TGS hands-on: Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon (Wii)
Square Enix's upcoming cute-em-up dungeon crawler, Chocobo's Dungeon: Toki-Wasure no Meikyuu will be released in Japan on the 13th of December. We managed to drag ourselves away from the giant Chocobo guarding the entrance to Square Enix's booth long enough to check the game out.
Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon is, essentially, a sequel to Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon 1 and 2 for the PlayStation. While those games didn't do as well as perhaps they should have (only Mysterious Dungeon 2 was released outside Japan) Square Enix seem to be giving the franchise one more chance on the Wii.
This latest iteration maintains much of the cuteness of the previous titles, keeping a consistant art style with all past Chocobo based games, whilst using a softer palette of colours throughout. The world of Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon is now full of pastel shades, as opposed to the bright primary colours used in games such as Chocobo Tales.
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Similarly the gameplay has remained largely the same, with some touch ups here and there. The game still consists of a central hub where you converse with the townsfolk, buy and sell items and embark on quests. From the hub you can enter the randomly generated dungeons (hence the name). Within these you will battle against monsters, find items, solve puzzles and defeat bosses. Lather, rinse, repeat.
In order to combat the repetitive gameplay inherent in the series Square Enix have implemented a job system (and why not? It worked with Final Fantasy 1,3 and 5) which promises to mix up the experience a touch. At the entrance to the dungeons is a large crystal where your Chocobo can have his job assigned. For the TGS demo there was a choice between Knight, White Mage and none. We're hoping that there will be a far larger selection in the full game. Preferably as unlockables.
Changing the class of your character affects your stats and abilities. They can be upgraded to improve stat boosts and, we presume, to unlock more abilities. We're not sure how exactly this is done, due to the relatively short time we had with the game. Having said this, most of the time we found ourselves ignoring our abilities in favour of a simple, but effective, melee attack.
Controls are very simple. The Wiimote is once again held on its side, like an NES controller. The A button opens your RPG-style micromanagement menu while the 1 and 2 buttons perform actions. The simple controls fit the simple gameplay. As far as we could see there was no utilisation of the motion controls whatsoever, which makes us wonder: wouldn't this be better on DS? Four player multiplayer dungeon crawling in the same room would be excellent fun.
There was nothing to indicate any multiplayer features, which would be a huge plus point for the game and, with the Japanese release date set for December 13th, we don't expect one to be implemented by then. With so little being said about the game outside of Japan we don't expect Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon to be released in the US or Europe, as the original PS1 title wasn't.
Despite the graphical improvements and the addition of the job system Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon is still a PS1 game at heart. Dungeon movement even takes place on an invisible grid. In fact, we would go so far as to say that the gameplay is scarily reminiscent of the ancient DOS game, Rogue. We would love the game to be localised for the English speaking world, if only to see if there are any other innovations that have been included. With the exception of the new job system, however, we can't help but feel that we can get the same level of gameplay by loading up our copy of Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon 2 for the original PlayStation.
