Before you even have a chance to breathe, the intro video is already drowning you in its supercute animated intro --the cute lil' guy's imagination is so powerful! This short cinema sets players up for what just about composes the game, a storybook adventure and enough sweetness to make your heart swell. In a nutshell, you play the part of a heroic Chocobo who lives the easiest life ever on a Chocobo farm with its friends and caretakers, when one day the resident black mage brings in a strange book. Well this stirs up a whole pot of trouble for you and the rest of the farm, as this book is actually the Dark Master Bebuzzu, and he's going to take anyone down in order to regain his full dark powers. In no time he's eaten nearly every Chocobo around, leaving you alone with the farm mages.

Since this obviously won't do, the resident white mage, Shirma, enlists you to help save the Chocobos. The rest of the game plays out as one would imagine, with plenty of good and bad characters to run across, including Bebuzzu's henchmen and a moogle with an identity crisis. The writing is great, eliciting laughs from yours truly, and a smile here and there. Final Fantasy fans will find nods to the series, with enough in-jokes to make the cut scenes comfortable enough to sit through. There are plenty of distractions along the way, as the overworld is filled with micro-games and little bits to interact with. Sadly, Chocobo Tales never really decides whether it wants to be a full-on RPG or collection of clever mini-games. This will leave players wanting a little bit more of each throughout the game, to then find it over all too soon.

In order to move through the main game, players must enter storybooks which are sprinkled over the land where they will play out the story to unlock a variety of secrets. Each book has a new take on an old-fashioned bedtime story, such as a "Rabbit and the Hare" spin, or the episodic "Jack & the Beanstalk", which will introduce itself with a prologue that leads into a themed mini-game. The games are all solid, although the difficulty can range from easy to frustrating, depending on the design, etc. For instance, there is a jumping mini-game similar to the one in New Super Mario Bros., where players must draw leaves on a beanstalk in order to bounce higher. While the leaves are effortless to draw, the problem lies in aiming your Chocobo past bombs decorating the massive plant. This can be a problem, as you will bounce too high or off the side of the screen, usually hitting a bomb or two. For the most part the mechanics of all the games are excellent, but when the problem occurs, it comes in the challenge being unfair. It's like asking a human to hold their breath under water for 15 seconds more than they can.

Of course, it's not all mini-games and candy. Well, it may be candy if you bother to buy some, but there's more than storybook tales at hand. Eventually you will encounter an enemy in the overworld who will engage you in a pop-up card battle. Now here comes a battle system that I can get behind. As someone who was never a fan of card battles in video games, finding them to be counter-intuitive, Chocobo Tales manages to dress it up enough to fool and entertain players at the same time. You will collect new cards in the overworld to use in a deck, which are gauged by CP color and rarity. These are basically summons, where each card has a move or two, and a plot of what it can guard and attack Your goal is to match this up with an enemy's card in order to block their attacks and get to their weak spot. The battles are played out quickly, as the cards are to be slid from the touch screen to the top and then engage in a quick battle scene. I was delighted to find myself wrong about a card battle system in Chocobo Tales, take notes everyone.

Visually speaking, Chocobo tales is one of the nicest-looking DS games on the market right now. Using the same engine as the recent Final Fantasy III DS release did for the overworld, the models are crisp, sharp, and everything else you'd expect from a Square Enix property --including style. In storybooks, dialogue is scrolled through on the touch screen while a short pop-up book enacts what the text covers. The mini-games and card battles are animated in a Paper Mario-meets-Yoshi's Island style which is always fun to look at, and distinctive to boot. The art direction in Chocobo tales is as cute as it is refreshing, always mixing things up just enough that everything still feel related and in tact.

The soundtrack is great as well, and as expected from a Final Fantasy game. Tunes are welcomingly original, or classically carried over form the series. Little surprises I didn't expect lie here and about, such as a rhythm-based music mini-game and little pieces of over world to interact with. The story is solid, reliable, and linear, guiding players along at a steady rate that will hardly ever mislead them. The real problem with Chocobo tales is in that the game is half of a mini-game collection, and half a real story. It's confusing, at times, as to what the real goal was here. You get what you ask for, though, a game cuter than Pokémon's Pichu which supplies a good story and solid number of mini/micro-games to be played for some time.

Final Fantasy fans will love this game, and so will their kids/girlfriends/wives. It's story is on the fence between challenging and "just sitting through it", leaning towards the easier grade, but still provides enough content to tide addicts over until their next fix. As a DS title, it utilizes the touch screen promisingly, managing not to turn it into a gimmick. Not only are there a bevy of mini-games, but the enjoyable pop-up card battle system takes players online with the DS's wifi to further extend the title's life. While I would bargain that five dollars be sliced off the price tag, anyone who picks up Chocobo tales will be happy with their purchase.