"Hyper Cute, Good Engine, Good Story, Horrible Controls, High Frustration Factor...Lacks Polish"

The good:

Graphics/Engine: This game uses what appears to be a slightly modified version of the DS engine created for the Final Fantasy III remake. As such, the bottom screen serves as a very workable 3D view into the world, with well animated characters and environments. Control in this overview works well. There are a variety of locations to see in the game (although the overall area you traverse is relatively small) and they all have their own unique feel and background music.

Story: Similar to a Paper Mario-esque game, Chocobo Tales doesn't take itself too seriously and peppers the story with frequent in-jokes and tongue-in-cheek moments. Many players will fast forward through the story, but I definitely recommend reading it, as it is a high point of the game.

Cuteness: This game just exudes an unbelievable amount of cuteness. From the characters' sound effects, to their adorable comments and affectations, you will likely have to pause at some point and just remark to someone just how cute this game is. The cuteness fortunately does not wear out its welcome by time the game ultimately concludes.

The bad:

Controls: The game intro specifies that the game must be entirely played with the stylus. Fortunately, the reuse of the engine from Final Fantasy III brought with it directional pad controls for the overview portion of the game. Unfortunately, all of the mini and microgames must be completely controlled with the stylus. This doesn't necessarily have to be bad, as many games thus far have used the stylus quite successfully. Chocobo Tales strict reliance on the stylus however, causes many problems for the player. Some of the games work well; but there are many that you will wish were controllable with the d-pad. Rotating a character as it rushes down twisting rapids would have been easy on the d-pad (left or right), but becomes a frustrating exercise as you try to grab onto the icon and rotate it, only to lose your grip on the icon when you need it the most. Even games that would seem like a good stylus fit (a sliding tile puzzle like you would find in a toy store) becomes frustrating due to poor controls (you often have to make the sliding motion 2 or 3 times to get the tile to move).

The microphone games are the worst offenders. Are these games even tested on a DS lite? They both require extremely precise control of your breath upon the microphone. Rubbing your finger over the microphone or blowing from afar will not win you these games. But putting your mouth close enough to the mike no longer lets you see the detailed action happening on both screens! I eventually (this is true) had to use a straw so that I could get the accuracy needed onto the mike and still let my eyes see both screens.

The ugly:

While the mini and micro games might start out strong, by the halfway point you will likely be pulling your hair out. This is because ALMOST ALL of the microgames (and most of the minigames) past the halfway point rely TO A LARGE DEGREE on luck. Plain stupid luck. There is one game even (the magic goblin pot) which is ENTIRELY luck based. There is no skill involved and it even mentions this in the description of the game.

Worse than that are the games which make a pretense of being skill-based. After many playthroughs, a skilled gamer will realize that he or she will just have to keep playing the game, over and over and over again, until they get a particularly easy series of events. Whether it be new puzzle combinations which can be 1 move away (or a blisteringly hard 15 moves away); or fruit/cheese popping up close to the characters for those challenges (or very far away), or getting a particularly favorable arrangement of icons with colors grouped together (or having them spread around all over); these games basically require you to play them extremely well AND get very lucky with the random assortment of events that happen in each.

I could easily see children giving up on these games, as they try and try again only to see little to no improvement (because they must pound away at them many more times to get a lucky assortment); adults will quickly see the luck element involved and get just as turned off (or resign themselves as I did).

The intros of each game vary from 5 to 10 seconds in length. The game will not allow you to skip any of them! This means that, for those games which you must play repeatedly over and over again hoping for a good assortment of events, you will likely get upset at having to watch these over and over again. One microgame does have an extended intro scene (about 20 seconds) and the game DOES let you skip it. This shows that they realize the problem, but didn't seek to remedy it for any of the other games.

You also cannot exit most of the games once started. Some games last 2 minutes long, and you will likely know if you can win in the first 15 seconds or so. Your only options are to let it sit idle until the 2 minutes are up, or to reset your DS (both sloppy solutions). This is because the exit option is on the pause screen, and the game does not allow you to pause most of the games (because they are time based, and could be exploited otherwise). This also means that if you are in a middle of a game and need to stop, your only option is to close the DS (and lose a few precious seconds in the process).

The cards:

The reason to put yourself through so much anguish on these microgames, of course, is to get more cards for the Tetramaster-like games you will play only a handful of times. The cards themselves are neat, and have a nice variety of effects.

The game itself however doesn't fare as well. Each game is played and then immediately discarded. At most, a few cards will affect the very next card you play, but no further. Because of this, strategy is limited and doesn't come close to what you might expect from a CCG (collectible card game, like magic, yugioh, vs. system, pokemon, world of warcraft, etc). Worse yet, you only have 3 cards in your hand at once, and are playing them against a computer card (or human card) that you haven't seen yet. You can see the "colors" of the cards your opponent has, but there is enough variation among the colors to render this information only mildly useful at best.

You are essentially hoping for a randomly good outcome with each play, much like the aforementioned microgames. There certainly is some decent strategy to be had in the creation of your deck, but it all seems so random and pointless once in a game. While playing, each round of the game takes far longer than it needs to. The game makes a BIG SHOW of demonstrating if each attack was successful or not, and then showing the animations of the attack. An option to cut out these mostly pointless animations would certainly make the game more fun to play, especially online where both players likely know what is going on by this point.

Summation: All in all, the game scores high marks for the engine, cuteness, story, and style. It feels as though the typical Square Enix polish we've come to expect (but are missing more and more these days) has not been applied here as much as one would have hoped.

I can't recommend this for children because of the high frustration factor in the latter part of the game due to the luck-based microgames. Teens and adults should try before they buy.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 04/16/07