The first time I ever saw Japan's most famous kaiju on the big screen was in Godzilla 2000: Millennium. Like any nine-year-old kid, I was obsessed with Big G. I read the Dark Horse comics, and I taped all the movies I could on TV. Things were different then; Godzilla was a big deal, but theatrical releases for Godzilla films were incredibly rare in the States If you saw those movies, it was on TV and they were dubbed or edited versions released under different titles like Godzilla: King of the Monsters or Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster. After Godzilla 2000 underperformed, it took another five years for the series to see a theatrical release in the U.S. – and into that void stomped 2002’s Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee. It was the perfect mix of subject matter (big monsters who were super into professional wrestling), genre (3D fighting game), and time period (licensed games were still, like… a thing). It was the kind of game that could dominate a pizza-filled sleepover weekend or become your personality for an entire summer. One friend’s parents bought it for them, and that copy became communal: a holy thing, carried from place to place. Maybe it’s fitting that it’s back now in the form of Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee Remastered, 24 years later. The world (and Godzilla) has changed a lot, but original developer Pipeworks is still at the helm. It somehow feels just as relevant now as it did then, just in different ways, and revisiting it was a joy even removed from the nostalgia.There is no one-to-one equivalent for what Destroy All Monsters Melee is, but the idea is pretty simple: you pick one of 12 monsters from Godzilla’s history (up through Godzilla 2000) – Godzilla, Gigan, Megalon, Ghidorah, etc. – then choose a real-world city or iconic Godzilla location to battle it out in. You’ll fight in classic rubber suit wrestling style while dodging environmental hazards, knocking down buildings, throwing rocks and skyscrapers at each other, and squashing the annoying military forces that really would prefer if you made a mess somewhere else. Last kaiju standing wins.Despite the name, this isn't a straight remaster. You're not just looking at uprezzed models. It looks fantastic while also maintaining the “these are guys in rubber suits drop-kicking each other” vibe that defines the films it’s based on. The audio pulls its weight, too – the soundtrack has the booming authority you'd expect from a Godzilla film, buildings crumble and collapse spectacularly, beam attacks sound powerful and painful, the radio calls from military forces in the area let you know where they’ll be focusing their fire, and the announcer is having a blast. And the monsters, of course, sound like themselves. And yeah, Godzilla makes The Noise, just like you remember, even if it’s your first time here.All of this is held together by a spit-and-duct-tape story that's just there to get you brawling: see, there's this alien race called the Vortaak. They're little green men with funky helmets, straight-from-the-‘50s fashion sense, flying saucers, and more than a little ego. They're here to take over the Earth, and what better way to do it than mind control the frankly absurd number of kaiju that are just hanging around, ready to smash a city at a moment's notice? Unfortunately for them, whichever Monster you pick breaks free of their mind control and decides the Earth is worth saving. Driving off the Vortaak means KOing the other monsters. All in a day's work, really. The soundtrack has the booming authority you'd expect from Godzilla.That's Adventure mode, which is one of several single-player options for you to rearrange cities in. You've also got Destruction for the score chasers, where you have to wreck a city in a time limit, a souped-up Adventure mode for monsters who are at a higher level and have better stats (which you gain from experience you earn as you play certain modes), and Survival, which is exactly what it sounds like. Listen, you can count the number of fighting games with good single-player modes on two hands (and several of those have the words “Soul Calibur” in their titles), but what's on offer here is solid if not spectacular. You only start with five monsters and a few stages unlocked, but Pipeworks has smartly reworked this remaster so you can unlock the rest in pretty much whatever order you like. You just have to meet the requirements, which you do by playing, following rumors, and unlocking research, and you can swap what you're focusing on whenever you like.On the one hand, yeah, it's super satisfying to unlock Ghidorah because it's Ghidorah – as soon as he stops being a silhouette I can't select and starts being a gloriously golden three-headed dragon I can take into battle, some lizard part of my brain gets very happy because I can't wait to fly around and shoot lightning with that sumbitch. On the other hand, it's mad annoying to see Rodan or Ghidorah or Mecha Godzilla in Adventure mode and have the 12-year-old who lives in my head put down his slice of pizza long enough to be like “hell yeah, I wanna play that one” and then realize I can't, especially in multiplayer. Does it give you more reasons to keep playing? Absolutely, and this stuff was part and parcel of the original experience. But man, sometimes you just wanna throw down with your friends without worrying about unlocks, you know? Multiplayer, of course, is really what Destroy All Monsters Melee is designed for, and I'm so happy that Pipeworks has added online play in addition to the returning local options. It even works really well! Most of the matches I played pre-release were smooth, though I did suffer a few disconnects. (Almost all of which happened when I was winning or doing well – I'm not saying my boy Lucas is a fraud or anything, but…)It's here, in the multiplayer, that Destroy All Monsters Melee really shines. People will tell you, naively, that this is a button masher with no depth. These people are foolish and wrong, and if this were a Godzilla movie, they'd got a dramatic close-up shot right before a giant monster foot turned them into paste. Can you play a chaotic four-player free-for-all where everybody is mashing? Sure. You can also do wacky team battles or square off against the never-as-challenging-as-another-person CPU (though, bafflingly, you can't mix CPU opponents with friends online; let me do a comp stomp, man!). This can certainly be a casual party game if you want it to be. But the thing about Destroy All Monsters Melee is that there is actually quite a bit more to it. Each monster has punch, kick, and fierce attacks that you can string into combos. Tilt the left stick in a direction and you get heavy attacks. Every kaiju has an energy attack governed by an energy bar that you can use as a quick projectile or charge for a beam. You can also pick up and throw buildings and rocks, or even other kaiju. You can run, jump, fly (if your character has wings), crouch, and block. This can be a casual party game, but there is actually quite a bit more to its combat.All of this opens up most of the stuff you'd see in a traditional fighting game. Someone shoot a projectile at you? Duck it. If you've knocked another monster down, they can wake up with an attack, but if you block it or stand just outside of their range, you can punish them instead. Finishing a predictable string when an opponent is blocking means you are either getting hit or thrown for your trouble. Every monster also has different stats to account for. Gigan's sword arms mean he hits… well, like a kaiju with sword arms, but his projectiles are relatively weak. Anguirus can't block normally, but his spiked shell means anyone who hits him while his back is turned is gonna be dancing around in a lot of pain. Megalon can burrow and come up under you. And Godzilla 2000's additional bit of quickness means he can apply pressure a lot more easily than his ‘90s counterpart. Knowing what the other city smasher you're staring down can do matters, and someone who understands the difference between Blunt and Edge attacks or who knows when to duck your strings is going to beat your colossal ass up and down Tokyo Bay if you're just mashing.But smart map play matters, too. Once you start to destroy a city, there's less cover to hide behind in future rounds and fewer things to throw at your opponent. It also means it’s easier to make a beeline for the power-ups that drop on the map – like Rage, which buffs your character and provides access to powerful Rage attacks. There are health and energy boosts, as well as my personal favorite, the Mothra Airstrike, which the announcer proclaims with a relish that makes me think he's been waiting to see a giant moth divebomb another kaiju his whole life. If you break down cliffs on Monster Island, you can chuck another monster into the lava. Crack open the forcefield on the alien’s Mothership and there's a whole other part of the stage to fight in. It's good stuff.Is it as deep as Street Fighter or Guilty Gear of Tekken? No. But a lot goes into a match of Destroy All Monsters Melee, and knowing your kaiju goes a long way. There is replay value in filling out the gallery and score chasing in Destruction Mode, but if you vibe with what's here, it will be because you love it. And by “it,” I mean uppercutting a monster the size of the Chrysler Building and watching him hang in the air for a second before he comes crashing back down to Earth.Admittedly, the deeper stuff isn't easy to learn because Destroy All Monsters Melee barely teaches you any of it. Aside from loading screen text and a basic movelist, there is no tutorial of any kind, so I learned by trial and error, talking to the people I was playing with, and hunting down guides for the original game. That sucks, because the fun part is digging into these systems, and it's much more fun when you understand the layers hidden beneath the scales (or metal). I came out of Destroy All Monsters Melee Remastered with my brain rewired – or maybe more accurately, it reminded me of what's important. It's not how big the roster is or whether there's a progression system to keep you playing forever once the character unlocks run out. It’s not about achievements or daily quests or a battle pass or all the other useless Skinner Box nonsense crammed into everything these days. This is a time capsule, a pure reminder that what makes a game are the moments at 2 a.m. when you throw your buddy into the lava pit… which happens to have a Rage power up in it. It's the comebacks and the laughs. It's like stepping back into the shoes of my nine-year-old self, seeing a Godzilla film in theaters before the series was drowning in cultural clout and an interconnected multimedia universe. The joy is in the thing itself. In surrendering your expectations and remembering how things can make you feel if you let them. Everything else is noise. And not the cool Godzilla kind.