Many Final Fantasy gamers rave about Final Fantasy VIII‘s Triple Triad card game, but me personally, I think the best card minigame is found in Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo Tales. If you never heard of that game, it came out years ago for the Nintendo DS, and I spent hours card dueling online. Chocobo Tales involved finding picture books, and the player chocobo would get sucked into a pop-up book to tackle one of the game’s minigames.
The art in Chocobo Tales was absolutely charming, and the character designer from that game just so happens to have illustrated Chocobo and the Airship: A Final Fantasy Picture Book. Which is, just as the name implies, a picture book featuring the JRPG mascot penned by another veteran from a chocobo-centered spinoff (Chocobo’s Dungeon 2).
If that was confusing, well, there is no introduction here about what a chocobo is or otherwise setting the stage. The book opens with a bang — literally.
Final Fantasy fans won’t need much of a setup, but it sure wouldn’t have hurt to open with something like, “Outside the town, a little yellow bird known as Chocobo was [doing whatever] when” and then the explosion.
Despite being catered to JRPG fans, Chocobo and the Airship is a children’s tale of friendship and magic. Monsters from a floating castle led by a Djinn regularly plunder the town where Chocobo and mechanic Cid live, and Cid dreams of building a ship that can fly. Chocobo and Cid keep working on building an airship even as everyone else flees the village, but is building such a vehicle impossible?
The story is nothing home to write home about, and in fact, I found myself questioning much of it. Cid repeatedly sketches out plans and builds prototype airships, but he has no idea how to make it fly until several pages in. Um, shouldn’t “how to make a ship fly” be Step #1 to solve? Or worst case, #2? In another example, Cid, mid-battle, somehow suddenly pulls out some sort of grimoire to figure out the Djinn’s weakness. If there was such a book, why couldn’t someone read it beforehand and attack the next time the Djinn came down?
This may seem overly critical of a kid-friendly tale, but the narrative does have several choppy moments, which, when combined with the lack of world-building, detracts from the cuteness of the book. There is no doubt in my mind the art is the real draw for any fan. Combining the allure of picture books with video game art, the visuals dance on the page. Between spotting the Final Fantasy staples, viewing the (silent) Chocobo’s expressions, and taking in the little side stories (including an Attack on Titan homage?), the soft yet bright illustrations are a delight. I do think there were some missed opportunities to go even heavier into Final Fantasy lore (WHERE IS MOG?!?!), but if you love the art styles in the Chocobo games or even the classic fantasy games like Final Fantasy IV and IX, you’ll enjoy the art. Chocobo and the Airship: A Final Fantasy Picture Book in fact could almost be an in-universe book from one of those games.
But ultimately, whether that’s enough to purchase it is a more difficult question. Perhaps gamer parents will try to sneak this in as their child’s bedtime stories, but I don’t know if kids will cling to a character who doesn’t actually speak in the story and isn’t really introduced. There are also a few spots where parents will likely have to clarify the text (“monsters ran pell-mell”, why three characters are all named [Color] Mage). So I still think the main audience for this are artbook collectors and chocobo enthusiasts. I’d love to see a follow up, with hopefully a smoother story. And Moogles, kupo.