YMMV / Pipeworks ''Godzilla'' Trilogy

• Anti-Climax Boss: Space Godzilla in Save The Earth. You have to play the game on a higher setting to fight him, and after the fight with Orga on the Vortaak Mothership where you have the Flying Saucers that are programmed from the start to focus on you, you have a completely fair fight with Space Godzilla.
  • Critical Mass King Ghidorah in Unleashed. He gets his own cutscene, you fight him in the volcanic Seattle, he's so big the screen can't fit him...but you fight him with two other allies, so if anything it might just end up like the ending to Destroy All Monsters, with the three of you constantly spamming your strong attacks and keeping him from getting back up and fighting back, especially if you manage to kick him into the lava. That being said, in the Mutants storyline you fight him alone, so it's more of a fair fight. In the PlayStation 2 version, it's even less of a climax; the cutscene continues as normal, but when the game loads in, you don't get your fancy Critical Mass Opponent... rather, King Ghidorah is just twice his usual size, and goes down even easier, since your allies are Fire Rodan and Mothra, both of whom are masters of stalling and knocking down enemy monsters.
  • SpaceGodzilla returns as this again in Unleashed, and thanks to the game's bad AI, he's even easier.
• Awesome Music: Oh yes! The entire Unleashed soundtrack can be found here.
• Breather Boss: Mecha King Ghidorah in Destroy All Monsters. After the brutal smackdown that is Destroyah's fight, he steps in, and turns down the difficulty with his weak defenses, less aggressive, and intelligent A.I., and arena which provides him nowhere near as much advantage, or protection as the previous one did for the last monster.
• Critical Dissonance: Critics mostly ravaged the games, dismissing them as clumsy and hard to handle (although the brunt of criticism went to Unleashed, the first two actually earning mixed to positive reviews). But fans love them, considering them to be among the best to have ever been made, and if anything there could have been more done with them.
• Game-Breaker: Monsters' long range attacks become this in Unleashed due to the removal of the ability to block and minimize the damage. The lack of the ability to block was supposed to be balanced by the lack of knockback on the attacks, and the health of monsters being broken up into cells that can only be depleted by a heavy attack allowing the monster hit with them to walk up to their opponent despite the attack. But the ranged attacks still do too much damage along the way meaning it's easy to knock off a cell of health by the time the opponent gets close to you. The attacks are even more broken for Mechagodzilla and Mechagodzilla 2 because their ranged attacks don't have this weakness.
  • Destroyah's Laser Blade was That One Attack in previous games but at least had the drawback of costing energy. This was no longer the case in Unleashed, meaning Destroyah has an attack with good range, damage, and can't be blocked.
• Goddamned Bats: The military. It's pretty much impossible to avoid damaging any buildings so the military is always going to show up and attack you. They don't do a lot of damage individually, but in large groups they can whittle your health down enough to affect the fight. It really doesn't help that they have freeze tanks that show up at times, which can completely shift any momentum you have in the fight. You can't reliably dodge their fire, and while they can be killed just by walking into them or shooting them down with your beam, they appear endlessly so there isn't much point in attacking them. Trying to fight them will typically leave you open anyways. It's especially annoying on the final rounds in Destroy All Monsters Melee and Save The Earth where you fight on the Vortaak Mothership and the UFOs will always attack you.
  • Freeze tanks in particular are this. First of all, they're small and drab-colored, so you might have trouble finding them. Next, they don't do damage, but even if their beam so much as scrapes you you'll be slowed down significantly for a considerable length of time before eventually freezing for a while; by this time your foe has likely recovered and is ready to unload a beatdown.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: One of the levels in Unleashed has the Golden Gate Bridge broken in half. And the bridge suffers it again in Godzilla when Godzilla plows through it.
• It's the Same, So It Sucks: While the Playstation 2 version of Unleashed obviously lacks the widely disliked motion controls of the Wii version, it was still largely criticized for basically being a glorified ROMhack of Save the Earth, having the same general gameplay and lacking the new monsters of the Wii version except for Obsidius (who is just a Moveset Clone of Orga, unlike on Wii) and the exclusive Battra (clone of Mothra).
• Most Wonderful Sound: "Rage!", whenever a monsters picks up the Rage power-up.
• Nightmare Fuel: The Tyrant ending in Unleashed. The disasters caused by SpaceGodzilla's crystals get even worse as they cover the entire Earth with the implication he exterminated all life the entire planet. Depending on who got the ending, if you achieve it via obtaining all the power surges and going mad with power it's chillingly said that you were their only hope over a black screen, while if you achieve it with a Mutant you get the lovely sound of SpaceGodzilla roaring in victory.
• The Scrappy: Obsidius from Unleashed is strongly disliked among the Godzilla fandom for being a very generic lava monster with a bland design, stock roar, and no interesting motivation. The real kicker is that he was the winner of a character poll to be in the game over much more interesting kaiju like the Visitor and Lightning Bug.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The "moon jump" — the ability for the kaiju to jump more than their own height and slowly fall to the ground — has been criticized for breaking the immersion of playing as a giant monster and was even mocked by the developers of the Godzilla game. When Colossal Kaiju Combat! was being made as a Spiritual Successor to the Pipeworks Godzilla'' trilogy, there was a push to remove the Moon Jump, though Simon Strange refused saying it was necessary for ground-based kaiju to have a non-breath weapon means of fighting airborne kaiju.
• No Problem with Licensed Games: Widely praised for giving what players would want to do in a Godzilla game, namely smash buildings and fight other monsters, in a very fun way.
• That One Attack: Destroyah's Laser Blade, especially in Destroy All Monsters Melee. It can't be blocked, and does good damage. It's already bad enough in the first two games since the overhead swing knocks you over and Destoroyah can keep hitting you with it over and over until he doesn't have the energy to keep it up, and there is nothing you can do to stop him. But it's even worse in Unleashed, in which it doesn't use any energy like the first two games, making Destoroyah an utter Game-Breaker.
  • The Gotengo's freezer missiles in Unleashed in the PS2 version. Since it already moves far faster than you, you have to chase the damn thing around Osaka as it constantly hails on you with freezer missiles that lock you in place while it then continues to sail off into the distance. Actually getting close enough to land any hits on it is quite a chore. This is completely averted in the Wii version since the Gotengo replaces the attack with a simple close-range strafe that fires normal missiles rapidly, which makes things much easier.
  • In Domination, Rodan and Megalon's strongest special attacks. The former rushes across the screen very quickly, while the latter burrows underground for a brief period of time. When they collide with a foe, they'll juggle them in the air and repeatedly stab them, shaving off half of the entire health bar! Megalon's is easy to avoid at least even if he moves fast underground since you can see his shadow, but Rodan is much harder if you're not far away when he starts it.
• That One Boss
  • In Save the Earth, there's Orga, the normal final boss; see above for why.
  • Jet Jaguar in Double Smash; there isn't a single attack that doesn't take up both screens at some point during their path, and he likes to spam them a lot.
  • Hedorah too; while his attacks don't do too much damage, all but one of them have just about no telegraph.
  • Destroyah in Destroy All Monsters. His battle takes place in Los Angeles, a location with plenty of throwable buildings that deal a lot of damage that he loves to throw at you. This isn't even to mention the insane range his horn attack has, and how he also loves to stun-lock you with it.
  • Mecha Godzilla in Destroy All Monsters. The fight first takes place in a walled off arena, and he's not trapped in there with the player. The player's trapped in there with him. Mecha Godzilla combines everything hard about the prior battles, and dials it up to eleven. Get ready to get nonstop wombo-combo'd, stun-locked, and thrown around like a rag doll because he never lets up, hits like a truck, and is exceptionally smart. You know the boss is hard when the recommended strategy for beating him is to immediately break down the cage around so you can get away from him.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: King Ghidorah in Destroy All Monsters will most likely be where new players will start to struggle as the game stops pulling punches. His lightning attack hurts, he has decent range on his melee and he can fly which allows him to blast you from the air. If you haven't figured out how to properly make use of your ranged attack or how useful throwing buildings can be, now's the time.
  • Destroyah in the same game also counts. After a relative lull of moderately easy battles after the difficulty spike that was King Ghidorah, he storms in, and immediately lets the player know that they're drawing near the final round, and playtime truly is over, and that if the player still hasn't learned how just powerful ranged attacks, and throwing objects is, he will gladly show you. His fighting style is nothing, but that as it's just a nonstop barrage of pummeling you with buildings, beating you down, and stun-locking you with his horn attack that has insane range, and using his projectile attack that draws you so he can do just that. He's also fast, and is the first opponent to start constantly running, and will chase the player down if they try to get away from him. He's also smart in that he'll duck behind buildings to block your projectiles, and try to knock those same buildings down on you if you get close to him while he's still next to them. Simply put, Destroyah's fight is a beast that serves to show the player that if they want to beat this game, they have to start playing as hard, smart, and aggressive as he is.