Kaiju Big Battel: Fighto Fantasy


Jul 15, 2020

Kaiju Big Battel: Fighto Fantasy

I'll admit, my first impression of this game, off title alone, was "not terribly impressed", until I read a little further.

This is an officially licensed game based on the live-action monster wrestling group Kaiju Big Battel, who have been performing their Godzilla-meets-WWE act for over 20 years.

Wait, what? This is a licensed game? Meaning Kaiju Big Battel is an actual thing? Yes, it is! Check out a match! How have I not heard of this before?

Now, as for the game itself, Kaiju Big Battel: Fighto Fantasy plays a whole lot like classic Final Fantasy games: it's a top-down, grid based world, battles are turn-based with picking all your party options first then watching the round go, all that good stuff. Party members have field actions to find secrets and shortcuts, and enemies are visible on the world to potentially dodge them.

I'll start by saying that as an RPG, this game felt a bit slower than I remember turn-based RPGs being. Animations took a fair while in fights, enemies were maybe a bit generous on HP, and there seemed to be no way to flee once you were in one, so even short combats dragged a bit. Luckily, this game is very generous with its difficulty settings: you can change difficulty at any time. Indeed, the easiest difficulty makes it a bit more pleasant to roam around, especially as it lets you change your party at any time, something very convenient for the field actions (on Normal or higher, you'd have to backtrack to a save location - feels a bit busywork).

That's not to say the gameplay itself is poor or anything. On the contrary, it is mechanically quite solid. The party members are all unique and interesting to play with, and balancing feels fairly on-point. Enemies only respawn when you restore your health at a checkpoints, for instance, meaning with enough resources or brute force, you can clear out an area for the long-term to explore in comfort. These checkpoints are generously placed and function as fast travel points, making backtracking trivial, and you can always warp to the central hub, which fills with useful resources as you progress. Actual saving can be done anywhere.

Keeping it on easy let me get right to what I enjoyed the most: the writing. If the concept of "kaiju mixed with wrestling all wrapped in a dose of parody and maybe some irony" didn't suggest so already, the world of Kaiju Big Battel is an odd one. The dialogue has a good dose of humor throughout it, thanks to characters that are already a little silly, and combined with a story involving heavy amounts of time-travel offered a consistent amount of chuckles. The game is also rich in flavor text: so many random objects can be examined for a quick description that it's unreal, and NPCs also tend to have an extra thing to say when spoken to again.

Unfortunately, right near the finish line, I ran into a crash-to-desktop situation with the Linux version. Continuing my playthrough for the last ~hour or so of the game will either need a patch, a migration to Windows, or something else. I just watched a video of the conclusion, honestly.

I enjoyed it, until that point. Kaiju Big Battel: Fighto Fantasy is a good game.