Bandai/Namco returns with new Godzilla game on PS3 -- coming soonish!

[JasonPratt]

Maybe by Christmas, who knows; word is they're 40% finished with it.

Hopefully the monster selection will be better than the previous iteration, Godzilla Unleashed, which switched out some of the better monsters from the 2nd (and still generally best) game Save The Earth for poorer or new (lame) monsters. Also it didn't work well on the Playstation (though I've heard it ran great on the Wii, where it is generally praised, go figure.) Though the 3rd game did feature Biollante, so there's that.

A ton of early-release screenies here: http://www.scified.com/site/godzillamovies/a-ton-of-new-godzilla-ps3-game-screenshots-released

Confirmed 'properties' in the game are Heisei-era Godzilla (apparently, though with the flexibility of late-Showa era), 2014 Godzilla, and Kiryu (i.e. Mecha-Godzilla 3), plus the Super-X-3 (from Godzilla vs the Destroyer) which seems to be returning in its role as a summonable 'spoiler' attack. (In the 2nd game a monster who takes the right powerup can trigger the X3 to arrive and freeze an opponent unless the opponent is very careful/lucky.)

The PS3 never did get a proper Godzilla fighting game, so I'm super-stoked to see Bandai (and probably also Pipeworks, the designer for the previous games) getting off its assets (so to speak) at long last.

Also, I'm a bit amused that this project is in effect being partially crowdfunded by the sale of the mobile match-3+ G2014 game released by Pipeworks a few months ago.  :P

[JasonPratt]

Necrothread, ariiiiNOOOOOOSTAYYYDEADDD!!!

{weep}

The game released a week or two ago, for the PS3 and PS4.

It
is
by
all
appearances
terrible.

{sob}

Why. Why Namco. All you really had to do was update Save the Earth with current-gen fx. And better music. And a few more monsters. Without getting rid of any of the good ones much less subbing tacky new monsters of your own (as in Unleashed).

The music is admittedly a little better, and the character models and sounds are admittedly much improved. But the WHOLE POINT to the series is to be a 3D fighting game set in large, colorful, diverse open arenas, with Toho's stable of creatures as the fighters.

So in their infinite anti-logic, they removed most of the skill-fighting concepts, made the kaiju clunkier to move (in order to accomplish practically anything worth while, Godzilla has to constantly stumble forward like a drunk, and then recover from that), invented a somehow-much-worse-story than anything previously for the campaign(s?), which (as usual) must be played to unlock the creatures to fight with and against (but with the fighting grossly handicapped), and then set the mission design in cramped little arenas seriously not much larger than 10x the length of Godzilla (kind of like the spoof "boxing ring" set in Save the Earth). Where, despite the constricted setting, none of the creatures ever feel like they're properly interacting with anything, just flailing around (with lots of clipping through the art) at nearby gfx which then do things eventually perhaps.

It's not entirely dreadful -- the creature models at least look and sound good -- as does the promotional art (but that isn't the game). And the creature list seems pretty complete, with the possibility of upgrading some creatures into higher-powered versions from various movies. But... dang...  :'(


Nothing I've seen so far anywhere on YT invalidates Jim Sterling's 20 minute play sample or his linked prose review:

All I can hope for is that Namco will be able to put up Sony's Save the Earth (the best of the series) as a port from the PS2, onto the PSN. I might consider buying it for convenience so I don't have to unpack the PS2 to play it for/with the nieces. But I doubt they'll do so, since it would take money away from their grotesque, terrible new game.

[JasonPratt]

I wish to update that my complaints were slightly unfair for being a little uninformed. Not a lot unfair -- the critiques have been largely spot on -- but a little.

If you infer from this that I went ahead and bought a $50 game as a console digital download that I already had good evidence to believe was at least criminally under-developed if not broken, because I am a very sad person who desperately wants a new good Godzilla game because I love the property so much... that is your inference to make. And also correct.

Fortunately, the game is no larger than the HD update-port of Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, a PS2 era game. So it only took about an hour to download and install. Thank goodness!  ::)

And yeah, to be blunt, this is a PS2 era game with somewhat better creature models. Except not as good as the PS2 Godzilla game released ten years ago on that platform. My impression from YT videos is that the PS4 version is not significantly different from, much less better than, the PS3 version (which is what I bought, since I don't own a PS4 yet. I do have some standards, yo.)

The game is clearly made with love for the property on at least some levels. The devs, or some of them, must feel terrible about releasing it; and I've read things to the effect that they want to go back to doing a 3D fighting game again.

Y'know. Like what the series was popular for to begin with, up to now. And what fans preordering thought they were going to get.

Despite the Japanese title, Godzilla VS., this is not a 3D fighting game featuring the Toho stable. It's... well...

The most accurately generous description, is that it's trying to simulate what a Godzilla movie looks like. It doesn't always succeed, but that's the reason for the wretchedly limited "sets", for example, and for the harsh semi-invisible limits to how far Godzilla can go, and why unlike practically every other game he can't enter and leave the water wherever he wants (despite this being at least half his whole design scheme.) Because the guy in the suit can't do that. He has to be very careful where he walks and doesn't walk on the set, and within those parameters he can go after the buildings set for destruction, especially the ones near certain camera setups, but he should stay away from the other buildings on the set because they aren't designed to be destroyed and are actually much more resistant to damage anyway.

Some of the sets look pitiable, and none of them look significantly better than any up-close look at one of the fighting arenas from Save the Earth ten years ago on the PS2. But they do sometimes look more-or-less like a set from one of the movies, and that seems to have been the goal, so mission quasi-accomplished.

This also explains why Godzilla lumbers around like you're wearing a 200 pound suit. And it explains why trying to play the game as a 3D technical fighting game (what everyone expected and hoped it would be), will result at best in watching your monster stumble around like a drunk. You aren't supposed to be moving around like that, you're supposed to be moving around like a guy in a 200 pound suit, and specifically like the Godzilla from the Heisei Era (the 2nd series) which is the basis for the visual design. Those movies were notorious for the suit being so large and heavy, that the monsters kind of waddled around up to each other, flailing a bit, and then beam-warring or launching a Macross Missile Massacre. Winning in this game isn't about fighting in a 3D technical brawler, it's about fighting as if you're watching one of the Heisei (or most of the Millennium) Era movies.

Granted, this is arguably the most badass looking Godzilla design in Toho's history (including arguably the 2014 AmG design, which by the way is included as though for a preorder bonus -- probably indicating there will be none of the planned DLC later). I'm not arguing with the choice, it looks awesome; and I'm trying to be as charitable as possible about the game theory involved in how the game plays. But the game design theory explains a lot for why it plays the way it does, and doesn't.

That doesn't explain the mostly-PS2-age graphics; much less why such limited graphics would be so horribly optimized that even on a PS3, much less explicably a PS4, the game chugs into a virtual slideshow if you destroy a bunch of things all at once -- which is the main gameplay goal, not incidentally.

But I was wrong about the music. Even the newly composed incidental music is significantly better than in Save the Earth (not sure about Unleashed -- my impression is that it had the same kind of earlier terrible music, but I'm here clarifying my impressions were wrong about VS., so...) And a few cues from the actual series play during key events. Not nearly enough, or as much as could have been used from chief composer Ifukube, and apparently(?) none from any other series composer -- Mechagodzilla 1 could have benefited a lot from including the bouncy threatening music from his first film -- but it is a real improvement, so I want to retract that complaint.

Back to the game design: it also explains why Godzilla starts with so few "moves" available, and even kind-of explains the insanity of not allowing players to apply bought move upgrades unless starting over in a new campaign. This isn't a fighting game, and each "campaign" is supposed to be a movie (an all-action-scene movie, roughly 1 hour long, with barely five minutes fighting any opponents), so the "actor" and his team develop new "moves" between "movies".

There are apparently three "tracks" available for each new campaign -- easy, normal, and hard -- with Godzilla starting over at 50 meters tall each time. (Depending on how much destruction you cause, Godzilla grows bigger during the campaign, but I'm more than a little unsure that this is only a score metric. I can't tell he's actually getting bigger in relation to the set pieces, though the game certainly has that capability in its engine: you can control your monster's relative size when posing figures for a diorama.) After the first mission you can choose to continue "normal" or go "hard", and if you go "normal" you can choose "easy" after the second mission -- each track has different prime ministers with different personalities. If you ever choose "hard", or continue choosing "normal", you can then make choices per mission about the "normal" or "hard" path; if you ever go "easy" I'm not sure it's possible to work back to the "hard" path, but you can choose "normal" or "easy" back and forth.

The monsters unlocked depends on which path you follow, and to some extent on how many of the four "cinematic" views you remember to find and trigger on each set (plus to some degree on how much destruction you cause, leading to heightened defense levels). Unfotunately, I forgot to get any photos on the final easy stage last night, after and during an otherwise perfect run (with 100% destruction of all buildings, and getting all 4 cinematic shots on each level), so if I want to unlock whatever the true ending fight is for that path I'll have to spend about an hour playing it again.

But I see no evidence yet that I can play as, or against, chosen monsters, other than a somewhat-random boss-monster string of fights in another mode. So I'm fuzzy about why I would bother. Since the game isn't really about the monster fights, they're designed to quickly finish in a minute or two. The monster list does seem fairly complete, though.