Saturday, August 24, 2019

Eric Vs. 365 - Day 55 - Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee

Eric's favorite thing in the world is Godzilla so day 55 of Eric Vs. 365 features our third Godzilla game thus far - Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee for GameCube. This first entry in Pipeworks and Atari's trilogy of 3D kaiju brawlers still holds up pretty well and is a ton of fun even if it doesn't have quite as much "stuff" as the ones that followed. One thing we noticed, however, is that reviews for these games are generally freaking weird nonsense, which is what we'll talk about in today's blog. Read on for more and to watch Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee gameplay.

Go look at reviews for Godzilla games - any Godzilla games - and you'll notice a particular trend - no one knows what the hell they're talking about. I refuse to believe that most of these reviews were written by people who are actual Godzilla fans. IGN's review of Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee is genuinely insulting and reads like someone who has never actually seen a Godzilla movie and is just paraphrasing things that other non-fans told them they don't like about the franchise. 

Back in my younger days as a fairly crappy game reviewer (I admit it), I looked at licensed games with weird expectations. I thought a licensed game needed to appeal to gamers outside of its fanbase to be "good" in order to justify its existence and earn a good score. I also thought that a licensed game could only be good if, when you stripped the license away, it was still good on its own without the fan service. Both of these concepts are absolutely 100% wrong. Games don't have to appeal to the masses to be considered good. And there is no point in analyzing whether a game is still good without a license because the WHOLE APPEAL of these games is that they DO have the license.

Eric Vs. 365 - Day 4 - Godzilla Kaijuu Daikessen
Eric Vs. 365 - Day 42 - Godzilla Generations

This is why reviewing licensed games is so hard. Fans of the license are obviously the intended audience of a game, and the ones that will appreciate your review the most, but if you give a niche game an 8 or a 9 outside people who aren't familiar with the license will play it and end up disappointed because they don't "get" the core thing that makes the game appealing in the first place. You could always specify in the text who the game will appeal to in order to avoid this, but most readers are freaking drooling idiot morons who only look at scores and don't bother to actually read anything. So, instead, most sites just crap out half-assed reviews from people who don't know what they're talking about and slap a 4-5-6 out of 10 on them that the games don't really deserve and call it a day. How DARE anyone give a game a score and quality review it deserves when it will only have a niche audience and also might confuse the drooling morons who refuse to understand that not every game and every movie and every product is for THEM. News flash - Just because something only appeals to a tiny minority that doesn't disqualify it from being "good". 

That was a weird tangent that I'm not sure actually conveyed what I really wanted to say, but whatevers.


Back to the Pipeworks Godzilla games. I don't understand how or why they were reviewed the way they were back in the day. Destroy All Monsters Melee was generally well received and got 7's and 8's, but Save the Earth and Unleashed got steadily worse scores despite the fact they they are all three basically identical in terms of gameplay and the latter two added tons more characters and modes and features. To me, having mostly the same gameplay but tons of extra characters and "stuff" means the games should be at least equal, but instead DAMM is remembered as the only good one and the other two, especially Unleashed, are "shit". The reality is that, if I was recommending these games today, I would 100% say to get Save the Earth or Unleashed instead of DAMM and everyone would go "Bu bu but the reviews say ..." and I'd tell them to shut the hell up because numb nuts idiots who didn't know what they were talking about wrote those reviews 10+ years ago and they're nonsense.

Ugh, again I'm not sure if that word salad actually says what I wanted it to...

Anyway, Destroy All Monsters Melee is fun and good but Save the Earth and Unleashed are really good too. We'll also play those others as well at some point down the line, too.