It's not a regular Final Fantasy game but it's more then what you would expect...
How would we have won all those races without you? Sure you may look just like an ostrich with yellow feathers, and a bigger brain but we still love you with all our Final Fantasy hearts!
I'm not sure if you got the right idea, but I really like chocobos. The first time I saw one was in Final Fantasy VII. Of course at that time I thought that they were stupid and unoriginal, but just like for all the flaws in all Final Fantasy games I just let it slide.
So, if I am not mistaken, this is the 3rd or the 4th Chocobo game, but the first one for the Wii, and how does it hold up?
Well, it's a nice little game. While playing through it, my opinion was going up and down all the time. I called the game : cute, boring, repetitive, unoriginal, original, sweet, lame,... but in the end when I look back at it, It was a solid dungeon crawling game which I don't regret playing.
Let's start with the story. Since it is about a chocobo you won't expect much from it because it's... well... kid friendly. Chocobo along with his partner Cid the treasure hunter, accidentally stumbles into a town called Lostime, where people seem to like forgetting things. Every time a clock tower rings it's bells people forget more and more things, and they LIKE IT... really LIKE IT... (I think they even sing about it) Because chocobo doesn't seem to be affected by the bells, he decides to do the only logical thing... stop the clock-tower from ringing it's bells and help people restore their lost memories. He does so by entering people's minds and occasionally climbing (down) a tall tower. Luckily every single mind is a dungeon which has it's memories stored somewhere deep down, and it's up to chocobo to find and restore them. As in all my reviews, I don't like to spoil anything because you might want to play this game yourself. Let me just finish by saying that the story is very predictable and really cutesy-wutsy... for kids in other words.
Now as for the game-play, it couldn't be more different then the story. With the kind of kid friendly story, you'd expect the game-play to be really easy and simple. Well, it is kinda easy and simple for me, but I don't see a lot of 10-12 year old's getting it.
Anyway, chocobo travels through dungeons in a turn based style (you move once and then your enemy moves once). It's simple to learn but there's a lot of planning involved so I'm not sure, though, I could be wrong, that 12 year old's can really learn how to play these dungeons very well.
While crawling through dungeons chocobo uses his talon kick as a main attack. Chocobo can also learn a few jobs, which are basically classes you have in early Final Fantasy games such as: Knight, White and Black Mage, Thief as well as some stronger classes like Dark Knight (Cecil from FFIV) and Dragoon (Kain FFIV). You can level up chocobo by killing monsters and gaining experience and you can also collect job points to power up your job's abilities and gain job levels. It's a simple formula that works well and is addictive.
Every dungeon consists of several floors and at the last floor there is either a boss, a prize or both.
You can also equip chocobo with talons and saddles to boost his attributes a bit. You find different types of armor in different dungeons and some of them have special traits as well. Not only can you get better armor but you can also combine them and upgrade them at the blacksmith's. Instead of mana chocobo has crystals. Every time chocobo uses an ability it drains 1 or more crystals depending on how strong an ability is and to recharge it all you do is walk, attack or get attacked. HP is the same as in any game, you lose it all and you die and get sent out of the dungeon, meaning you have to start all over
, oh and you lose all the items you collected, except for your equipment. This would be a huge flaw, but fortunately every 10 levels into a dungeon you get a check point so you can start from that level instead from the beginning. Chocobo also has a hunger percentage bar because he gets hungry from all the dungeon exploring. Fortunately you can eat some greens to lower his hunger.
So as you can tell, this is a nicely planned out dungeon crawler game. The only problem is that it gets really repetitive really fast, but if you are determined to beat the game or simply like to raise all the job levels to the maximum you won't have any problems playing through it.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot, you can also collect cards in the game which you can use to play a final fantasy card game thingy but I haven't had the patience to do so. The card game makes no sense to me and is extremely boring. There's no skill involved, it's just pressing buttons faster then your opponent. Ok, maybe it's not that bad, but it's really not appealing to me. But the game thinks it's awesome. Not only that, the game will often award you with rare cards for very hard achievements and even has online play so you can battle your friends.
I also found out that the game is a port of a DS game, I'm assuming that the DS version is a bit better.
The graphics and music. A lot of people have praised the music in this game, saying that it plays old school final fantasy themes. Well, yes, it has a few themes that you might recognize, like the Training Area theme from FF8 (fake gasp)
or the original final fantasy theme that we hear in EVERY SINGLE final fantasy game (another fake gasp). So as you can tell, I'm not that impressed with the music in this game. I mean, sure they were done fine, but they could have picked better themes. (why not something from FFVII or FFX?).
The graphics are bright and colorful. Chocobo looks cute and so does everything else in the game. In fact, the game constantly has to point out just how cute chocobo is, by having characters tell him that, by doing extreme close ups of chocobo and just by doing some random things. For example, there is a small pond right outside the town and the only purpose for it is so chocobo can jump in and swim one lap around just so you could melt in it's cuteness. WE GET IT!!! CHOCOBO IS CUTE!!! CAN WE GO BACK TO THE GAME?!!!
Voice acting is a mixed bag. There is absolutely zero lip synching but the voices themselves sound decent. The characters have great voices except all of them sound like quotes from the movie Twilight! (not depressive, just unrehearsed :) )
And that's my review of Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon. It's a nice little game for kids and hard core Final Fantasy fans, if you are neither of them, you probably won't enjoy it much. I enjoyed it but I don't think I would replay it...