Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo’s Dungeon (Wii)

Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo’s Dungeon
h.a.n.d./Square-Enix

Review by Anthony

Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo’s Dungeon was a great little game. But I’ll get to that. First I want to comment on a basic absurdity of Square-Enix’s pricing... why would they do us the favor of pricing this lovely little game $10 lower than the usual new Wii game, and in doing so give me about 40 hours of good playtime... then turn around and charge $10 more for their new DS releases, which contain among them, ~15 hour mediocre RPGs and several remakes of old games? I get that Square-Enix really likes money, but why be nice here and cruel with the platform where they’re putting out the most software for right now?

Anyway, although I rented the only stateside release, Chocobo’s Dungeon 2, back in the day, I didn’t particularly enjoy it. Now having done a few dungeon crawlers and liking more of what I saw in reviews/previews of this, I decided to eventually give this a shot. I’m glad I did. This is a well made game that managed to be fun, simple to play, and have enough variety in options that it always felt intriguing.

What’s good:
- The job system works great here. From trying out the ones I liked and later giving them all a shot, I’m impressed with how well they balanced the job system. Aside from specialized and/or bonus dungeons that require specific talents, I found that you can really stick to the kind of job you enjoy and succeed in the game with good strategy. I really enjoyed running around as a Thief, but I levelled many other jobs that were equally useful and fun.
- Unlike my neutral feeling towards Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates’ overly convoluted armor/weapon forging system, Chocobo’s Dungeon gets it exactly right. It’s easy to hone weapons/armor to be stronger, fuse new weapons/armor with your old ones to “upgrade” them, and add/remove special modifiers as needed. I love the aspect in games of getting stronger armor/weapons along the way and noticing the differences, and this game captured that well and just as simply as it needed to.
- The menu and inventory system works at blazing speed, and has got to be some sort of technical achievement. I can’t remember the last game I’ve seen that has a menu to pop up instantly, and with quick shortcuts in and out of skill/item menus, you feel like you can do or see anything you need to within a second. This was very appreciated, especially when managing inventory.
- Similarly, it controls well. Using the wii-mote alone, the D-pad moves you around, 2 attacks, 1 faces the nearest enemy, A brings up the menu, and A+1/A+2 bring up items or skills. That’s basically all you need to know, and it works perfectly well.
- The music is fantastic. If you’re a Final Fantasy fan, it’s full of beautifully remixed versions of Final Fantasy music from FF1 to FF11.. and later contains a jukebox to listen to them all and find out which game each is from. If you’re not a fan, then the music is either pretty or cool depending on the scenario.
- I enjoyed the story. No seriously. It’s a given that if you’re talking dungeon crawling RPGs, you’re not doing it for the storyline. Add in that you have a small, doe-eyed yellow bird as the hero and you expect it even less. That said, I was fairly engaged in the storyline, and enjoyed it better than much of the storyline tripe offered to me in other SE RPGs I’ve played lately. It’s still silly and twists are somewhat predictable, but they at least tried, and I commend them for that.

What’s neutral:


- The hometown is nice and colorful to navigate, but an option to quickly jump between important locations would be preferred. Trekking on foot to the church to uncurse items, a shop to buy/sell items, the forge to work on your armor/weapon, the warehouse to store items, the farm to check on your flowers, then back to whatever dungeon... there was really no reason to walk around all different parts of town to do those things.
- No volume controls of SFX/Music/Voice? I thought that was pretty standard these days with console RPGs, and unfortunately leads to the next bad point:

What’s bad:
- Upon unlocking a person’s memories and while descending to new floors of dungeons, you’re treated to the characters’ internal monologues as they remember their past. Unfortunately, they do this with an absolutely shrill tone to many of their voices that’s overly loud to the rest of the music/sound effects. It was bad enough that I’d have to turn down the volume when these happened, or warn my wife that the scenes were about to come because they’d be so startlingly unpleasant.
- When I got to the final boss, I used several items to buff myself up and approach him, only to do 0 damage and for him to do a mandatory 9999 damage so I’d get back up and beat him... except of course, I lost those buffs and the items it took to do them. Really, programmers, we’re still making this annoying mistake?

In the end, I got to play a tiny, cartoonish yellow bird as he put on costumes and kicked many mythical monsters into oblivion... and I loved every minute of it. Changing jobs and finding out what worked for different situations, levelling jobs up, and figuring out strategies on some of the trickier parts... I found it all quite fun. If a turn-based dungeon crawler starring a cutesy bird doesn’t sound appealing, then by all means, avoid. Otherwise, it’s an innocuous little game that I enjoyed significantly more than I expected to.