Too Long; Didn't Play: Godzilla (2015)

Sponsored By: Me

Time Smashed: 120 minutes, give or take an eon.

Godzookie Review

Oh! No! There goes Tokyo! Go, go Godzilla!

Godzilla Review

I should preface this by saying that I've never played a Godzilla game, nor have I seen a Godzilla movie.

Oh, I've been party to many facsimiles. I played the crap out of Rampage in the arcade, and my younger cousin got me into Power Rangers for about a season, even though I was well out of the age demographic for the show. The giant monster wrecking up your town is a classic videogame trope, and I'm all over it. You could say I like the idea of Godzilla more than the fact of it. It's something that I feel like I would like, but I've never gotten around to actually experiencing it.

For a very long time video games have tried to capture the feeling of being a child knocking over cities made of wooden blocks while yelling "rawr!" There was a version of Rampage on the Atari 2600, for crying out loud. Sure, your character looked like an orange turd savaging a phone booth, but still! Rampage! Think of all the quarters you'd save!

A more recent entry into the genre was War of the Monsters, a PS2 title that really leaned into the B-movie shtick, complete with classic-style matinee posters. You could pick from a number of giant monsters, but the gameplay never felt quite right. The monsters were too fragile, and nothing kills the illusion of playing a hundred-foot-tall behemoth than the need to run away and hide while you look for health power-ups. Think about your childhood. When you pretended to be a dinosaur sacking a city made of sand castles, did you ever stop and run away from the sandcastle so you could recharge your health? Of course not! You just roar loudly and make up some asinine superpower that was heretofore undiscovered, like being freeze-proof or having a special shield to deflect energy beams.

That's what Godzilla for the PS4 really gets right. A monster the size of a skyscraper shouldn't jump around like a flea on a hot brick. And he sure as heck shouldn't run away from anything. Giant monsters in battle stand toe-to-toe, trading earth-shattering kabooms and occasionally knocking over city blocks when they fall down. Oh, and they roar a lot. The roaring is important. A lot of your modern monsters neglect the roar, but that's about standards.

Godzilla's controls add to this experience. The left joystick moves Godzilla (or the monster of your choice – try King Ghidora!) forward, backward or sideways. The left and right shoulder buttons (are they called bumpers on this controller, or is that only on consoles that don't have Godzilla?) make your giant monster turn left and right, respectively. If that sounds awkward as heck, then I described it right, because it is about as intuitive as the various control panels in Windows 8 (ba-Zing!). In context, though, it works. No other game could pull off these controls and still be fun.

I know what you're probably thinking: "Greg," you're thinking (because we're all familiar and informal in your head), "It has awkward controls, but does it have RPG elements?" To that I can only reply, "Yes it does!" The more you destroy, the more points you earn that can be used in combination with bits of the monsters you've defeated to unlock new abilities for your monster, or for your secondary.

Now, it has awkward controls and RPG elements, not to mention Godzilla and every monster he's ever appeared in a movie with. What else could possibly make this game more Japanese? Would you believe: sharing gameplay mechanics with Katamari Damacy? During the single-player campaign, the more buildings you knock over, the bigger you get. Unfortunately, the more buildings you knock over, the more likely it becomes that another monster will appear to see what's up with all the ruckus. Theoretically, I suppose you could head right for the main objective and never see another monster. There should be an achievement for playing that way, called "Missing the Point."

You want to destroy as much as you can, as fast as you can, because when that other monster shows up, you want to be bigger than it is. If you aren't bigger than the invading monster, you've got a real problem on your hands, because the bigger monster will probably just keep knocking you down and preventing you from getting an attack in edgewise.

The most interesting thing, in my opinion, is not the controls or the monster battles; it's the story mode. As you play through the levels, wrecking your way inland, you're presented with branching paths that are rated by difficulty. That's not remarkable, but what is remarkable is the way the difficulty level you select feeds into the story, if you select the easiest difficulty, for example, the people of Japan elect a prime minister who is trying very hard to understand your plight as a persecuted architecture-vore. He is therefore very reluctant to raise the emergency level that would deploy stronger troops to stop you from your rampaging.

If you play all the way to the end on the easiest difficulty, he will sound very disappointed that he wasn't able to get through to you. I find that darkly hilarious – I don't mind telling you.

The middle difficulty Prime Minister is a bureaucrat functionary who is doing things by the book because he's doing things by the book because somebody wrote the book in order for someone like him to do things by said book. He raises the disaster level mechanically based on how much damage you're doing, deploys troops as required by law, and is generally ineffective at doing anything but complaining that the book isn't working. I find him darkly funny as well.

The hardest difficulty has a Prime Minister I could actually vote for. She's all set to crank that disaster level on a hair trigger, brings out the big guns immediately, and doesn't give a crap about her approval rating because who has time for polling when a giant lizard is eating the capitol building?

The downside is that her levels are freaking hard, especially when the other monsters show up, because the monsters are harder too. You have to think about your destruction strategy, because if you don't destroy enough buildings, you won't get big enough to defeat the attacking monster. However, the faster you destroy buildings, the faster the invading monster shows up to fight you, and sometimes they gang up on you with flying Roombas that the prime minister sends to destroy you with varying levels of enthusiasm – based on your difficulty level. Prime Minister Squishy McWetnoodle deploys one of them while apologetically muttering something about having no choice. Prime Minister Subparagraph 7-3.b sends them out in accordance with the technical manual, but only after thoroughly reading the EULA for the latest firmware update. Prime Minister Arms-are-for-blowing-things-up deploys two flying Roombas at once, along with giant missile launchers and heavy artillery and several stainless-steel Kohler kitchen sinks plus the granite countertops they came with. Needless to say, if you're going to fight on the hardest difficulty, you're going to want to upgrade your monster.

Upgrading is your basic points-buy-abilities system that we all know and love. Increase your attack combos. Reduce your special-move cooldowns. Make your special moves more powerful. If you've got the points, you can turn your monster from a giant, unstoppable engine of destruction to an even giant-er, more unstoppable engine of destruction. Rawr!

Godzilla is jam-packed with modes that I haven't gotten around to in my first hour. In addition to the standard destruction mode, there's a mode that lets you defend the city from other monsters, which I imagine becomes difficult when the game starts to penalize you for collateral damage. It seems a bit silly to me – playing a giant monster that isn't allowed to destroy anything seems kind of like trying to eat a peanut-butter-cup without eating the chocolate parts. Sure, it's probably possible, but it seems like it misses the point, Then again, the peanut butter part is awfully good, so maybe I'll give it a try someday

Overall, Godzilla gets full marks for capturing the essence of Godzilla. Or, at least, the essence of Godzilla as understood by someone who's never actually seen Godzilla.

Keep playing?

My kids both adore the game, but the controls are just too complicated for them right now. I guess that means I'll have to take up the controller and play it while they watch.

Sometimes being a dad is tough.

Is it the Bloodborne of Kaiju simulators?

The difficulty in Godzilla is very much optional. If you always pick the easy levels, you'll never really have to worry about being challenged or defeated. On the other hand, the Hard difficulty is brutal and expects the players to really get a handle on the awkward controls

Call this one a YMMV out of a million. Your experience with Godzilla is not my experience with it, but depending on how you play it, Godzilla could very well be the Bloodborne of its genre.

Comments

Prime Minister Squishy McWetnoodle deploys one of them while apologetically muttering something about having no choice. Prime Minister Subparagraph 7-3.b sends them out in accordance with the technical manual, but only after thoroughly reading the EULA for the latest firmware update. Prime Minister Arms-are-for-blowing-things-up deploys two flying Roombas at once, along with giant missile launchers and heavy artillery and several stainless-steel Kohler kitchen sinks plus the granite countertops they came with.

The. Best.

I just spent way too long trying to find an online explanation of what "award controls" were before finally realizing it was just a typo of "awkward." Full disclosure: I had to type "awkward" four times to get it right.

You've outdone yourself with this one, Greg. I love it.

You probably would have loved King of the Monsters on SNES (and I think Genesis).

Awesome.

Very fun.

Somewhere in here there could be a gamera/camera pun, but I don't know where.

AnyLameName wrote:

I just spent way too long trying to find an online explanation of what "award controls" were before finally realizing it was just a typo of "awkward." Full disclosure: I had to type "awkward" four times to get it right.

Oh noetry!

Fixed.