I will hold to my dying day that there’s more to the appeal of Godzilla than “see the big Kaiju crush things”.
Toho’s most famous movie star has appeared in features that covered everything from the horrors of nuclear war to pollution, government incompetence to concepts of post-war honour and sacrifice… as well as immense Kaijus turning a variety of Japanese cities into dust.
Also Jet Jaguar turned up once, but he’s awful. Let us never speak of him again.
The point here is that Godzilla films made by the Japanese are more than just dumb action films.
If you want that, there’s the Legendary “Monsterverse” films, which are pure turn-your-brain-off-and-put-a-bucket-on-the-floor-to-collect-the-drippings-as-it-turns-to-mush style fare.
Which is not to say that the plot of Godzilla Destroy All Monsters Melee Remastered is a Shakespearean masterpiece; it’s about as simple as Godzilla films ever got, borrowing heavily from the 60s Showa era films – most obviously Destroy All Monsters, of course – with an alien force called the Vortaak taking over a bevy of Kaiju with the intent of dominating planet Earth.
All that stands between them and global destruction is one lone kaiju, fighting their way through each foe in turn, along with a little military action to throw in freeze rays, a few stray bullets and intermittent power-ups along the way.
As the suffix suggests, Godzilla Destroy All Monsters Melee Remastered is a remastered edition of a game that first saw light of day on the Nintendo GameCube way back in 2002.
I should admit that I can see my copy of that game – and its sequels, Godzilla: Save The Earth and Godzilla: Unleashed – from where I’m writing this review, just to set the stakes for how much I expect out of a remaster.
They’re tricky business, you see, because while there’s some appeal in updated visuals where artistically appropriate, getting the balance of how the original game played and how play trends have evolved over time is never a simple matter.
To Atari’s credit, it’s brought in original developers Pipeworks to create the remastered version of Godzilla Destroy All Monsters Melee. You can’t get more familiarity with the source material than that, and it does rather show.
Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee Remastered is essentially just a multiplayer brawler in the classic arcade style, one part King of the Monsters, one part Power Stone, and absolutely best played with a group of friends, a tangle of controllers and suitable snacks to hand. Seeing as how it’s 2026, the tangle part of the controllers isn’t required and there are options for online play as well.
Visually, Godzilla Destroy All Monsters Melee has been given a serious and generally nice makeover, with far more detailed models for the game’s combatants that make them far more movie-realistic, while still retaining the slightly goofy fun of the original. It was always fun to deliberately stomp on a Kaiju’s foot back in
One tweak that Pipeworks has made that I’m not a big fan of is the way that you unlock additional Kaiju foes as playable characters.
The original game used a simple play-through-as-each-character system, which was very much the style at the time, but for the remastered edition, this has been replaced with an experience system that sees you generate research points that go towards a variety of goals, including unlocking new characters.
All of this is largely done in single-player mode, and the problem here is that it’s far more of a lengthy grind than the original was… and a misstep.
Why a misstep? That’s because the joy to be found in Godzilla Destroy All Monsters Melee was always in competitive play with other humans, and that’s best when you’ve got the game’s full roster of Kaiju in play. Without the grind, and if you want online play, you’re stuck.
The same isn’t quite true for local couch play, however.
Hidden away in the settings menu is an option for “tournament” play, which disables all the research gathering tasks and leaves you with a simple menu that allows for multi-player (or vs CPU) play with the game’s full roster of playable characters.
You can’t use this for online play, but if you can get other players in your actual location, it’s a very welcome quick and easy hack around the problem… which shouldn’t exist in the first place.
If you’ve still got a copy of Godzilla Destroy All Monsters Melee and a working GameCube (or Xbox, because a revised version came out later for Microsoft’s OG console) then Godzilla Destroy All Monsters Melee Remastered isn’t exactly a must-buy proposition. It’s shinier, yes, but the core game is fundamentally the same.
However, the reality here is that folks who do keep their old consoles up and running are in the minority, and if you’re more in the space of the Switch 2 (or PS5, Xbox Series X or PC) then it’s an excellent party game, especially for local play.
I could have wished for Pipeworks to produce an effective mashup of its three Godzilla titles from that era, because that would have given me a much wider roster of gigantic foes to fight against and as.
My inner cynic wonders if the idea isn’t to see whether Godzilla Destroy All Monsters Melee Remastered sells well enough to “develop” remastered versions of Save The Earth and Unleashed as well… though I guess if they did that, it would mean the re-emergence of Jet Jaguar as well. Maybe just sticking to Godzilla Destroy All Monsters Melee was a wise choice after all.
