King of the Monsters

King of the Monsters (キング・オブ・ザ・モンスターズ) is a fighting/wrestling game released by SNK in 1991 for arcades. It was later ported for the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis by Takara. The game uses giant monsters that are reminiscent of Kaiju and tokusatsu characters.

A sequel called King of the Monsters 2 was released a year later.

Story
Our planet in the near future...

As our civilization advanced technologically and through the passage of time, the earth experienced a gradual decline... Unexpectedly, this vast earth came to a surprising halt. Suddenly, Super Monsters unimaginable to the human mind began to appear all over the world! This crazy universe gave birth to these quick transforming Super creatures!!!! Super Monsters that would mercilessly destroy building after building. Super Monsters that would ignore the frenzied panic of the people. No human military came close to their power!

Some time later the Monsters began to ask themselves, “Who is the strongest one among us?”. And thus began the great power battle between the Monsters. Eventually, the ultimate natural destruction site, “The Land of Civilization,” became the final battleground for the 6 victorious Superpower Monsters.

Gameplay
Players choose one of six monsters (four in the 16-bit ports) for battle, and two players can join forces to fight the monsters together. Battles end when one of the monsters is pinned for a three count or if time expires (in which case the player loses).

The game consists of 12 total levels (8 in the 16-bit ports) which takes place in 6 cities in a futuristic 1996 Japan. Each city is featured twice with the game beginning and ending in Tokyo. Other cities include Kyoto, Okayama, Osaka, Kobe and Hiroshima (the latter two are omitted from the SNES port. The Sega Genesis port only features Tokyo with the other cities being "Mega Port", "Dragon City", and "Castle City"). The player first must defeat all six monsters, with the last monster being oneself, but in a different palette. Then the player must defeat the six monsters again, in the same order, but this time in different cities.

Characters

 * Geon
 * Woo
 * Astro Guy
 * Poison Ghost
 * Rocky
 * Beetle Mania

Other appearances
In 1992, a sequel called King of the Monsters 2: The Next Thing  was released. In 2005, three characters from that sequel (Cyber-Woo, Super Geon and Atomic Guy) was featured in Neo Geo Battle Coliseum. These characters also appeared as character cards in the DS game SNK vs Capcom: Card Fighters DS.

In addition, to the original ports, King of the Monsters was included in SNK Arcade Classics Vol. 1 featuring many rare pieces of the game's production art production art. In 2018, the game was ported to the Nintendo Switch Shop by Hamster. The port features two extra features in a High Score Mode and Caravan Mode. A Neo Geo CD version was advertised and even previewed, but it never released.

Other Media
King of the Monsters was a regular on the popular Nickelodeon game show Nick Arcade. It was almost always picked, leaving other games like ActRaiser, Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts, and El Viento out, this was the same on earlier broadcasts of Sky1 show Games World.

Critical Reception
In Japan, Game Machine listed King of the Monsters on their April 1, 1991 issue as being the fourth most-successful table arcade unit of the month. Likewise, RePlay reported King of the Monsters to be the third most-popular arcade game at the time.

Mega criticised the game, awarding it a score of 10%, with Andy Dyer making the comment "unforgivably bad. There should be laws to protect us from crud like this".

IGN reviewed the game in 2008, giving it a mediocre score of 5.5/10, with Lucas Thomas commenting "There's certainly some appeal to the sight of giant creatures kicking over skyscrapers and stadiums on their way to slap one another into submission, but King of the Monsters just ends up being far too shallow".