Godzilla: Monster of Monsters! (NES) Playthrough
535A playthrough of Toho's 1989 license-based action game for the NES, Godzilla: Monster of Monsters!
As Godzilla: Monster of Monsters! opens, the inhabitants of Planet X have declared war on Earth, and the entire solar system has been turned into a massive battlefield. Godzilla and Mothra join forces in order to fight the enemy and save the planet.
The duo battle have to recapture the worlds that stand between them and King Ghidora's stronghold on Planet X, and the surface of each planet is made up of a field of hex tiles. Godzilla and Mothra have to defeat any enemies they encounter on this field and capture the enemy HQ in order to move on.
The map resembles a scene from a table-top strategy game, but it's essentially a glorified stage select. Each tile shows an icon that reflects the area's terrain, and the terrain determines the type of action stage you'll face if you end a turn there.
The action stages are the real meat of the game, and they're loaded with swarms of enemies and inconvenient terrain features that you have to safely navigate. This makes your choice of character an important one: Mothra's ability to fly over low obstacles makes her ideal for areas loaded with ground-based enemies, while Godzilla's whipping tail and radioactive fire breath let him waltz through tanks, cannons, and mountains with relative ease.
If a classic Godzilla monster is nearby, you'll take it on in a 1-v-1 battle using the same moves that you have in the action stages, but these fights last just forty seconds. If the enemy gets away, they'll regenerate some health and you'll have to try again.
Speaking of classic Godzilla monsters, there are a ton. Gezora, Moguera, Varan, Hedorah, Dagora, Manda, Baragan, Gigan, MechaGodzilla, Matango, and King Ghidora all appear over the course of the game.
I have no idea what the general perception of this Godzilla title tends to be, but I liked it. The action feels overwhelming at first as you find yourself getting pinned behind obstacles and whacked by an endless stream of bullets and lasers, but it becomes manageable once you get used to the controls and the flow of the stage layouts.
The more your characters fight, the stronger they'll become, but it's important to keep your heroes' levels even. Godzilla is the easier and more fun choice in most cases, but if you neglect to build up Mothra in the earlier stages, she'll be thoroughly useless later on.
There are some obnoxious moments when the game decides to stun lock you in a corner, but that can be usually be avoided if you're careful enough, and the bosses can be frustrating until you figure out that you can stun lock them, but overall it works well. The gameplay is significantly less polished than you'd expect from a Compile game, but it is much better than you'd expect from a licensed game published by Toho, and it looks pretty nice for a game made in 1988 despite the slowdown, sprite flicker, and the endless recycling of stage layouts and enemy types.
It's not a deep game, but if the idea of planet hopping as you lay waste to an endless stream of aliens and spaceships appeals to you, Godzilla: Monster of Monsters! is a fun way to sink a few hours.
If you like Godzilla, you might also like Vasteel on the TurboGrafx-CD (https://youtu.be/RbW8CvBtadg). It feels a lot like this but with a much heavier emphasis on the strategy elements.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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