Meta:Chocobo's Mystery Dungeon

Chocobo's Mystery Dungeon (Japanese: チョコボの不思議なダンジョン) is a spin-off game from the Chocobo series developed and published by SquareSoft on Sony PlayStation in 1997 in Japan. The game also received a port on Bandai WonderSwan in 1999 as well as multiple re-releases. It is part of the first set of the Chocobo's Mystery Dungeon series.

Gameplay

Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon is a roguelike game in which you control the franchise's mascot character Chocobo, that appears in the Final Fantasy series to explore mysterious dungeons.

Plot

The main characters, Chocobo, and Moogle Atla visit a village. At that time, a farmer in the village who was cultivating the field accidentally digs up a mysterious amethyst that grows by absorbing desires, and his soul is taken in. At the same time, a mysterious dungeon appeared in the village, and Chocobo dived into a mysterious dungeon to rescue Kamira.

The story is divided into three stages, and later Atla is also incorporated into the amethyst. After clearing the first and second dungeons, the ending will flow and move to the next dungeon, alike to Enix's Torneko's Great Adventure: Mystery Dungeon.

Development

Between Kazuhiko Aoki, the game's director, of Square at that time and Koichi Nakamura of Chunsoft, the former company were working on their first Mystery Dungeon title. However, Chunsoft was not involved in the development of this work, it was jointly developed by Square and Banpresto, while being supervised by Nakamura for production advice. In this series, the title is no longer "Fushigi no Dungeon" due to the feeling of words, but it has been changed to "Fushigina Dungeon" with the consent of Nakamura.

Following the world view of the Final Fantasy series, familiar monsters appear in this title, and its successors. However, unlike the mainline series, it builds a unique world view where mainly animal and monster characters live side by side, without humans. It features a character design deformed by Banpresto staff, Toshiyuki Itahana, who was in charge of character design. He was later transferred from Banpresto to Square after this work.

In addition to the basic elements of roguelike games, the familiar ATB system and summoning magic of the Final Fantasy series are adopted. The feeling of the Mystery Dungeon series is deep-rooted, and there are also collection elements such as collecting items, synthesizing and strengthening equipment, and completing a monster pictorial book rather than advancing the story.

The PlayStation version comes with a "mysterious data disc" that contains trial versions and movies of new software, and special data of past works from SquareSoft; save data where you can see the strongest character data and special events. Although this disc is not included in the Game Archives version, the special data saved from the PlayStation version can also be used in the Game Archives version for titles like Hironobu Sakaguchi's Final Fantasy VII or Tetsuya Takahashi's Xenogears.

Sales

Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon on PlayStation sold 1.17 million copies in 1998, making it the most copies sold in the trilogy.

Gallery

For this subject's image gallery, see Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon.

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  Sony PlayStation cover art.

In Other Languages

Language		Name
English		Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon
Japanese		チョコボの不思議なダンジョン, Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon
Korean		초코보의 이상한 던전

References

• Gameplay, Plot and Sales sections based on the Wikipedia page.