It's hard to rely on chocobos. To their credit, Square Enix's faithful feathered steeds have ferried us across hostile overworld terrain going all the way back to Final Fantasy II. Not only that, they've helpfully consumed piles of carrots and gysahl greens that would've otherwise clogged our inventories. So thanks for that, chocobos. Unfortunately, these ubiquitous birds have also let us down, with side-gigs like Chocobo Racing, Chocobo Stallion and Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon boring all but the least-critical Final Fantasy stalwarts. So it was with a bit of trepidation that we began playing Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo Tales, the noble bird's latest creative dalliance. As it turns out, our worries were mostly unfounded.

Even so, the game's story mode starts things off exactly wrong. We're introduced to our avatar, a sort of savior-chocobo, surrounded by a cast of idiotic, one-note characters worthy of a second-grader's play. About two minutes in an evil book is resurrected, and it seals many of your poorly-chosen friends within its magical pages. Its world-conquering scheme has only one major flaw: leaving you behind. With a dutiful wark and perhaps a honk, you set off to free your awful friends and tear the pages out of that jerk of a book.

Story Bad, Action Good

A few minutes in you'll encounter your first minigame, which takes place within the pages of an enchanted book. Each book features five difficulty levels and a trial mode. Accomplishing certain goals in each book affects three changes in the outside world, stuff like restoring your trapped idiot-friends and rebuilding broken bridges. Thus the game's shape becomes clear: travel the compact overworld seeking out books to unlock new paths.

We were skeptical at first, since the first minigame wasn't too hot. Things quickly improved, though, and within an hour we were actively looking forward to discovering each new game. There's a lot of variety in the minigames, ranging from foot races to music memorization to a Final Fantasy take on whack-a-mole. There's a good variety overall, with 16 book-based minigames and over 20 slightly-less-involved microgames (which you can send to other players). The difficulty is just about perfect. Getting high enough scores to progress through the storyline is easy, but getting the gold in every last game would be quite an accomplishment.