Godzilla

Godzilla is a movie star (top billing over Matthew Broderick, at that), a template for all sorts of other Hollywood monsters, a symbol for poor dubbing in films, and an icon of all things Japanese. Unfortunately for everyone involved, he's also the title character of this rotten Nintendo game.

Godzilla is designed to be a side-scrolling action game. While it succeeds at the side-scrolling, it comes up remarkably short in the "action" category. The plot is that the race of beings inhabiting Planet X - that supposed 'bonus' planet in our solar system - have somehow assembled an army of space monsters. 'Space monsters' is, I'm told, the proper scientific terminology here. The denizens of Planet X want to invade Earth with this army. While it's not clear in the least what their motives are, they sure are dogged about it.

This leads the Earth to send its trusted guardians, Godzilla and Mothra, to combat the threat. Now I was concerned that this meant Godzilla had gone soft, because I distinctly remember him terrorizing cities. But after looking into a bit of Godzilla history, it seems that the reason he and Mothra are teaming up is because of territorial issues. Space monsters invading Earth doesn't exactly make for a happy home. So, you as the player get to control both of these um, things, as you play through the game.

As you can see at left, the map of the Earth is incredibly detailed and accurate. Godzilla can move two hexes per turn, while Mothra can cover four. What hex you land on determines the kind of terrain you'll encounter...partially. But more on that in a bit. See those two other monsters down at the bottom right? Them's your "bosses."

On this map are Moguera, some sort of robot thing that likes to shoot fire, and the incredibly irritating Gezora. The latter of these is literally incapable of damaging you, but merely flicks a tentacle in your face repeatedly, disabling your movement. When you want to fight a boss in the game, you simply land on the hex next to it, complete the normal stage, and you face the boss at the end of it. Other bosses you'll fight in the game include a hydra, a robotic Godzilla, a quadrupedal dinosaur, and a monster comprised entirely of smog. None of them is particularly difficult; however, you'll be forced to fight them on every single map until the game is over.

The maps themselves are supposed to represent the planets. You progress from Earth outward in the solar system, such that completion of the Earth map takes you to the Mars map, and so forth. Every planetary map brings more of the same. The levels look basically like what you see at right, regardless of the planet. I wish I could even say that each planet simply offered a palette swap of the basic level to distinguish them, but palette swaps happen completely at random in this game. Occassionally levels will also have you fight large brain mushroom things, whatever they're supposed to be.

The only real noticeable difference between the planetscapes is what's in the background, but there's even fault to be found with that. In order to show that you are on a given planet, it shows that planet in the night sky as the background. So, for instance, to play on Saturn, a gas giant to begin with, the background is a clear view of Saturn. What? Imagine going out at night and instead of a full moon, you see the planet you're supposedly standing on. What do you do? If you answered "Get a psychiatric evaluation," you are correct. It's mind-boggling.

You'll encounter a variety of non-boss enemies throughout your planetary romps, but this is by no means a good thing. Enemies are so strange and random that the game never finds any sense of self-consistency or personality. You'll fight anything and everything that is animated. This includes the expected, such as tanks and aircraft, to the wholly absurd. Things like punching a volcano to make it explode, or a pillar of planetary crust that keeps bouncing up and down, or flame-launching totem poles. Most infuriating, there's this one fireball-ish enemy that not only cannot be killed in any way, but also seeks you and when it hits, does so repeatedly until it leaves the screen, often killing you at early stages. There are no continues.

Along these same lines, there are two ways to complete any given map. First, you may finish the end stage of the map with both Godzilla and Mothra. Second, if one of the two dies, you must beat the end stage with the remaining one. What this means is that if you beat the end stage with one character and the other one dies afterward, it is game over. The game ignores the fact that one of your dudes is on the next planet and healthy. Back to the title screen. Why bother?

At least the two playable characters are themselves reasonably different. Godzilla moves slowly, but has a lot of power, and can attack high, medium, or low. He is also able to jump and duck, though his size prevent these from being incredibly useful most of the time. His special move (fueled by "POWER," as you can see) is his atomic breath, which pretty much kills anything it hits. Mothra, on the other hand, is much quicker and more agile. She takes up less space and is harder to hit, but does significantly weaker damage. She also is able to fly over much of the terrain and drop bombs, or poison darts, or spore, or larvae, or whatever you want to call those weird blue pixelated things, down upon her foes.

And a note about the "LEVEL" appearing in the above screens: this is not level as in the stage you are on. This title attempts to pass itself off as an action RPG, by having the playable characters level throughout the game. Your game score is your combined experience points, if we may even use the term. After you score a certain amount of points on a given character, that character levels. It will gain an extra health and/or power bar, and that's about it. While bosses may require a bit more health to defeat, the levels are otherwise virtually meaningless. They exist to provide an illusion of depth that simply doesn't exist.

All in all, the tediously repetitive gameplay is enough to make you either quit the game altogether or kill yourself along the way. Even the ending sucks. Before you reach the inane screen to the left, you are treated to a wall of text explaining a note that the defeated civilization of Planet X has left. It states something along the lines of "We got beaten because Godzilla is more powerful than we thought, but don't worry, we'll be back." It would be terrible enough if it was left at a simple cliffhanger sort of thing like that, because this game should never, ever see a sequel. But the Planet X-ians went on to insist that they would never give up their dreams to invade Earth, and even if it took eons, would form a new space monster army to do so. All this is being said as they settle on a new world in another solar system.

What's your problem man? Why do you want to kill Earth so much? There's only one answer I can think of that would explain the blind hatred Planet X has for Earth - Earthlings made this atrocity of a game.

Bottom Line: 4/20