Chocobo Racing

If you aren’t familiar with chocobos then you are in the wrong place, but you are forgiven. Chocobos are like…chickens…or ostriches, and they belong to the Final Fantasy series. They are present in every game, I think, and I also think there are other chocobo based games, but Chocobo Racing is, well, a racing game where you get to play as a Chocobo.

Anyway, Chocobo Racing came out for the original PlayStation way back in 1999. It's a kart racer...I guess, so if you thought this was going to be anything like the chocobo races from Final Fantasy 7, you are sorely mistaken; though, I think that would have been a great way to go—to be able to catch and breed better chocobos in order to advance? That spells fun to me. Alas, Chocobo Racing is more like Mario Kart.

As you play through the game, you obtain other characters like the moogle. If you don’t know what a moogle is, look at the picture below.

The plot of the game is basically to find all the shards of magicite, which you may recall from Final Fantasy 6, and to do this, you must race characters from the games. It's obviously a simplistic plot, focusing on the racing aspect of game play rather than story line. You can play in two player mode also, which, as you may have guessed, allows you and a friend to race one another on various tracks.

The Good

The scenes between the races, wherein the story is revealed, are kind of fun to watch. They’re not really cut scenes, like, they’re not movies, but they’re like an animated pop-up book, which is a novel idea; I don’t recall having ever seen anything like this in any other game, so that right there is aces.

The music, which is adapted from previous Final Fantasy games, the animation, the characters, the game play, everything is satisfactory. While nothing really stands out, there’s nothing bad about the game, either. As you race, you can build up your power and boost to go faster, you pick up power ups, it’s basically like Mario Kart, but this leads right into the bad….

The Bad

Chocobo Racing feels like it’s trying to emulate Mario Kart without emulating Mario Kart, and what we get is a mediocre game that leaves us asking: Why aren’t we just playing Mario Kart? Furthermore, the controls while racing feel a little stiff.

The game is also redundant, leaving you feeling like the next race is a chore you have to complete just see the next pop-up animation.

In my final analysis, I’m just left baffled. Either they should have ripped off Mario Kart while employing Final Fantasy characters, or they should have made an entirely different game. I definitely suggest you give Chocobo Racing a run, but don’t expect too much. Probably, you’ll just end up playing Mario Kart.

As a score, I’m hard pressed to give Chocobo Racing anything above a C-. It’s playable. It’s a novel game. It’s kind of fun in very short spurts, and if you’re like me, you’ll push through just to see more pop-up animation, which is often funny and glitchy.

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