Eric Vs. 365 - Day 4 - Godzilla: Kaijuu Daikessen

On the fourth day of Eric Vs. 365 Eric gave to thee - Godzilla: Kaijuu Daikessen. This Godzilla 2D fighter never made it out of Japan, but thanks to the wonders of emulation - and how freaking easy it is to hack the SNES Classic Mini - it's pretty simple to get your hands on it and play these days. Keep reading to learn all about our obsession with Godzilla in today's blog post.

I love Godzilla, though it has been a fairly recent obsession compared to some other things I've gone crazy over. When I was a kid my parents told me Godzilla and King Kong and all of that was dumb so I didn't ever watch any of them. As an adult I said "Screw it" and started watching them and fell in love. 

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This was back in 2012, which is significant because I was kind of in-between fandoms at the time. I got super into anime in 2010, but by 2012 I had bought most of the reasonably priced series I was interested in, and streaming was growing and becoming more viable, so I didn't really need to spend much money on anime anymore. Likewise, I was a huge collector of Transformers at the time, but the new lineup of figures pretty much sucked and I already had most of (what I considered, at least) my older "holy grail" toys. Also at this time, my interest in playing video games outside of my work for About.com was kind of dwindling too. Basically what I'm trying to say is that I didn't have anything else to spend my money on so I jumped head first into Godzilla.

I bought up every movie that was easily available in the USA. The only ones I don't own - but I have seen them - are "Son of Godzilla" and "Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla" because they haven't been re-released and the old DVDs are stupidly expensive. All of the rest of the franchise sits proudly on my shelves. In 2017 I even made a ranking of all 31 (at the time) movies, which you can watch here. I haven't seen "Godzilla: King of the Monsters" (2019) yet and the anime trilogy of movies are all pretty much trash, and came out after that video was made, so they aren't included. Maybe I'll make an updated version someday.

I've also played many of the Godzilla video games as well, of course. We made videos for Godzilla: Save the Earth and Godzilla: Unleashed, which are pretty solid and worth watching. Godzilla: Unleashed for the Wii stands as my favorite game in the series as I actually think the Wiimote motion controls make the game pretty fun to play and it still looks surprisingly good. The newer Bandai Namco Godzilla game for PS3 and PS4 looks better, obviously, but is kind of poopy to actually play (and now they're out of print and the PS4 version is stupidly expensive).

As for Godzilla: Kaijuu Daikessen, today's video, it's all right. It basically plays like Street Fighter II so there isn't much to talk about. It uses 16-bit versions of the classic music and monster sound effects from the movies, which is pretty impressive. All around it's a pretty fun game for a few minutes. We played on a hacked SNES Classic Mini. Fun fact - Godzilla doesn't actually appear in the video. Weird, I know.