It Shouldn’t Be This Hard to Make a Final Fantasy Racer

thegamer.com:

Square Enix, baby, what are you doing?

First you announce that you’re into NFTs, and then you kind of shit on your own Guardians of the Galaxy game, despite it being one of the most beloved releases of last year. And now this. Chocobo GP.

Making a Final Fantasy racing game shouldn’t be this fucking hard, guys.

Related: Chocobo GP Review - Ready, Set, Choco-go!

Here’s how to make a good Final Fantasy racer. You take Mario Kart. Replace the characters with Final Fantasy fan service, and you make it about 60% as good. Replace mushrooms with potions, replace blue shells with summons, and replace coins with, I dunno, I guess different coins.

That’s all you need to do. It’s all anyone’s asking you to do.

But you couldn’t even do that, could you? You couldn’t even slap together a fucking Final Fantasy racing game without adding the weirdest microtransactions. So, I need to buy a season pass to play as troubled youth Cloud Strife, but the fake money to get that season pass is free, but also expires, so if I don’t use it, I need to buy the season pass anyway. Got it. Great.

Sure, I know season passes are the thing now. Games are expensive to make in 2022. In the game business there ain’t no game without the business. But for the love of god, the way Chocobo GP demands you work through its eldritch economy is like paying $50 to get the opportunity to re-experience the worst aspects of mobile games from the worst eras of mobile games.

Square Enix, you were able to do this shit just fine on the original PlayStation! And, again, I do mean “just fine.” Chocobo Racing on the PlayStation was a mediocre Mario Kart cash-in and, you know what? We were okay with that. The point wasn’t that it was necessarily any good - it was a racing