City Shrouded In Shadow: Why The Best Kaiju Game Never Came to the US

The word Kaiju encompasses a genre with a lot of variation and many massively popular series. The genre has been popular in Japan for a long time but recently came into more popularity with films like Pacific Rim and 2014’s Godzilla. It’s not a genre often explored in video games, however.

In Japan, Kaiju movies are a part of the Tokusatsu entertainment, which is generally science fiction film or television dramas that heavily rely on special effects and costuming. Things like Ultraman or Power Rangers also fall into Tokusatsu.

Godzilla games, Rampage, War of the Monsters: Kaiju games can be counted on one hand. Sadly, one of the most ambitious Kaiju games of all time simply never made its way out of Japan. City Shrouded in Shadow ( Kyoei Toshi in Japanese) pulls from the biggest Kaiju and Tokusatsu series out there, and it’s a shame it never came to western audiences.

City Shrouded In Shadow Combines the Biggest Kaiju Around

City Shrouded in Shadow is actually a spiritual successor to another popular Japanese games series, Disaster Report. The series casts you as everyday civilians forced to survive catastrophic events like earthquakes or tsunamis, and each game puts a heavy emphasis on survival elements. City Shrouded in Shadow functions on the same concept, only you’re an average joe trying to survive a Kaiju attack on the city. The game is more goofy than serious, however, and puts a big emphasis on storytelling and the dynamic between characters.

What makes City Shrouded in Shadow interesting, though, is that it isn’t using generic monsters, but incredibly popular and established brands. The game lets you play as a man named Ken Misaki or a woman named Miharu Matsubara, and contains several different scenarios. Each scenario features a different attack on the city from famous monsters, like Godzilla versus King Ghidorah, Eva versus an Angel from Neon Genesis Evangelion, Gamera versus Legion, Mothra versus Batra, Ultraman fights, and even Patlabor mechs.

City Shrouded in Shadow takes some of the most famous Tokusatsu franchises out there and smashes them into a survival game. Everything is seen from the view of a survivor so these Kaiju and heroes are massive creatures that can destroy entire blocks in one blow, and oftentimes they have minions trying to hunt players down.

It’s a fascinating concept, and there’s a lot of player choice involved. Players decide a number of options for the main character at the beginning, like their occupation, relationship with the love interest, personal history, and more. The game does have its flaws, quite a few of them. It’s a somewhat budget title so animations aren’t incredibly smooth, the city isn’t completely explorable, and controls can be a bit clunky. However, the concept alone makes City Shrouded in Shadow a fascinating game and an experience that you haven’t seen anywhere else in gaming.

There have been Kaiju games before, but most of them put you in the shoes of the Kaiju themselves or some kind of superhuman fighting them off, like the Earth Defense Force series. City Shrouded in Shadow revels in the scale of these massive battles and making you someone that literally can’t do anything about it other than survive.

Why City Shrouded in Shadow Never Came West

There are a few likely reasons why City Shrouded in Shadow never came to the US, and Bandai Namco never suggested they were looking at a localization. Many of the game’s properties are either niche in the West or have little to no appeal. Godzilla is obviously recognizable but anime series like Patlabor and Evangelion don’t have mass appeal. By the same token, there aren’t a lot of western fans intimately familiar with the likes of Ultraman and Gamera.

Compounding this issue is the fact that only the first two Disaster Report games ever came to the US. Because of these two factors, Bandai Namco probably saw it as too much of a risk to localize City Shrouded in Shadow, when there’s no guarantee it would sell well at all.

It’s not all doom and gloom, however. The game only released in 2017, and the last few years have seen a slow increase in more niche Japanese titles being localized: Trails of Cold Steel 3, Zanki Zero, Root Letter, just to name a few. Even the Disaster Report series is making a comeback in the West thanks to the localization efforts of NIS America on Disaster Report 4 Plus: Summer Memories. If fans show an interest in Disaster Report 4, there may be a chance that audiences could see City Shrouded in Shadow sometime down the road, especially considering Ultraman is about to make his Marvel Comics debut.

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