Zeiram 2 (1994)

You may remember Zeiram as the movie that begins as a Sci-Fi martial arts clash between an alien bounty hunter and a mutant super-weapon that suddenly pivots into a Laurel & Hardy duo of dimwits having a Scooby-Doo chase with said mutant super-weapon in an empty warehouse district. More than anything, it was a vehicle for director/character designer Keita Amemiya’s intricate tokusatsu aesthetic, probably one of the most prolific ones in the eighties and nineties (aside from various TV series, he worked on the effects of both GUNHED and Shin Kamen Rider: Prologue, and directed the Ultraman vs. Kamen Rider special), let loose from the strictures of television and plot—but that comic relief twist made it an odd one. Amemiya’s sequel, made three years later, actually streamlines the storytelling in a way that better distributes the action throughout its runtime and integrates all the characters in a more organic way, meaning that it might be a better-constructed film, while still being almost exactly the same.

Orochi, the Eight-Headed Dragon (1994)

During the Heisei era of Toho monster movies, the studio wasn’t really venturing into the genre outside the annual Godzilla flicks (after those ended, they began the Rebirth of Mothra trilogy, and maybe we’ll be getting back into those movies soon-ish…), a big departure from the sheer variety of the Showa days, as we have seen. One exception was this movie, titled Yamato Takeru in Japan, which was directed by Takao Okawara, who helmed every Toho Godzilla film from 1992’s Godzilla vs. Mothra to Godzilla 2000, with the exception of Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla, which released a few months after this (interestingly, Okawara had worked with original series director Ishiro Honda, and his buddy Akira Kurosowa, on Kagemusha.) This is not so much a traditional giant monster movie as a historical fantasy that utilizes Toho’s monster-making crew, which feels like a throwback to the days of Honda and Eiji Tsuburaya applying suitmation to other genres, and even to the fantasy films of Ray Harryhausen and the gang. This is basically a modernized retelling of the legendary tales of Yamato Takeru, a figure who is based partially in history and partly in mythology—in fact, Toho had previously a made a film about him in 1959, a three-hour epic in the style of The Ten Commandments called The Birth of Japan, AKA The Three Treasures, which also included a kaiju-styled version of legendary Orochi (I don’t remember a giant multi-headed snake showing up the Ten Commandments, so Cecil B. DeMille can stick that in his pipe and smoke it.) The “modernization” ends up blending Japanese mythology, high fantasy adventure, monsters, and some tokusatsu flair into definitely different from the Heisei Godzillas, and also quite entertaining.

Monster Multimedia: Gargoyle’s Quest/Demon’s Crest

Capcom’s Ghosts ‘n Goblins games are among the easiest to hate and love at the same time—they are infuriating exercises in precise and unforgiving platforming action, demanding an absurd amount from players and rewarding them with yet more cruelty (this a series where GOD HIMSELF appears to tell you that you can’t actually finish the game until you play through it a second time)…but there’s something about the style of those games that remains appealing even while hordes of demons are kicking your boxers-wearing behind over and over again. Part of that has to be its distinctively comical yet still appropriately ghoulish aesthetic, barrelling through Boschian landscapes literally bursting with skulls while hordes upon hordes of demonic entities dance around and vomit projectiles at you (sometimes also literally.) These lively and animated escapees from the Dictionnaire Infernal are memorable both because of their interesting and fun designs, but also because a good majority of them are among the most vexing obstacles preventing you from making any progress in the game. I guess if the game is designed to be Hard as Hell, your enemies might as well all hail from there—and the worst of the worst of the non-boss demons making life miserable for the diminutive knight Arthur are the Red Arremers, the gargoyle demons whose ability to chase you down while flying in erratic patterns makes them a menace in every game in the series. Once you see one sitting in its signature cross-legged waiting pose on the other end of the screen, you know pain is incoming.

The Red Arremers were so memorably hateful that, only a few years after their debut, someone at Capcom had a genius idea: why not have a game where you play as one of them?

Monster Multimedia: The Monsters of Final Fantasy VI

I’ve written before about how having access to books and television shows collecting stories about monsters of myth, legend, and whatever you’d classify cryptooology as (mygend?) was one of the things that tipped me over into full-on obsession with monsters, but that isn’t necessarily the only thing that did. Around that same time (the mid-to-late nineties), I had been introduced to an entire new type of video game: the RPG. Thanks mainly to the much more child-friendly Super Mario RPG, I was finally confident enough to take on other games by Square, the developers of Mario RPG. I jumped headlong into Chrono Trigger and the Final Fantasy games, and I’d continue to check out a few other RPGs here and there on later consoles. I was definitely not an RPG fanatic when compared to many other people (I don’t think I played through a single 3D RPG), but I was always intrigued by them—nowadays, I simply don’t have the patience for it, but I still hold a lot of nostalgic affection for the ones I played on the SNES specifically, and the many strange and wonderful things that were found in them. They were to me what I imagine science fiction and fantasy novels and tabletop roleplaying games were to kids of the previous decades.

What does any of that have to do with monsters? Well, if you’ve played any RPG, you know the answer: every single one is crawling with them, whole titanic bestiaries heaving with diverse creatures of every description. Given that so much of these games were map-rambling and dungeon-crawling with random encounters to give your party a way to get stronger and earn money (and also to pad out the length—how much of those “one-hundred hour games” was actually spent getting anywhere?), they certainly needed a lot of monsters that could show up again and again, and that’s not even counting scripted boss encounters. The sheer scope of the critter collections in these games also means that, despite some attempt at coherence, you really couldn’t expect the designers to stick to some rigid idea of what is or isn’t allowed in the world of the game—which is to say, they just let their imaginations run wild when designing random encounter monsters, without having to deal with nitpicky details like “a coherent tone” or even “making any sense at all.” Even if random encounters to our more sophisticated modern eyes is an unnecessary bit of ancient design, at the very least the mechanic gave me a chance to see a whole swathe of bizarre and delightful monstrosities pulled from the developers collective imagination, things that made me ask questions and wonder what it was I was looking at. The monsters you saw in these games were of the purest kind—sheer nightmare visions that obeyed no rules, they simply were.