Project Choro-Q, 2026

A strong first showing for the series with some rough spots and jank; but it's jank that mostly becomes iconic to the series.

The original Choro-Q lacks the open world of later games and begins with only providing access to a one-race mode in which you gain money for a top three finish. Money lets you buy parts, of which there's only 2 or 3 of each category available, but each tier represents a significant boost in capability. At the start you have access to three tracks, but getting a top three finish in them opens up three more; then two after that. Getting a top three finish in all eight finally opens the Grand Prix mode.

Getting into Grand Prix feels like you're just starting, but in truth you're near the end of the game. You do a point based cup of all eight tracks again, and winning gives you credits. If you can consistently take first or second in the single races, this isn't that much harder because the AI does not consistently finish in the same placements, meaning their points are spread around evenly. I got this far in two and a half hours.

Once you beat the Grand Prix, it doesn't tell you but it unlocks a second Grand Prix, with a new track in the mix and a new opponent that is impossible to beat with your current parts. A second shop also opens, giving access to 2-3 new tiers of parts for most of the types. Honestly, the only way to handle this is throw attempts at the new Grand Prix until you either win, or get enough cash to upgrade parts until you win.

Two things I found unusual about this: an entire new type of terrain and tire is unlocked here, previously kept secret from the player. Snow namely. And the tiers of gear you unlock are ludicrous. You can probably win the second Grand Prix with one or two upgrades of one tier, but the best engine, tires, and transmission will turn you into a beast that starts winning races by half a lap or more trivially.

It's a blast though. Once you're out of the initial grind and throwing attempts at the Grand Prix, it's incredibly fun. The car handles well, the game feels fast, you feel in control most of the time, and when you're on power curve with your opponents, a fair amount of skill is required to pull out a win. The music is great, the track design is varied and engaging, and it's just full of cute charming vibes.

Jank abounds though; first, the frame rate can dip down to 10-12 in some of the busier tracks. Definitely a combination of crowded design and early PSX title issues. Second, you have a very basic downforce mechanic and the ability to buy spoilers to increase it. The way the game informs you you have insufficient downforce is by making your car vibrate against the track, randomly coming up off it to disrupt acceleration and control. The camera moves with it, causing this jarring, sometimes nauseating vibration effect. It took me awhile to realize this was the game's way of saying "Buy a spoiler, dingus!".

Finally, as with many Choro-Q games, the way this one handles loss of grip/control is questionable. If you turn harder than your current speed, tires, and terrain allow, you don't just being to lose control and oversteer. You go into an almost Ridge Racer style drift, cannot accelerate, and turning becomes inconsistent and weird; you have to practically come to a complete stop to come out of it. This is all avoided mostly by knowing when to let off the gas in a turn, though.

A strong start to the series; a blast. I 100%ed it.

Choro-Q 2 picks up where the original left off. Beyond adding "A few bells and whistles", a lot of the game is polished and tightened up in really important ways. The initial grind experience is smoothed over and you can be winning races a lot faster. You still have to podium every race to get to the Grand Prix, but that feels easier this time around.

The weird wiggling camera problem when your downforce isn't all there is gone, but there's still some significant framerate dips. Fewer than in the predecessor, fortunately. In exchange, the car handling physics feel more demanding and punishing. It's a lot easier to spin and the tracks are more demanding on top of it. Furthermore, the pacing of parts always has you running an engine stronger than your tires can handle, so you feel stuck on the razor's edge of keeping control.

The track design though is probably the biggest improvement. The original Choro-Q's track design was already good, but Choro-Q 2 takes it to a new level with underwater sections, cooler tunnels, new biomes, a night stage, and some really out there gimmick courses that keep things fresh and unique. The most out there is a course that changes through the game, portraying the four seasons and changing routes through it every couple of races. Unfortunately it's also kind of a guide-selling point as you have to figure out this is happening and beat all four variants to unlock the second Grand Prix.

Like the original, once you beat the Grand Prix you get a sort of fake credits, then can unlock a second one. Unlike the predecessor, the second Grand Prix doesn't have a single racer that will destroy you until you max your car out. You can (and are expected to) smoothly migrate to the second Grand Prix and upgrade as you go. If you want to be destroyed by a superior racer, there's the "Old Courses": all eight original Choro-Q tracks, unlocked as a single unit by performing a special jump in the open world; namely through a giant clock face.

The open world itself is pretty bare bones, but does set the stage for what Choro-Q as a series will do in the future. You can drive from corner to corner of this space in about 30 seconds and there's ten or so buildings in it, some hidden. Once you drive into a building, it gets added to a list that you can access from the main menu, so you only need to actually drive into each location once. In this world are multiple cosmetic shops, three part shops, two minigames, a casino, a hidden unlockable course, and a couple decorative landmarks you can drive around for fun. It's not much but it is new and cool!

Choro-Q 2 is a step up, hampered in all of its improvements by a more punishing handling system and pacing of parts that, while letting you buy parts faster, hold you back from getting the tires you need to actually grip the road. The Grand Prix experience is smoother to compensate, but actually getting the second Grand Prix isn't as clear and simple as it was in the first game. I had to have someone point out the seasons were changing.

It's better in almost all ways, but the one way it's not is kind of all-encompassing. Still, it's an exciting peek into where the series will go from here!

Choro-Q 3 cements the formula that will be seen in most future Choro-Q mainline games. The open world is actually substantial and important to progress rather than having a couple small things, part progression is more or less smoothed out, and mechanical quirks are ironed out. Frame rate issues and camera shake caused by downforce issues are gone and handling is more or less made intuitive and most of your spinouts feel like your fault. You still will randomly jack-knife on a straightaway if your tires are very sub-par though.

A lot of your tracks and all of your shops and events are discovered in the open world this time, which is about three times as large as Choro-Q 2's. Choro-Q 3 also introduces the notebook system we'll see going forward: 100 events you find in the world including finding and unlocking shops and just finding things randomly in the world. I found 90 of these organically; the remaining 10 were split between "That's so obscure, how would I ever find that" and broken, including a second paint shop that only opened if you satisfied its unlock condition after repainting your car in the first one. Since I was focused on racing and had a body that came stock in yellow, I didn't ever bother. I had to look at a guide.

Still, I 100%ed it! Choro-Q 3 also sports three Grand Prix cups, each unlocking when you get podium in all the tracks available up until that point. This does require exploring the world to find the extra tracks so if you plan to not explore at all, this will be a miss for you. The GPs are well balanced, giving you a decent shot at winning when you first reach them. Black Mary from Choro-Q 1 is still nowhere to be seen. There is a super-car in the final GP, but it's nowhere near that unfair. It's also silly; I won't spoil it.

Really this is the perfect immaculate prototype for Choro-Q. The tracks are different and atmospheric and each one had some memorable gimmick. Progression is smooth, winning is challenging but not impossible and you can overcome most of the difficult races by throwing cash at them. Most of the remaining rough spots will remain as part of the series's identity forever, for better or worse. The open world is there and actually important and fun to explore.

The first core racer not on the Playstation. Choro-Q 64 returns to the straight Grand Prix formula, foregoing the open world that the prior games established. Instead of shopping and exploring, you grind races against opponents then steal their parts as part of winning takes.

Choro-Q 64 also experiments with new controls and handling options, and new forms of difficulty and track design.

64 is also the first game in the project I played previously and I'm returning to it to get a feel for the progression of the racer series and see if my handling of Choro-Q racing physics has improved with my completion of the first three games.

My first playthru took five hours; the replay took three. To put it bluntly: this is more a kart racer than it is a Choro-Q game. You have weapons, you have no open world, you have no money or shop system. You do gain parts by stealing them from your opponents when you win (and they can take parts from you when you lose), but that's about all you have of the Choro-Q mainstays.

Handling in this is more polite than prior games. It's harder to lose tire grip, and there's only a couple tiers of tires. This is necessary though for two major reasons: the first is your car can roll, halting most of your momentum rather than just causing a skid; second you will never, ever be on the racing line you want or have any real control over your handling because the AI will ruthlessly ram you, shove you, and leave mines in your line.

Yeah mines. This is the first (and I hope only) Choro Q game with weapons. They are plentiful and the AI is absolutely ruthless with them. Rather than having to pick up weapons on the track, you select a weapon to take into the race, and get refills based on your placement at lap time. This means the sixth place racer will have 9 land mines to poop around the track across the race. Fifth place will have seven. The AI places mines with ruthless design, around blind corners, immediately past boost panels, and dead center on narrow bridges. You also have missiles, boosters, and a bunch of other stuff.

This is less a racing game and more a "Will the AI screw me?" slot machine.

On your side: absolutely nothing short of exploding or colliding with an opponent entirely will slow you down. You can bounce off walls, make bad turns, boost into obstacles. You will come out at full speed. Hitting an opponent or being struck by a weapon however will pop you into the air and halt all of your forward momentum. The absolute unstoppable state of your car gives you a fighting chance but it makes the racecraft absolutely pointless. You just send it and hope no one shoots you, rams you, mines you, blocks you, etc.

You also have a really cool new handling tool. If you begin a drift while holding R, you will deliberately roll your car. This lets you suddenly turn the car 90 degrees while keeping most of your speed. You can turn on a dime if you abuse this, and I found a hilarious way to handle the opening of the Volcano track with it.

There's nine tracks, and you loop through them four times. Getting top three in each cup will unlock the next one. The only difference in cup is your point limit: every part has a point cost and the limit goes up as you go. The final cup, the AA, has no point limit. This produces an oddly backwards difficulty curve. You have a strangling point limit of six in the C-tier cup, meaning you cannot bring a weapon and can't even use the best starting engine you have. As you go the limit goes up more than the difficulty of the AI increases. By AA your only chance of losing is being rammed at the start of the race.

All in all a pretty frustrating experience with some good ideas buried in there that don't ever get returned to.

The sequel to the original N64 Choro-Q 64. This one keeps a lot of the same systems and concepts: straight Grand Prix with part theft for winning. However Choro-Q 64 2 sports a weapon level-up system, more realistic and challenging controls and physics, and some major differences in how parts are released to the player.

Choro-Q 64 2 also sports a major graphical facelift in both gameplay and menus, bringing it more in line with the cute whimsical style of the other games.

When I first started up Choro-Q 64 2, I was impressed and heartened by the immediately noticable improvement to the driving physics. You no longer just start rolling like a hamster ball if you lose tire grip, and cars seem to have a little bit of weight and inertia instead of just being wild mouse cars that can turn on a dime (unless they roll). The initial aesthetic of the game is cuter and more whimsical, with a more playful interface and first race. I'd hoped this meant a stronger title than the lukewarm predecessor.

For me? It wasn't. There were several attempts here to add depth to the game but they all seem to run counter to what a Choro-Q game should be. The first and most obvious one is the addition of a proper Grand Prix mode, but this comes with the down side that this mode does not provide you with parts when you win. Not real ones anyway. You get cosmetic parts here. That's a shame because this is how you progress in the tiers, so you have to do it. To get actual parts you have to go back to Single Races like you did in Choro-Q 64. Here things get really kind of weird.

Choro-Q 64 drip-fed you parts as you progressed through the race classes by putting them on opponents of each class then letting you win them. I think it worked pretty well. Here, there are a couple vehicles: a fire truck, a bread truck, and a garbage truck mainly, that just have every part in the game, and you can win them starting with your C-class first race. My first pull was the SS-tier Acceleration engine!

Of course that means nothing because you can't use it. The part point limits are back and are even stricter this time. Part cost has gone up significantly. You're not using anything but stock in you C-class races. Your reward for moving to B is being able to use the 2nd tier of engine, not the 3rd or beyond like in Choro-Q 64. But that's kind of okay because it just dulls the impact of the game's biggest crime: the parts don't mean a dang thing.

You start with three stock engines, and a stock all-terrain set of tires. The tires are good for the entire game; purpose-built tires are barely better and in some cases seem to either be bugged, or simply don't do what the fan translation I played claims they do. I discovered quite painfully that off-road tires do not work on off-road tracks and simply went back to my regular all-terrains only to find they're... fine... on every track; no need to change. You can get two more tiers of all-terrain tires but you don't even need them really. Your starters are fine.

The engines are kind of sad. You can only use the stock tier 1 engine in C-class, then tier 2 in B, then tier 3 in A. That's probably a good thing. You move from 150kph top speed to 165 to 180. Then you may look around for an even better engine. Thing is, it doesn't matter. The best top speed engine takes you to 190 while tanking your acceleration. Anything with balance doesn't beat the tier 3 stock engine. The difference between the best speed engine you can get and your starter is 10kph: about 6%.

Steering goes up to S tier but going past about tier 4 is an active detrement. I used tier 2 and would have been fine with stock. I didn't even pull a spoiler and don't think it would have mattered much because once I figured out tires I had no want for grip ever again. Then you have the weapons... sigh

I'd hoped weapons would be left behind in Choro-Q 64 but alas, they're here and even more annoying. The AI is still super deadly with them, but more willing to use them, and they added two weapons that auto-target the lead globally: a thunderstorm and a confusion attack. Both can be avoided by jumping at the right time (holding R and pulling down on the stick), but the window is short and the AI frequently uses the abilities at times best suited to ruin your turns and positioning.

The course design feels oddly uninspired in some places and actively painful to play in others. Choro-Q 64 had cute cities and castle halls but this one just seems to have "Street Track", "Ice Track", etc. There is a pretty okay spooky haunted house course but you drive around outside the haunted house, not in it like in Choro-Q 3. Then you have Training Grounds: their biggest attempt at making a thematic course that kind of just falls apart in execution because the themeing gets in the way. Training Grounds is a Chinese castle, and it's pretty well done visually, but the gates get in the way of clean racing lines, the bamboo gets in the way, and then you have the hallway of crushing boulders that seem to actively seek out flattening you. I learned way too late jumping makes you invincible; would have saved myself some pain trying that earlier. Jumping is OP in a lot of places.

To contrast the "Ping off walls" physics of the original 64 game, this one punishes you for wall contact far, far harder than any other Choro-Q game. Wall contact brings you to a complete stop most of the time, and accelerating from zero on dirt or ice is typically going to result in squealing your tires and not going anywhere for multiple seconds; sometimes many seconds. I got completely stuck for 30 seconds in a moat at one point because I had to slowly claw my way out of the bog, against a wall, only to get hit by an AI racer and shoved back into the moat when I got out.

This all to say Choro-Q 64 2 is a frustrating game to play and when you play it right it doesn't even feel like you did much at all because there's no part progression and the weapon chaos and unpredictable driving physics make it all feel like luck. I don't hate it, but it's a middling kart racer that is not a Choro-Q game at all.

The first game to cement the full concept of the open world exploration system. Wonderful builds on Choro-Q 3's solid but unpopulated open world to provide a living environment to cars travelling the streets and going to and fro, as well as buildings to explore and shops to find and quests to do. This is the prototype for what eventually becomes Road Trip Adventure and Choro-Q HG 3, complete with an actual plot and progression milestones.