Although it looks like “another clone of Mario Kart” from the outside, those of us who comb gray hair know that there was already one Chocobo racing which debuted for PlayStation a whopping 23 years ago. At that time, only Mario Kart had appeared for the SNES and N64, and although Squaresoft shamelessly adopted the Nintendo formula to bring it to the character field final fantasy, even then he tried to freshen it up with his own ideas. By the way, the Chocobito protagonist was already out and about on roller skates. Now, after a failed project for Nintendo 3DS earlier in the last decade and with many more Mario Kart releases on the way, Square Enix wants to repeat the strategy.
With these precedents, Chocobo GP is therefore a modern game that drinks a lot from Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and also remembers this origin on PSX, although now it comes out exclusively for Nintendo Switch to delight a portion of the millions of ‘kart racers’ who own the console.
The idea is not bad and we have already enjoyed very good copies of the concept in the past, both from Nintendo itself (Rare’s mythical Diddy Kong Racing) and from other studios (Team Sonic Racing, Crash Team Racing…), but In the case of Chocobo GP, the copy is not well done, and the own ideas do not provide enough fun.
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Because he doesn’t drop the rings when copying it, if it worked as well as Mario Kart I wouldn’t complain that much. In fact, I’ll admit that I started analyzing this game because I like the genre and to see if it would serve as an additional game for the many who have already “burned” MK8Dx on Switch. It’s all down to the riding level, including the jumps to do a pirouette turbo while jumping (here it says “air trick“) or the drifts accumulating a multicolored impulse. Of course, already said, they could have kept the same buttons …
The main change at the level of mechanics of Chocobo GP is the replacement of the objects of the traditional Mushroom Kingdom surprise blocks with the magic and its small role factor: up to three of the same type can be stacked for greater elemental impact. Although the idea sounds original, the actions of these spells themselves are as obscure as the rest of the race, and only a few, like the dimensional portal, bring anything surprising to the genre.
The other novelty is that capabilities, a special attack in each character’s power that is loaded with skids and other things as the race progresses. This idea is more original and in fact I would want to see them in Mario Kart 9 almost as if it were the special attack from Smash Bros. The only negative is that they are assigned to the Y button and therefore you have to thumb off stepping on the gas pedal or pressing it with your index finger in “hook mode”.
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For the rest you collect instead of coins crystals -of course- and there are also coupons as you level up, which are used in the store to surprise buy all sorts of stuff, including characters, vehicles, backgrounds or customization accessories (which don’t affect the “stats”). Who wouldn’t want to wear their booster skates in lovely magenta?
But even if the copy is only half done, are you saying the rest doesn’t work? Well, no, the biggest problem with Chocobo GP is that it doesn’t even come close to Mario Kart in terms of control, handling, responsiveness, circuit design, fun generation, or exciting situations… Basically, what constitutes that party racer be funny races are a rather garish hodgepodge of flashing lights and dissonant colors, movement is pretty clunky (you’ll bump into walls with even the most manageable characters and vehicles), and pace is often lost, usually due to the imbalance between speed and Speed the various breaks, with some turbos that don’t bring you back into the race credibly. Try to get that bloody and unfair touch for which they will ruin your race on the last stretch, but not transmitting security to the controls and with the different resources, instead of stabbing you to another, it leaves you indifferent gain weight.
Another happy idea that Chocobo Racing came up with was this story mode, which sounded appropriate for a game based on an RPG drama. However, it was already presented in 1999 with very static scenes based on speech bubbles, when DKR had already tackled its adventure mode in a much more lively way two years earlier. Well, Chocobo GP subscribes to exactly the same idea as the original, with a story that’s as boring for adults as it is repetitive and excessive in terms of the amount of text for little ones, as well as the voices in English.
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If you click “skip” to go through all the scenes, you’ll see that what’s strange about the story mode is that the races are overcome victory conditions like winning a specific character, finishing the race, or finishing a position. Again, the idea of a story mode and conditions are things we’ve seen in other car games that Nintendo wouldn’t mind trying out in Mario Kart, but here it offers little more than a way to clean up the tutorial.
The bottom line is what’s happening to the circuits that’s happening to the rest of the game: intent to innovate, terrible execution. The clever idea here is that the same route can be run on different layout types, for example in short, technical, long or “hyperspeed” variants. The environment and its hazards remain the same, but the draw, rhythm and strategy of the race change. It’s just that the circuit designs themselves are very simple and silly (for example, the shorts are a boring no-no), and if you discover that in mode competition they are repeated more often than the ajoblanco, they take away the desire to continue playing. This means that there are no cups like in MK with their predefined races to unlock, but the various tournaments cycle through many well-known racetracks ad nauseam and only change the variant.
It all adds up to a rather mediocre audiovisual finish, despite what the game’s first materials indicated, in which circuits such as Zozo for the brilli-brilli and little else. In fact, Unreal Engine’s generic flat finish looks miles away, at times looking like a mobile game, while at times it could have easily outperformed Mario Kart 8 in geometry or effects.
Because, let’s remember, Mario Kart 8 came out 8 years ago, in 2014, and this Wii U game is still around much better in all aspects, without having to look at the enhanced version of Nintendo Switch Deluxe. It lacks the care, the talent, the resources, the art… In fact, there are some pretty amateurish technical issues, like that loading screen that sometimes puts yes, sometimes no, a game tip along the way. If not, you won’t have time to read and the screen will remain black throughout the loading process.
Then what do we do? Isn’t there a new alternative to MK8 Deluxe, Crash and Sonic? Well, unless you’re a big fan of Vivi, Gilgamesh, Behemoth, and the skating Chocobito, and you know you’ll get plenty of use out of local or online multiplayer. I thought that I could give a field to children who only play kart titles or those who have devoured what the genre has to offer on Nintendo Switch, but finally I dare that these 48 circuits coming to MK8, they will give a lot more play.
