay is something else… oh boy. Being on the Wii, they just had to incorporate motion controls. It would have been a lot more fun and a lot less stressful if all I had to do was push buttons, but this game is a big jerk when it comes to the controls! I have no problem with swinging it left or right for punches, up and down for kicks, or whatever. The big problem is with the grabbing, the jumping, and the rushing. Those moves all have to be done with swinging the nunchuck and remote in very similar ways.
Whenever I try to rush, I end up either grabbing or jumping. Whenever I try to grab, I end up jumping, and if I’m lucky, I grab while I’m in the air. Sometimes I get really lucky and actually grab my enemies, but then they shove me off and I can’t do my special grab move! That, along with the swinging of the remote to use normal punches gets my arms tired. It especially doesn’t help when I’m up against 2 or 3 other kaiju that are ganging up against me! I swing frantically saying “Stay away from me!!!!” I look like a freaking maniac!
Instead of just one health bar, each character has up to 6 health cells, each cell containing one health bar. In order to take away one health cell, you need to deplete the health bar as low as it can go, then use a move that will knock the enemy down. That means I could be going nuts with the controller until all those cells are gone, and if those monsters are ganging up on me, it would be stupid to go in there and take them all on at once! I’m not Optimus Prime here! I can’t do that! So, I find myself trying to flank the others to get to one, attack him for a bit, then flee for my life. Don’t think that keeping your distance and using your ranged attack will help, because it’s useless!
It’s not as powerful as it was in Save the Earth. It’s only good for depleting the health bar of one cell, but not so good for getting rid of a cell! Only physical attacks can do that. Good luck aiming it, too. You need to aim with the remote, and it’s easier said than done. No matter what, I always get screwed over and lose the fight.
Despite the difficulty with the gameplay, I still manage to have fun with this game. I remember staying up till 12 AM, repeatedly beating the crap out of kaiju, just so I could get enough points to unlock everything. The last obstacle was Spacegodzilla, which needed 100,000 points to be unlocked. I kept fighting, and fighting and fighting and fighting and fighting and fighting… and proceeded to fight some more, and keep on doing it, just wanting those 100,000 points. This was on the PS2 version, so Spacegodzilla was the only one that cost this much. Finally, I got him. I rested that night, for my battles made me weary. The next morning, I tried him out… and was utterly disappointed.
Remember how I mentioned the speed issues of the PS2 version? Well, Spacegodzilla is LITERALLY the SLOWEST CHARACTER IN THE WHOLE GAME!!! He was designed to be that way, too! And with a game that moves this slow… it’s not fun! So, I’m moving slower than a turtle taking a $h!t, giving my enemy time to kill me! The other big issue is that EVERYTHING he does requires a significant amount of energy, and he takes forever to recharge. Yeah, I feel SOOOOOO victorious after all that effort! I wasted so many hours of my childhood with that! I could have been doing something else with my time! Instead, all I did was play Godzilla Unleashed…. ugh….
Very fun, yet frustrating, Godzilla Unleashed is a decent addition to anyone’s gaming library. It has so many recognizable kaiju, like Varan, Titanosaurus, and King Caesar, along with 2 original ideas, Obsidius and Krystalak. Both of the new guys look cool, and I wouldn’t mind seeing them in a movie. One of the best parts of this game that I almost forgot to touch on was the soundtrack. Go to YouTube, look up Jet Jaguar's theme, Moguera's theme, and Mecha-King Ghidorah's theme for this game, and listen to how awesome they sound. This is sort of worth buying, but only if you’re a hardcore Godzilla fan, and are determined to withstand the torture… like me.
I give Godzilla Unleashed a 3 / 5.
Well, there’s that. Up next is the IDW comic series, then one more thing, and this Godzilla Countdown will be over… until the release of Legendary’s prequel comic to the film, but that’ll be separate.
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