Last night I beat a little game called Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon. I only picked it up a few months ago, despite it being released in 2008. I didn't hear much of it then, and it's clear why: it's an imperfect and often confused game, although I definitely think its strengths outshine its weaknesses.
Chocobo's Dungeon is a quasi-revival of a series that saw two titles on the PlayStation. I hadn't played those games because I wasn't a fan of roguelikes then, and I'm not now. Chocobo's Dungeon is a dungeon-crawler where the maps are procedurally generated and death means you lose all your items and most of your progress. You might think this is at odds with the cartoony esthetic with an adorable Chocobo running around and, frankly, you'd be right.
The game starts with Chocobo and the game's Cid searching for treasure. They fall into another world, landing in a town called Lostime where they meet some idiots, chiefly the mayor. The mayor explains they choose to forget the past because the past sucks, and when a bell in the middle of the town rings, everyone (including Cid) loses their memories, with the exception of Chocobo. Before long an egg falls from the sky and a baby hatches, and the mayor says he had a dream that this baby's name is Rafaello, despite the fact he can't remember anything else. The baby then jumps into people's brains and Chocobo goes in to chase him (?) finding a dungeon inside (?!). These maze-like dungeons make up the meat of the game and are the only real place to explore, since the non-maze gameplay is confined to one compact town.
The town is small, which is a good thing to my mind -- a lot of the gameplay comes from beating the dungeons in people's minds and restoring their memories, so it's good that you get to know these people very well. With that said the main town is built like a wheel, with a central hub in the middle and branches with the shops built outward along long paths. This is really annoying as Chocobo has to traverse long stretches of empty space a lot to do things like sell loot and upgrade weapons.
Eventually Chocobo finds a real-life dungeon and against all logic they behave the same as the idiot brain dungeons. He beats the first one and finds a cocoon, from which the baby emerges miraculously having aged several years. I won't spoil much more of the plot but rest assured it is stupid. The dialogue is awful and the voice acting ranges from corny to bad. The story flirts with some dark moments -- the people in town forget the past because they don't want to remember The Very Bad Thing -- but the direction is entirely off and sometimes slides into uncomfortable moments like this (go to 19:10 in the video to see Chocobo leap at Rafaello's crotch and... well...)
This leads me to the central contradiction of the game -- it has this cutesy esthetic and dumb, idiotic plot where very basic concepts are explained and re-explained, but absolutely crushing consequences for failure. This is fine, but the game does far too little to tie Chocobo dying to failure on the part of the player. In some of the brain dungeons, Chocobo is stripped of all items including equipment, and levelled down to a set level. A few of these special dungeons have Chocobo and enemies reduced to 1 HP, but they're still loaded with traps that see Chocobo ganged up on, out of the blue, by several enemies, with only time to take out one, and other traps that sap his magic supply so there is literally no way out of the situation. These can be immediately next to each other! Chocobo can also miss in combat in these dungeons, and in fact seems to do so quite a bit. Bear in mind, again, that missing in this situation essentially means automatic failure. I had a dungeon where I attacked an enemy and whiffed, and in an uncommon stroke of luck had him use a pointless special attack that did no damage, only to miss again on the second strike! Come on, game! Regular dungeons will have things like rust, which permanently degrades your weapons and armour, and flare traps, which will easily knock off half your health. (Putting two of those together was really fair, Square!) When you lose in a dungeon, even in the special ones where there's essentially no penalty, you can't simply restart the dungeon. This, along with some rough load times and other issues mentioned (and some I'll spare you) make this game drag and eat up a lot more time than it should.
The tonal contradiction is further evidence by the title. I got a lot more enjoyment out of this than FFXIII and would say it's the harder game, but how would you know with a name like Final Fantasy Fables? Why not just call it Baby's First Final Fantasy? I think that's the whole reason I passed up on the game to begin with: it seemed like a real half-assed game, like if I wanted a Wii game I only deserved some crappy imitation. The Wii had a real problem with this in general (the Brett Favre smiley face and happy stars Madden is a good example).
With all that complaining out of the way, I definitely did have fun. There's a job system that makes for some fun customization, there's quite a few sidequests and tricking out your equipment is one of the big draws (and even on death, you don't lose equipped items, which is a welcome break). By the end, my Chocobo was a killing machine and I was ripping through dungeons, and that progression felt earned. The game can feel monotonous, but if you've got a stomach for that, you might really like it.
So why did I tolerate this? Why put in the time? Well my friends, the music alone is worth the price of admission. This medley compiled on YouTube does a great job of showing off the soundtrack. The game is like a jukebox musical that pulls from the best tracks in Final Fantasy history, even showing off a few hidden gems. There are great covers of Battle with the Four Fiends, Clash on the Big Bridge, Man with the Machine Gun and lots more. The whole reason I picked up this game is because I played a few tracks in Theathrythm Final Fantasy Curtain Call and was shocked the music was so good! The graphics almost match the music too, even being in SD. The cutscenes, pre-rendered and in-game, look good and while the dungeons are basic, jaggies are mostly at a minimum.
There are mini-games including the requisite fishing (in which Chocobo shakes his ass to and fro) and some motion-controlled mini-games that are entirely optional but very much indicative of this game's release early in the Wii's life. The game also has a welcome use of motion control in-game: when in Chocobo's inventory, a quick swish of the Wii remote sorts his items. It's intuitive and non-intrusive. Well done! There's also a card game you can play with people online, but I didn't like the card game and don't know anyone who has the game, so I have no idea if you can even play online anymore (and I don't really care). The game is controllable with the Wii remote in sideways NES style, the remote upright (who wants that?) and even the classic controller, so perhaps an off-TV-compatible port to the Wii U is possible?
In the end, this game is a lot of fun. If you like roguelikes and Final Fantasy, or perhaps want an introduction to the Final Fantasy mythos, pick it up. If you're an absolute soundtrack diehard, I'd recommend it too. There's a lot of stupid crap to wade through, and my 25-hour playthrough definitely wore out its welcome, but the good stuff definitely makes up for the bad.
