This game is so freaking adorable!
This is my first time playing a mystery dungeon style game, but it was a lot of fun! You play as cute little chocobo who wound up in a town where no one can remember anything. You travel into their minds, which are randomly generated dungeons, and fight monsters and bosses to restore their memories.
The gameplay can get a little bit repetitive, but it stays fresh unlocking new buddies and classes. Your chocobo can use many different classic Final Fantasy classes (such as Knight, Black Mage, White Mage etc.) that changes their move set a bit as you level it. You can also unlock buddies that act as a party member to aid you on your adventures! These can be acquired from either finishing story and special side missions, or taming enemies after defeating a certain amount of them.
Honestly the cuteness alone kept me going back to this game. It is a very cozy little Final Fantasy themed game!
The music in it is also really good! It's a compilation of new song arrangements from other Final Fantasy games.
If you like chocobos or mystery dungeon games, definitely give it a try!
This is my first time playing a mystery dungeon style game, but it was a lot of fun! You play as cute little chocobo who wound up in a town where no one can remember anything. You travel into their minds, which are randomly generated dungeons, and fight monsters and bosses to restore their memories.
The gameplay can get a little bit repetitive, but it stays fresh unlocking new buddies and classes. Your chocobo can use many different classic Final Fantasy classes (such as Knight, Black Mage, White Mage etc.) that changes their move set a bit as you level it. You can also unlock buddies that act as a party member to aid you on your adventures! These can be acquired from either finishing story and special side missions, or taming enemies after defeating a certain amount of them.
Honestly the cuteness alone kept me going back to this game. It is a very cozy little Final Fantasy themed game!
The music in it is also really good! It's a compilation of new song arrangements from other Final Fantasy games.
If you like chocobos or mystery dungeon games, definitely give it a try!
A remaster of a cute Mystery Dungeon Wii game. Dialogues and plot feels a little like a chore, but beside that the gameplay is nice.
Honestly, this game lost my interest about 2 hours in. The dungeons all felt the same and most of the enemies weren't very interesting mechanically. I can see how some people might enjoy the chill and silly story/atmosphere but there wasn't enough there to keep me interested.
This has been in the backlog so finally went back and finished it. It's the first Mystery Dungeon game I've given a proper go and I think I've decided that this format isn't really for me.
Overall balanced after the first area, until a brick that has the words "fuck you" spray painted on it comes crashing through your window
Hella fun but I still prefer the OG ps1 game
Chocobo on a swing? Chocobo swimming? Chocobo just existing and being cute + a mystery dungeon? Peak game
For a game that is seemingly too “fun” and “friendly”, this game can be quite unforgiving in difficulty and a bit dark in story. Until you learn the ropes of the game, I cannot imagine a child getting around the first few dungeons. The challenge becomes more manageable and fun, however, as you progress through the game, unlocking several jobs in the process.
The Chocobo franchise was my entry point to the endless rabbit hole of the world of Final Fantasy. This game specifically sealed that deal.
The Chocobo franchise was my entry point to the endless rabbit hole of the world of Final Fantasy. This game specifically sealed that deal.
I would give my life for Chocobo
How about NO BUDDY you stupid game
Damn it! I absolutely cannot stand when an overall very fun game throws a completely bullshit challenge at you that sucks all the fun out of the game and that's what I'm experiencing with this game.
First of all, this is a straight-up Mystery Dungeon ripoff game. It plays exactly like pretty much any ChunSoft game and that's perfectly fine by me. I couldn't care less if a game is original, nor do I care that this game doesn't add one single new idea and is just an uninspired clone. It's still fun, and this game is certainly a very solid Mystery Dungeon entry with the added bonus of chocobo cuteness. All of the graphics and story and all that is very cute and silly, stupid fun. The game does what Final Fantasy side games usually do and it has your typical plot about some world-smashing god that needs killing and whatnot, but it's on a smaller and cuter scale. I like it.
And I just generally love the whole Mystery Dungeon design. Shiren on the DS was the game, way back when, that taught me what a roguelike even is and made me love the concept and even to this day, I think I really only like Mystery Dungeon games and not roguelikes in general even though I call myself a roguelike fan. This time, I found myself realizing that I actually very much like turn-based battles; I just don't like the J-RPG style that doesn't involve any tactical movement. I like this style of turn-based and I like it a lot.
The problem with this game is that it's got a strong yin and yang, heaven and hell, type of vibe. It's equal parts cute chocobos and brutal roguelike design by it's very nature, but it's also equal parts good designs and just awful ones. Good dungeons with interesting quirks and barely playable ones that suck all of the fun out. You've got equal parts fun depth and incredible tedium, like how spread-out the city is and how much running around you have to do just to maintain your inventory.
The worst offender is the bonus dungeons. Man, most of them are so boring, and they actually make up the meat of the game. You've got the campaign, which is I think five dungeons long and each one grows in size, difficulty and loot quality compared to the last one. The campaign and regular dungeons have a roguelite-inspired structure where you're meant to escape, which you can do with any staircase, if you find a good drop that you want to keep. It also offers checkpoints so you can get back to about where you were and continue on with your upgraded gear. This might be something different from ChunSoft's style, actually, as I don't recall them being this generous with hopping in and out of the dungeon, and it obviously makes the game easier, but I like this lighter change of pace and the heightened focus on upgrading equipment. With this part of the game, you do get a solid 50 hours of enjoyment so if all you do is the campaign, you've still made a solid game purchase.
However, there are more bonus dungeons than there are campaign dungeons, counted both in amount of dungeons and their combined numbers of floors (because one of the bonus dungeons has 500 floors so it alone wins that contest) and, man, do most of the bonus dungeons suck. They feel like unfair chores where RNG decides whether or not you win far too often. They're so high in difficulty that one miss can be the difference between winning and losing, and missing is pure RNG. The worst offender is the one called just Mystery Dungeon and it has so many bad designs that it's forcing me to stop playing to save my sanity right now. It's 50 floors long and you start from level 1 with no equipment, meaning that you have to painstakingly explore every corner of every floor to make sure you find every possible upgrade (since you can no longer partake in the leaving the dungeon to upgrade weapons in town system) and there are no shortcuts, meaning that you have to do the entire 3-5 hour dungeon in one go. And it won't let you save mid-dungeon, even though the game has that feature for other dungeons. Why would you ever do that? That's not difficulty design, that's just you being an asshole. In fact, whoever made these design choices is such an asshole that they won't even let us have a quit or abandon option. If you we enter a dungeon that refuses saving and we suddenly have to leave due to real-life issues, we have to find a staircase or intentionally get killed in order to safely leave without risking corrupting our save by quitting incorrectly. That's just...wow, what an asshole design decision to make.
In short, this game is a super fun lightweight roguelike with lots of charm if you just stick to the fairly easy but not too easy campaign. It's a very solid game that doesn't really suffer from anything except low quality of life with things like an inconvenient city design and, of course, the graphics that were dated even when the original came out in 2009, but that's not a very big deal. The game looks fine. Unfortunately, though, this game becomes an unenjoyable nightmare if you're a completionist who wants to take on all of the challenges and the game becomes tough to give a score for. I'll settle for four stars since the campaign was a lot of fun but the bonus content was lame, and the campaign is long enough for it to not feel like a ripoff of any kind. It just pains my completionist side that I now have to uninstall it because the bad dungeons frustrate and bore me too much.
First of all, this is a straight-up Mystery Dungeon ripoff game. It plays exactly like pretty much any ChunSoft game and that's perfectly fine by me. I couldn't care less if a game is original, nor do I care that this game doesn't add one single new idea and is just an uninspired clone. It's still fun, and this game is certainly a very solid Mystery Dungeon entry with the added bonus of chocobo cuteness. All of the graphics and story and all that is very cute and silly, stupid fun. The game does what Final Fantasy side games usually do and it has your typical plot about some world-smashing god that needs killing and whatnot, but it's on a smaller and cuter scale. I like it.
And I just generally love the whole Mystery Dungeon design. Shiren on the DS was the game, way back when, that taught me what a roguelike even is and made me love the concept and even to this day, I think I really only like Mystery Dungeon games and not roguelikes in general even though I call myself a roguelike fan. This time, I found myself realizing that I actually very much like turn-based battles; I just don't like the J-RPG style that doesn't involve any tactical movement. I like this style of turn-based and I like it a lot.
The problem with this game is that it's got a strong yin and yang, heaven and hell, type of vibe. It's equal parts cute chocobos and brutal roguelike design by it's very nature, but it's also equal parts good designs and just awful ones. Good dungeons with interesting quirks and barely playable ones that suck all of the fun out. You've got equal parts fun depth and incredible tedium, like how spread-out the city is and how much running around you have to do just to maintain your inventory.
The worst offender is the bonus dungeons. Man, most of them are so boring, and they actually make up the meat of the game. You've got the campaign, which is I think five dungeons long and each one grows in size, difficulty and loot quality compared to the last one. The campaign and regular dungeons have a roguelite-inspired structure where you're meant to escape, which you can do with any staircase, if you find a good drop that you want to keep. It also offers checkpoints so you can get back to about where you were and continue on with your upgraded gear. This might be something different from ChunSoft's style, actually, as I don't recall them being this generous with hopping in and out of the dungeon, and it obviously makes the game easier, but I like this lighter change of pace and the heightened focus on upgrading equipment. With this part of the game, you do get a solid 50 hours of enjoyment so if all you do is the campaign, you've still made a solid game purchase.
However, there are more bonus dungeons than there are campaign dungeons, counted both in amount of dungeons and their combined numbers of floors (because one of the bonus dungeons has 500 floors so it alone wins that contest) and, man, do most of the bonus dungeons suck. They feel like unfair chores where RNG decides whether or not you win far too often. They're so high in difficulty that one miss can be the difference between winning and losing, and missing is pure RNG. The worst offender is the one called just Mystery Dungeon and it has so many bad designs that it's forcing me to stop playing to save my sanity right now. It's 50 floors long and you start from level 1 with no equipment, meaning that you have to painstakingly explore every corner of every floor to make sure you find every possible upgrade (since you can no longer partake in the leaving the dungeon to upgrade weapons in town system) and there are no shortcuts, meaning that you have to do the entire 3-5 hour dungeon in one go. And it won't let you save mid-dungeon, even though the game has that feature for other dungeons. Why would you ever do that? That's not difficulty design, that's just you being an asshole. In fact, whoever made these design choices is such an asshole that they won't even let us have a quit or abandon option. If you we enter a dungeon that refuses saving and we suddenly have to leave due to real-life issues, we have to find a staircase or intentionally get killed in order to safely leave without risking corrupting our save by quitting incorrectly. That's just...wow, what an asshole design decision to make.
In short, this game is a super fun lightweight roguelike with lots of charm if you just stick to the fairly easy but not too easy campaign. It's a very solid game that doesn't really suffer from anything except low quality of life with things like an inconvenient city design and, of course, the graphics that were dated even when the original came out in 2009, but that's not a very big deal. The game looks fine. Unfortunately, though, this game becomes an unenjoyable nightmare if you're a completionist who wants to take on all of the challenges and the game becomes tough to give a score for. I'll settle for four stars since the campaign was a lot of fun but the bonus content was lame, and the campaign is long enough for it to not feel like a ripoff of any kind. It just pains my completionist side that I now have to uninstall it because the bad dungeons frustrate and bore me too much.