This is part of what I was trying to say. Agreed.Israha wrote:I'd say the one thing that made me enjoy HGM more than ROE is more tight and straightforward plot. Monsters are reappearing on Earth, humanity (sort of succesfully) tries to hold em back until they realize they're not the main antagonists. One major twist in otherwise simple, yet solid story, with enough, but not too much monsters (so each of them has its time to shine), and with a main human character, who is actually not an one-dimensional antihero like he appears in first few issues.
All the kaiju fought the Trilopods at some point. And I appreciate that some of them got focus earlier with Trilopod battles. But, I expected more from some of them during the final fight.LSD Jellyfish wrote:There was more of an all out war than you think. Gorosaurus fights the Trilopods. Gaira and Sanda and the other monsters fight the trilopods. Godzilla and Spacegodzilla fight the trilopods. King Caeser fights the trilopods. Then Jet Jaguar fights the Gojipod. Then the big climax. ROE had many smaller fights then you give credit for. But yeah I actually agree the series could have used more issues. In retrospect it makes me a bit peeved at issue 22(or was it 21) where there seemed to be some filler.
For the few that are built up (maybe Gorosaurus?) the others succeeded. JJ kicked ass, as did Gigan which were clearly favorites of the writers. As did Sanda and Gaira and Zilla. Other monsters who already had their chances to shine like Anguirus took a backseat which was fine. While I do agree the series could have used an extra issue I don't have any bad feelings about the monsters in the climax with the exception of Kameobas and the two no shows Gezora and Manda.
Sure, the series did give a lot of attention to the Gargantuas, one of my favorite things about the series. But I would've liked to have seen the attention lead up to something... more. Not that they didn't do their part in the final battle, but we didn't see too much of it. It felt kind of odd to see them get so much focus, then at the end, they're just one of many monsters in the background.
Obviously, you can't expect all the kaiju to get a lot of attention, so you expect some to act more as background monsters, but during that final fight most of them ended up being just background monsters, you just see fragments of their battles, like when they kill something. It wasn't bad for the time they had to do it in, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't have been much longer.
I feel the opposite. HGM was okay when it started. Interesting concept. But sometimes it could drag out or feel like filler (issue #5). Then when the space monsters showed up, it improved significantly (well, not in issue #9, but everything after that was stellar until the ending). And I disagree on the characters, they were still pretty important to the plot in the last arc. Not as important as they were earlier, true. But they still did quite a bit, like freeing all the monsters on Monster Island, and attempting to use Kiryu to fight Monster X (I really wish they didn't get trashed immediately though).I didn't like HGM cause towards the end there's a complete tonal shift. The first half has the heroes fighting monsters and being successful. They also fight off human baddies. Godzilla doesn't fight anyone until Hedorah arrives other than Kiryu. And to be honest I really liked what they were doing, having tons of destruction but no forced fights. But then towards the end it felt like they needed for force a bunch of shit in at the cost of making human characters I liked a lot having less importance. I will concede I prefer Boxer and the monster kill crew vastly over Woods and Lucy.
To clarify, I like ROE way more than HGM. I'm just saying that they did a few things better than ROE, but most series do something better than another. I just liked how HGM was, well, like Israha said above, "tight and straightforward"; one big story. Despite this, ROE's still one of my favorite Godzilla comic series, well above HGM as a whole.
I too loved all the focus on the new monsters, though remember that ROE was really the first that could do that. They acquired the new monsters while HCW and HGM were in development. For some reason or another, probably because both series were already largely planned out and they couldn't rewrite the stories based on new monsters. They were able to throw a few in HCW because there were already a bunch of monster there, and Megalon and Ebirah just added to the chaos. The final story arc of HGM took place about a year after they acquired the new kaiju, so in that time they were able to change the story around to make the new monster the final boss (as you said, originally Megaguirus was planned but they opted for Monster X, which was cool but Spacegodzilla suffered for it).
