You pick from a wide cast of colorful characters, select a kart and go on the track. I promise I won’t spend the entire review comparing the game to Mario Kart but if you’ve played the mushroom kingdom racer, Chocobo GP plays very similarly. That being said you’re probably going to start finding the menu song a bit annoying after listening to it too much. The music in general, while also lacking in quantity, was also excellent with classic Final Fantasy renditions remade into adrenaline-pumping race tunes, even ‘Melodies of Life’ was remixed to be more fast-paced while still keeping true to the original track. My favorite had to be The Bridge, with its diverging pathways and rocking rendition of the classic ‘Battle on The Big Bridge Theme’. Likewise, while there aren’t a lot of stages, the game has a lot of variety with a few of them calling back to older games in the franchise. Cloud and Squall are due to appear as DLC but it would have been nice to see a few more familiar faces in the game. There are only 4 characters from the main Final Fantasy series: Gilgamesh from V, Terra (in esper form) from VI, and Vivi and Steiner from IX.
CHOCOBO GP PLATFORM SERIES
The rosters consist of the Chocobo series mainstays like Shirma, Camilla, and Clair (Fat Chocobo) as well as several summons, all redesigned into cuter chibi forms. There’s even a custom rules mode to change the race to your liking.įor Final Fantasy fans out there, Chocobo GP has a lot of fanservice from across the series, albeit from certain games more than others. Fans might get a kick out of seeing comedic spins on summons like Ifrit and Shiva, and the dialogue is funny at times, but there’s way too much chatting for something so light and inconsequential – especially when each exchange culminates in another normal race on the same tracks.Follow GP comes with a variety of different modes, and GP Tournament mode, a story mode, multiplayer, a series race arcade mode to race different cups, and a time attack to race for the best time. Along with the standard cup events over four tracks, there’s a story mode which stitches together races with fully voice-acted storybook style cut scenes. The problem is, these variations aren’t distinct enough to shake the feeling they’re cutting corners, with repetition quickly setting in when you’re seeing the same few environments repeated.Įven with a robust stack of modes and difficulty options, the small amount of tracks stretches them all too thinly. To milk the nicely designed backdrops, Chocobo GP has multiple variations of each course with slightly different routes and obstacles. There’s technically only nine worlds in total, ranging from Chocobo Farm, Big Bridge from Final Fantasy 5, and the town of Zozo from Final Fantasy 6.
This carries over to the surprisingly small pool of tracks. The biggest sin is the painfully long recovery times after being hit, which makes Chocobo GP feel like a relic next to modern standards. The best kart racers balance the madness by rewarding skilful driving, but the stiff manoeuvrability here isn’t tactile or fluid enough to counter the frustrations. There’s a charm to the chaos but the haphazard imbalance, especially in the character abilities, turns most races into a scrappy crawl to the finish. Tracks generally feel smaller in comparison to other karting games, so you’re often forced into a slapdash approach to succeed.
Amid the chaos of a race, with so many items and specials firing back and forth, there’s little breathing room to engage with the magicite system in any deliberate, meaningful way. These translate into homing blasts of fire, multiple blasts of ice, and teleportation gates which will catapult you further depending on the item’s level.Ĭouple this with character-specific abilities (24 in total) and the amount of weapons at your disposal is surprisingly big… to an unnecessary extent. Collect a bronze and you’ll earn a low-level magicite, which, if held onto, can be upgraded by hitting a silver or gold.
Unlike other kart racers, boxes are separated into classes between bronze, silver, and gold. The item system is inspired by magicites from Final Fantasy, with spells like Fire, Water, Aero, Blizzard, and Haste – which can be stacked if you hit certain item boxes. There are a few tricks unique to Chocobo GP’s arsenal.
A track based on the Gold Saucer amusement park from Final Fantasy 7 is practically Rainbow Road by any other name – with coloured surfaces and devious corners without guardrails. The drifting is identical to Mario Kart, with three tiers of boosts, and crystals (like coins) are collected from the track to increase your speed even the turbo trick from the starting line is the same. The racing is functional, if rigid, and borrows heavily from its slicker competitors. If you haven’t played a kart racer since 1999, you might find Chocobo GP endearing.
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