All Wark AND All Play
I recently finished the main quest of Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo’s Dungeon, coincidentally right around the time that Shiren the Wanderer for Wii was coming out and Jeremy Parish started talking about roguelikes a lot. This got me into sort of a roguelike kick, so you may be seeing a few posts from me on the subject over the next week or so.
First I want to talk about about Chocobo’s Dungeon, since it was what initially renewed my interest in the genre after years of playing NetHack for five or six levels, not knowing what to do, dying, then not playing again for several months. Chocobo’s Dungeon is lightweight enough to cause purists to scoff in its general direction, but I think it’s a pretty great way of introducing someone who’s used to traditional JRPGs to the dark side. Beyond that, it’s just a fun, surprisingly polished game, and one of the overlooked gems on the Wii, if you ask me.
The story, such as it is (really more of a premise), involves a chocobo named Chocobo arriving in a mysterious isolated town where everyone has lost their memories, and it’s up to Chocobo to restore them by venturing into dungeons, collecting loot, and fighting monsters. Oh, and there’s some kind of weird angel baby involved. That’s all I can remember without looking up the plot synopsis on Wikipedia, but it really doesn’t matter beyond providing you with a hub world from which you can reach the various dungeons, in addition to buying and managing equipment (more on this later).
In case you’re not familiar with roguelikes, this is basically how it works: once you enter a dungeon, all movement and actions are entirely turn-based and grid-based. The map of every floor is randomly generated and includes some combination of monsters, traps, and loot, and the challenge is not only to survive and make it to the exit, but to balance that with exploring the map thoroughly enough to prepare you for the next one by collecting equipment, food, and experience. After enough floors, you reach the end of the dungeon (maybe after fighting a large monster) and escape with your spoils.
Chocobo’s Dungeon makes things a bit easier than some similar games by having fairly lenient penalties for death. If you die, you lose the items and money you were carrying, but keep the experience and the gear you had equipped at the time (there are also places outside the dungeon where you can store any possessions you want to keep safe). Most dungeons have checkpoints every ten floors that you can warp to upon re-entering, and at every floor’s exit you’re given the opportunity to escape back to the hub world (keeping and identifying everything you’ve collected). You can also revisit previous dungeons to collect more items. So while the occasional death is inevitable, with smart playing it shouldn’t set you back far enough to be too frustrating.
The parts of the game I found most interesting were the job system and equipment upgrades. At the beginning of the game, you’re just a regular, “Natural” chocobo, but as you progress, you’ll unlock additional jobs, each with its own abilities, that you can switch between at will whenever you enter a dungeon (and occasionally at checkpoints within one). In addition to Chocobo’s overall experience-based level, each job can be leveled up independently by collecting job points from slain monsters, granting it additional abilities. The jobs make up a spectrum of specialties from combat to stealth to magic to item collection, and they all feel pretty useful while encouraging you to vary your strategies.
As for the equipment, every saddle and set of talons (the chocobo’s version of armor and weapons, respectively) that you collect may have special attributes such as immunity to certain status effects, bonuses against certain types of monsters, hunger prevention, faster HP regeneration, etc. The interesting part is that these attributes are represented as “seals,” and each piece of equipment also usually has several empty slots for additional seals. If you bring the equipment to the blacksmith in town, you can have her transfer seals from one piece of equipment to another to create combinations of effects that can eventually end up bordering on ridiculously powerful. This adds a lot of depth and provides incentive to collect and hoard even equipment with crappy stats if you think its seal might come in handy on another item later.
Unfortunately, the lack of permanent death leads, seeming inescapably, to grinding. Since you always keep your experience, there’s nothing stopping you from just going into a dungeon, fighting monsters until you die, and repeating (though it’s always in your best interest to get out of a dungeon alive so you can keep the loot you’ve collected). This is a fundamentally un-roguelike idea — though of course, it’s extremely Final Fantasy. It’s mitigated somewhat by the job system, which adds some variety, and of course you don’t have to grind any more than you want to… but a lot of the motivation to develop good tactics is lost when you know that if you just put in enough time, you can eventually brute force your way through the enemies. But this may be a necessary evil for not completely turning off this game’s target audience, and if you do want more of a challenge, there are quite a few optional “special rules” dungeons in which your level is capped and there may be restrictions on which items can be used/generated, etc. (There’s even one where you have to survive with only one hit point.)
For me, this game proved to be a great “gateway drug.” The similar games I’ve been playing since have made it seem a little on the simple and easy side, but it still has its own unique charms, and I think it does a better job of distilling roguelike mechanics while remaining accessible than the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games. If you’re looking for a good RPG on the Wii (and are more interested in mechanics than story), I recommend giving this a try. If you like it, perhaps you’ll be interested in going on to the game I’ll be talking about next time: Shiren the Wanderer. Stay tuned!
—Scott
