YMMV / King of the Monsters

• Awesome Music: Of course. This is an SNK game. Here's Astro Guy's theme.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • While none of the cities the Monsters can rampage through are explicitly named, the "American City" level is blatantly meant to be New York. And while tearing skyscrapers off the ground to clobber your enemies with or plain smashing them down for bonus points is funny, the fact that the game lets you do just that to what is obviously the World Trade Center Twin Towers became much less funny about a decade after the game came out.
  • You can bring down the WTC on the Neo-Geo version of King Of The Monsters 2. There's 2000 bonus points as a reward for doing so. Yeah, talk about harsh.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: The second game is notorious for its extreme difficulty that goes beyond Nintendo Hard, requiring multiple credits on most playthroughs just to reach the final boss, and most of your enemies are damage sponges, while the grapples are almost impossible to win. And it doesn't reward skilled players either - the few players who finished the game on one credit generally spammed the same moves over and over again to exploit the bosses' Artificial Stupidity.
• Lighter and Softer: The second game has more upbeat and heroic-sounding music and more brightly colored, cartoony graphics compared to the first game.
• Nightmare Fuel: Some of the monsters can be quite... unsettling.
  • The Game over screen for the Genesis version.
  • The Game over screen◊ from the first game is equally terrifying.
  • The death animations of the three playable monsters: Geon dissolves into a puddle, Atomic Guy is Stripped to the Bone, and Cyber Woo blows up in a rain of pieces. The bosses tend to just explode.
  • Whenever Famardy opens his mouth very wide, you can see his insides.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • Godzilla Domination for GBA is very clearly modeled on this game but it's more balanced to give players more fighting chance.
  • Dawn of the Monsters, a 2022 2D side-scrolling beat-em-up modelled after King of the Monsters' gameplay.
  • Giga Bash, planned for 2022 release, is also very clearly modeled on this game.

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