Kaiju

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"RUN! It's Godzilla!"

– What you should be screaming when you meet the fuckin' King of the Monsters.

Kaijus. Giant fucking monsters. Do you really need more to that description? Kaijus are awesome. There is simply no debate. Your mecha needs an enemy to fight? Bring in the fire breathing lizards. You need some eerie menace that looms over the jungle? Bring in le giant monke. You need dragons, but you want 'em bigger? Bring in the fuckin' giant dragons!

Erm.

In all seriousness, Kaijus (literally translated as "strange beasts") are defined as giant monsters the size of buildings or even bigger. Since the term itself betrays it was popularized by Japan, some may deem liking them a small subset of being weeaboo. Not that /tg/ cares.

/tg/ relevance

Before they suddenly got a wider presence in the mainstream scene, Kaijus were pretty niche, and certainly amongst the nerdiest of shit. Some would prefer to watch wrestling and hear Vince McMahon scream the name of the new champion every month or so, some prefer to watch people in rubber suits pretending to be obese lizard charging lasers while throwing each other unto buildings. For the longest time, Kaiju films were a japanese exclusive and hardly accessible. Meaning that if you wanted to watch one of those flicks, you had to know where to look, but you also really had to be into it because a lot of those films were unapologetic sci-fi schlocks. People come in for the monsters, they stayed for the monsters.

Naturally, /tg/ being occupied by nerds, it's easy to assume a lot of them might be into kaiju shit. Usually speaking, Mecha-fans and Kaiju-fans tend to go hand in hand, sitting right there on the same spectrum of autism. That, or they fight for no particular reason on who's got the worse genre.

When it comes to featuring kaiju in tabletop gaming, the first things that we have to talk about is Monsterpocalypse, a miniatures-based war game in which you get to be the star of your own kaiju movie, controlling all manner of giant monsters, giant mecha, and other things related to the genre, like ninjas that can grow into kaiju-sized battlers.

The other notable source of kaiju-related /tg/ content is, ironically, Dungeons & Dragons. Back in the days of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, not only was the adventure module WG6: Isle of the Ape was basically "D&D does King Kong", but there was also a monster called the "Gargantua", which was basically a thinly veiled kaiju - the sample picture of a "Reptilian Gargantua" in the Monstrous Manual even looks like a knock-off Godzilla. 3e saw the Gargantuas return in the page of Dragon Magazine #289, where Paizo provided rules for creating and battling your own kaiju in 3e. They followed this up when they split off to form Pathfinder, creating the Kaiju monster template, officially creating a "Monster Island" for Golarion, and inventing their own set of individual kaiju.

There is also Splicers, by Palladium Books( the same authors of Rifts), which uses the War Mounts, creatures who acts as partners for some classes and are almost completely customizable by the players. While not every War Mounts is Kaijuu sized, most of them still have an impressive arsenal of organic weapons before said customization and terryfing strength and endurance, even by the standards of the Megaverse

Yu-Gi-Oh! has an entire archetype dedicated to making your opponent fight you with giant monsters aptly named, Kaiju, with a lot of Kaiju effects revolving around making sure nothing, spells, traps, and other monsters, etc, interfere with your big monster fight.

Japanese Kaijus

Creators of the genre, the Japanese are the most proud of their cinematic achievement that is the Kaiju genre. Because, believe it or not, but the creature literally originates from film, and not from Japanese folklore. It all started in 1954 with the very first Godzilla movie, and from then on, a full myriad of giant monster films popped up left and right. They turned out to be extremely popular with the public, teenagers and children. Hell, some even attended theaters to see a specific building being destroyed. Especially those associated with taxes and politics.

There are different eras of Kaiju films. Some might tell you that these are all based on what Toho was doing with Godzilla, but let's be honest; The Godzilla eras fit the entire japanese side of the genre well.

• Showa Era; The very first. Starting with the very serious and outright terrific Godzilla film. An heart-shattering anti-nuclear war film about the embodiment of mankind's folly to destroy itself made manifest rampaging Tokyo. Bear in mind that this was made in a time when the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki's bombin was still very, very vivid. The movie spokes volumes to the public of the time... And then Toho made sequels. Mountains of them. And they all dropped the serious and gritty tone of the first film. Yeah, the 60s and the 70s were wild times in Japan too. And every Kaiju movie turned out to be a massive wank fest. Godzilla goes to Space, Godzilla fights a mechanical clone of himself, Godzilla fights aliens and kicks their shit with his "friends"... And then kicks the ass of his friends! Godzilla fucks Barney the Dinosaur and spawns Minilla. And so on and so forth.
  • During that very same period, other Kaiju stars made debuts. And admitedly, it was the only period in which they really had a chance. Gamera is a famous contender and fellow rival of Godzilla, although the two never official met. Mothra, too, the giant butterfly thing that ended up becoming the good counterpart to Big G. Rodan, the reptile who had one film for himself and then nothing else but featurings with King Godzi. Few even had the privilege of starting franchises.
• Heisei Era ; Sometimes considered the best era. So one day, Toho was like "Man, we did a lot of shitty movies. So how about we crank the serious juice to never-seen-before levels and create an actual universe and continuity?". And they did just that. Starting with Godzilla 1985, the Heisei era redifined the Kaiju genre by doubling down on the special effects and catching up with the times. This time the monsters were actually monstrous and gave 0 shits about Humanity. Turned out that it worked for them, because having Godzilla being the friend and ally of humanity wasn't much of a good idea. All things considered. This time, Toho started a brand new cinematic universe where each film was a direct sequel to the previous one, or loosely connected to one another if they were spin-offs. This is where less new Kaijus were created and more ancient ones got a serious amount of polish. Some of the goofiest were event outright scrapped due to how ridiculous they looked; Hedorah, the literally TRESH monster, Gigan, the chicken-raptor thing from outer-outer space, King Caesar, the guy who needed a fucking opera to be summoned, etc. All of them disappeared. But then you have new ones introduced as well; Motherfucking Biollante, the plant monster who could make Nurgle run for his life, SPESS GODZILLA, WHO IS JUST GODZILLA FROM SPESS, and none other than the Devil himself; Destroyah! Yeah, that's his actual name: DESU-TORO-YAH!. On the Godzilla side of things, they capped off the era by killing the original Big G and finally saying "The End". Tough shit, but Toho felt like they had to move on from the King of the Monsters for good before they started to fuck shit up again like they did during the Showa era.
• Millenium Era: So, the Americans really, really, really fucked up your baby monster bad. What do you do? Well, you enter the new Millenium by continuing the Heisei Saga by making Godzilla Junior the main protag! Around this time, Godzilla was pretty much the only one still in the Kaiju ring. Mothra had a few films here and there and Gamera definetely tried to catch up to his rival, but to not avail. Even Mothra struggled, so much so that she had to resort to go back to featuring in his films to even stay relevant. That isn't to say the Millenium films of the Godzi franchise were good. Well, they were to some extent, but let's say that the entire era is pure Skub material. Toho to shove as much shit as possible, even coming to the point of trying to capture the original spirit of the first film while still retaining the power-crazed style of the new movies with GMK. Arguably one of the best movies, but one that is hardly mentionned outside of discussions surrounding the Millenium era.
• Reiwa Era: So the Americans really, really, really, really fucking suck at getting Godzilla right, so you get the guy from Neon Genesis Evangelion to set things right. So far, only a few films came out. And there's only one major feature. Hard to tell now if Kaijus are going to get back into a popular fenzy again. Only time will tell. What's for sure though is that now Horror and social commentary are back on the menu, and it's gonna get downright eldritch from now on.

So, what about other kaiju? Well, most of them got their chance to shine in the Showa era, and frankly almost none of them really had the chops to pull it off. The most well known are Mothra, Gamera and Rodan; of those three, Mothra and Gamera got the best deal, whilst Rodan at least managed to get his own movie and then get pulled into the Godzillaverse as a pretty important 2nd-tier monster. There were all kinds of individual kaiju movies in the Showa era, such as Varan (about a giant flying lizard that lives in a lake), Dogora (a carbon-eating alien jellyfish... this one is exceptionally bad, because the directors really wanted to do a goofy comedy-crime flick and just threw Dogora in as a background element), two Frankenstein Kaiju films, and Yog (a bodiless alien possesses sea animals and mutates them into kaiju), but they never made the real impact.

Of the Toho monsters, only Mothra really took off besides Godzilla, getting his own miniseries where she and her son got shonen-esque transformations and fought to protect the world from various kaiju threats, such as the most powerful incarnation ever seen of Toho kaiju arch-enemy Gidorah.

Then... there's Gamera. A giant, firebreathing, flying turtle monster. He started off strong as a rip-off of the original Godzilla flick, with one key difference: there was an annoying little Japanese kid in it that loved Gamera and didn't want him hurt. And for some reason, this obnoxious little shit gave Gamera's creators the idea to retool Gamera in his future films as a "friend to all children". Whilst the first sequel was actually pretty good, largely because it didn't have any of these annoying kid protagonists (sometimes nicknamed "Kennys" after the English dub's name for the original Gamera-brat) and was just a straight up rumble between Gamera and an ice-breathing, rainbow-laser-shooting chameleon monster (we shit you not: Gamera's kaiju are weird), the rest got worse and worse, with more and more emphasis on the stupid little kids. Luckily, after this iteration of the Gameraverse tanked, he got his own version of the Heisei era, which reimagined him as a much more badass character and gave him far darker, more terrible foes to face off against. And no more annoying little kid protagonists, too!

American Kaijus

Like Disney did with European folktales and mythologies from across the globe, Americans wanted a part of the Giant Monster cake, and we're gonna be blunt around here, they really did not do a good job. At all.

Which is a cruel irony, since technically America invented the giant monster movie genre. Kaiju as a concept stretch all the way back to the 1930s, when America created King Kong, the first ever kaiju. America also jumped on the "nuclear nasty" genre around the same time Japan did, releasing the actually quite awesome giant ant horror movie THEM! several months before Godzilla debuted on Japanese theatre screens as Gojira. Sadly, though America did its own share of giant monster movies throughout the 50s and 60s, most of them were basically xploitation films trying to clumsily ape THEM! without either the scriptwriter's talent or the budget, and the genre slowly died off around the 60s - ironically, perhaps in part due to the influx of (admittedly badly dubbed) Japanese kaiju movies.

But what really stained America's reputation was when they rented the license to Godzilla from Toho in the 90s and attempted to do a new spin on the king of the Japanese kaiju... unfortunately, they decided to go back to the kaiju genre's pre-Atomic roots, reinventing "Zilla" (as he is now derisively known) as more of an old-school giant beast; no nuclear breath, no regeneration, just sheer size, strength, speed and cunning, to the point he is ultimately brought down by sufficient firepower once he is immobilized. Now, if this hadn't been attached to the Godzilla title, it would have been a decent old-school giant monster movie...but since this was a Godzilla movie, and this creature bore no resemblance to the classic Japanese kaiju (hence the other nickname of Godzilla In Name Only, or GINO), it led to an enormous backlash from the Japanese kaiju fandom, to say nothing about Toho's reaction. The only time anyone from the land of the rising sun would ever see this mistake would be in 2004's Godzilla: Final Wars, where it appeared as a jobber that gets wrecked in one minute without even a mention. You know how this thing was supposed to go down originally? Godzilla was supposed to be normal lookin' and was going to fight an actual american kaiju; the griffin! But, in true Hollywood fashion; They hired two guys who vehemently hated Godzilla and wanted to do something that was completely different from it. Seriously, Emmerich, what the actual fuck is wrong with you?

The failure of the '98 Godzilla spelled the end of American Kaiju films for over a decade, save a few minor entries like Peter Jackson's King Kong remake from 2005 and the JJ Abrams produced found-footage film 'Cloverfield' from 2008. All this was to change with the one-two combo of 2013's Pacific Rim and Legendary's crack at Godzilla the year after... Which wasn't any better.

Godzilla (2014) was a human-centric movie. Very reminscent of the first one with maybe even more dramatisation because this is Hollywood we're talking about. So it's nowhere near as heavy because all the sad stuff mostly focuses on Walter White and his family. No shit, Hal was the best part of the movie and he freakin' dies. Which is a shame because every single bit of human tragedy is usually transmitted by the boring middle-class american family. With that being said; you have to bear in mind that this movie came out after decades upon decades of Monster Wrestlin'. Which means that kaiju fans felt blueballed beyond comprehension, to such levels that audiences and public alike were wondering why the fuck were some autistic nerds screeching about the film on the internets. Why's that? Well, the focus of the film is on HUMANS. Which any Godzilla fan will tell you is the most difficult part to get right, and most of the time the most boring. Because the movie is called "Godzilla" not "Joe Schmoe and his family of two ft. Godzilla". Any fight that happened between the MUTOs and Godzi was immediatly skipped to have more exposition scenes or scenes with humans. Not particularly good scenes either because its either Joe Schmoe or the military talking. Having the whole film being shot from a human perspective was a neat idea though. The Showa was particularly guilty of not making the monsters feel giant.

Alas, the movie was a success and what soon followed was the Monsterverse. It was to Godzilla what the MCU was to Marvel. The Monsterverse tried to appeal to three different publics; the casual audience who never saw kaiju films, kaiju fans who like seeing monsters brawling, and movie enthusiasts who like deep things. Seeing how difficult that would be, they decided to make a bold attempt at capturing a certain "vibe". Something between the craziness of the Millenium era and the eerie majesty of the Heisei era... To mixed results. Shoving deep lore that more or less reference the original films, contradicting the tone and direction of the first Godzilla/King Kong film, shoving in humor and DEEP LORE into the thing, while having this sort of "I'm not taking myself seriously unless I actually am" kind of tone... The movies are dividing.

Notable Kaiju

• Godzilla: THE king of the Kaijus, as far as anyone is concerned, a towering reptilian monstrosity that breathes atomic fire. Has had quite a few changes in portrayal over the years, shifting from a symbolic terror to a rampaging force of nature to an unwitting guardian of the Earth.
  • Burning Godzilla: Godzilla's Super Sayian form. Swapping his usual blue for a fiery reddish-orange (duh), this form is achieved by further exposure to nuclear energy (or, partially, bullshit Mothra powers when it made its Western movie series debut). In its original appearance, this form was not stable and in fact threatened to have Godzilla's nuclear furnace of a heart go critical and create an apocalyptic explosion, which was only prevented by having Destoroyah (which was born of mutation caused by the Oxygen Destroyer of the original film) kill the King and then having the JSDF use special cooling weapons to bring the remnant nuclear energy under control.
  • Mechagodzilla: A giant robotic copy of Big G created by the EDF as a defensive measure if Godzilla goes uncontrollable. Armed to the teeth to take anything down, though being a machine lends it some serious limitations.
  • SpaceGodzilla: A giant crystal FROM SPEHSS that absorbed some of Godzilla's DNA. Those crystals allow it to be more of a threat at range, with electrical disturbances and firing lasers.
• King Kong: The west's Kaiju icon, a giant ape from some faraway island who is captured and forced to entertain a derisive public before breaking free with its' one moral fetter on one last rampage before going down. Yes, this story's been repeated more than quite a few times. Is also considered Godzilla's main rival, given that multiple films focus on lizard vs monkey action.
• Mothra: A giant magical moth who is one of the few unironically good Kaijus in the franchise. Incredibly flimsy whether it's a newly-born silkworm or its more iconic adult form, but its wings have dust particles that can cause considerable damage to whatever they land on.
• Rodan: An oversized pteranodon who breathes uranium fire. Usually a menace because it can fly around whereas Godzilla can only lumber around and try to catch up.
• Anguirus: Spiky-backed turtle dinosaur thing that became Godzilla's best buddy during the Showa era.
• King Gidorah: Another of Godzilla's most famous adversaries and the most consistent, a giant three-headed golden dragon from outer space who is claimed king of the Kaijus despite being more of a mind-controlled slave. Seriously, he's usually under the control of some invading alien race in most film he appears in. In the anime trilogy, trough, he's turned into a lovecraftian and ethereal monstruosity which said aliens worship, almost managing to get rid of good of Godzilla, here in his most gigantic form.
• Frankenstein: Yes, seriously, they made a kaiju movie out of Frankenstein's monster. During World War II, the Nazis send the immortal heart of Frankenstein's Monster to their Japanese lab to be studied for a super-soldier program, but the lab is in Hiroshima and gets nuked. The radiation causes Frankenstein's heart to regenerate into a deformed humanoid who then grows into a building sized giant. He's actually not the bad guy in this movie; the real killer is a burrowing laser-horned dinosaur-thing called Barugon. He is killed by being dragged into the sea by a giant octopus. Followed by a sequel called "The War of the Gargantuas", where Frankenstein's remains regenerate into two new humanoid kaiju; a peaceful land-dweller and a man-eatings sea-dweller. These brothers ultimately fight to the death of what to do with humanity.
• Gigan: A cyclopean cyborg space dinosaur with a chainsaw in its belly, a laser eye and bladed hooks for hands. Like Gidorah, he's a popular bruiser for invading aliens to back up their forces.
• Gamera
• Gyaos

Golarion Kaiju

• Agyra, the Forever Storm
• Agmazar, the Star Titan of the Valashmai Jungle
• Bezravnis, the Inferno Below
• Cimurlian, the Great Bear
• Ebeshra, the Winged Razor
• Frovith, the Void Duke
• Igroon, the Dragon Eater
• Jakabu, the Eternal Leviathan of the Eastern Sea
• Mantraska, the World Talons
• King Mogaru of the Valashmai Jungle
• Shbloon, the Vortex Maw of the Valashmai Sea
• Lord Varklops, the Thrice-Headed Fiend
• Queen Vorgozen, the Shapeless Feeder
• Yarthoon, the Moon Grub
• Yorak, the Horned Thunder
• Zimivra, the Endless Coils