Answer the questions correctly and win the monster’s heart.
High-concept dating simulators are usually the gateway to the genre, such as Pixel Puzzle Makeout League with Picross or Boyfriend Dungeon with Dungeon Crawl. So my ears perked up when Kaiju Dating Simulator came out on Switch. Sure, Kaiju, a game about manipulating a Kaiju and trying to date another Kaiju, would be eclectic, weird, and ridiculous. Unfortunately, Phantom Thief is repetitive and flat, and the only saving grace is the comedy of the premise and presentation.
The setup is interesting, introducing two newscasters whose playable character Gigachu pairs up with another beast and goes on a date to destroy world monuments like the Statue of Liberty and the Great Wall of China. When you go on these dates with one of the six types of Kaiju, all you do is answer multiple-choice prompts with good, okay, and bad responses. It’s a compatibility question that you have to answer correctly about whether you prefer something or a younger or older partner. Can be found in clever applications of things.
During some dates, you’ll start to see the questions repeated, and these cute question-and-answer segments begin. Everything is written in sentences. This is interesting, but repetitive and easy. Within 20 minutes of playing, the question was repeated. And the whole game is basically he six different sets of the same date on different Kaiju. Cute but not enough. It gets even worse when the relationship actually fails. Flub’s question advances the Broken Heart Meter, and when it’s filled the game ends. Taken from a previous save. Go to the save before that and then play the exact same question you’ve probably seen multiple times already.
To some extent, underwater is what it was aiming for. A modest Kickstarter success, this was never marketed to be a massive, gigantic game. Unless you’re really into the idea of a kaiju dating sim, which is actually a set of trial-and-error multiple-choice quizzes with nice animations, there’s no reason to take Gigachu on a subversive dating world tour.
