In case anyone cares, Godzilla, Gamera and Ultraman can now beat the shit out of each other in a fully licensed setting
Gigabash is actually good without all the DLC but it's nice to see the big three together finally
Not Pictured: Ultraman
This week, the latest DLC for Gigabash launched which brings characters from the 2023 CG anime version of Gamera to the battle.
I've been banging the drum about Gigabash for a while; it's an incredibly fun battler from Malaysian studio Passion Republic that when launched felt like a spiritual successor to the beloved Pipeworks Godzilla games (Destroy All Monsters: Melee, Save the Earth, and Unleashed). Much like SNK's King of the Monsters titles, it featured variations of...shall we say..."copyright adjacent" famous toku and kaiju characters; a Kong / Godzilla hybrid, an Ultraman stand-in, a notGundam, and some more relatively original creations. It was great as it was though!
So a few months after it released in the summer of 2022 it was both a bit of a shock and also "wait, no this makes perfect sense" that they announced a partnership with Toho to release a DLC for the game that added four Godzilla characters to the roster; the Heisei era "90's" Godzilla, Millenium-era Mechagodzilla, infamous villain Destroyah, and Showa-era shitbird Gigan.
This started a wave of more DLC partnerships over the intervening years that resulted with not only more Godzilla characters down the road (Ghidorah and Hedorah!!), but also a partnership with Tsuburaya to bring Ultraman characters into the game. Additional DLC for more original characters (including some legally distinct Voltron/Power Rangers shit lmao) happened afterward so it seemed like that was the end of the licensing deals. Godzilla VS Ultraman was pretty cool in its own right though!
This week, Kadokawa joined the list of partners and Gamera (again, specifically the 2023 Gamera: Rebirth version of the character) has joined the fray - which I believe means for the first time in Kaiju / Tokusatsu history, there is officially licensed media where Godzilla, Ultraman and Gamera can bite, throw, kick and blast the shit out of each other.
Obviously, fan-created works since the dawn of these franchises have done this but I can't think of anything 'official' where the licenses were in place?? It's wild that more than half an century after the characters debuted, they can finally throw down as the fans had always intended and it's being facilitated by an independent studio in Malaysia who started the venture as a 'We have Godzilla at home' game.
Gigabash does have single player campaigns for the original characters but it truly shines as a couch co-op experience, so if you have some controllers and friends or family into kaiju, super sentai or tokustatu, I highly recommend gigging your bash.