"Godzilla vs the Cheese Monster"

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CHOMP.

In a fine example of an imaginative premise handily crushing its rather questionable execution underfoot, the popularity of 1991’s King of the Monsters made a sizable impact in arcades and home consoles alike on either side of the Pacific as it stomped onto the scene with gargantuan rubbery titans looking to pound each other into submission for the total supremacy of Japan. After all, who can honestly resist the sight of an overgrown fire-breathing lizard as it roars triumphantly from atop the still-smoldering ruins of downtown Tokyo? Not I. What’s that - you can? Wow, it must be awfully rough to go about your life without a soul.

Even so, were you to stand back and watch this game in action during its prime, you’d be likely to find it a flashy and impressive one – armed with an array of punishing attacks and an appetite for destruction, six titanic freaks of nature duke it out one-on-one amid sprawling and vividly colorful cities from Kobe to Hiroshima, the rumbling music and booming sound effects driving home this infectious carnage as once thriving populaces are reduced to charred wastelands of raging fires and thick smoke. The tiny buildings that dot the landscape as far as the eye can see are soon crunched flat as the player treads about with barely a thought, while more sturdy structures such as mighty skyscrapers, dazzling ferris wheels, and the ancient snow-capped castles of Kyoto erupt into satisfyingly hefty explosions whenever a monster is sent careening through them. Meanwhile the entire Japanese military swarms about ineffectually; with fighter jets screeching all around both combatants, one can snatch up ruined vehicles from the ground and hurl them at an unwary opponent, variously bashing them with a horn-blasting bullet train that wrecked itself upon your scaly feet, those cute little army tanks, or what appear to be suspiciously phallic mobile laser cannons.

Each of these rampaging beasts that oppose your rightful dominance has its own distinct musical theme, be it the Neo*Geo’s trademark of synthetic rock or a dire-sounding chant set to pounding drums - or a liquidous musk of swamp creature funk. I’m not actually sure what that last phrase even means, but it (like the music) sounded pretty sweet. And who, you might ask, are the monsters in your neighborhood? Besides the expected inclusion of Geon, regulation fiery-breathed dinosaur as required by Japanese law, one can contend with the likes of a towering gorilla named Woo, the crusty fists of a Rocky stone golem, or the oozing slime-covered body of the swamp creature Poison Ghost. The aptly named mutant insect BeatleMania was always an arcade favorite, but we naturally can’t forget Astro Guy, this spandex-wearing spoof of Ultraman and his torturous ilk having been transformed into his current state by a megaton of radiation. Any of these six behemoths await your choosing, but only one ridiculous cliché may emerge triumphant - or perhaps . . . two? Drag a friend along for the ride and the pair of you may team up for a frantic four-monster melee and an even greater promise of excitement!

Until you cease watching and actually pick up the controls for yourself, that is.

For that, my friends, is when the other shoe drops. King of the Monsters is also rather likely to disappoint thanks to a chronically haphazard fighting engine that employs a variety of wrestling moves - and a seemingly random rate of success. Every monster plays pretty much the same: pull the joystick in the appropriate direction, repeatedly tap the desired button, and hope for the best. To its credit, this means that anyone can play for the first time without needing to know any special moves or combination attacks, but this also means that there is precious little actual skill involved; at one moment you’ll be triumphantly punishing your opponent with a series of monstrous suplexes and skull-cracking piledrivers, perhaps briefly chomping on the enemy’s arm for good measure, only for the computer to suddenly break out of nowhere and proceed to dominate your every subsequent tie-up before sending you crashing to the continue screen. The monsters can simply punch and kick without grappling, but such attacks do a negligible amount of damage, resulting in players button mashing as they attempt to get their chosen character to do something. But button mashing doesn’t actually work - when you’re winning it seems as if it’s all about the timing of your moves; the rest of the time you’ll claim that the AI is just cheating. Admittedly, the first three or so bouts aren’t all that bad, but since there only five opponents followed by a mirror match, the game then sends you off to fight even stronger versions of them all over again, a less than tantalizing incentive to continue playing and assume your rightful place as the king of the quarter-munchers.

Yes, as if adding insult to injury, SNK also designed the game to fleece its player of their money as quickly as possible - rather than a match ending at the end of a life bar, you must pin the opposing monster for a three-count; unfortunately, your opponent simply isn’t going to stay down even after you’ve completely drained his health meter, typically prolonging the match to painful levels in later bouts thanks to the wonky grappling system. Upon defeat you’ll be prompted to insert another coin in order to reset the timer and resume the match at full strength; the home console obviously doesn’t require any tokens in such a situation, but its bios provides for only six credits without the option to change one’s desired time limit or difficulty level whatsoever. Each battle lasts a quickly-depleting 3 minutes; run out the clock and you’ll again need to produce another quarter, yet the fight will continue with both monsters’ health partially refilled. Speaking of which, the amount of energy your monster recovers at the conclusion of a successful match is completely dependent on how much collateral damage you managed to inflict upon your surroundings since your last continue, meaning that you can easily be pinned at the very outset of the following one.

Again, to be fair these problems don’t manifest themselves to an unbearable tooth-grating degree in the early goings, and it’s certainly true that KOTM was actually considered quite entertaining in its day, but while it might be worth dropping a quarter or two into this game in exchange for some mindless destruction, its all too evident flaws simply don’t stand up to prolonged or repeated play. The nature of the Neo*Geo arcade hardware means that it’s probably housed within the very same cabinet as a selection of better games; fellow owners of the home console, meanwhile, will want to think twice before adding this one to their respective collections, lest they find that their fond memories of noisy arcades and greasy pizza parlors long past to have been generously smeared with the treacherous haze that is nostalgia. For then they’d be left much akin to the city of Tokyo: depressed.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 11/06/03