Godzilla: Monster of Monsters
From Wikizilla
Godzilla: Monster of Monsters is a Nintendo Entertainment System video game released in the US in 1989 by Toho Co. LTD.
Contents |
Storyline
Alien invaders have arrived into the galaxy.
Gameplay
GMoM features two playable characters, Godzilla and Mothra. The player uses both monsters in turn by selecting the desired creature on a virtual gameboard, representative of the planet it is on, and moving it like a chess piece. Each space is a hexagon that represents playable, side-scrolling levels.
Level Style
There are several varieties of levels including forest, mountain, enemy base, sub-space, and ruined cities.
Monsters
- Godzilla: One of the playable characters. He can attack with his claws, feet, tail, or atomic breath. He's slow but powerful.
- Mothra: The other playable monster. She can fire small 'pellet' shaped energy balls from her eyes and spread poison from her wings. She can fly around and move quickly, but is quite weak.
- Gezora: A monster from Space Amoeba never featured in the Godzilla series. He's a giant cuttlefish with weak offense and defense. His only method of attack is to slap his opponent with a forward projecting tentacle.
- Moguera: the mechanical beast who first appeared in the Mysterians and the design of which is used in the game. He fires heat beams from his eyes and tends to retreat a lot.
- Varan: This monster only made one small cameo in the series, but he had his own movie, Varan the Unbelievable. Varan is a melee fighter who punches, kicks, and has a powerful tackle attack. He is approximately the same size as Godzilla.
- Hedorah: The first enemy monster original to the series to show up in the game, the Smog Monster launches globules of condensed smog and attacks with his tentacle-hands. In addition to his final form, a sprite of Hedorah's flying form is shown in the ending of the game, though it does not appear elsewhere (at least not in the North American release).
- Baragon: This one also only made a small cameo. He is too short to hit easily, but he attacks with fire beams and a jumping horn attack. Baragon has moments of random silliness in the game, often taking time out from the fight to turn and look directly at the player and smile, as if mocking the person controlling his opponent and effectively breaking the forth wall.
- Gigan: Another actual Godzilla-series fiend. His eye can fire lasers, and he has a rotating buzzsaw in his chest. When activated, the blades extend to cause damage. This is a different means of use for the weapon than in the three films Gigan has thus far appeared in. Gigan has a unique animation in the game. Certain blows to Gigan's lower body will cause him to bend over as it he had been struck in the groin.
- Mechagodzilla: He has mostly the same physical attacks as Godzilla, a powerful optic blast, and a large amount of life compared to most other monsters. He and King Ghidorah and Godzilla will end the game with exactly the same levels of life and energy by the time players reach the final stage in the game. Mechagodzilla first appears on Pluto (Pluto was before Neptune when the game was made, Pluto's orbit takes it inside Neptune's orbit at two points), and then appears on Neptune and Planet X.
- King Ghidorah: A large and powerful beast from many of the series' movies. He fires lightning beams (instead of his normal gravity beams) and attacks with what the game manual refers to as 'neck punches' (in reality he is essentially slamming his heads into the heroic monsters and may or may not be biting as well, since there are no real animations for his mouths, unlike Godzilla, Varan, Gigan, MechaGodzilla, and Baragon. Ghidorah is the final opponent in the game and unlike the other monsters, never moves from his position at the enemy base, forcing players to travel the length of the Planet X game board to fight him. he is extremely powerful, having the same amount of power and life as Godzilla and MechaGodzilla by the end of the game and is a serious threat to both of the player monsters, as he likes to corner opponents on the left side of the screen and attack relentlessly, making defeating him very difficult even for experienced players of the game.
- Matangos, Dogoras, and Gohtens appear in the Hyperspace hexes.
Trivia
One type of attacking spaceship is the Super X from Godzilla 1985. It first appears on Earth and appears on all subsequent planets, the color of it's hull changing from world to world. No explanation is given for why this machine, which has earthly origins, is being utilized by Planet X. The intro shows hundreds of Gotengos. These ships also appear throughout the game, including certain stages which pits Godzilla and Mothra against massive versions of them which take up almost the vertical entirety of the screen and are three screens long. Like with the Super X, no explanation is given to why this machine, which is also from earth, is being used by the people of Planet X. The game's end features; in addition to a beautiful animation with a hand drawn rendering of Godzilla and Mothra viewing Earth from Planet X; includes a type of epilogue, which states that after Godzilla crushed the final base in the game, the people of Planet X departed their homeworld, but left behind a 'challenge' for Earthlings, claiming that they had underestimated the power of Godzilla, but that Earth's people should not revel in the victory brought to them by Godzilla, because they would return with an even more powerful Legion of Space Monsters (the name given to the collective grouping of monsters sent to conquer Earth).
Interestingly, the Xians make references to both Gigan and King Ghidorah during this statement, yet make no mention of MechaGodzilla. This is unusual, as MechaGodzilla is stronger than Gigan in the game. Godzilla: Monster of the Monsters is one of the few games in the history of the Nintendo entertainment system to show a 'cast' of characters, rather than simply saying 'the end' or producing a list of people involved in the game's production, at the game's end, showing still shots of each monster who appears in the game, ending with Godzilla.
The Xians were later adapted into the Vortakk (as the Vortakk appear largely the same as the Xians did in Godzilla vs. Monster Zero, in which the Planet X in this game debuted) and also appear in Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee and Godzilla: Save the Earth, and will return again in the upcoming game Godzilla: Unleashed.
