Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobos Dungeon review

We wouldn't blame you for writing off Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon at a glance - previous Chocobo games have suffered from overly-simplistic kid-friendly gameplay, which sounds like a recipe for disaster when mixed with the dungeon crawler genre. But with its variety of dungeon types and robust job system, Chocobo's Dungeon kept our interest for far longer than we expected. And with famed composer Nobuo Uematsu supervising the soundtrack, it's saturated with nostalgia-inducing melodies, featuring reworkings of themes from various Final Fantasy titles throughout, which is a huge bonus for FF fans.

The story, while not incredibly profound, is suprisingly good for a kid-friendly dungeon crawler. Instead of the usual battle of good vs evil, the conflict here is all about forgetting vs remembering. In the land of Memoria, there's a town called Lostime with a huge clocktower in the center. Every time the clocktower's bell chimes, it causes selective amnesia to anyone who hears it. The townspeople are divided as to whether or not this is a good thing - some want to forget painful memories, but others yearn to remember, no matter how difficult. As a brave Chocobo named Chocobo, it's your job to dive into people's heads (aka dungeons) and recover their lost memories. 

Each dungeon is a grid-based series of floors, with tons of monsters and items randomly throughout. The battle system is simple, as your only options are moving from square to square, attacking, and using special attacks (which consume SP). As you walk around your health and special attack meter constantly replenish, but your hunger levels increase, so you've got to constantly maintain a balance among the three by eating food and walking around. It sounds tedious, but it's pretty easy to keep a good balance with little effort.