Godzilla Defense Force is a 2019 mobile game developed by Studio 22 and Neople and published by Nexon for Android and iOS.
The Xiliens are attacking Earth and sending wave after wave of giant monster to Earth's major cities in an attempt to overwhelm and conquer them. In response, the Earth Defense Force constructs bases all around the world to fight back and defend humanity from the onslaught.
The game boasts over 80 different incarnations of various Toho monsters to fight. This includes almost every version and form of Godzilla from every movie he's been in, as well as versions of Mothra, Rodan, and Ghidorah from the various spin-off movies. Even only tangentially related Kaiju get included.
There are three premium currencies in the game, though all are fairly easily obtained in-game and only one can be directly purchased. X-nium Crystals are awarded for completing achievements, shooting down Xilien UFO's, watching ads, or just straight-up buying them; these are used to upgrade a base once it reaches a certain level (if you don't have enough coins) and to speed up time-delayed processes like harvesting Moonstone. Moonstone is stone from the moon, which is mined by rescued civilians and spent to summon and upgrade allies. Time Shards received for resetting your progress and can be spent to unlock and upgrade artifacts, which in turn make the game a little easier bit by bit. There is also Card Powder, used to upgrade cards (which can also be done with X-nium), which is awarded for defeating Kaiju, completing a level of the Kaiju Dungeon, and given in large quantities when real money is spent.
The game has elements of Real-Time Strategy, Tower Defense, and resource management as its base gameplay. Money is earned by fighting monsters of ever-increasing difficulty, which is then used to build and upgrade defenses. Each location has a number of different weapons at its disposal, with each new one unlocked dwarfing the previous in power. In addition, the player can use G-cells to activate cards which will affect gameplay by increasing production speed, power, or chance for critical hits. The player can also target specific points on the monster by tapping where they want the attacks to focus. Otherwise, troops will randomly hit the monster wherever they happen to. Civilians will also occasionally get caught up in the action, panicking and running around; they can be saved and put to work to help colonize the moon by extracting Moonstone.
This series provides examples of:
- Achievement System: Performing tasks such as leveling up a nation's base high enough of fighting a specific monster a certain number of times both gives you a mark for doing so as well as awarding Xilien Crystals.
- Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: Each upgrade is more expensive than the last. Within the first three areas, you'll end up earning and spending septillions of coins just to keep your head above water. It will eventually get to the point where the only efficient way to upgrade is to take money earned in later levels back to earlier ones, which you only really want to do so you can get more Time Shards with you time travel.
- Adaptational Badass: Monsters traditionally considered low on the tier list such as Baragon and Anguirus show up after many monsters normally treated as much more powerful than them. Both show up after numerous encounters with several different versions of Godzilla.
- Adaptational Villainy: The Xiliens have seemingly brainwashed almost every Kaiju in Toho history, meaning unquestionably heroic ones like the 1968 incarnation of Godzilla and the gentle Garganua Sanda. Even the guardian King Caesar attacks Earth!
- Adaptational Wimp: In a relative sense; the first Kaiju you fight is Mothra Leo's Super Mode, Rainbow Mothra. Cretaceous Ghidorah, the villain monster of his movie whom Leo eventually defeated, is much more difficult to take down in comparison.
- Arbitrarily Large Bank Account: The amount of money you make gets to absolutely absurd levels. By the time you get to Sydney, you'll be making more money than actually exists on Earth, regardless of what currency you compare it to.
- Assist Character:
- All of the monsters and a number of machines can be unlocked as cards that improve damage, production time, or critical hit percentage. These can be acquired by defeating the monsters in battle or finding any of them in a card pack.
- There are also Ally characters, such as the various incarnations of the Shobijin and the Black Hole 3 Aliens who can assist in battle as well as product coins or affect troops in various ways.
- Balloonacy: Rescued civilians are airlifted by Fulton surface-to-air recovery, strapping them to a weather balloon and letting it carry them up and away from the action.
- Bribing Your Way to Victory: You can use real money to buy X-nium and cards. The more expensive card packs include X-nium and Moonstone in addition to the cards.
- Eiffel Tower Effect: Almost every base is near a renowned landmark for where it takes place.
- Tokyo has Tokyo Tower.
- London has Elizabeth Clock Tower (often mistakenly called Big Ben), the Millennium Wheel, and London Bridge among others that aren't always visible.
- Sydney has the Opera House, the Harbour Bridge, and the Walsh Bay shipyard. Justified, as they are all really right next to each other in real life.
- New York features the Statue of Liberty, Studio 42, and the Empire State Building, as well as lots of other generic skyscrapers. They're made to look futuristic with Tron Lines.
- Arizona is the only one that doesn't seem to be based on a specific landmark, but appears to be on a cliff or mountain with lots of railroads and a middle-of-nowhere gas station diner.
- Excuse Plot: The Xiliens are attacking Earth because they need water, which they normally have to produce through chemical reactions because it doesn't exist on their planet otherwise. That's more story than you actually need anyway, since the player most likely doesn't care and just wants to be able to fight giant monsters.
- Defeat Equals Friendship: Beating a Kaiju unlocks its card, allowing you to use G-cells to summon it and gain effects in combat.
- Giant Enemy Crab: Gamines, the giant rubble crab possessed by the Space Amoeba from the movie of the same name. Also various forms of Ebirah, the massive lobster.
- Godzilla Threshold: The entire point of the game is that this has been crossed, so the EDF is breaking out their biggest and best monster fighting weapons.
- Hand Wave: All of the monsters from different continuities, as well as multiple forms of the same monster, are able to be in the same place at the same time due to a combination of the Xiliens traveling to multiple different times and dimensions to amass their Kaiju army. That's all the explanation you get.
- Humongous Mecha: The various Mechagodzillas, as well as MOGERA.
- Idiot Ball: The Xiliens, who came to Earth to look for water, attack the Arizona desert of all place. Despite realizing their error, they attack it anyway, wasting their time and resources to attack the EDF out of spite.
- Jiggle Physics: Yui has this to varying degrees with her costumes. Her regular uniform has only a little, while the Mothra one both increases her bust size and the distance of her bouncing.
- Loot Boxes: Cards can be acquired by purchasing card packs from the in-game store. They can be purchased with X-nium Crystals, Moonstone, or cold, hard cash.
- Kaiju: But of course. The Xiliens send waves of generic insect, bird, and bat Kaiju punctuated by Godzilla series giant monsters, ranging from the well known (like Rodan, Mothra, and the Big G himself) to more obscure ones that are only indirectly related (Sanda and Gairanote ).
- Massive Multiplayer Crossover: The various monsters all come from different eras of the Godzilla mythos. While every continuity except Shin Godzilla treats the original as canon, the Showa, Heisei, and Millennium film series are all overwise considered separate from each other (and the Millennium movies aren't even all related within just their era, either). As a result, not only do monsters from different continuities show up side-by-side, multiple incarnations of the same monster are treated as separate individuals. Even monsters that should be the same individual, such as Heisei Ghidorah and his past self, show up in different areas and can even be there at the same time.
- Mini-Mecha: The Heavy Armor first used in London. It's comparable in size to an E-Frame.
- Monster Compendium: The Codex includes snippets of information and movie screenshots of every monster included in the game. This basically means every Toho monster from 1984 to 2016 except for the two American adaptations.
- New Game Plus: Using Time Travel to go back to when you started awards you with Time Shards, which are used to buy and upgrade artifacts that increase your units' damage along with other effects.
- Original Generation: Operator Yui and General Tywin are both brand new characters.
- Power Creep: Each new base you unlock in a given city leaves the previous one absolutely in the dust, unless the previous one has been significantly overleveled. You can expect the new one to take over as much as 90% of the city's DPS the moment it's unlocked. Later on, this becomes less common with new weapons only ranking in at around 30% of total DPS once unlocked, but quickly take over as they're upgraded.
- Rank Inflation: Your rank for beating a monster goes from D (barely beating it with less than a second left) to A (winning in under half the time allowed), but also S (less than half the time) and SS (less than 5 seconds)
- Spared by the Adaptation: Kamoebas is alive and ready for some carnage this time around, when his debut in Tokyo SOS was already posthumous.
- Virtual Paper Doll: Operator Yui can be dressed up, though only one alternate costume (Mothra) is currently available.
- Whole-Plot Reference: This game could have been called Godzilla: Final Wars: The Game. The only major difference being that the Xiliens have brainwashed Godzilla in addition to all the other Kaiju.
