Literature / NES Godzilla Creepypasta

NES Godzilla Creepypasta (Blogspot mirror here) is the work of sprite artist Cosbydaf. It relies on a combination of first person narrative and edited video game screencaps to tell its story. It was originally posted on the Bogleech forums in 2011.

One day, Zachary, our protagonist, is given a bunch of NES games by an old friend of his. Being an enormous Godzilla fan, he starts with a nostalgic favorite, Godzilla: Monster of Monsters!. Shortly after beginning, he finds that the game is glitched, presumably from a hack. At first he's delighted to find that the game includes monsters that weren't in the original. He becomes suspicious when he faces extremely recent Godzilla enemies from films that came out long after the game's release.

Things take on a decidedly darker turn as a shapeshifting beast known only as "Red" appears, displaying awareness of Zach's existence; from there, environments become ever more sinister, cheesy monsters transform into indescribable abominations, and twisted worlds spawn, seemingly independent of Zach or even the game itself. The game reveals knowledge about Zach that it couldn't possibly have as the mind games of the insidious entity leading it all grow more and more aggressive...

A sequel to the original story, named Godzilla: Replay, is currently being created. It involves the game cartridge falling into the hands of another gamer named Carl, who plays through an entirely different adventure alongside Godzilla (of course), Rodan, and King Ceasar, facing a group of giant monsters based off of the Seven Deadly Sins. The fifth chapter was released in 2013 and, after a long hiatus, the first part of the sixth chapter would release in March 2023, showing the story was still in production.

A playable adaptation of the original creepypasta is now in development with the developers of Blazing Chrome and Cosbydaf's assistance, featuring new content previously unseen in the story. The demo with Earth, Mars and Pathos can be downloaded here, while development livestreams can be viewed here.

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List of tropes:

NES Godzilla Creepypasta

• 11th-Hour Ranger: In a way, Acacius.
• Abandoned Laboratory: Extus. It's even brimming with cybernetic monstrosities.
• After-Action Report: The story is structured exactly as one, with a lot more narrative than is usual.
• And I Must Scream: Zach ends up like this in the final battle, where he cannot move his body to do anything but play the game. Fortunately, it's temporary.
• Angels, Devils and Squid: The three main entities in the game act this way towards Zach, with the benevolent Angel (Melissa), the evil Red, and the enigmatic and sometimes-helpful, sometimes-obstructing Face.
• Animal Jingoism: When two species of monster in the "Organic level" face each other, they'd attack each other and leave the player alone.
• Art Shift: In a non-comedic example, the graphics start out as fairly plausible for NES graphics, but from the Titanosaurus battle onwards begin to subtly shift into more advanced fare, culminating in Zenith's Womb Levels which look like rotoscoped meat, complete with the Canimorph, a monster that appears to be comprised of a skinless dog's head atop a fleshy stalk, and gigantic tapeworm-like creatures that extend from the ground. At the same time, these levels still feature some monsters that remain as traditional sprites, serving to only exemplify the bizarre Art-Style Dissonance at play.
• Ascended Demon: Solomon. Coming back to life after turning against his master changes his eyes from red to blue, implying his demonic nature, which previously barred him from going to any level marked with a Cross and guarded by the Angel, has been purged.
• Back for the Finale: After two worlds in which he doesn't appear, Anguirus comes back for the final world.
• Back from the Dead: All of the killed monsters and Face are revived after Red's defeat.
• Bad Moon Rising: The empty stages in the third level, Pathos, are marked by a sinister blood-red moon hanging in the sky, and this is the part in the game where it becomes abundantly clear that this is not just a glitched or hacked cartridge. The playable version of the game makes it even worse by subtly painting Red's face in the moon.
• Beast with a Human Face: Not-Mechagodzilla is a quadrupedal mechanical creature possessing a human face. Zach even lampshades that its human face gave it a very uncanny look.
• Berserk Button: Red really hates Solomon.
• Big Bad: Red, the hell beast, is the entity corrupting the game and forcing Zach to play for his life.
• Big Good: The blue angel, or Melissa. Acacius, her greatest fighter, also counts.
• Bittersweet Ending: The narrator survived the game, defeated Red, saved Melissa's soul, and everyone who died in the game came back to life. However, the experience left him horribly depressed and not so sure what to do anymore. And the game cartridge is still out there...
• Black Eyes of Evil: Red, whenever they're not glowing.
• Blood from the Mouth: After being killed by Red, loads of blood leaks from Face's mouth.
• Bloody Bowels of Hell: The second-to-last level in Zenith is a nightmarishly hellish world. There's a visceral look to everything; the landscape appears to be made entirely out of flesh and gore, and the enemies are all skinless aberrations. The whole level's graphical fidelity is beyond what an NES could possibly pull off.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Face does not appear to comprehend human morality (among other concepts) and seems genuinely curious about it. Its emotional response to many of Zach's answers are equally incomprehensible.
• Body Horror: Plenty, but in particular the mutated creatures on Entropy and pretty much everything on Zenith.
• Body Motifs: Faces.
• Bonus Stage: The Heart Temple is full of harmless enemies that the narrator uses to refill his health.
• Boss Rush: The end of "Extus" contains a battle with all of the "replacement" monsters one after another. It ends with their combined form, the Chimera.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: The last three questions of Face's first quiz. "Do you like dogs?" "Is the president good?" "Does your dog like the president?"
• Breath Weapon: It's a Godzilla game. Red has one too, as demonstrated in the final battle, in the form of fire. Fire with a Nightmare Face, no less.
• Breather Level: invokedThe snowy forest in Entropy, in stark contrast to the vast majority of the other levels, is downright relaxing. Subverted when the narrator runs into a massive field of frostbitten animal corpses and raptors driven mad by the cold, then having to fight the Moon Beast with Mothra, then being brutally reminded of Melissa's death with Red's face popping out of a mass of "Kill" text. OUCH.
• Bring My Brown Pants: Downplayed. After Red looks at him in Trance, Zach nearly pees himself. He gets to the bathroom on time.
• But Thou Must!: During Trance, Zach attempts to enter the base at the end of the map without fighting Orga, only for the game to claim that there is no monster there and proceeds to put his monster near Orga.
• The Cameo: In Zenith Part 1, there is what appear to be a shrine with two statues. One of them is Red, the other is a reference to one of Cosbydaf's other stories, involving a cursed statue.
• Character Select Forcing: Zach is forced to use Mothra on Entropy. Though this is justified, since it'd be impossible with any other character.
• Chekhov's Gun: Acacius, the monster who appears in the last level which Red won't let Zach use until Melissa intervenes after all of the other monsters are dead.
• Cloud Cuckoo Lander: Face has a tendency to ask strange questions like, "Can it spin in all directions?"
• Colorful Theme Naming: The Big Bad is named "Red".
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: invokedZachary prefers the Mighty Glacier Godzilla to the faster and stronger Anguirus and Solomon. It's not even a case of Godzilla being Difficult, but Awesome; Zach just happens to be really good with Godzilla. It shows, too, since he takes down some very difficult bosses with Godzilla even when those monsters have obvious advantages over Godzilla in particular. Solomon is so much more powerful than Godzilla that Zach will turn to him for the hardest challenges, though.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Although Red purports to play by the rules, his monsters cheat by altering the base game's mechanics and programming, giving them additional powers and even switching out easy bosses for tougher ones. And at the end of the game, Red himself attempts to directly kill off Zach by stopping his heart, blatantly contradicting his earlier statements. Thankfully, this either caused Red to lose the power to lock out Acacius from the game, or gave another higher power an opening to intervene on Zach's behalf and unlock Acacius for his use.
• Darkest Hour: After Red takes out all four of Zach's active monsters, Zach tries to activate the last one, but Red paralyzes his heart and the screen flashes "Game Over"...
• Dark Is Not Evil: Solomon is a demon who used to serve Red and is also one of the good guys.
• Death Glare: Red doing this after the second chase stage is the first hint Zach gets that The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You.
• Defiant to the End: Solomon would rather die than serve Red.
• Demonic Spiders: In an in-universe example, the narrator runs across a fair amount of these once Red takes over. Kumonga, a gigantic - but not necessarily demonic - spider also shows up as one of the non-original but new bosses.
• Deus ex Machina: Acacius comes in at the most convenient time for Zachary, has no really backstory or lead up to his character, comes completely out of nowhere, KILLS Red, AND brings back Godzilla, Mothra, Anguirus, and Solomon, whom have been either killed or eaten by Red prior to his appearance.
  • Melissa's intervention seems to be the bigger Deus Ex Machina here, Acacius being only part of it.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: In the ending of the first story, Red finally dies after Acacius finishes him off.
• Do Not Taunt Cthulhu: Red gives an armour-piercing stare straight at Zach after the latter decides to insult the former at the end of one of the Run stages. This backfires for Zach when Red stops his heart after killing all of his monsters.
• Dramatic Disappearing Display: Every display is gone in the chase stages, replaced by one word: RUN.
• Dual Boss: The pyramid monsters.
• Early-Bird Cameo: At first, Zach thought Biollante's appearance was this. He assumed that her appearance in this game was to "build up excitement" for Godzilla vs. Biollante, but that the developers changed their minds.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Well, Bittersweet Ending. Zachary beats Red and saves Melissa from his torment, and the monsters who died (and Face) are revived, but Zach is unsure of what to do anymore after that.
• Eldritch Abomination:
  • The Moon Beast and the various replacements for the Toho monsters qualify.
  • Face is a much more subtle version. It doesn't seem to understand human morality, and judging from its questions ("Is water wet?") it comes from / perceives / is a location where conventional physics are unreliable at best. While not as evil as Red, it is also kind of a dick.
  • By the time Zach gets to Zenith, most of the enemies are grotesque, scarcely-describable colossi at least the size of the playable Kaiju themselves, and more often than not larger. Not even Godzilla can face them without significant harm; the best course of action if they notice the player boils down to running away from them as fast as possible. The Organic Levels are particularly poignant examples, turning everything just mentioned up to eleven.
• Eldritch Location: The levels gradually begin taking on aspects of this, ceasing to become a series of obstacles and transforming into entire worlds where entities live out their lives independently.
• Emotionless Girl: According to Zach, Melissa had her moments of this.
• Escape Sequence: "RUN". And you'd better!
• Everybody Lives: By the end, Melissa, Godzilla, Mothra, Anguirus, Solomon, and even Face are all resurrected.
• Evil Is Visceral: Red certainly thinks so, if the fleshy Organic Levels and monsters within are any indication.
• Evil Sounds Deep: Red's voice in the audio adaptation is a deep, menacing whisper that verges on Voice of the Legion.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Red and Face, who... are.
• Expy: Solomon heavily resembles the legendary cryptid Mothman. They're both humanoid figures with glowing red eyes, fur and wings.
• Fanservice: Not in the "cute girls in short skirts" variety, the "nerdy indulgence" variety. Appropriate enough for something from Bogleech, it's got kaiju, old video games with strange, abstract enemies, cool sprite work and pixel art, and of course good ol' fashioned Nightmare Fuel on top of it.
• Fetus Terrible: The boss of Zenith's "Blood Lake" level is a particularly nasty version of this.
• Fire and Brimstone Hell: The setting of every chase level, the last level, and the final battle. They all contain copious amounts of fire, and the second also includes lakes of lava and hellish demons.
• Fission Mailed: After Red eats Godzilla, it looks like it's curtains for Zach... until Melissa saves him and unlocks the previously unusable monster.
• Flunky Boss: The Not-Hedorah boss can shriek to summon a swarm of horse-bat enemies.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: As the unfortunate Zach finds out at the final stage of World 4, Trance, when he makes the mistake of calling Red an asshole.
  • Near the end we learn that Red has been watching Zach well before he started playing, and that he was the one who killed Zach's girlfriend Melissa. Red's attacks during the final battle also cause him physical pain and he even attempts to kill him by stopping his heart.
• Gaia's Lament: The aptly-named Entropy shows a beautiful world decay and mutate under the strain of industrialization. The harmless giraffe-herons become gruesome mummy-birds when exposed to toxic waste, the raptors turn homicidally insane, and the moon itself gives birth to a fetal humanoid that transforms into a titanic abomination.
• Gainax Ending:
  • As more than a few readers have pointed out, the True Love Conquers All-style happy ending is rather... out of place for a Creepypasta.
  • Then there's the alternative joke ending. Red turning into John Madden? What?
• Game-Breaker: In-universe subversion with Solomon. He is essentially the best about both Mothra and Godzilla rolled into one monster (who in addition hits significantly harder than either of them), prompting Zach to call him "overpowered", but as the difficulty of the game mounts his high power becomes invaluable.
• Genre Shift: The cartridge features jumping puzzles that were not in the original game.
• Giver of Lame Names: Zach is not very creative with naming the face in the "quiz levels", replacement monsters, and level types.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: This is the most obvious way Red emotes.
• Guest-Star Party Member: The Gotengo shows up to help in the battle with Manda. It is short-lived though, because Manda crushes it in no time.
• Hand Wave: When Red froze Zach to the chair and didn't let him move except to work the controls, it was noted that Zach's computer had somehow begun taking screenshots on its own without him having to do it manually. Not much effort was put into explaining or theorizing about how this could be, but it sure was convenient how it allowed for the story to still be illustrated by screenshots even when the plot wouldn't allow Zach to take them.
  • When Godzilla was burned by Red, Zach said that merely looking at the screenshot made him feel uncomfortable. Maybe on the slim chance that he'd beat Red, the screenshots that the computer took would haunt him. It doesn't sound like something Red would be above doing.
• Happy Fun Ball: What looks like a perfectly normal cartridge for an obscure NES game turns out to be a haunted device that serves as a medium to interact with otherworldly beings in alternative realities (including possibly even the afterlife) that just might very well kill you.
• Heartbeat Soundtrack: During the Red chase levels. The "music" is described as "slow, steady drum sound resembling a heartbeat."
• Heel–Face Turn: Solomon pulls one before the game begins.
• Hell: Zenith is basically this, mostly invoking Bloody Bowels of Hell but with plenty of Fire and Brimstone Hell mixed in.
• Hell Is That Noise: Invoked. Much of the soundtrack, but special mention goes to Unforgiving Cold.
  • The glacier levels' theme song compared to another subtle, eerie winter theme from Donkey Kong Country. Red delights in contorting the soundtrack in unrecognizable ways.
• It Can Think: Zachary has his suspicions about the game being sentient, beginning about halfway through. It can indeed think.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Face. Yeah, he took Godzilla and Anguirus from Zach, leaving him only with Mothra... because some levels in Entropy would be impossible to beat with them, for example, Gold Labyrinth, while playing some others might have been either extremely difficult due to all the ground enemies (The Toxic Waste level) or might have lead to some awkward yet unavoidable Kick the Dog moments (the forest level with the deer and creatures might have gone far different had he played it as Godzilla for example). And the fact he got revived by the Blue Angel at the end of the game should tell you he's not that bad.
• Kaiju: Obviously. It's as much a love letter to obscure and fan-favorite Godzilla Kaiju as it is a creepypasta.
  • Word of God has stated that Red was partially inspired by the idea of Giygas as a kaiju. It explains so much.
• Land, Sea, Sky: Red's three main forms.
• The Last Straw: Zach is able to put up with a lot of the game's quirks, such as disturbing visuals and unpleasant reminders of his past, but when Red actually inflicts pain upon him every time he attacks his monsters during the final battle, that's where he drew the line.
• Light Is Good: Acacius, The Golden Light.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Mothra is regarded as this In-Universe, with Zach not liking how awkwardly she played in the original game.
• Macro Zone: Zenith appears to be one, as all the playable monsters have their sprites shrunk to about half their normal size in the levels there.
• Marathon Boss:
  • In Extus, Chimera takes Zachary a long time to kill. And that doesn't count the Boss Rush of Replacement Monsters that precedes it.
  • Red's final form and his absolutely massive health bar. It's implied that, even using Acacius, it took a while to defeat.
• May It Never Happen Again: Played with in the end. Zachary considers destroying the titular hacked Godzilla: Monster of Monsters! game in case Red goes after him again, but he decides not to, as finishing the game had set Melissa's soul free. He decides to sell it online instead, but he advises anyone who buys it to shut the game off if they feel like it's messing with their mind.
• Meaningful Name: Acacius: A quick search on Wikipedia shows that the majority of the notable Acaciuses of history were saints, clergymen, or representatives of the imperial law.
  • The first creepypasta in general has these with the chapter titles. Extus is the term for exodus, Zenith is the term for full potential (once Red takes over the game), Entropy is decay over time, etc.
• Minus World: The first half of the "KILL" stage seems to deliberately Invoke this. It's accessible normally, but the level graphics are just repetitions of the word "KILL" and the "music" is a haphazard cluster of 8-bit noises.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: The enemies and boss of the "KILL" stage. And in a way, Chimera.
• Monster Clown: Bobo, a bat-like creature with clown nose and makeup that serves as the boss of the Blood Lake stage.
• Mood Whiplash:
  • The alternate joke ending.
  • The television sets of "Entropy" are all bizarre yet comical animations of characters with unusual heads... except for the third one Zach comes across, which depicts a gruesome execution. This catches him off guard and leaves him in anticipation of the remaining television sets on the board.
• Mordor: Red's homeworld, Zenith.
• The Most Dangerous Video Game: Vaguely implied to be a conduit to other worlds, and possibly the afterlife. And it's still out there.
• Multiple Life Bars:
  • The last boss in the Boss Rush of Extus, the Chimera, has two life meters with 20 bars of life each.
  • Red's Final Form takes things a step further; having three life meters with 23 bars of life each.
• Mysterious Past: Who exactly is Solomon? What role did he play as one of Red's henchmen? What caused his betrayal? Why did Red state "I ALWAYS HATED YOU"? And how does Face know him so well to entrust him to Zach? And most of all... What is the significance of STILL THE BEST 1973? Guess we'll never know...
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: "Red"? Not scary. "Hellbeast"? Scary.
• Near-Villain Victory: One look at the health bars during Red's demise, and you can see that Acacius, and Zach by extension, were one hit away from death.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Red during the final boss fight. Up until that point he apparently had been rather careful not to "break the rules," until the last moment. This leads to the 11th-Hour Ranger being usable.
• Nightmare Face: The Hell Beast has one, utilized to great effect when it pops out from a screen-full of "KILL" to shock Zach — and audience. Face is killed and becomes a bleeding skull in the final world, Zenith.
• Nintendo Hard: The original game was hard enough, but Red's alterations? Bullet Hell, Goddamn Bats up to eleven, cheating bosses, random glitches designed to kill the PC, zero warning one-hit kills, no instructions for entirely new game mechanics, and then finally the game actually made the room warm and made Zach dehydrated. Zach still beat it in one sitting, with only one game-over that was itself actually just Red cheating.
• Nothing Is Scarier: Implemented to pants-wetting effect. Most prominent in the "Unforgiving Cold" level, which is a completely uneventful seven-minute trek down a blue stone hallway with a static effect on the screen, stone Nightmare Faces lining the ceiling, and eerie music in the background.
• Oh, Crap!: Every time the narrator discovers a new way that the fourth wall fails to protect him.
  • One word: Run!
  Zachary: Do you know that feeling your body has when you feel like you're in extreme danger? You start to recoil and tense up as the adrenaline flows through your veins, and your nerves start to feel very cold? That's the feeling I had when I took this screencap.
• One-Winged Angel: Some of the new Godzilla monster bosses keep their alternate forms: Biollante, Battra, and Destoroyah. Mecha-Godzilla starts off looking like normal Godzilla before the Robotic Reveal and then later changes into a "replacement" monster. In the last stage, King Ghidorah apparently uses the replacement monster glitch to become Mecha King Ghidorah. And of course, there's Red.
• Our Angels Are Different: The "angel" that's featured in the center of the site's banner blocks the Hell Beast (and promptly gets killed, crying Tears of Blood as it happens) to give Godzilla time to escape. It is eventually revealed to be the spirit of Melissa, an old flame of the narrator, and later returns to save him from Red's wrath.
  • A skull-faced red angel with a similar design appears in the red temple stage on Zenith — but is nowhere near as friendly.
  • Acacius, while not outright called an angel, certainly gives this impression.
• Our Giants Are Bigger: Some of Zenith's monsters completely dwarf the Kaiju.
• Our Monsters Are Weird: Are they ever. Even more so in the Zenith levels.
• Perpetual Frowner: Red never smiles, not even triumphantly.
• Phallic Weapon: The monster that replaces Baragon in Dementia attacks with a Gatling gun that emerges from its crotch. Fittingly, attacking it causes extra damage to the beast.
• Pragmatic Adaptation: An audio adaptation can be found on Youtube. The narrator actually sounds terrified during the frightening moments. There are also a few Jump Scares that the original version couldn't do.
• Prehistoria: Parts of Entropy. A number of prehistoric animals appear in the past versions of the hourglass levels, and the deerlike creatures appearing throughout Entropy are based on Macrauchenia, which did live with giant sloths, but not with raptors.
• Psychotic Smirk: Face's appropriately-dubbed "Maniacal" expression, brought out when he takes Godzilla and Anguirus from Zach, forcing him to use Mothra.
• Purposely Overpowered: Solomon can fly and does about twice the damage Godzilla does, and attacks twice as fast. While Zach loves using him, he still prefers Godzilla. Acacius is even more overpowered, doing about 4-10 times as much damage as the other monsters and his beam attack combines both regular eye beams and a stream of light from his hands.
• Quicksand Sucks: Replace sand with flesh, and the entire floor of the "Organic level" is this.
• Recurring Boss: Red, if this was a normal video game at all. The end of each stage starting with "Pathos" is an Escape Sequence where he chases after you and his touch is a One-Hit Kill. In the final level you fight him instead. Fortunately he can't One-Hit Kill you... it's against the rules.
• Recycled Soundtrack: The new Kaiju bosses use the same songs as the original roster. When King Ghidorah and Destoroyah go One-Winged Angel during their respective battles, on the other hand, the music changes to the Stage 5 battle theme from Super Godzilla. Meanwhile, the level at the end of Extus features "Prayer for Peace" from the very first film.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: Take a wild guess. It helps that he was inspired by Giygas from Earth Bound.
• Red Is Violent: Both figuratively and literally.
• Revised Ending: Played for Laughs here.
• Rivers of Blood: Zenith's "Blood Lake".
• Rousseau Was Right: Downplayed and Zig-Zagged, but, when compared to most other Creepypastas, there are more monsters here that are either allies to the hero or just minding their own business then there are for most other Creepypastas believe it or not. Averted with the enemies of Zenith and Red, as expected from a Creepypasta.
• Run or Die: What Red's levels boil to. The screen reads RUN for a reason...
• Satan: Essentially what Red represents.
• Screw the Rules, I Make Them!: Red, though to a limited extent; he can modify whole levels and even boards, but even warped and tweaked as the game is, he has to follow the rules of the game engine. Trying to force a Game Over to prevent Zach from using Acacius is not within these rules, and he pays for it.
• Sealed Evil in a Duel: Red forces this upon himself after killing Godzilla, forcing Red to break a rule as he still won't let Zach use the last monster.
• Sensory Abuse: During Zenith, the music for the first part of the "KILL" level is a cacophony of NES sounds.
• Sequel Hook: The game cartridge is still out there...
• Shout-Out:
  • MOTHER
  • "I'll tell you a secret... I killed Melissa!"
  • Acacius the Golden Light looks less like a Kaiju and more like a deliberate nod to the Giant of Light himself, ''Ultraman Tiga - more specifically, his golden Glitter Mode.
• Signing-Off Catchphrase: "STILL THE BEST 1973" appears after Solomon finishes a level or beats a boss.
• The Silent Bob: Red never speaks until Chapter 5. He gets real chatty in Chapter 8, though.
  • In contrast (possibly to differentiate him from his predecessor), Warlock from the sequel speaks quite frequently.
• Sixth Ranger: There are three in the original: Anguirus, Solomon, and Acacius.
  "Would you like a new monster?"
• Speculative Biology: In an Entropy level called "Time warp", the third act of the level shows what Zach perceives as it showing animals that could exist in thousands, if not, millions of years in the future. One particular creature looks like an iconic speculative biology creature called "Troodon Man".
  • The other levels in Entropy, namely the forest levels, also portray creatures that resembled real-life animals behaving vaguely like their real life counterparts. It's pretty interesting for a Creepypasta to dabble in a subject like this, even though it isn't mentioned prominently outside of Entropy. As Zach quotes:
  It was very surreal watching these creatures interact. I didn't feel like I was playing a video game, but rather that I was traveling through a forest in some other dimension.
• Spinoff: While Creatures of Zenith started out as an attempt to translate the story into a sprite comic format, it very quickly morphed into an Expanded Universe that took inspiration from the story's events.
• Spot the Imposter: Mothra's fight with Mechagodzilla. Zach wasn't fooled.
• Suspicious Videogame Generosity: The penultimate level Extus provided not only the extremely powerful Solomon, but also "heart temple" levels with harmless creatures that provided health recovery. Both of these things would be invaluable for what was to come.
• Synchronization: In the final battle, whenever Red damages one of Zach's monsters, he feels the pain of it. And some of Red's attacks include breathing a giant cone of fire and eating the opponent alive.
• Take That!:
  • Zach isn't very fond of a particular incarnation of Godzilla, given what he says when Orga shows up in Trance.
  Those guys at Toho may be smart, but I'm sure they couldn't see that far into the future. If they could, they never would have gave Roland Emmerich the rights to make a Godzilla movie.
  • Among the other games he got is "some stupid thing called Action 52".
  • Zach remarks that he traded his copy of the original game for Amagon when he was 11, and quickly regretted it when he found out what the latter was like.
• Tears of Joy: After defeating Red and learning the deceased monsters were revived, Zachary cries out of happiness.
• Technicolor Death: Red.
• That One Boss: Red in his final form is an extreme In-Universe example: he has a gargantuan amount of health, and all his attacks make short work of Zach's monsters. Even Solomon, the strongest monster (other than Acacius), stands no chance against the beast; the narrator comments that the battle was "like trying to fight a mountain." Zach is also forced to stay through the experience, feeling the excruciating pain each of his monsters go through.
• That's No Moon: Moon Beast. In this case, the moon seems to be an egg, which hatches into an embryo and falls into water, before emerging as the titanic Moon Beast itself.
• This Is Unforgivable!: Zach first starts truly hating Red at the end of "Extus" when he kills and devours the blue angel after she sacrifices herself to buy Zach time to get away from him.
• Tone Shift: While the first two chapters are unsettling at most, it's when Red first appears that the game starts becoming nightmarish.
• Tranquil Fury: Zach's reaction to Red gruesomely devouring the blue angel:
  "You're going to pay."
• Trick Boss: Of all the replacement bosses, Ghidorah's replacement is... a Dorat that sends Zach into a brief laughing fit from its Boss Rush buildup and quickly dies after two slashes from Solomon... then Chimera appears.
  • Ghidorah himself reappears in Zenith, but uses the same replacement glitch to turn himself into Mecha-King Ghidorah!
• Ugly Cute: In-Universe, Zachary considers the Canimorph not as disturbing as he feared the "Organic Level" boss would be.
• Unbuilt Trope: One of the very first creepypastas, being written in 2011, to be around The Most Dangerous Video Game, complete with cliches such as high-fidelity graphics displaying violent material, the player being forced to continue unwillingly, and malicious forces within the game actively attempting to kill the player. It may come as a surprise to readers used to the bleakness of other creepypastas about haunted video games to see that there are also benevolent forces in the game willing to help Zach, and the ending is not a Downer Ending, but rather a relatively upbeat one where the Big Bad is killed, the heroic monsters are revived, and the player escapes with his life.
• The Unreveal: How alive is the game? What was up with Face's questions? The TV screens? What was Solomon's past connection with Red? What does "Still The Best 1973" mean? What even was Red? How did Red know Zach? For how long has he been watching him? How and why did he kill Melissa? How is she in the game? By the end, Zachary still doesn't know, and he doesn't care to know.
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: "Zenith". The setting is basically Hell, the quiz game and television screens are broken, and the final two bosses before Red are King Ghidorah and Destoroyah, both being among the strongest and equally most (in?)famous villains of the Godzilla franchise.
• Videogame Caring Potential: In Entropy, Zachary feels it would be wrong to attack the deer-like creatures he finds there, and leaves them be. At times, he even chases away some raptor-like animals that appear to be their natural predator. For good reason, in that these creatures might actually be alive.
• Villain Ball: One gets the impression that Red of all "people" didn't quite think his plans for the last world through - that is, separating Acacius from the main board, forcing Zach to use his other four monsters until only Acacius is left. Cue Fridge Logic: while this means that he can't use Acacius on Red... this also means Red has no way to kill his last monster, essentially making the game Unwinnable for both Zachary and Red. This forces Red to break the rules and go in for the kill, which in theory should allow Red to get past the unwinnable situation he had set in play, but also allowing Melissa to step in and bring Acacius out for the final battle. Red really wrote his own demise when you think about it.
  • If Red initially had nothing to do with the supernatural cartridge — simply being a demon haunting Zach's life — deciding to use the game to screw with Zach in the first place ultimately sealed his fate.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: Red has a running form, a swimming form, and a flying form, which it uses to chase Godzilla, Anguirus, and Mothra, respectively. And, as revealed in the final chapter, a giant form.
• Wham Episode:
  • The first Hell Beast chase.
  Zachary: "Run? From what?"
  • The second part of "Entropy", in the "white tree" stage. The deer are dying, and the raptors that were their natural predators are now going mad from the bitter cold. And the end segment of the level draws directly from Zach's memories.
  • The end of "Extus".
• Wham Line:
  • At the end of the Moon Beast fight, Zachary sees text on screen that confirms once and for all that this game isn't just a hack:
  "Melissa... kill yourself."
  • Red reveals just how he knows Zachary so well:
  "I'll tell you a secret... I KILLED MELISSA"
• Wham Shot: The relief after Zachary cheers over completing one of the "Run" levels is immediately put asunder when Red looks directly at him after being taunted.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: In-Universe. After the end of Pathos, back when he still thought the game was a prototype; Zach wanted to know why someone would put something like Red in a children's game.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Invoked. "If you're going to cheat, then why do you even let me use the controller?!" "CAN'T BREAK THE RULES"." Apparently Justified, since Red's attempt to break the rules lets Zach use the Eleventh Hour Supermonster.
• Womb Level: The "organic levels" in Zenith. The monsters and obstacles are truly sickening, so much so that Zach nearly puked.
• Worthy Opponent: Zach considers Chimera this as the fight ends.

Godzilla: Replay

• Always a Bigger Fish: Happens with the Bait-and-Switch Boss in the Tempest world — the fake boss is tongue-grabbed and eaten by the real, toad-like boss.
• Apocalyptic Log: The Transcendence Project has shades of this via journal entries.
• Art Evolution: The sequel's screencaps use the NES's screen resolution and more plausible glitch graphics.
• Bait-and-Switch Boss: At one point during one of the stages in Tempest, Carl (playing as King Caesar) comes across a large crocodile-like monster. Said monster is then grabbed by a weird-looking tongue and eaten alive. The tongue belongs to the real mini-boss: a giant, grotesque Surinam toad.
  (Carl comes across the fake boss)
  Carl: I think we're at a boss.
  (The real boss kills the fake one.)
  Carl: Definitely a boss.
• Big Bad: Warlock is shaping up to be one. At least for the first five parts.
• The Cameo: Several. A blue version of Krystalak is the boss of an Ice Cave stage, and Gorosaurus appears in the Lost Way, accompanying Godzilla to the exit.
  • Gabara is a miniboss in the Reflect stage of Corona.
  • Titanosaurus shows up in the Reef stage in Amorphis as a miniboss, and Manda appears as an NPC in the Depth stage.
  • Zilla appears as a regular enemy in the Falls stage of Amorphis.
  • Triax, a fairly obscure monster from the 1977 Marvel Godzilla run, shows up as a minor encounter in Alkali Pt. 1.
• Changing of the Guard: Carl is the one who buys up Zach's old game out of curiosity. He's actually in contact with Zach and read the original creepypasta, so he has a general idea of what he's getting into. However, the game has altered itself again, so now Carl has his own adventure.
  • Unlike Zach, Carl doesn't know much about Godzilla or how to play the game, nor does his share Zach's crazy skills. He is, however, apparently very good at platformers, so the game's difficulty hasn't caught up to him.
  • Also notable is the fact that he plays the game one level at a time with long breaks between (Zach finished the entire game in one sitting). This probably helps him maintain his sanity.
  • The story that we read on the blog is him taking notes while he's playing and screen-capping, so he comes off as not very talkative but very analytical and observant, relying on his pictures a little bit more than narration. In contrast, again, Zach put together his entire story after he finished the game, looking for some sort of catharsis in the process.
• Colorful Theme Naming: Averted. The announcement for the sequel says that the one for the second story is "not named after a color".
  • Chapter 5 confirms Grey's real name: Warlock.
• Door of Doom: A large gate appears between stages with seven empty slots that are filled whenever Carl defeats a boss. Presumably, beating them all opens it.
• Eldritch Abomination: The Warlock.
• Escort Mission: In the "Gelid" world, Carl ends up escorting Gorosaurus (who he doesn't recognise, of course) and a little green creature from the "Amorphis" world named Usol out of the "Lost Way" level.
• Genre Shift: It's early yet, but Godzilla Replay has more sci-fi aspects, such as inexplicable minigames that appear to be experiments of some sort, possibly on Carl, as well as an Apocalyptic Log called "The Transcendence Project", which a previous owner from 1997 added into the game cartridge.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: Godzilla gets them in his very first true appearance.
  • Warlock, an otherwise completely grey demon, has glowing green eyes.
• Interface Screw: The game screen turns bright colors and tilts crazily from side to side during King Caesar's Mushroom Samba (a result of hitting a tree covered in syringes).
• It Can Think: The game can create anomalies based on the players playing it. The effects are quite unsettling.
• Mathematician's Answer: Carl tries asking one of the creatures in Amorphis how are they able to hear him in the game when he talks. The answer? "I hear with my ears".
• Meaningful Name: Plenty. One example is that Carl states that he's rusty at chess, and a Patzer is someone who's bad at chess. Another is the world of Gelid, which is a term for anything icy or cold, and so on and so forth. Then there's Warlock, named for his sorcery and usage of black magic.
• Mêlée à Trois: In the chess stage, it's mentioned that while the black and white pieces do attack the player, they're spending more time fighting each other, and the player can attack both sides.
• Mushroom Samba: The syringe tree in Tempest induces this.
• Origin Story: Carl's playthrough depicts Godzilla's origins, loosely based on the official origin story for Godzilla's Heisei era incarnation given in Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah. He starts out as a Godzillasaurus traversing an island, before the other dinosaurs become inexplicably violent. The level ends with Godzilla dueling a triceratops, while in the background a bomb drops slowly. Carl beats the triceratops before the minute is up, but the bomb explodes anyway. There's a photorealistic shot of a nuclear mushroom cloud before Godzilla pops into the screen with glowing red eyes. A lovely introduction to the game.
• Prehistoria: The first stage, which shows Godzilla's origins in the Mesozoic.
• Seven Deadly Sins: Replay has levels based on the Deadly Sins.
  • Gelid is Sloth. The level and the monsters are light blue, the level's motif is ice and cold (which slows down), there is a monster too lazy to research who the first person to land on the moon was, the boss's name is Lethar (as in "lethargic") and Carl beats it by jumping around a lot (being the opposite of slothful).
  • Corona is Pride. The level's color is purple, it has a lot of mirrors, one of the monsters calls itself "the prettiest thing there could ever be" while looking at itself in a mirror and the boss' name is Exalton (exalted).
  • Amorphis is Envy. The level is green, a monster complains that it's not fair that it can't be strong, and the boss Odia (as in "odious") takes the form of Godzilla sometimes (being envious of him).
  • Tempest is Lust. The level's color is blue (a lesser used color for Lust), there's a lot of Freudian imagery (like piercing) and plenty of wind-related levels (in Dante's Inferno, the Lust circle is described as an endless windstorm), one of the monsters looks like it's masturbating, many of the monsters (including the boss) can call in "child" monsters, one of the minibosses violently explodes (as if climaxing), the boss' name is Salaac ("salacious").
  • Alkali is Greed. As first shown in the teasers Cosbydaf has shared on his deviantart about this world, the level's color is golden yellow and is heavily industry-themed with sapient Kaiju working tirelessly to sate the demands of a creature named Avidus (as in "avarice"). There is also a currency exclusive to this world called "Daru" which is used to buy items from markets. Some Kaiju aren't so lucky and live in poverty while their competitors get richer.
• Shout-Out:
  • The king that appears in the "Patzer" stage during Carl's playthrough is the king from The Legend Of Zelda C Di Games.
  • The first level of Tempest, the world based off of lust, takes place in heavy winds. The punishment for lust in Dante's Inferno was to be blown around by violent winds for eternity.
• Sixth Ranger: Rodan serves as a new monster on Carl's side, that Zach didn't have access to.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: Warlock pretends to be a new playable monster who quietly teleports the boss of Chapter 5 around until the player gets rid of his playable form.
• Wham Episode: Chapter five has Usol getting kidnapped. It also turns out that Warlock, the grey monster that has pursued Carl, is a shapeshifter.

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