Was The Heisei Series Always A Hard Reboot?

[Irockz]

I've been going through the Godzilla series in it's entirety, chronologically, for the first time recently (in the original Japanese audio, of course, so that's the version I'm referring to). I just finished Godzilla vs Biollante and, while Return of Godzilla had some dialogue that suggested the Showa sequels didn't happen (even then it could, for the most part, just be interpreted as "Godzilla's been gone for upwards of a decade and he's pissed now"), vs Biollante could have easily taken place in the Showa continuity. We even see that they've developed something akin to maser cannons which, if we choose to believe the later Kiryu Saga, were invented to combat the repeated kaiju attacks.

So the question is, did they intend to make it a complete, hard reboot? Or was it just a relaunch that didn't reference earlier continuity to make it easier for new viewers that they eventually decided to split into it's own continuity with vs King Ghidorah?

[UltramanGoji]

It was always intended to be a hard reboot that ignores everything but the 1954 film. Tomoyuki Tanaka did not like the heroic aspects of Godzilla towards the end of the Showa series so I'm pretty sure he wanted it to be a direct sequel to 54 with everything else afterwards being tossed aside.

[EternalMothra]

It was my understanding that it was "mostly" a reboot. It still acknowledges (as UltramanGoji said) the 1954 film, but it was clear with 1984 that they wanted to take Godzilla in a slightly more modern direction. If you watch the Japanese version of 1984, there are many references to the "first Godzilla." Though, I am still wondering if there may be some translation discrepancies.

[eabaker]

Yes, it is and always was a hard reboot, which returns the series to its original default status, in which the 1954 movie happened but nothing subsequent.

There's simply no 1984 it with the intervening movies (and believe me, when I was young and fixated on continuity and canon, I tried to make it work).

[Ivo-goji]

Biollante's tech is an logical progression of the tech seen in Return of Godzilla, where Japan has a flying laser tank and the Soviets built a nuclear bomb launching sattelite.

[GodzillaRangerPrime]

Well, we see the statue of KingGoji in GvBiollante and multiple photographs in the background from the Showa Era in GvDestoroyah.

You can say it’s just a visual/ soft reboot, but I think it was always a full on reboot where nothing happened between 1954 and 1984.

[Arbok]

Biollante's tech is an logical progression of the tech seen in Return of Godzilla, where Japan has a flying laser tank and the Soviets built a nuclear bomb launching sattelite.

Yep. They went out of the gate with the Super-X and those masers in 1984. It helped define the Heisei series as something that was always going to be futuristic on the tech side... and then once they brought in Mecha-King Ghidorah and using that tech, anything felt possible from Mechagodzilla to freezing rays.

As for the question at hand: been said multiple times but the Heisei series is a hard reboot. The Millennium series is a more mixed bag when it comes to continuity, as each entry has a slightly different story behind it.

Btw editing to the title to mention series rather than era.