At first, this game seems to be a cute yet simplistic adventure game revolving around a Chocobo. A game that, while fine for small children, wouldn't offer much else to fans of Final Fantasy. After playing it for hours on end, however, I couldn't feel any different. This is a really fun story with some really fun and competitive minigames and is a cute love letter to the lore of Final Fantasy.

The story centers around a young Chocobo whose entire town has been sealed inside over a dozen books, and it is up to you to free them all and save the town from the dark magic. You explore the world and solve puzzles to either get to new locations, find new books to save townsfolk, or even unlock new cards to use in the Pop-Up Duels. The puzzles are pretty basic microgames like matching or whack-a-mole, but the requirements for gold ranking are pretty intense.

When you find a book, you will be thrust into the story as a main character. Each story utilizes a well-known fairy tale as its central plot and creates a minigame out of the contents of that story. For example, one of the stories is Jack and the Beanstalk, and you are tasked with climbing up to the Giant's Tower in the sky. So the minigame is creating trampolines for your Chocobo to climb up to the top the fastest. Each minigame usually has 5 different levels of difficulty, along with a time attack or a score attack depending on the game. Each book also has a list of 5 tasks that can be done to complete it, usually by beating the different difficulty levels. Every task that is completed will either give a new ending to the book which unlocks something in the overworld like the townsfolk or a barrier, give you a card for the Pop-Up Duel, or unlock new levels within the book itself.

All of these can be played with friends outside of the story mode and it is really fun in a Mario Party kind of way, with some of the games standing out more than others. Unfortunately, a couple of these games are not very fun, as the controls can sometimes not be very intuitive. The minigames are not the only part of this game though.

During certain encounters, you will face off in a Pop-Up Duel, and this is where the cards you collect come in. This is a really fun card game that has you building your deck in a way that can counter the deck your opponent is using. The strategies you can employ within this game prove to me that these developers were passionate about this game, as it feels balanced and fair in every fight.

To me, this is as good as a minigame collection can get, from its aesthetic to its gameplay. The biggest downside is that this is all the game is, a minigame collection. With that said, if you are okay with that and want something fun and cute to play on your Nintendo DS, this game is a genuine hidden gem.