Kaichu: The Kaiju Dating Sim Mini Review (Switch)

Love is a wonderful thing to experience. The bubbling excitement of taking a journey with a person that causes your heart to race and leaves you with a sense of calm is one that is hard to fully describe unless you’ve experienced it. However, love isn’t easy. Roadblocks often crop up when you least expect it and you’ll have to overcome them if you wish to move forward. This is the case not just with humans, but with kaiju as well. Will you find love while also bringing about destruction to the Earth? Or will you crash and burn as the military mobilizes to save the planet?

You play as Gigachu, a reptilian kaiju that has appeared in the North Pole, ready to look for love and destroy key tourist attractions around the world. And there are plenty of kaiju to romance, six to be exact. Whether you like birds, moths, or sea serpents, you’re sure to find at least a couple of kaiju that suit your fancy as you hop aboard the train of love. However, if there’s one thing that kaiju aren’t known for, it’s speaking a language that humans can understand. That’s where news anchors Brevity Ormes and Lucky Cole come in, giving a play-by-play of each date that you go on.

The game opens up with you on a map of the world, with several landmarks available to visit, as well as six kaiju to romance. You can choose any of these kaiju to romance and once you do, the world is your oyster (literally). From there, you can choose to go to one of 24 different landmarks to learn more about your date and hopefully grow closer to them.

Dates take the form of personality quizzes, akin to what you’d see online. You have three responses that you can choose from for every question: thumbs up, neutral, or thumbs down. Sometimes, questions will give you a set of choices to choose from and you have to choose which option you agree with. No matter the question, your kaiju date will respond in kind with either a positive, neutral, or negative response. If you receive a positive or neutral response, the both of you will proceed to attack the landmark in front of you. But if you receive a negative response, shame will descend and there’s a moment of awkwardness where neither of you attack.

Some questions will be marked as dealbreaker questions, and they are always at the very end of a date. How you answer these questions can swing the results of a date in or against your favor. Once the date is wrapped up, both kaijus will stare at each other before either kissing passionately, Gigachu blowing a kiss, or rain pouring down as you both despair over the fact that the date was a failure. It’s usually easy to figure out how a date is going based on the state of the landmark. If the entire landmark has been destroyed by the end of the date, more than likely the date will be marked as a success.

But don’t let yourself get too comfortable, as the military will eventually show their face to break up your budding relationship. After all, you are destroying countless landmarks during your dates. It’s not uncommon to find yourself blasting through landmarks before finding yourself facing the wall that is the military. Whether your love perseveres past that point depends on how well you can answer questions, with less of a margin to mess up.

Outside of the individual questions asked between different kaiju and a few lines of dialogue, each playthrough will follow the same story beats. Of course though, each act in a playthrough has the possibility of ending sooner if you’re not able to get a reading on the kaiju you’re courting and answer the questions correctly. But each kaiju tends to be straightforward with how they feel about specific topics, so even if you stumble a bit in the beginning, you can easily get your footing and move forward. And if you don’t end up in a relationship towards the end, there’s always the next playthrough.

Kaichu: The Kaiju Dating Sim is a bright and vibrant game, with plenty of colors to put you in a lovey-dovey mood. The aesthetic takes on more of a cartoony vibe, akin to a show you’d see on TV. Given the subject matter and how lighthearted the storytelling is, it fits very well. The music also fits very well, with bright cheery tunes before shifting over to your typical news bulletin track when new developments arise.

Kaichu: The Kaiju Dating Sim is a quick experience, with dates lasting only a few questions long and acts consisting of only a few successful (or unsuccessful) dates. You can easily clear through all of the romanceable options in a couple of hours, which may not appeal to those looking for a more fleshed out dating sim. But if you want something that’s cute, will put you right in a good mood, and is easy to pick up or put down when needed, this game is worth checking out.