The Pacific Rim film franchise, a loving homage to classic giant monster movies and Saturday morning giant robot cartoons, has inspired official spin-offs such as comic books and Pacific Rim: The Black on Netflix. Fans who want to tell their own mecha vs. kaiju stories should check out these video games and tabletop games, each with rules and premises similar to Pacific Rim and the franchises that inspired it.
The timeline of the Kaiju War, summarized through montage in the first couple minutes of the first Pacific Rim and fleshed out in spin-off works, goes something like this: massive Kaiju creatures emerge from a dimensional breach at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The nations of humanity construct "Jaegers," giant fighting robots, to intercept and destroy Kaiju before they make landfall. After an era of triumph where Jaeger pilots are treated like celebrities, the alien creators of the Kaiju craft stronger anti-Jaeger monsters who overwhelm Earth's defenses and push humankind to the brink of apocalypse. Pacific Rim and Pacific Rim: The Black are about protagonists fighting a war of resistance against the nearly victorious Kaiju menace, while Pacific Rim: Uprising is about a new generation of Jaeger pilots in the age after the Breach between worlds was destroyed.
Director Guillermo del Toro's work on Pacific Rim was born from an earnest love of mecha and kaiju movies and cartoons ranging from Godzilla to Tetsujin 28-go. Tabletop/video gamers with a similarly earnest love of Pacific Rim-style stories can get their fix of Robot vs. Monster action with the following video games and tabletop RPG system, each concerning themselves with giant robots, giant creatures, and tiny human pilots doing their part to cancel the apocalypse.
Into The Breach
The turn-based tactical roguelite Into the Breach, designed by the makers of FTL: Faster Than Light, is about a mech squad commander desperately trying to save the last remnants of humanity - a match for the timeframe where the first Pacific Rim movie takes place. Players control a three-person squad of pilots and mechs deployed onto 8 by 8 grid maps, fending off the insectoid Vek while protecting local buildings and infrastructure from being destroyed. If players fail to save a timeline from the Vek, they can send one of their pilots back in time to try again.
13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim
The adventure/strategy game 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, developed by Vanillaware and published by Atlus games, is about a motley crew of time-traveling teenagers struggling to hold the line against increasingly deadly armies of mechanical "Deimos," utilizing different generations of "Sentinels" mechs specced towards different styles of combat. Between these pausable real-time strategy combat missions, players learn the stories of all 13 Sentinel pilots through flashback events and story routes, exploring beautifully drawn 2D environments while learning shocking secrets about the protagonists and the war they're fighting.
Kaiju Incorporated
A strong point to the Pacific Rim franchise is the multiple clever world-building details worked into its setting; Kaiju, for instance, don't just explode into nothingness when they're defeated, so there's a black-market industry centered around butchering and recycling Kaiju corpses before they utterly pollute their surroundings. Evil Hat Production's Kaiju Incorporated tabletop RPG focuses on the stories of these unsung heroes, featuring game session about rebuilding cities, getting rid of bio-hazardous materials left over from Kaiju/Mech battles, and keeping a business afloat.
The Tears Of A Machine 
The Tears of a Machine tabletop RPG, currently available as a Quickstart from itch.io, takes several cues from the Jaeger Pilot training cadet protagonists of Pacific Rim: Uprising. Besides Pacific Rim, it also takes many cues from Neon Genesis Evangelion, a dark deconstruction of the Giant Robot genre where traumatized teenagers fight biblical "Angels" with bio-mechanical Mechas that have a tendency to rampage out of control. The narrative-focused rules of The Tears of a Machine alternate between apocalyptic Mecha battles against colossal alien weapons called Magnas and non-combat scenes of teenage drama, its character sheets featuring attributes such as "Ego" and "Angst."
Source: Evil Hat Productions, itch.io
