Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo Tales Hands-On

It may seem as though Square Enix has been slapping the Final Fantasy name onto a great number of disparate games in the last few years, but then, given the sales numbers that brand drives, who can blame them? And when the series' frequent offshoots are as endearing and thoughtfully produced as the new DS game Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo Tales, we'll take as many titles bearing the classic moniker as Square Enix cares to churn out. Chocobo Tales is decidedly geared toward the younger demographic, but we've been charmed so far by its seamless mix of minigames, card-battling, and very light role-playing, all of which are backed up by an entertaining localization and enjoyable storybook art style.

The game casts you as one of those eponymous silly yellow ostrichlike birds that Final Fantasy fans know and love. Your character (whom you can name) lives on a chocobo farm with a bunch of other chocobos of varying shapes and colors, all of whom love to listen to stories read by their human caretaker, Shirma. But one day the crew's black-mage friend Croma shows up with an ominous-looking storybook from a faraway land, and all heck breaks loose. (C'mon, it's a kids' game.) The book unleashes a number of unseemly characters who trap many of the other chocobos inside various other storybooks and begin scheming up ways to bring back an ancient evil being who will help them take over the world. See? It's starting to sound more like Final Fantasy already.

Luckily, neither Shirma, Croma, nor your chocobo seem to be affected by all this madness, so it'll be up to you to roam around the chocobo farm looking for new storybooks to dive into as you try to rescue all of your friends and gain new powers that will help you combat the local baddies and restore things to order. You can play the main story mode with the standard controls, but we enjoyed playing it with the stylus only, which you use to run around, talk to other characters, pick up items, and so forth. Finding new storybooks is one of the main focuses of the gameplay, and your chocobo alone has the power to enter each new book, solve the problem therein, and write a happy new ending to the tale.

All of the stories in the game are based on Aesop's fables but are given a Final Fantasy sort of flavoring. So Western fans of the series will get a double dose of nostalgia here when they see stories like The Tortoise and the Hare replaced with The Adamantoise and the Cactuar. Each story's text has a delightful, singsong-like cadence to it that makes it both authentic and pleasurable to read. Once you've read the first part of the story, you'll access the minigame attached to that story. Winning the minigame the first time will cause the book to write a new ending magically before your eyes, and this will open up subsequent, harder versions of that minigame that will reward you in various ways (more on that in a bit). Even better, events that take place in these new happy endings will often influence events in the real world, allowing you to advance to previously inaccessible areas.

The minigames themselves are all touch-screen-driven and use a really attractive 2D art style that looks sort of crayon-drawn. The game attached to the Adamantoise-and-Cactuar story is called "Race to the Top" and has you spinning a dial on the touch screen to steer your adamantoise up a windy mountain path faster than your opponents, all amid a rain of boulders. Another minigame attached to a story similar to "Jack and the Beanstalk" had us drawing leaves underneath our fallen chocobo to propel it skyward along a giant beanstalk while avoiding bob-ombs that were placed randomly along the way. The game will also include a number of "microgames," which are a bit less involved than the minigames. We played one called "Blowgun Blitz" that had us blow into the microphone to launch a series of blowgun darts, so we could see how many balloons we could skewer with a single dart.

Occasionally during your quest, you'll run into boss characters that you'll have to defeat via a card duel, and this is where the rewards from exemplary minigame performance come in. The card-battling is actually fairly complex, with various cards exhibiting offensive and defensive capabilities that are coded by color. Naturally, you'll want to guess the color of your opponent's offense and play a defense card of the same color, and conversely, you'll want to play offense cards that your opponent can't deflect. Many cards also have special abilities that will activate when you play them, if you have a sufficient number of crystal points (which you build up as you duel).

There are around 120 cards in the game, some of which are much rarer than others, and you can go back to search the environment or try to do better at the minigames you've already accessed to earn more powerful ones. The minigames even have a number of preset achievements you can strive for, and succeeding at these goals will yield especially rare and powerful cards that will bolster the strength of your deck. You can access the card-battling gameplay from the title screen if you want to try your hand against some of the villains you've already vanquished, and better yet, the game will support online play, so you'll be able to take your battling skills on the Internet against other players from both North America and Japan.

In fact, you can play just about all of Chocobo Tales' card-battling, minigame, and microgame content from the front end, without having to jump into the story mode. As you'd expect, all the minigames and microgames you've found during your quest will be available for play here, and you can even play quite a few of the minigames with up to three other players via local Wi-Fi play. We spent an uproarious few minutes playing these games with Chocobo Tales' producer Yokoyama-san and some other Square Enix staff, and found that the multiplayer had the same sort of competitive edge as the assorted touch-screen games included in New Super Mario Bros. last year.

Despite Chocobo Tales' clear appeal to kids, we've had a lot of fun with it, thanks largely to its great presentation and what seems like a top-notch localization so far. The game will certainly offer something to the diehard Final Fantasy fan, since it's so chock-full of characters, creatures, and music from the series proper, so even those older gamers who fondly remember Square's most storied franchise would do well to investigate Chocobo Tales when it hits the DS in the first week of April.