Chocobo GP (Switch)
Greed is a common issue in video game design and The Game Hoard has already taken a look at various failed games that get so caught up in trying to nickel and dime players they forgot to make the game good to start with, but Chocobo GP is an unusual case of monetization. A bright and colorful kart racer based on the cute Final Fantasy spinoff series all about the beloved yellow birds called Chocobos, the game released for 50 dollars which would be a reasonable enough entry price for a full-fledged game. However, quickly the game revealed it would bar many characters behind limited time microtransactions, and while this model does see some success in otherwise free games, it felt like Chocobo GP was trying to double dip by denying players their money’s worth. The greedy monetization became what most people knew about the game, but after a few seasons of content, it seems the reaction was enough to get through to Square Enix. The game was reconfigured to make most everything reasonable to unlock for free and there were no longer any options to buy extra content, it all available for a player who boots up the game now if they put in a bit of work. That means at present, Chocobo GP is free to be better judged only on the racing gameplay it does offer, and without attempts to make you open your wallet blocking your view, it can be the cute lighthearted party game it should have always been.
Chocobo GP’s three lap races take place on a set of small but well-considered courses, many races not even taking two minutes to clear but the track designs keep the action lively throughout. Racers in Chocobo GP may drive a variety of vehicles, from the Chocobos using roller blades to others hopping into special vehicles or even the Cactuar out there running the course on foot, but usually the driving aims to be accommodating to younger players while rewarding more skillful racers who can anticipate turns. Making contact with course walls, driving offroad, or even ending up on a reverse conveyor usually won’t slow you down too much or can be accounted for with a quick hop, but a head-on collision is going to cause a quick stop and tracks do throw in dangers that will send you spinning out or drops that take a surprising amount of time for you to be saved from. Taking turns is fairly manageable with just normal driving, but do a hop and lean into a drift and you can get a speed boost once you’ve built up enough power. Drifting can sometimes be worse than taking a turn or even be easy to manage on a straightaway, the proximity of walls to bonk into usually the deciding factor on which to go for. While it can feel a bit like the vehicles don’t have much weight to them, once you figure out the driving’s quirks and starting nailing other elements like the starting boost or performing tricks after ramp jumps for extra speed, you can gain edges in a race through tight driving that allow you to thrive despite the more chaotic elements of this racer.
When out on the race track, there are some pick-ups to watch out for. The Magic Eggs are the most important thing to grab, these being this racer’s take on the items common in kart racers. Driving into a Magic Egg will give you a familiar magic spell from the Final Fantasy series, a pretty solid range of options that are easy enough to learn making for a mostly good set of equalizers. Some are pretty simple, Haste is a boost, Fire launches a fireball in front of you, Water leaves a puddle for people to slip on, but there are some niftier ones with more pronounced effects. Doom for example will hit a nearby player with a countdown, the player having to hop repeatedly and lose some speed to shake off the little grim reaper before they hit them hard. Swap is perhaps the most creative, the player making a blue portal in front of them and entering it to pop out of a red portal farther down the track. However, both portals can be used by others, meaning other players lagging behind will be able to tag along for your surge forward, but a player out in front can accidentally drive into the red portal and be sent backwards for an interesting setback. A good deal of spells don’t seem too restricted based on your placement, only Bahamut that turns you into a fast dragon that flies through other racers seeming to be granted exclusively to racers in the lower spots of these eight player races.
However, the spells aren’t just items to be used as you grab the eggs. Eggs come in three different colors, Copper, Silver, and Gold eggs lined up with there being different values based on what you grab. You can store three spells at once, but spells can be upgraded to more powerful versions at the cost of filling more of your spell slots. Grab a gold egg and you’ll immediately have a level 2 spell, grab a silver egg and you’ll get a guaranteed upgrade to your current spell, or grab a copper egg to always get a spell instead of upgrades. All eggs can grant spells if you don’t have any already stored, but when you see the pick-ups ahead, there can be some extra thought or chance-taking involved in which one you try to grab. Upgraded spells can be incredibly potent to reward the extra time and effort it can take to acquire them. The fully upgraded Firaga will crash onto the first place racer like a meteor, a fully upgraded MBarrier will take the shield item and automatically trigger it when needed instead of it needing to be activated, and even simple upgrades like Haste making you boost for longer are still appreciated. This upgrade system adds some intriguing strategy as does the option to instead try to carry three different spells to be more flexible, and thankfully item randomization does seem to be skewed to avoid too many powerful spells all going off at once. Some spells can hit hard and leave you unable to drive for multiple seconds so keeping their power reined in is key to avoiding the racing becoming frustrating, and already in a normal race there will be constant magic casting to the point the frantic spell frenzy can definitely be too much even with the weaker ones at times.
One more universal layer exists in Chocobo GP’s racing mechanics, that being Crystals. On the track there are crystals to collect, and if you manage to collect 10, you’ll drive a bit faster. Crystals can be lost if you take damage though, and they don’t provide their speed bonus until you have a full set of ten. Crystals aren’t too hard to collect but do ask you to drive a bit differently if you want to grab a bunch, adding yet another complication to how you choose to drive that keeps you involved no matter your placement. Crystals also serve as fuel for your character specific ability, and while you build up some energy for it just by racing, a player can go from just one chance to use it per race to perhaps three if they’re good at grabbing crystals. The power of character specific abilities is a bit all over the place, the pink chocobo Camilla for example making boost rings ahead of her that other characters can also use while her father instead whips out a plow to ram through other characters at speed as he also drops water traps behind him. The lightning mage Ramuh launches a thundercloud ahead that homes in and hits many other racers and Shiva’s Diamond Dust will cause racers ahead of her to be chilled and unable to boost or use magic for a while, but Irma just gets a few speed boosts. You could say that character choice might come down to which of these abilities you want most, especially since racer stats can sometimes be altered by acquiring new vehicles for them, but at least the extra rides usually just tinker stats slightly so characters who are otherwise defined as being quick to speed up or fast once they get going will only slightly change. On the other hand, it doesn’t feel like character abilities are balanced with the stats, so there are some clear winners and losers in the cast in terms of viability.
When it is time to race, you might want to first turn your attention to Story mode, this not only where the game explains its mechanics but also provides a good deal of unlocks just for playing. In the story, Chocobo and his Moogle pal Atla hear about a new racing tournament held by Racing Hero X, a wish being promised to whoever wins. The two set off with their friends to prepare, quickly making a rather large friend group as they run into characters like the White Mage Shirma and the young Behemoth Ben, and eventually they even start to encounter characters from major Final Fantasy titles like Terra from Final Fantasy VI as well as Vivi and Steiner from Final Fantasy IX. Many other characters are recognizable faces or designs from other Chocobo series games, but the story is generally written in a silly manner that both works as a lighthearted goofy romp for someone unfamiliar with Final Fantasy and yet one with many inside jokes if you do recognize the characters. The game can be quite self-aware and even a little corny, but it all provides a fun air that makes cutscenes actually interesting to watch, especially with how it can commit to running jokes like how the over the top warrior Gilgamesh keeps popping up after almost every racer yet no one takes him seriously. Cute and funny voice acting and a sprinkling of references make the plot much more interesting than the simple tournament prep set-up may imply, and the Story races even give you an incentive to play them well thanks to the game’s overhauled unlock system.
The in-game shop primarily runs on two currencies: crystal tickets and gil. Crystal tickets are collected mostly by getting ten crystals in any sort of race (and you will get credit even for ones you grab beyond the limit) and these tickets are the main way to get new vehicles, racers, and other goodies like alternate outfits and colors for the drivers and their rides. This once being a game trying to fleece its customers benefits us a little here, there being 10 characters from the old system you can now get more easily such as Cloud from Final Fantasy VII plus the delightfully strange octopus Ultros riding the equally unusual Typhon for his ride. You can unlock most of the characters just by playing through the story as well as its harder Extra variant that has no new scenes, the race goals of finishing in a specific amount of time as well as being first place in every lap adding some extra challenge even to easier races but also not being so far out of reach they feel impossible to earn. Squall from Final Fantasy VIII and a few other high end unlocks are still kept in the gil shop, gil earned through online races or the racing series. Online Chocobo GP tournaments nominally are meant to have 64 racers but the game happily fills the spots with AI racers if it can’t properly build its elimination style contest otherwise, but the racing series are local cups where you race across four specific tracks and try to place well across the races to earn points and come out on top. There are a whopping 30 racing series to compete in, this very daunting until you realize these are a remnant of the game’s old seasonal structure and beating them in full is not required. However, while these do start just shuffling around the same courses in different ways eventually, they also are a good showcase of how Chocobo GP diversifies its race courses.
There are ten race courses in Chocobo GP… but technically a great deal more because most every course has two to four variants. While they will use similar backdrops as well as background music, often a track variant is incredibly different in how they play. Race through Alexandria (Hyperspeed) and you pass an airship dock, but Alexandria (Long) will send you through a castle dodging chandeliers and going down a twisting ramp as you need to dodge monsters and iron balls. Big Bridge has many splitting paths with some variants more about the goodies you can get based on your choice while others require you to judge which split is closing or opening lest you crash into the barrier and have to wait for it rise back up. Gold Saucer’s longer variant includes many useful shortcuts, and while it does have many shared elements with the shorter variant, the way you race them feels different because of the important shifts to level layout. Racing through familiar locations from other games like Balamb Garden and Midgar can be just as entertaining as the often windier if a bit plainer in concept test tracks, but musically it will be the borrowed courses that come out on top. Chocobo GP takes its kid-friendly nature a bit too far with the music, squeaky songs easily getting on your nerves when they arise and even the joyful menu song with its fun lyrics losing its charm since it plays constantly while you’re just trying to do things like pick options. The occasional goofy sounds are fine in moderation and probably won’t get in the way of fun during multiplayer races or some of the more challenging goals in single-player, the game not so juvenile it feels like only kids would get a kick out of what it offers.
THE VERDICT: Freed of its monetization shackles, Chocobo GP can be better appreciated as the fun Final Fantasy racer it always was at its heart. The magic system can give you long term rewards or an immediate edge in a race while you can impact how helpful it is, character abilities instead being a more reliable feature so you can have an ace in the hole if spell luck isn’t going your way. The magic and abilities can lead to some very chaotic periods in a race admittedly, but course design also makes for some quick and exciting races because of things like Egg placement and how often you can focus on drifting or crystal collection. With a cute and humorous story on top of a good range of courses, Chocobo GP can provide fun racing solo or with friends despite little bits like the imbalanced characters.
And so, I give Chocobo GP for Nintendo Switch…
A GOOD rating. Perhaps the only part you can really point at as still being part of Chocobo GP’s old greed is a set of crystal cosmetics for every vehicle in the game, the gil price being absurdly high when compared to how quickly you earn it. However, these feel more like long term goals or cosmetics there if you care compared to every racer being well within reach and the alternate vehicles either being such small changes they don’t give unfair edges or easy enough to earn if you focus on them over other options. Cosmetics and alternate track music feel like they’re rewards for people who want to come back to the game for a clear achievable reason while all the meaningful content won’t take much extra work to get, and the crystal ticket system generally just adds more substance to races as you go for the extra goals or try to grab more crystals when you can justify it. The races already have a good deal of things to keep you busy in a good way, even nominally long courses having a nice condensed feel to them so you’re often quickly moving between parts of the course that each have some new driving consideration. How you take the turns or dodge dangers is one thing, but the magic system is the real crown jewel of this racer and what gives it something to stand out beyond the series branding. Some unique spells like Swap and Doom as well as the spell upgrade system that you have a good deal of control over make this system about giving players of all skill levels a means to make up ground but also some more rewarding results than just luck in determining how much of an edge you can gain. Character abilities do feel like a good addition despite how skewed they can be between small speed boosts to attacks that can mess with almost every other racer, but it does feel more like the problem is with the underpowered ones rather than the strongest ones, although Atla’s crystal stealing stun feels unique in annoying who it hits but not helping him much. Before considering other ideas like giving the vehicles more heft, ironing out the abilities to be universally interesting would at least mean you can more freely pick your racer based on stats or appeal. At least player skill will still make up a lot of ground even when there are other deficits or simply too many spells and abilities going off to have any hope of staying safe.
Chocobo GP will always have any legacy it holds tainted by that early effort by Square Enix to wring out money from players of what should be a light-hearted bit of casual fun, but playing it now in its final state just gives you a content rich racer where you can more easily appreciate its nifty ideas and cute quirks.