The King of All Monsters (well, besides Ghidorah) will be the one to see us off this Octurbo. Similar to, I suspect, a great number of people who grew up in the past four decades, I maintain a healthy respect for Toho's legendary lizard kaiju. He's one of those ubiquitous cultural icons like the Marvel/DC superheroes or James Bond where everyone has an idea of what a Godzilla movie is, even if they aren't invested enough to watch them all and know the mythos back to front. Beyond Godzilla, Mothra, Mecha-Godzilla and maybe Gamera, people tend to get stuck with the rest of the menagerie that challenges Godzilla on a frequent basis. Myself? I seem to have absorbed a lot of the lore and details about the various kaiju of Godzilla despite the fact that I've barely seen more than a handful of the movies, and most of those had Joel and the robots talking over them.
Godzilla (or Godzilla: Battle Legends as sites seem to call it, despite the fact that the Japanese subtitle Bakutou Retsuden means something else entirely) for the TurboGrafx-CD did the sensible thing and just made their Godzilla game a standard one-vs-one fighter. As you might expect from monsters weighing several thousand tons apiece, it can be a fairly sluggish and unresponsive affair. I'll go into the mechanics a little more later. It does have a fairly sizeable cast of kaiju, however, and it looks and sounds pretty decent for a 16-bit game. It also has some amazing attention to detail for movie fans that I didn't even notice until putting up these images. Given the general caliber of Godzilla games up to this point, it might well be the best of a mediocre bunch. I know, I'm damning it with faint praise, but if you were a fan of Godzilla back in the early 90s this was probably the game to go for.
GRAAAAAAHHHH And Such
Oh no! Godzilla's going to crush that car like a Beetle!Welcome to the Brawl! Smash Bros? Get that weak mess out of here. How much does Pit weigh? 80lbs soaking wet?'Cause they're big in Japan, tonight. Very big. Colossal, even.I still don't know how I feel about dog snout Godzilla.Welcome to Godzilla! Put your feet up on the smashed Tokyo Tower and we'll begin.See, I figured the two player versus mode would be more the "normal game" for a fighter, but let's go single-player for now.Godzilla does the unusual thing of presenting two possible fights each round, letting the player choose their preferred opponent. The first two opponents are Anguirus (who is sort of an Ankylosaur) and Rodan. I guess they wanted to throw us a softball for the first round.I'm going with Rodan, because pterodactyls are cool. Rodan's an annoyingly dexterous opponent, and can pick you up and slam you if you let him. Godzilla's repertoire is less effective against flying opponents, but he can jump, so if needs must you can try and swat him down.Once on the ground, Rodan ain't so hot. Godzilla's Atomic Breath is your standard down-forwards+attack motion. The green energy bars underneath the health bars let you sustain certain special attacks like Godzilla's Atomic Breath for continuous damage, but that bar drains quick and refills slowly.That was not the easy fight I anticipated for a first round brawl. Then again, I suck at fighters. Them and shoot 'em ups: totally useless.This is one of a handful of fighter games where the score actually matters. All will become clear later. What's amusing is that it makes the Godzilla roar every time a point bonus pops up, and because these games always draw it out when adding to your overall total it plays the same noise continually as it does so. Hard to take it seriously after that.The second stage immediately gives you the Morton's fork of Gigan or Ghidorah.I mean, I guess Gigan. I don't think I'm quite ready for a three-headed space dragon.I really like these interstitial screens. Just a neat, movie-reminiscent way of presenting each battle.So, two things: Ghidorah's found someone else to fight in the background (it's Gamera, I think) and Godzilla looks different. The game is such a stickler for detail that it changes Godzilla's sprite to however he looked when he first fought this stage's kaiju. This is his 1968 incarnation (the Rodan fight featured his 1964 incarnation).As for Gigan, he has a particularly powerful grapple. That's the benefit of having a buzzsaw in your abdomen. Besides that, he's fairly limited. He has a beam weapon, but it drains his energy bar super fast.The grapple works both ways, Gigan. If you get grabbed, you can occasionally take control if the opponent hesitates too long. This bite is Godzilla's standard grapple attack, and it's strong to boot.Oh yeah, I neglected to mention Gigan's fire breath. I guess he has everything.Besides a prayer of beating me. Booya!I'm... hesitant to fight Hedorah. I don't want to end up with a thousand status effects.Megalon ain't much better, but I might as follow up buzzsaw-guts with drill-arms.These also feel like boxing promos too, now I think about it.The Stag Beetle From Hell is a fairly durable opponent, but all that armor makes him the slowest opponent yet. Besides his drill arms, he doesn't have a whole lot in his repertoire.I mean, he's still kicking my ass, but what opponent hasn't so far.Yowch! Maybe "frying my ass" would be more accurate.I don't recognize the fighters in the background, but one of them appears to be Ultraman? That can't be right. By the way, this cutesier version of Godzilla is from 1973.I mean, I could fight Mecha-Godzilla, but the other opponent is more interesting than a metal version of myself.So instead, we're going to fight Biollante, the giant plant.Biollante's an unusual fight, in that the giant rose creature is firmly rooted to the ground. Instead, he attacks via his more mobile tendrils. There doesn't seem to be an easy way to avoid getting grappled constantly. (Before I forget, this is 1989 Godzilla.)However, Biollante can't move, so he's pretty much a sitting duck. He can block you like this, but it requires all four of his tendrils and is something of a stalemate.Once defeated, he just disintegrates like a Final Fantasy boss.Another opportunity to fight Ghidorah. Like Godzilla, Ghidorah has two versions: His Showa period incarnation and his Heisei period incarnation. I'd advise you look up what "Showa" and "Heisei" are, but they're essentially how Japan handles their calendars and has something to do with their Imperial lineage. The switch over was in 1989, after Hirohito died.Sorry, I'm still too intimidated to fight a giant space dragon. I also have no idea who this is.Battra? Sure, all right.Oh weird, it's like a little caterpillar guy. I wonder if he's related to Mothra? (Who seems to be conspicuously absent.) (Additionally, this is the most recent Godzilla on the roster, his 1992 incarnation.)Battra's more maneuverable than he looks, and has a Psycho Crusher type screen-sweeper attack that I kept not screencapping in time.Plus he fires lightning from his antenna, because what bug monster doesn't?So here's the deal with the score. The more you earn, the better the final battle. Because I suck and barely survived each fight, I can only take on the consolation prize.What did I tell you about boxing promos? This game knows what it's doing.Ah, Super XII. I'll tell you now that the other four end bosses are: Mecha-Godzilla II (same as the first, but can fly for some reason), Mecha-King Ghidorah (so that actually makes three Ghidorah incarnations), Battra Imago (the adult version of Battra) and Super Mecha-Godzilla (the most overpowered character in the game).Super XII is this little guy. A tiny UFO.I mean, look at this. They send a frisbee to fight the mighty Godzilla?Of course, it's packed with so many missiles and rockets that it's a damn terror. The fact that its so small makes it hard to hit too. I imagine this being a cheap opponent in multiplayer.Oh, whoops. I seem to have finished Godzilla. Well, I did get the crappiest ending.I don't know what adjective I'd use to describe the minimal story, but it certainly wasn't "broad".Before we call this, here's the Versus mode. As you can see, you have to beat each opponent in the single player before they become unlocked. You'll also note that Biollante isn't here. Given his four independent tendrils, I guess it'd be hard to program that for a player.
That's Godzilla, and that's Octurbo for another year. Thank you so much everyone who has been reading and commenting on these. We're now deep into Giant Bomb's absurd Extra Life charity stream schedule, so I'm going to have to cut it off at an even twenty four days (and these chumps are only doing twenty four hours? Pfft). There might be a bonus or two later in the month, though, so watch this space.
Until then, thanks for checking out Octurbo this year and... keep it Turbo? I might have to workshop a proper sign-off quote for Year 3...
