On the main menu of Chocobo Racing, you’ll find five modes, Story Mode, Time Attack, Grand Prix, VS Mode, and Relay Race. Interestingly, aside from modern controls, these two games are remarkably similar.
If 23 years of game design has taught us anything, it’s how to make kart racing feel good. They’re tight, responsive, and I felt in control the entire time. If you’ve not read my review of Chocobo GP, which you totally should, the controls in it were one of the few points I had no complaints about. I’m not sure why Chocobo Racing’s controls ended up like they did, but it certainly is unfortunate. You’re able to fine-tune how sharp of a turn you want to make and it feels fantastic after playing with Chocobo’s physics. However, when I checked out a game with similar character sprites from the generation that launched two years prior, Mario Kart 64, I found that it featured comparatively great analog movement. No matter if I turned the control stick a little bit or all the way, the character seems to turn the same amount regardless.Īt first I thought that this could just be a placebo due to the fact that your character is just a two-dimensional sprite that faces either front, left, or right with little variation. Most of the control problems, however, is that despite this game featuring an analog controller graphic within the settings, it appears to just use eight-directional movement. Part of the issue is the awkwardness of not having a button to drift, but rather having to press both the accelerate and brake buttons at the same time to drift. It’ll likely come as no surprise that I found the controls in Chocobo Racing to be pretty bad.
Even a game like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the highest-rated game of all time, I find to have rather shoddy controls by today’s standard. This makes sense, the PS1 and Nintendo 64 generation was the first with 3D games and developers were still learning how to make controls work with the new z-axis.
Is it still fun to play after all these years? I often find controls are the first to go in a game. I’m mostly concerned with how the game feels. Now, I’m not too concerned with the more obvious things, like how the game was already a bit ugly for a PS1 game, and time has done it no favors, or that the music is still good because audio doesn’t really age now that we’re in the CD era. So, in the spirit of Chocobo GP’s launch, I wanted to revisit this old classic and see if it’s still able to cruise on in 2022 and how it compares to its distant sequel. In that time, it was one of the best games we owned and I never got sick of it.
Well, I’m not sure when it entered my house, I’m not that old, but it’s always been there. Twenty-three years ago, Chocobo Racing raced its way onto the PlayStation One (PS1) and into my house. Elsewhere in the trailer, you can see the castle track previously shown in the Chocobo GP announcement trailer.Note: The opinions and views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the opinion of Byte or Byte’s editorial board. The trailer also reveals a quick glimpse at a track we’ve not seen before – you can see it around the 1:26 minute mark and it looks like a Final Fantasy spin on Mario Kart Wii's Moo Moo Meadows.
Although Chocobo GP has its own series ready to go at launch, players can create their own, too. We also learn that similar to other kart racers, a series will consist of four races. In it, we get more details about the game, including a brief look at its story mode, some of the characters we can expect to see, and more. Today’s March 10 release date news was announced in a release date trailer on the Nintendo UK YouTube channel. Plus, if Final Fantasy is more your franchise versus Mario or any of the others highlighted in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, then Chocobo GP might be your new favorite kart racer. Look, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is arguably the best kart racer out there so it’s not surprising to see another racer take on a similar shape. From the item boxes, err, Magicites, placed throughout the track to the track design and even the way racers drift, Chocobo GP looks very much like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.