It's new to me: Godzilla: Monster of Monsters

A licensed game with some fascinating concepts that should be revisited in the present.

This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Godzilla has a long history in video games. There’s nothing surprising about that at all, of course, given Godzilla is famous enough in his home of Japan that Hollywood went out of their way to make their own inferior versions of the movies. Ah, the ultimate sign that You’ve Made It.

The first Godzilla game released in 1983 for the Commodore 64, in which you played as the military attempting to defend Tokyo from a soon-to-be-rampaging Godzilla. While a few early Godzilla titles — like that one, which was just known as Godzilla — were made for western platforms and by western developers, others were Japan-exclusive games for home computers like the MSX and FM-7, and sometimes included the option to play as Godzilla against various monsters from that universe. Toho closed out the 1980s with a Famicom and NES game where you got to play as Godzilla, as well as rival-turned-ally Mothra, fighting against a whole bunch of their powerful foes on different planets across the solar system.

Godzilla: Monster of Monsters was developed by Compile, though, you wouldn’t know that from the international release: the studio’s name is nowhere to be found there, which is a strange omission. Simply add it to the list of other games Compile developed that they didn’t get full credit for. Godzilla: Monster of Monsters isn’t one of Compile’s finest offerings — it’s not a great game, it’s not a bad game, it is just a game — but there are some fascinating ideas in here that easily could have resulted in a real good one with some more tweaks.

The Famicom box art for Godzilla: Monster of Monsters. Image credit: MobyGames

Here’s the basic gameplay loop of Monster of Monsters. You play as Godzilla and Mothra, and your first actions will take place on a hex “board” that serves as a map of sorts. Your monsters begin on the left, the enemy boss monsters — of which there are an increasing number of on every new planet — are more to the right. You move Godzilla and Mothra across the board, two and four hexes at a time, respectively, in order to reach those enemy monsters and, eventually, a teleporter that will transport you to the next planet.

What’s fascinating is that your moves on this board are essentially just you picking the path you plan to take: the actual movement will occur in side-scrolling action levels, and your choice of route is impacted by whether there are (fightable) monsters blocking your path or not. There are multiple stage types, and the kind of region it is will determine which enemies you’ll face, the terrain you’ll have to deal with, and, in some cases you’ll have to learn about over time, whether or not Godzilla or Mothra is a better fit for clearing it. Godzilla has short distance melee attacks — punches, tail whip, jumping attacks — but otherwise is grounded, while Mothra flies and shoots projectiles, and these differences can matter depending on the level types.

Godzilla and Mothra gain experience points for defeating foes — well, you score points, but like with Compile’s cult classic, The Guardian Legend, scored points are also experience points — and level up, which increases their number of health and power bars each time. Health is pretty self-explanatory, but the power meter is a recharging one that’s used for special attacks. For Mothra, that’s an attack that fires off wings below it like a bunch of bombs, and for Godzilla, you already know what time it is: atomic breath, baby. Mothra’s attack is weaker but can be used repeatedly, as it doesn’t consume much power, but Godzilla’s will use up the entire meter in one go. Again, if you’re familiar with Godzilla at all, that makes sense. He’s always recharging his energy for that atomic breath.

So, you have to strategize which levels you’re going to pass through, which you’ll want to avoid, and where you should be heading to score the most points and level up your characters. The hexes with the giant mushroom foes can give you tons of points and maybe earn you a level, so you don’t want to miss those if you can help it, but maybe you want to avoid volcano spaces when you can with Godzilla, since he’s very large and can’t necessarily avoid or deflect everything being shot at him in those levels as he’s also trying to break through rocky terrain that blocks him. Or maybe, with the way you play, Godzilla’s brute strength is preferable for crushing those giant rocks and volcanoes in your path, rather than using Mothra’s mobility and range to defeat them slowly while dodging enemy fire.

It’s a nifty concept for a game that combines tactical elements with action, and it all also looks great. Godzilla’s sprite is huge and detailed, and animates well. There are enemies in front of you, enemies hiding away, and enemy spaceships flying overhead orbital bombing you, all with detailed backgrounds to look at as you rampage, too. Monster of Monsters all controls well, too, with whatever little quirks the game has all easy to figure out in a hurry, like how if you are too close to an enemy and keep taking damage from them, Godzilla kind of gets stuck in a loop he can’t escape from, whereas Mothra gets pushed down and to the left of the screen whenever she’s hit. Once you know that’s how it works, you adjust for it. Mothra looks and moves well, albeit in a limited space for its size, and is fun to use even if the raw power of Godzilla is missing. Seeing detailed, large sprites for Hedorah, Gigan, Mechagodzilla, and King Ghidorah is delightful: they might be 8-bit, but Compile showed off their expertise working around the restrictions of the hardware here. There are creatures from other Toho movies in here, besides just the famous foes of Godzilla, such as Space Amoeba’s giant squid Gezora, or Baragon from Frankenstein vs. Baragon, which, not coincidentally, was originally slated to be a vs. film featuring Godzilla rather than his eventual enemy, according to a 2017 biography of director Ishiro Honda.

Great, inventive concepts. Excellent art. An appreciation of not just Godzilla’s history, but that of Toho and director Ishiro Honda as well. What’s not to love, then? Well… the game somehow features giant monsters battling and makes it boring. Not right away, no, but eventually. There’s just not enough differentiation in what you’re doing: being able to choose your path is a good idea, but the levels are repeated again and again with maybe minor differences between them, and you have to defeat the same boss monsters again and again on every planet, of which there are seven. You face Gezora and Moguera on Earth, teleport to Mars, fight them again as well as Varan, head to Jupiter to fight those three plus Hedorah, and so on until you reach Planet X, where King Ghidorah awaits, as well. Considering how quickly you can die sometimes, too, if you make some bad calls or are underleveled, having a password system to get back to the planet you were on again later isn’t enough to make it all feel less tedious.

It’s a shame, too, as more variety and less repetition could have made for a high-quality game instead of one that feels like wasted potential. Obviously you can’t just go out and make a Godzilla game without it being licensed from Toho, but some studio should pitch remaking this with the repetitive parts cleaned up and replaced. Additional foes, more levels with better differentiation between them, some additional attacks and such for Godzilla and Mothra to learn, maybe let everyone kill the Godzilla (now known as simply “Zilla”) from the 1998 TriStar movie… it’d work. The original version was supposed to feature two more playable monsters, which implies both that this game was supposed to have more going on, and that maybe there was a publisher deadline that necessitated scrapping a more expanded version of the game in order to hit it. Make it right in the present, Godzilla is still a worldwide sensation and all that.

Compile was always looking for some new way to play games and combine elements of one genre with another, and maybe if this hadn’t been a licensed game — or, more accurately, hadn’t been on the kind of timeline licensed games were and are so often on — it would have had more room to grow into its ideas. The initial ambition is there, but the final result is lacking, leaving Godzilla: Monster of Monsters as more of an intriguing curio than a game worth playing through from start to finish.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.