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IGN Review of Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo Tales
Square Enix has been in the videogame industry long enough to know and understand one important strategy: if you've got an immensely popular franchise, milk it as far as you can without destroying it. Final Fantasy is, easily, the company's bread and butter and most recognized property. The RPGs are the real kings of the franchises, but through the power of spin-offs the company's been able to expand into new ideas and experiences; Final Fantasy Tactics and Dirge of Cerberus to name but a couple. Even individual characters, most notably the cutesy Final Fantasy chocobo critters, have been headlining designs that branch out from the usual Final Fantasy line. Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo Tales hides a surprisingly fun and engaging experience under its candy shell, and even if the Final Fantasy franchise wasn't there to keep things together the game still would have been a good one.
Chocobo Tales isn't so much an adventure game as it is a collection of DS-centric mini-games held together by a plot. Players, as a yellow chocobo, wander around this Final Fantasy world trying to save his/her/its friends who have been sucked away into a very evil book and turned into two dimensional cards. Oh, and while this evil book was busy vacuuming up all the birds in the realm, it managed to gulp up a book of fables. These stories have been coughed up and scattered throughout the land, and only the yellow chocobo can enter the books and save his friends.
Many of the stories are familiar fables that have been given an interesting Final Fantasy twist. The Tortoise and the Hare, Jack and the Beanstalk and several others are represented with Final Fantasy characters, and rewritten to fit within this game's adventure. Each story has a mini-game attached to it. When you complete the game within the story, something will happen -- unlike most adventures that are puzzle focused, most -- if not all -- of the challenge in Chocobo Tales is entirely skill-based. Completing a level within a storybook will either A) rewrite the ending to the story, which will affect the outside world, B) free a lost Chocobo critter, or C) reward players with a playing card for boss battles.
The adventure is incredibly linear and honestly there rarely will be a time where you'll be stumped on how to progress -- if there's something blocking your way, clearly you need to enter a book somewhere in the game and complete the task that will rewrite an ending to change the world somehow. Like, if there's a cliffside that clearly can be scaled but is lacking a vine to climb, there's an ending to the Jack and the Beanstalk story that'll most likely cause that vine to grow.
That said, even though the adventure may be simplistic, that doesn't make the game easy or derivative. Many of the mini-games inside this product are not only clever and well-designed, but they offer up a good amount of challenge since you'll have to compete against some vicious computer AI opponents. Some of them are pretty easy: racing up the mountain isn't incredibly tough, which makes sense that it's the first game you'll encounter. But the later levels in the game's "Ugly Duckling" story where you'll have to douse flames and collect coins, all the while avoiding attacks that'll drop the tokens, gets pretty hairy on Level Five.
The card collecting element comes into play with the game's battle system. Yes, there's a Yu-Gi-Oh-style card game in here, but the company managed to create a card battle design that's simple, engaging, and full of strategy. Players create decks of fifteen cards that they'll collect along the way, and then use them in battle against the occasional boss that wanders into the story. At each turn, both players have three cards in their hand and must use one of these to attack the other. The player who chooses their card first will attack first, so quick thought is rewarded. But if you don't keep an eye on which colored cards are in the opponent's immediate hand, you might get your feathery butt handed to you in battle. The system incredibly basic and easy to learn, but with more than a hundred rare and common cards to find in Chocobo Tales there's a lot of little nuances to the strategy that make the card battling design a winning one. We also like the "flicking" interface to send cards into battle.
And then scattered around the realm are other games. Micro games. These are nothing more than supplemental challenges with a high score to shoot for, and a rare card to earn if you manage to crack the top ranks. Some of them are the basic fare: blow into the microphone to keep a mouse hovering in order to collect cheese, or play a game of "Whack-a-Mole" without accidentally detonating a bomb creature. Some are more addictive than others, like versions of those weird Yeti Sports webgames.
If anything, you can say that Chocobo Tales is full of variety. Minigames, microgames, and a really well thought-out card battle game. All tied together in a cute Final Fantasy package, complete with all sorts of fan service. If you're a fan of the series there will be so many nods made in your direction you'll lose count. Familiar characters, creatures, music...even micro-games that use old-school NES sprites. Square Enix made damn sure that the Final Fantasy branding in the game's title got plenty of use in this adventure.
The game employs a really cool visual style -- something we pretty much assume out of the Square Enix folk. For the overworld it looks like the development team's milking the toolset and engine made for last year's DS version of Final Fantasy III, but this time thankfully sticking an overworld map on the upper screen instead of leaving it blank. For the storybook mini-games and card battle engine, the developers create a hybrid 2D/3D style to give the appearance of an animated pop-up book. The battle sequences in the card game come to life extremely well using this style, pulling off something akin to the Pokemon Staduim experience on the Nintendo 64.
And every challenge you unlock can be played outside the adventure experience, in single and multiplayer challenges. The multiplayer mini-games use the Nintendo DS system's Download Play option so only one person needs a copy of the game for as many as four players. Chocobo Tales even supports the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection for the cool card battles, so you'd best beef up your decks since there will be some heavy competition online.
©2007, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Chocobo Tales isn't so much an adventure game as it is a collection of DS-centric mini-games held together by a plot. Players, as a yellow chocobo, wander around this Final Fantasy world trying to save his/her/its friends who have been sucked away into a very evil book and turned into two dimensional cards. Oh, and while this evil book was busy vacuuming up all the birds in the realm, it managed to gulp up a book of fables. These stories have been coughed up and scattered throughout the land, and only the yellow chocobo can enter the books and save his friends.
Many of the stories are familiar fables that have been given an interesting Final Fantasy twist. The Tortoise and the Hare, Jack and the Beanstalk and several others are represented with Final Fantasy characters, and rewritten to fit within this game's adventure. Each story has a mini-game attached to it. When you complete the game within the story, something will happen -- unlike most adventures that are puzzle focused, most -- if not all -- of the challenge in Chocobo Tales is entirely skill-based. Completing a level within a storybook will either A) rewrite the ending to the story, which will affect the outside world, B) free a lost Chocobo critter, or C) reward players with a playing card for boss battles.
The adventure is incredibly linear and honestly there rarely will be a time where you'll be stumped on how to progress -- if there's something blocking your way, clearly you need to enter a book somewhere in the game and complete the task that will rewrite an ending to change the world somehow. Like, if there's a cliffside that clearly can be scaled but is lacking a vine to climb, there's an ending to the Jack and the Beanstalk story that'll most likely cause that vine to grow.
That said, even though the adventure may be simplistic, that doesn't make the game easy or derivative. Many of the mini-games inside this product are not only clever and well-designed, but they offer up a good amount of challenge since you'll have to compete against some vicious computer AI opponents. Some of them are pretty easy: racing up the mountain isn't incredibly tough, which makes sense that it's the first game you'll encounter. But the later levels in the game's "Ugly Duckling" story where you'll have to douse flames and collect coins, all the while avoiding attacks that'll drop the tokens, gets pretty hairy on Level Five.
The card collecting element comes into play with the game's battle system. Yes, there's a Yu-Gi-Oh-style card game in here, but the company managed to create a card battle design that's simple, engaging, and full of strategy. Players create decks of fifteen cards that they'll collect along the way, and then use them in battle against the occasional boss that wanders into the story. At each turn, both players have three cards in their hand and must use one of these to attack the other. The player who chooses their card first will attack first, so quick thought is rewarded. But if you don't keep an eye on which colored cards are in the opponent's immediate hand, you might get your feathery butt handed to you in battle. The system incredibly basic and easy to learn, but with more than a hundred rare and common cards to find in Chocobo Tales there's a lot of little nuances to the strategy that make the card battling design a winning one. We also like the "flicking" interface to send cards into battle.
And then scattered around the realm are other games. Micro games. These are nothing more than supplemental challenges with a high score to shoot for, and a rare card to earn if you manage to crack the top ranks. Some of them are the basic fare: blow into the microphone to keep a mouse hovering in order to collect cheese, or play a game of "Whack-a-Mole" without accidentally detonating a bomb creature. Some are more addictive than others, like versions of those weird Yeti Sports webgames.
If anything, you can say that Chocobo Tales is full of variety. Minigames, microgames, and a really well thought-out card battle game. All tied together in a cute Final Fantasy package, complete with all sorts of fan service. If you're a fan of the series there will be so many nods made in your direction you'll lose count. Familiar characters, creatures, music...even micro-games that use old-school NES sprites. Square Enix made damn sure that the Final Fantasy branding in the game's title got plenty of use in this adventure.
The game employs a really cool visual style -- something we pretty much assume out of the Square Enix folk. For the overworld it looks like the development team's milking the toolset and engine made for last year's DS version of Final Fantasy III, but this time thankfully sticking an overworld map on the upper screen instead of leaving it blank. For the storybook mini-games and card battle engine, the developers create a hybrid 2D/3D style to give the appearance of an animated pop-up book. The battle sequences in the card game come to life extremely well using this style, pulling off something akin to the Pokemon Staduim experience on the Nintendo 64.
And every challenge you unlock can be played outside the adventure experience, in single and multiplayer challenges. The multiplayer mini-games use the Nintendo DS system's Download Play option so only one person needs a copy of the game for as many as four players. Chocobo Tales even supports the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection for the cool card battles, so you'd best beef up your decks since there will be some heavy competition online.
©2007, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved