Completion Time: 8h:16m:00s
Rating: 8/10

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A Belated Mothra’s Day

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Yeah, I meant to post this on Mother’s Day, hence the very tortured pun title there, but I was busy with other things so it’s going up today instead! But wow, I’m glad to be touching on a fighting game that has my childhood written all over it. The only other one on the GameCube that could compare would be Super Smash Bros. Melee (which I’m working on right now, so don’t worry about that), but I think this is a worthy good time with just a couple of flaws that keep it from being truly great. Let’s get to smashing!

Godzilla is comin' right at ya!

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A Romp in Downtown Tokyo

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So, whether you’re familiar with Godzilla as a franchise or not, the character himself has immediate recognizability and pull. I mean, all these monsters do is rise out of the ocean or descend from the sky and then beat the hell out of each other. Transplanting them into fighting game territory makes as much sense as doing so for DragonBall characters, and in fact there have been 2D Godzilla fighting ventures prior to this one. But there are a couple of added benefits that make this one special.

My day is going great, and then boom: Mothra attack

I think the biggest pull here is the stages. Now, when I say that, I don’t mean the variety unfortunately. Apart from Monster Island and Mothership, most of the others are identical as just world cities. They attempt to mix it up a little bit with larger landmarks, the inclusion of rivers and bays, or even a day/night filter that can be activated for all arenas. But they are still similar. No, what I mean is that the stages are fully destructible. Within the confines of the stage, everything can either be picked up and thrown or at the very least raised to rubble by slamming into it. I know there have been other games where you can affect the stage, but I can’t really think of one that did it to this degree, it adds a whole other layer of fun to battling.

Well, our entire city is destroyed, but at least the smokestacks still stand tall!

They did a great job of varying the movesets of characters as well, with all of them having a unique way of jumping and flying (or teleporting in Gigan’s case and burrowing for Megalon), different types of laser beams and howls, distinct super attacks (Rage moves), etc. There’s absolutely a case to be made for each of the monsters being able to succeed in different ways. I had a hard time grabbing monsters with King Ghidorah and Mecha-Ghidorah, but Megalon can pick characters up with no trouble by just burrowing beneath them. The two Godzilla’s have relatively weak super attacks that have a small radius of effectiveness, but Gigan can launch across the map with his and hit multiple times, while Destroyah’s acts as a homing missile. There are pros and cons to each for sure, and if you can manage to learn their moves with the varied button presses behind them, you’ll be golden.

A large, angry pteranadon is no match for loud screaming

If I have a complaint, it’s just one, though potentially a very large one: the controls. That seems like a large one, and to be fair there’s only one aspect of the controls that I don’t care for, that being the simultaneous buttons you need to pull off for some of these moves. I don’t know if this is a problem with the GameCube version specifically, or if it transcends all releases of the game on other systems, but boy oh boy I could rarely get some of these to work. In a similar vein to trying to pull off a combo move in Mortal Kombat, but worse because they’re shorter sequences. I think the game doesn’t always register two buttons being pressed at the same time, with one always coming first. I really felt the sting with picking things up (A + B) and pulling off your Rage ability (A + X), neither of which worked consistently. I can’t even tell you the amount of times I was furious as my Rage meter ran out and disappeared, all while I had been desperately trying to kick it off the entire time. I don’t know why this is the case, but I tried multiple controllers, so I know that wasn’t it. It’s either a GameCube issue or I’m just terrible (both are equally likely).

Go down and stay down. Please. I'm begging you!

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Completing the Game

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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it time and time again, but completing fighting games usually falls into the same couple of categories and is therefore easy to track. Even if it ends up being extremely difficult to achieve, you at least know what you must do. And that isn’t really all that different here. Playing through Adventure mode with each available kaiju will lead you to unlocking another character and stage, until you have the entire roster! The strangest bit here must be Orga, a creature that premiered in “Godzilla 2000: Millennium”, and therefore was likely the newest enemy of the Godzilla canon at the time of the game’s release. He’s the final unlockable monster, which I was sure would’ve been Mecha-Godzilla given his status as the final boss in most all the Adventure runs (if you play as Mecha-Godzilla, you fight against Mecha-Ghidorah). But I unlocked him and couldn’t help but notice one more hidden character sitting in the roster. Sure enough, it was Orga. Man, how I long for the days when an entire roster for a fighting game wasn’t revealed before the game even launched.

So many monsters, so little time...

The one remaining piece of the completion puzzle is the Gallery, and thankfully someone documented a guide that is mostly accurate as to how unlocking these images works because it was driving me up a wall. So, when playing through Adventure mode (and allegedly Survival mode, though I never noticed it), you will occasionally come across a large, glowing Atari logo with a white beam of light emanating from it. Collect it and finish the bout to unlock a new picture in the Gallery. There are 40 of these images. However, here’s where the rules get a bit more complicated. I’ve listed the ones that I’ve found to be true below, and there could be more that I didn’t even notice. But I find it WAY too complicated for this type of unlockable, and boy was it an annoying grind. Why they made it this way I haven’t a clue.

• You must be playing Adventure Mode (or Survival I guess).
• You must be in either Medium or Hard mode (changed through the Options menu).
• After collecting the item, you need to finish the match.
• You can only find the item inside large scale buildings. If it can be picked up, it won’t have the collectable. Hence, if you enter the “pickup all buildings” cheat code, you’ll never get the item.
• There can be no more than a single item hiding in a stage at any given time.
• The final stage in Adventure mode (Mothership) will NEVER have a Gallery item.
• Different monsters have different Gallery item loot rates. For example, Orga and Mecha-Godzilla will rarely come across this collectable, whereas Godzilla 2000 and Anguirus will likely find it in every single match of their run. This is the one that took me way too long to figure out, so many wasted matches…

The worst part about this is that the Gallery items aren’t even all that special, like there isn’t much concept art or anything like that, mostly just renders of the monsters and maybe a mockup of an early alpha build? It’d be better if there were more behind-the-scenes aspects to the Gallery.

The final unlock I got in the game. Speechless, honestly.

Even with how much time I spent wiling away time attempting to get the Gallery finished, this still holds up a lot in my mind as a fun fighting game that’s even better with friends. If you have a familiarization and appreciation of the Toho movies, all the better! But the added benefit of bringing the stage around you to ruins as you fight will never get old as a concept. Maybe other console releases had a better handle on the control system, or maybe I’m just terrible at it, but that’s the only thing really keeping me from considering this an all-time classic.

This is another entry in a series where I go through and complete every GameCube game, as it is the largest part of my video game collection. GameCube Games: 35/652