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Chocobo Tales is incredibly cute to look at, which is more or less all it has going for it. That’s enough for a fuzzy plush toy tie-in, say, or novelty character t-shirts, or any number of other products that Square Enix might use to exploit its catalog of popular characters, but a $30 game needs to do more than just make you say, “aw, isn’t that precious?”

The rest of Chocobo Tales is a simple mini-game collection in the framework of a very simple action-RPG. A card-battle competition is the most complex challenge on offer, and it’s awfully basic as digital card games go. The rest of the package runs to repetitive stylus twiddling, of the kind games like Feel the Magic did a lot of in the early days of the DS.

Two and a half years later, that kind of gameplay doesn’t fly anymore. (Truth to tell, it didn’t fly so steady in 2004, either, but the DS software library is many miles deeper now.) Chocobo Tales could be even cuter than it is – and it’s already shockingly cute, keep in mind – and it still wouldn’t hold many gamers’ attentions for very long.

One for the Birds

Naturally, Chocobo Tales stars the famous yellow bird of the title, as well as lots of other chocobos in many different colors and sizes. His village full of chocobos has been visited by nefarious forces, trapping his neighbors in magical cards, and it’s his job to explore his home and the surrounding environs to put things back to normal.

Magical picture books are scattered around the 3D village, which transport Choco into cartoon worlds where a collection of mini-games takes place. Inside the books, clearing away challenges creates magical effects in the main game world, which open up more areas, more books, and more mini-games.

The entire game is stylus-driven, including the overworld – point at a spot with the stylus and Choco walks there. That goes for the mini-games too, of course, which range from a riff on the old Windows Minesweeper puzzle to a Where’s Waldo seek-and-find and a lot of bumper-car action variants.

As a rule, the games control well enough. None of their problems stem from being too hard or confusing to play. Generally, though, they’re too thin to stand up to repeat play, and the game insists you play them a lot of times over, at increasing levels of difficulty that make them harder, but not any deeper or different to play.

Feather in Your Cap

The main reason to keep scoring higher in the mini-games is to unlock new cards for the “Pop-Up Card” battle game. There, you build a deck of monsters and pit them against a computer opponent’s cards, hoping the card that you throw out each turn will have an advantage over the other.

Conflicts between cards use a sort of rock-paper-scissors mechanic. Each monster card is marked with four elements, and it may have a sword or shield icon in one or more of them. Swords mean an attack with that element, shields represent defense against them. Deck-building involves matching attacks to enemy weak points and defensive cards to the other guy’s offense. Cards also have special “crystal” powers that let you activate extra effects with stored elemental energy.

A simple card battle game needs a faster pace to work, though, and more variety in deck construction than this game allows. That’s what made SNK’s famous Card Fighters Clash so good – it wasn’t especially complicated, but you could throw out cards almost as fast as you could think. Chocobo Tales has too much sitting and waiting through animations while the game slowly resolves each turn. There’s also more luck involved in matching up cards than many players might prefer.

You could say something similar, in a larger sense, about the entire game. A better mini-game compilation, like Wario Ware, makes simple challenges work by spitting them out at machine-gun speed, with something different at every turn. Chocobo Tales does the exact opposite, deliberately slowing things down with lots of wandering and chatting through the story. The English text is very clever – the editors were aiming for a children’s fairy-tale feel, and they definitely hit the mark – but funny rhymes and pretty pictures are no substitute for real gameplay.

Crosstown Rivals

It has to be said, for one last time, that those pictures sure are pretty. The main game world is nicely done in traditional texture-mapped 3D, but the mini-game worlds are even cooler, pieced together in a sketchy 2D/3D style like Paper Mario or Parappa the Rapper. There’s also a few choice animated cinemas, looking like moving storybook illustrations, and lots of familiar Final Fantasy characters pop up, from the famous White and Black Mages to many different monsters. The strength of those classic character designs holds up, more than 20 years later for some of them.

The game can’t get by on good looks and charm alone, though. To get an idea of what was really possible here, have a look at Square Enix’s own Rocket Slime for the DS. That’s another super-cute mascot spin-off production, but one that also happens to feature deep, challenging, replayable gameplay. It takes a little effort, maybe, but you can make a game for kids that doesn’t bore a more experienced player.

Article by: D. F. Smith
Video produced by: Michael Benson