A while back, I wrote about the history of Godzilla-based video games, and how perplexing it is that such an important pop cultural figure—with a particular influence on video games—has almost no truly notable games to his name. The disproportionate “Influence on games vs. Actual presence in games” history you see in Godzilla might actually be more pronounced in Godzilla’s former kaiju movie counterpart Gamera: there are innumerable Japanese-made games featuring turtles—whether it be a Pokemon, Bowser, or a random Mega Man enemy—where the turtle tucks into its shell and spins around, and every one of those instances is a direct reference to Gamera; and yet, there are only a tiny handful of games featuring the giant, fire-breathing friend to all children. While there might be fewer Godzilla games than you’d expect, there are certainly a lot more of them than there are games based on Gamera.
Part of that is just a result of the two franchises’ histories: Godzilla returned after a decade-long hiatus just as console games were really taking off in Japan, giving him ample opportunity to be adapted into video games from the Famicom days to now. Gamera’s final film for a good long while was 1980’s extra-length clipshow Gamera: Super Monster, and with that movie making a shambles of the monster’s reputation (and original studio Daiei long dead), Gamera was no longer a going concern, and was seemingly relegated to exclusively being a nostalgic reference for certain generations of Japanese (and western) fans. Not surprisingly, then, the first Gamera video games (all Japanese-only, also not surprising) did not appear until the mid-nineties, tied in directly with the high profile revival of the series through Shusuke Kaneko’s Gamera: Guardian of the Universe—for a brief period, Gamera went from having zero games to a couple of them, and much like the Gamera movies themselves, these games basically followed the same trajectory as the Godzilla games, in microcosm.
That means there that no two Gamera games played even remotely alike, and most of them even seemed to buck conventional wisdom when it comes to making licensed video games. Where a traditional genre cash-in would make sense, they instead went about the things in a sideways manner, creating games that are more perplexing than fun. That brief time where Gamera games were coming out with no real direction, however, did at least produce one interesting result: 1997’s Gamera 2000, the one Gamera game that received some notoriety outside of Japan, with import copies receiving a few surprisingly positive reviews from western game magazines of the time. In this case, an unexpected take on a giant monster game actually resonated.
To better understand context of Gamera 2000, let’s take note of its direct predecessors. Three games were published in 1995, all from different publishers and developers, and with wildly different concepts. There was a Bandai-published game on their multimedia pseudo-console Playdia, a barely interactive “game” using footage from the movies (a style of game that really only existed in the early-to-mid nineties.) The Super Famicom game directly based on Guardian, developed and published by Sammy (a company that merged with Sega a decade later), is a strategy game where you command the military to battle Gamera and his archenemy Gyaos. The one game where you actually play as Gamera was on the Game Boy, developed by Angel Studios (who mostly seemed to work on Sailor Moon games) and published by KID Corp (mostly known in the west for publishing the infamous Pepsiman Playstation game), which was a turn-based battle game where Gamera faced off against multiple monsters from the series, not dissimilar in style from Super Godzilla on the SNES, but with all the city-crawling and action parts taken out, and somehow even more finicky and confusing. Needless to say, there was no real consensus on what a Gamera game should even look like, and none of these experiments led to anything particularly memorable.
Gamera 2000, released on the Playstation, was the fourth and final game—not just the final one of that batch, but the final console Gamera game ever made, with only mobile and pachinko games bearing his name for the past twenty-five years (although there’s also a Dreamcast VMU virtual pet that, interestingly enough, can connect to the Rebirth of Mothra III VMU virtual pet, the only crossover between Gamera and Toho kaiju in existence)—released during the brief intermission between Gamera 2: Attack of Legion and Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris, which also saw the ascension of polygon-based consoles. Alongside those fancy new graphics, we got a fairly interesting take on the kaiju game, finding a rather creative middle ground between playing as the human military and playing as the monster itself: you are, in essence, controlling both simultaneously, working together. This certainly fits with Gamera’s status as an ally of humanity, although in this case he’s working with a band of military-types rather than the kids of the original series or the teenage girl of the Kaneko trilogy. The style of game isn’t even the most surprising thing about Gamera 2000, a game whose title permanently cements as a mid-to-late-nineties product—the most surprising thing is that it is actually fairly well-made, and is not only the best Gamera game by a wide margin, but may actually be more interesting than most Godzilla games.
What helps is that it based itself on a fairly rock solid foundation: that of Sega’s Panzer Dragoon series of fantasy rail shooters (which themselves have a very monster-heavy angle)— and by “based itself”, I mean “shamelessly ripped off.” It includes most of the signatue gameplay elements of PD, including a full 3D camera, lock-on attacks, and even a variation of Panzer Dragoon II Zwei’s super-powered special weapon. Developer Digital Frontier (no real notable credits elsewhere from what I can find, although this game’s main programmer apparently worked on the cutscenes of Capcom’s Maximo games on the PS2, which is the highest profile connection I saw) evidently saw that high-flying dragon-based shooting action game and figured it was a perfect fit for Gamera, and it turns out they were probably right! Playing as a hotshot pilot for the United Nations Science Defense Academy, you fly a Sci-Fi jet around zapping legions of alien “Bio-Mecha” while Gamera, mostly in his adorable sea turtle form introduced in the nineties movies, follows alongside, and by charging your lock-on laser, you’ll command Gamera to spit out groups of homing fireballs; you can also charge up a separate meter so Gamera can use an extremely powerful shell spin attack. Having your secondary weapon exist as a separate entity (although apparently there’s a co-op mode where a second player controls Gamera) is the one real innovation this brings to the PD formula.
To bolster the enemy variety, and to make this feel like a true kaiju experience, the evil aliens have also stolen the DNA of frequent nemesis Gyaos (who appears in more Gamera media than any other enemy monster in the franchise), and used it to engineer numerous mutant spin-offs, from more standard flying forms to dog-beasts to boss abominations, including a humanoid form and a somewhat cute armadillo hybrid. The most impressive of all the Gyaos you encounter is the G;Bionic Gyaos (aka the Dragon Fortress), which is apparently the size of the entire city of Hong Kong. At least one of these boss battles features a one-on-one ground battle between Gamera and the mutant Gyaos in the midst of a burning city, providing a sequence of traditional giant monster combat in this high-speed shooting game.
The action seems to be fairly well-constructed, with a good sense of speed and attempts to vary stages—in one sequence, your jet is replaced with a hoverbike and you zip through a forest that is completely not like Return of the Jedi at all, all without Gamera’s aid. While the game is otherwise fairly short and simple (you don’t even have a score to keep track of), competently executing that sort of arcade action in 1997 Playstation game is still no small feat. Further cementing it as a game made in 1997, the soundtrack consists entirely of thumping house electronica, which certainly fits the rhythm of this sort of game.
What’s interesting to me in all this is how much Gamera 2000 does not feel in line with the movies it’s ostensible tying into, and that especially comes through in the game’s live action cut scenes. These cinematics were singled out in the coverage of this game in 1997, and it’s easy to see why: using all English-speaking actors to portray the members of the Science Defense Academy, the acting quality is what you might call “not entirely professional”, full of strange dialogue and even stranger line readings (you will learn to appreciate the frequency in which your commanding officer tells you to “recapture Gyaos DNA”.) One of the more charming extra features are little interactive screens you can screw around with in between levels, where you click on computer screens or parts of your Sci-Fi jet or even the characters themselves to initiate further cutscenes, conversations, or even just cute, pointless animations—it reminds me of a mid-nineties educational PC game. All of this is another remnant of nineties video games, where live action cut scenes of this style were frequently used in games like Command & Conquer, but the developers of this seemed especially devoted to these cutscenes: from the end credits, it looked like the cinematics staff was several times larger than the actual game development staff.
In some ways, the schlocky quality of the cinematics feels like an attempt by the Japanese developers to nod towards the reputation of giant monster B-movies (including the original Gamera movies) in the west, intentionally making something awkward and campy (although it’s just as likely that it was not intentional at all.) This is strange not only because this game never left Japan, but also because it’s a marketing tie-in to the Kaneko movies, which are serious and well-made kaiju movies, almost completely tonally at odds with whatever this is. Aside from matching the designs of Gamera and Gyaos to their modern incarnations (although it is odd that in a game based on suitmation movies that also has plenty of live action footage, the monsters are depicted entirely in mid-nineties video game CG), Gamera 2000 feels completely disconnected from the direction the franchise had taken, as if someone maybe less sober-minded was trying to bring back sixties-style Gamera, updating it for the rave club, explosion-happy nineties. Based on some of the impression of the game I’ve read, that actually fits the preconceived image that many people already held about Gamera in general, which may have also influenced their surprise when the game turned out to be decent.
That’s the paradoxical nature of Gamera: because of the inherent silliness of the concept (which the older movies fully embraced) and the way it was presented outside Japan, it’s generally treated as pure kitsch, a thing that people could enjoy but never take remotely seriously. In that mindset, every time something Gamera-related turns out be genuinely interesting or well-made, it often takes certain audiences by surprise. Despite living down to Gamera’s reputation in certain aspects, Gamera 2000 is yet another example of this franchise shellshocking westerners.
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