I am not well versed in the kart racing genre, but I did spend most of the recent holiday period playing Mario Kart 8 Deluxe with my nephew. With 4-player splitscreen, the whole family got in on it, and with dozens of characters and tracks, we never got bored. So I was thrilled when I first heard about Chocobo GP. At a glance, it looks like a not-so-subtle clone of Mario Kart with racers and worlds from across the Final Fantasy canon. What a fantastic way to indoctrinate the kid into my favourite media franchise, I thought, being the terrible uncle I am. Now that I’ve played it, it wasn’t entirely what I expected. Chocobo GP is an entertaining racer that definitely has the potential to stand up to those mean Italian plumbers, but it’s wrapped in a package that makes me wonder who its target audience is.

The first place you’ll want to go is the game’s Story Mode, which gradually introduces the game’s mechanics, which I found quite familiar. Select your character and take off in arcadey and accessible racing as you compete against a roster of characters each equipped with individual abilities. If you drift for long enough whilst racing, you get tiered speed boosts, and you get a boost if you accelerate when the starting countdown hits 2. While these are clearly borrowed mechanics from Mario Kart, I appreciated Chocobo GP actually giving me tutorials for them, and I found them less punishing in practice. Chocobo GP is a very approachable racer for filthy casuals like me and my family (sorry mum if you’re reading this). 

Another borrowed, tweaked concept is Magicite, Chocobo GP’s take on powerup items. Driving into Magicite grants you a classic Final Fantasy spell, such as Haste, which makes you go faster, or Fire, which throws a fireball in front of you. The almighty dragon Bahamut is functionally Bullet Bill. You can hold up to three spells at once, but if you get two or three of the same spell, they merge into stronger forms. These upgraded spells are far more effective (for example, Fire grows larger and homes in on targets) so there’s a level of strategy involved when deciding if you should shoot now, or wait for an upgrade. 

The spells themselves are utterly chaotic. My personal favourite is Swap, which teleports you to a spot further along the track, but leaves entry and exit portals behind you. If another player is fast enough, they can jump into your entry portal before it closes. There were also several times when I accidentally skidded into someone’s exit portal, sending me back to where they started. Even playing solo, the AI relentlessly flings spells around you, so you need to do the same to keep up. At its best, races are exhilarating, and unpredictable in the best way.

The story itself is a mummer’s farce, following Chocobo and his friends as they travel the world in search of a magical race that grants wishes. It’s harmless kid-friendly nonsense, filled with deepcut Final Fantasy references (reFFerences) that seemingly exist just for me and nobody else. The real benefit of Story Mode is unlocking all the tracks and racers. A few characters will join your roster directly, but the rest will need to be unlocked from the in-game shop with “item tickets”, a form of currency.

Item tickets are earned by collecting little crystals across each race, or completing optional Story Mode objectives. Whether or not you win a race, a gauge will slowly fill up to grant you item tickets. Unlocking characters, different vehicles, and customisation options all require item tickets, and even though you’re always making progress towards getting them, they are obtained much slower than I would like. Even after finishing story mode, there are still a bunch of characters I have yet to unlock. 

It’s disappointing that a third of the playable characters are from the obscure Chocobo spinoff games, most of which were never released in the West and the most recent came out in 2012. Others are either original to this game or cutesy renditions of classic Final Fantasy summons (Ifrit is a firefighter, Shiva is a ski instructor, and so on). But if you’re here to play as beloved party members from across the franchise, you’ve got FF6 protagonist Terra, and FF9’s Vivi and Steiner. That’s it. There is a baffling missed opportunity to include more characters that fans and newcomers would recognise, which renders Chocobo GP’s fairly sizeable cast unmemorable. 

Chocobo GP’s racetracks thankfully represent more than two Final Fantasy locations with FF7’s Gold Saucer as the Rainbow Road stand-in. The problem is that there are only 8 tracks in total to race on. Technically there are 21 tracks, as the 8 tracks are remixed into multiple arrangements (short version, long version, technical version with more traps, etc.), but the game grows dull fast when you’re racing through one of the same 8 backgrounds in every race. Even the implementation of the remixes is inconsistent, as 1 beautiful city track only has 1 configuration, but the final unlockable track has 6.

Season events are held every few months in #ChocoboGP!

Play in Chocobo GP mode to increase your season level and obtain special season rewards, like items and Gil which can be exchanged for various other items in the games different shops depending on your season level. pic.twitter.com/jDEhmFe6IC

— FINAL FANTASY (@FinalFantasy) February 10, 2022

I don’t necessarily have an opinion on seasonal passes in free-to-play games that let players spend money if they want to, but Chocobo GP is a full-price title that also requires a Nintendo Online subscription to access any online content. To then put players in a position where they’d need to either grind races repeatedly or spend even more money to unlock stuff feels like a poorly thought out decision on Square’s part. I can’t imagine Chocobo GP’s current model being sustainable long term without making the base game free and removing the need for Nintendo Online, like Fortnite and Rocket League on Switch. This appears to be Square Enix dipping their toe into a distribution model they’re unfamiliar with, and they either didn’t do their research or are aiming for a merciless cash grab. Either way, the handling of microtransactions is a massive letdown that looms large over the entire game. 

One final problem with Chocobo GP that I simply can’t ignore: the song. The game’s theme song plays on repeat throughout most of the menus. It’s an upbeat pop song, a catchy earworm (big Baby Shark vibes), which normally I don’t mind. But if you listen to the lyrics, you’ll realise it’s just a list of the characters and spells in the game, followed by a description of what racing is like. It’s inane, and never ends. The only way to turn the song off is by muting all music, which means you miss out on the excellent genre-appropriate remixes during races. The song is not the worst part about Chocobo GP, but I hate the song.