Time to start your engines, ladies, and gentlemen! Chocobo is back and ready to race. Our favorite yellow bird put on the old rollerskates again and is ready to rumble against the forces of darkness. Armed with an arsenal of weapons, upgrades, fourth wall jokes, and.. gacha elements..? Yes, you read that right. So before burning down the house, let’s ride a lap with Chocobo; he deserves at least that much credit.
Chocobo Racing?
I love Final Fantasy, but I used to suck at it – there I said it. I mentioned a few times already that I’m not the greatest at JRPGs, but luckily I’m getting older, and I understand them much better. Chocobo is one of my favorite characters from the Final Fantasy series, so when the new racing game dropped, I jumped the kart. It’s a sequel to the Chocobo Racing game launched in 1999. Chocobo Racing, known in Japan as Chocobo Racing: Genkai e no Road (or “Chocobo Racing: Road to the Spirit World”). As the title states, the game’s star and namesake are the Chocobo, the mascot of the Final Fantasy series. Other figures from that series, such as Mog the Moogle, the Black Mage, and Cid, fill out the all-Final Fantasy cast. Most of the game’s soundtrack is composed using songs from previous Final Fantasy titles. As a formulaic kart racer, Chocobo Racing is often compared to Mario Kart and Crash Team Racing. Chocobo Racing borrows themes and elements from Final Fantasy I to Final Fantasy VIII. The Story Mode is narrated by Cid and includes nine chapters in a pop-up book fashion with FMVs. To progress, the player needs to defeat the chapter’s respective challenger. Before each chapter begins, the player is given the option of viewing the story or skipping to the race except when playing the Story Mode for the first time.
Chocobo GP!
Fast-forward to 2022, and the sequel to this long-forgotten (or is it) game is released! Like its predecessor, Chocobo GP is a kart racing game developed by Arika and published by Square Enix. As a spin-off of the original series, it’s a celebration for the 35th anniversary of the series and features locales and characters from across the franchise. Before we address the elephant in the room, let’s say this (because that’s why you are re-reading this review). It’s a decent game, a decent karter – with some elements that should have never been put in this game.
Chocobo GP offers the traditional game modes, like versus, grandprix, time attack, etc. Next to these features, Chocobo GP offers something I always missed in the original Mario Kart games – a Story Mode. It’s not a super fleshed-out story but provides a wide range of cameos from other FF games. This gives room to jokes, subtle fourth wall breaking, and a feast for the Final Fantasy fanbase. Most story missions are based on ‘finish before character x’s or ‘finish in the top 4’ to progress. Next to these options, you have some map-specific challenges, which usually consist of finishing a game in a specific time or completing every lap at pole position. These can be pretty challenging, and I suggest you wait until you unlock some of the later characters of buying some upgrades in the store to help you with tackling these missions.
Shopping time!
See how I mentioned shop? Yes, Chocobo GP offers a shop function. Usually, you unlock certain items or characters through character progression or beating a course at a particular time (for example, in Mario Kart). However, Chocobo GP chose a different approach, which leads to the gacha element I mentioned before. Those familiar with games like Pokemon Unite or Mario Kart Tour will recognize the system Chocobo GP chooses. Many games offer a sort of seasonal track, which can be bought and unlock certain extra assets of the game. Most of the time, these are cosmetic or offer ingame characters that can’t be unlocked by regular progression. However, Chocobo GP locked them behind a very hard paywall, which means that you either need to play many online games to earn gill (and I mean a lot) or buy mithril to buy certain characters.
To give you an example, Cloud (from Final Fantasy 7) can be unlocked by leveling up until level 60 on the seasonal track. This, however, takes forever; and feels like a function one would see in Chocobo GP mobile, for example (since it’s a feature commonly found in freemium games). However, Chocobo GP is a pretty expensive Switch game that offers little to nothing extra content when talking about what you unlock through story mode. Yes, the story mode is fun and unlocks a wide range of characters, but if I want to play as Mecha Chocobo, I’ll have to fork over even more money. Feels wrong. Sure, they can be earned by completing ingame events and other aspects, but the whole angle is ‘buy me’ – and Square Enix isn’t shying away from promoting it.
Twitter-updates
At the time of writing, Square issued an update on the matter through Twitter, which reads the following;
現在起こっている不具合について及び今後のアップデートについて「チョコボグランプリからのお知らせ（3/11）」を取り急ぎ画像公開させていただきます。
引き続き、皆様からのご意見ご要望もお待ちしております。 pic.twitter.com/c9lfCdrbvg— チョコボGP公式 (@Chocobo_GP) March 11, 2022
Loosely translated, thanks to the Reddit AMA they did:
1. They’re aware of and working on fixing the online issues.
2. They sent out 500 Mythril and lowered EXP requirements on the pass as an apology to players, meaning the reduced EXP requirement may not be how they do future passes. If you had enough EXP to be higher, you were automatically leveled up.
3. Major updates and changes will come with season changes, so there will likely be no future adjustments for season 1.
4. Future seasons will include two new characters (1 on the pass and 1 for Gil).
5. “Items added to the Gil Shop will be added each time the season is repeated,” it sounds like they’ll be keeping Gil-bought characters in the Gil Shop for future seasons, but it could also mean that they are planning to repeat seasons eventually.
6. Characters on the pass may be available to be purchased “directly” with Mythril or Gil after the pass has been run.
7. New courses will be released for players on both the full and lite versions in Season 2.
8. More Mythril shop items (costumes and BGM tracks) are coming mid-season.
9. Currently, Mythril can only be obtained via login reward, but starting in Season 2, it will also be a pass reward.
10. Balance changes are coming in Season 2, including characters and base mechanics changes. They’re not touching anything before then unless it’s broken enough to need an immediate fix, though.
11. They take player feedback about DLC/microtransactions into account when planning future updates.
12. They seem to primarily be concerned with the average player getting to level 100 (out of 200) throughout a 2-month pass.
13. Current EXP gain is balanced so that players with a 1:1 win/lose ratio in GP mode will receive roughly 1 level per GP mode run with the stickers provided by the pass. The line after this (“In this way, our new basic policy is to create an environment in which it is easy to obtain additional characters simply by purchasing the product version”) implies that they essentially find this suitable and maybe keeping the current EXP gain rates for the pass.
14. More cosmetic/BGM sorts of things will be coming to the Mythril shop and the pass as high-level rewards.
15. Changes being made to the Lite version are “to make it easier for video distributors to hold events,” so this might be indicating that they may be allowing Lite players to access the host’s roster, as “events” is probably about tournaments. However, it may also be about allowing non-GP online play or something else entirely.
Conclusion
Chocobo GP offers a fun kart game, which might have been better as a mobile game instead of the whole console port we are playing right now. The infuriating tutorial, shop elements, and bare-bone story don’t weigh up to the ‘fun’ I had with the game. I finished the story on the ‘normal’ speed in under three hours, with only having to replay a total of two missions. I’m not a huge racing nut, so people with even better drifting skills might be even faster, which leaves the online part for those who like that aspect. I’m not great a keeping up with said events since they usually don’t run long enough for me to get the reward offered at the end of the road. This leaves us with a costly online racing game, slapped with some Final Fantasy elements. This could have been so much more, even with the fixes inbound. So if you are on the fence about buying – download the lite version, you get the online element with it, without paying for a very expensive full game.
