can't make up its mind
is it a board game
or is it sidescroller actioner
I'm willing to take the heat
give it credit for both
a hero is me
you play as Godzilla and Mothra
doing battle 'gainst a gang of giant monsters and future war vehicles that appeared in various Toho produced special effects pictures 1954 to 1984,
so no Biollante,
not yet,
but you've got Mechagodzilla, King Ghidorah, Gigan, and the rest,
but no Anguirus,
guess because they didn't know how to make a quadruped playable?
Anguirus would've made it into a proper heroic trio, but alas, it's just a dynamic duo
like I said
it's a sidescroller
and then it's a board game
and then it's a sidescroller
now back to board game
it's confounding, is what it is
I don't know what the thinking was
except it sorta lets you change up the order in which you confront the Enemy boss monsters
since, they, too, are obliged to maneuver across the hex map,
and you can see them coming, adjust your moves as necessary,
but it's so slow and repetitive
I just march headlong into battle,
no need to dance about,
the giant monsters
they just plow right into each other in the movies,
but this game seems to suggest I'm giving orders to Godzilla and Mothra,
like I'm a battlefield commander or something,
but these giant monsters don't submit to military chain of command,
you'd have to hit 'em with alien mind control beams,
which does happen in the movie Invasion of Astro-Monster,
but I'm not some xtro flying saucer warrior,
I'm an Earth person,
or so I thought,
and where are the fairy twins who sing to Mothra? that could've been a novel mechanic, having to hit just the right notes to get Mothra to fight, but you would need the Famicom controller with the built-in mic for that kind of action,
and I can't sing for shit,
maybe dub the fairy twins' audio off of a movie? replay into mic?
Truly,
this is a vast and repetitious ordeal of a game,
wherein a limited set of stages repeat over and over again,
you could easily spend over three hours on a beginning to end playthrough
much of that time eaten up by pure traversal
-perhaps that's the point? that huge, lumbering monsters take for-damn-ever to get anywhere?
most perverse of all
is the truly great soundtrack
full of drive and moment and even passages of mystery
that deserves a far better game than this
I've half-convinced myself that the developers created the game-which they damn well knew was near satirically overblown-and then they asked themselves, "If the soundtrack is sublime, could the music in-and-of-itself hypnotize the player into staying the course?"
and
no
it isn't enough
especially in the Age of Internet
when you can just listen to it directly
skip the busywork
go straight to the sonic fun
but it's a damn fine score
with the standout track being the bittersweet ending theme
that plays as Godzilla and Mothra wander off into the horizon,
and we are subjected to an extended text scroll full of the delusional ravings of the defeated Planet X Commander,
who darkly alludes to a self-destructive journey to nowhere even while threatening revenge against Earth,
all this culminating in a kaiju curtain call
but this bittersweet music
also invokes the dilemma of our heroes,
our beasts of burden
Godzilla and Mothra
having saved the human race from an army of extraterrestrial beasts and war machines
yet
Godzilla'n'Mothra are still themselves monsters,
outcasts even in their heroism,
doomed by their excellence and potency to inspire hatred and loathing inside neurotic primate minds
-but give the atomic devil apes-homo sapiens-our due: did not Gojira and Mosura terrify us of old in those Toho flicks? Maybe those movies were exaggerated anti-kaiju propaganda-but did not these lumbering beasts wreak havoc accidental and malicious upon us? Is there no logic to our fear, our loathing, our ingratitude, even?!? Are we doomed to scurry and caper at the feet of Powers greater than ourselves? When will humanity come into its own Agency free of deities, devils, and dictators?
-November 2021-June 2022
