| Chasing Kaleidorider | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Release Date | Gameplay & Story | Pre-Register & Pre-Order | CBT#2 Review |
Chasing Kaleidorider's Closed Beta Test 2 is out, and we came away with one impression: this is a game that shouldn't work nearly as well as it does.
Real-Time Shootouts at Highway Speeds
An Identity Crisis as a Compliment
Most games are easy to describe. You can, for example, summarize the entirety of Wuthering Waves as an apocalyptic open-world action game, or Neverness to Everness as an open world sandbox ARPG—you’d be right on the money almost every time. Chasing Kaleidorider, however, seems almost determined to make that impossible.
Is it a high-speed action game? A strategy RPG? A mystery story? A romance? A card game? A character collector? A dating sim? The answer is "yes." Yes, it’s all of those, and much more. And yet somehow, none of them really captures what it feels like to actually play the game.
That's because Chasing Kaleidorider isn't just a game that blends genres. It's one that repeatedly leaves your expectations in the dust the moment you think you've figured it out. What initially looks like a twitch-heavy action game is actually built around deliberate resource management and planning. Likewise, what seems like a story about stylish motorcycle battles quickly gives way to one centered on conspiracies, supernatural horrors, and human relationships.
Ordinarily, that would be a criticism. But after spending time with the playtest, I came away feeling that this is actually the game's greatest strength. It's not that Chasing Kaleidorider didn't know when to stop—it simply never wanted to.
Card Games on Motorcycles
The great thing about Chasing Kaleidorider is that while it looks like one genre built around motorbikes, girls with guns, high-speed road combat, and stylish character art, you'd actually be wrong—and you'd keep being wrong until you gave up trying to summarize it. That’s because everything about this game will give you the wrong first impression until you're very, very deep into it.
Like, for example, if you only looked at the surface level of its promotional materials and assumed it was going to be a twitch-heavy action game, then you’d already be wrong because its core mechanics are far more deliberate. It involves real-time RNG management, an energy economy, timing skills based on enemy formation, and more—it plays more like a strategy RPG at that point.
Going a step further, if you assume that the story will mostly revolve around motorbikes and any parallel theme, you’d be wrong again. Heck, even the character designs mislead you. At no point do they suggest that these women spend their days riding motorbikes while firing rifles, cannons, and rocket launchers at floating eldritch horrors. Instead of centering its story on high-speed action, though, it’s actually about conspiracies, friendship, and mystery. Yet for some reason, most of its narrative quirks seem intent on convincing you it's a dating sim, complete with a bond system, dates, accidental kissing, and a generous helping of fanservice tropes.
Eventually, I found that it made the experience much richer once I stopped trying to categorize Chasing Kaleidorider altogether. Every time I thought I'd figured out what kind of game it wanted to be, it'd introduce another mechanic, another trope, or another narrative that sidestepped that assumption.
Rule of Cool
While sure, you can argue that other games are similar in nature. For example, Chaos Zero Nightmare is a Lovecraftian horror-themed card-based roguelite with dating mechanics, a story about political intrigue and personal tragedies, and deep RPG systems layered on top of it all. Even that, however, feels more cohesive because every one of those ideas ultimately serves the game's overarching theme of holistic development in the face of cosmic horrors.
Chasing Kaleidorider, meanwhile, is much looser. Some of the concepts it throws together simply don't make sense alongside one another unless you eventually give up trying to justify them and admit: maybe the developers just wanted them to be there.
That’s not criticism, by the way. There are a lot of little decisions throughout the game that feel like they exist simply because someone on the team thought they would be cool. Take the motorbikes, for example. Nothing about the combat system actually requires every Rider to own one. They could've just carried signature weapons like every other RPG cast. But think about it: having every character own their own signature motorbike instead of a weapon is exactly the kind of decision that feels less like careful worldbuilding and more like someone saying, "Wouldn't this be better?"
There are other examples, of course. The game using a UI typically reserved for turn-based games despite using real-time mechanics simply because it made rotating between characters look much more energetic is one, and the story revolving around mystery instead of action to sell a cool plot about the "Sea of Consciousness" is another. Yes, there’s also puzzle stages and whatnot. There’s never a shortage of these, really.
As a result, Chasing Kaleidorider really gives off the impression that it was designed by a development team that prioritized fun over cohesion. Maybe it fit, maybe it didn’t. Either way, they stayed.
Personality Over Perfection: Chasing Kaleidorider Playtest Impressions
A lot of gacha games nowadays feel like they're trying to optimize for something. Combat systems are refined around familiar formulas, progression is carefully paced to maximize retention, and even new mechanics often feel like small variations on ideas that have already proven successful. In general, many of them feel safe.
Chasing Kaleidorider, however, doesn’t feel safe at all. Even just from the playtest alone, it never felt like it was maximizing some engagement metric beyond its romance elements. It also doesn’t feel like it was chasing some trend, either. It’s not cohesive, and it’s certainly not elegant. But it’s honest about it.
Nearly every part of it seems to pull in a different direction. Somehow, though, that lack of focus is a part of its charm and identity. Rather than feeling like a product assembled through cold market analysis, it feels more like a game made by people who simply couldn’t stop themselves from asking "Wouldn’t it be cool if…?" Ironically, I think this game will lose a lot of its charm if they suddenly thought about optimizing their content for general consumption.
It’s like we’re back in the days of Kuro Games’ Twin Tail Battlefield or miHoYo’s Honkai Impact 3rd; games that, during Fate/Grand Order’s peak, felt less like products chasing the popular trend and more like developers enthusiastically throwing ideas at the wall and, wouldn’t you know? Almost all of them stuck.
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