Love/Hate: Chocobo Racing (1999)

Welcome back to the Final Fantasy Love/Hate series! After putting well over a hundred and twenty hours into Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth, I need a short, low-commitment game for a palate cleanser… so we’re taking a hard detour and checking out Chocobo Racing, the kid-friendly, chocobo-themed kart racer released on the PS1!

After my son and I fell in love with chocobos early into my Rebirth playthrough, I tried to see if there were any Final Fantasy games he could play and discovered that chocobos are way more prolific than I had realized. There’s this kart racing series, there’s a mystery dungeon series, minigame collections, a bunch of mobile games, a card game, a board game, and even a children’s storybook (which I may or may not have bought for my kids). Are these cute little spin-offs just cash-grabs to get kids interested in Final Fantasy, or do they stand up on their own right? Read on to find out…

Love

• Charming and Cute Presentation – By far the best aspect of Chocobo Racing is its extremely charming and cute presentation. The characters are all given adorable, colourful redesigns to fit the kid-friendly aesthetic, with each of them resembling something you might see out of a Pokémon game. The story mode is presented in this fun little pop-up book style, and the narrative itself is simple, whimsical, well-paced, and entertaining to get through. If you love cutesy things, then Chocobo Racing is a homerun.
• Character Selection – You’d think that a kart racer based around Final Fantasy creatures would probably struggle to fill out its roster, but Chocobo Racing has a surprisingly robust and iconic cast to choose from. There are nine characters initially available (including the titular chocobo, Mog the moogle, an adorable white mage, the iconic black mage, fat chocobo, and bahamut), but the game also has a ton of unlockable characters available each time you beat the story mode, including FFVIII‘s Squall, FFVII‘s Cloud, and Parasite Eve‘s Aya Braya (kind of wild to have her showing up in an E-rated game!). This isn’t a PlayStation All-Stars situation, where you’re scratching your head over why a certain character mode the roster; everyone here makes a lot of sense and earns their spot.
• Final Fantasy Theming – Chocobo Racing isn’t content to just slap a Final Fantasy skin over a standard kart racing skeleton; instead, it actually goes to some effort to make the racing gameplay feel like Final Fantasy.
  • The most obvious example of this is the item pickups system, which uses classic spells from throughout the franchise (Fire, Blizzard, Haste, Mini, Ultima, etc). What really makes this feel like Final Fantasy though is that you can “level up” your spells up by running over a spell pickup while holding the same one. This can be done up to two times (ie, leveling up “Fire” to “Fira” and then “Firaga”), significantly improving the potency of the spell in the process. That said, your opponents can steal your spells by bumping into you or using a special ability, so there’s a real risk/reward system in trying to go for a higher-level spell!
  • Also, I’ve really got to shout-out the black mage and his Magic Plus ability, which automatically upgrades your held spell to level two! Despite being on the slower side, this ability allows the black mage to be utterly devastating with little effort!
  • Upon beating the story mode, the game also reveals a character customization system, which allows you to select a racer, give them a unique colour, and then spend XP to customize their stats as you see fit. This makes for a really cool and flavourful way to essentially build-craft your own racer!

Mixed

• The Racing Mechanics – Chocobo Racing feels pretty good for the most part, with each racer feeling reasonably snappy and responsive. However, there are a couple pain points which can mean the difference between winning and losing:
  • First of all, drifting is really slippery here. If you go too hard into a drift, you just continue sliding forward into the wall (or, worse, off the edge of the track). You really have to learn how to drift in order to win most of these races, but having to rely on it can really screw you over at times. Sure, maybe this is realistic, but that really isn’t that important when we’re talking about a Final Fantasy-themed kart racer.
  • Then there’s reversing, which is brutally slow. It’s so bad that I was literally just restarting races if I ended up in a position where I needed to reverse – it takes so goddamn long, there’s no way I’m coming back from that.
• Mediocre Graphics – Chocobo Racing‘s graphics are colourful and appealing, but look dated by the standards of 1999. Most notably, the racers are all rendered with 2D sprites (similarly to Mario Kart 64), with a handful of angle variations to give a thin veneer of 3D. Most racing games by 1999 had fully modeled 3D vehicles, and Square were known for pushing the limits of technology, so it’s just weird to see them falling back on such dated graphics in 1999. That said, what we’ve got is still perfectly playable and charming in its own right, so it’s not really much of a blemish at the end of the day.

Hate

• The Black Manor – Fuck this stupid track. Black Manor is so full of twists, turns, and traps that it takes a TON of skill (and a lot of luck too) to win. There are very few straight-aways, so you can’t really reach top speed in a racing game. Oh, but of course, your opponents can, so you’re going to be getting absolutely ass-blasted on your first half-dozen tries before you start figuring out ways to wring out a dirty victory. It took me around a dozen attempts before I was able to beat this level in the story mode, which feels kind of excessive for a game aimed at children.
  • Meanwhile, I got my son Chocobo GP for his Switch, and he can’t even find the patience to get through the tutorial, let alone an actual challenging race like this one.
• It Doesn’t Really Stand Out – Presentation-aside, there isn’t a whole lot about Chocobo Racing that makes it feel unique. It’s basically doing everything Mario Kart 64 did three years earlier and hoping that the Final Fantasy branding is enough to draw interest. Hell, Mario Kart 64 even has stuff that Chocobo Racing doesn’t, like a free-for-all battle mode.
• Randomness – Sure, this is inherent to the kart racing genre as a whole, but it is infuriating when you get hit by a spell and then lose several seconds as your kart careens out of control wildly. Worst of all is when you get spun out, because this causes you to have to reverse (which, as I’ve said, makes getting back on track take even longer). It’s also really annoying when you’re playing against the goblin and he robs you of all your spells before you get a chance to use them. There are just so many things that can go wrong, which makes victory feel like an utter crapshoot at times.

Chocobo Racing was a pretty fun time. It served its role as a quick and easy palate cleanser with aplomb. I hadn’t played a racing game in years, let alone a kart racer, so it was a nostalgic experience. It’s not exactly a game that you need to rush out and try, but if you’re in the mood for a cutesy, breezy kart racer, you could do a lot worse than this!

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Barloq

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Writer, blogger, father. Blogging since 2012, writing my whole life. Was blessed by the chupacabra and the guardian shepherd.

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