Chocobo

Origins

Most of the creatures in this bestiary come out of myth. The chocobo came out of a lunch break. Koichi Ishii, an artist and designer on Square's original Final Fantasy (1987), had wanted an animal companion in the game from the start: a creature that could not speak but that players would love anyway. The idea went back to his childhood, when he bought a chick at a festival market, bonded with it, and came home from school to find that his parents had given it to a neighbor who kept chickens. He modeled the chocobo on that chick at its gangly middle stage, before it became a chicken, and named it after the Chocoball, a Morinaga chocolate snack. He later said he drew the first designs in about ten minutes.

Hironobu Sakaguchi initially rejected the idea. The chocobo made it into Final Fantasy II (December 1988) only in a reduced role: a big yellow bird found in a forest that carried the party across the world map, faster than walking and safe from random encounters, until they dismounted and it ran off. Nobuo Uematsu gave it a bouncy theme tune that has been rearranged in almost every game since.

Into the dungeon

Ishii was annoyed that his creature remained a vehicle in Final Fantasy III (1990), where it appeared alongside another new mascot, the moogle, and as a summoned monster. When he got creative control of Final Fantasy Adventure (1991) for the Game Boy, the first game of what became the Mana series, he made the chocobo the loyal companion he had always intended. Final Fantasy V (1992) gave the hero Bartz his own chocobo, Boco, the first chocobo with a personality of its own.

From then on the chocobo became a system. Players rode chocobos across the world map of Final Fantasy VI (1994). Final Fantasy VII (1997) added breeding: players fed, mated and raced birds at the Gold Saucer amusement park, and rare colored strains could cross rivers, mountains and oceans to reach hidden places. In the same year a chocobo became the hero of its own game, Chocobo no Fushigi na Dungeon, a PlayStation Roguelikes in Chunsoft's Mystery Dungeon style and the first of a spin-off series that runs to nearly twenty titles, including Chocobo Racing and Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo Tales. The MMORPGs Final Fantasy XI and Final Fantasy XIV made it a mount and a pet, and in A Realm Reborn (2013) a player's own chocobo can fight beside them as a companion.

Variations

Chocobos come in many colors, and each game invents its own: black chocobos that fly, gold chocobos that cross oceans, the enormous Fat Chocobo, and the chick-turned-merchant Chocolina of the Final Fantasy XIII series. Artists have redesigned the bird for every setting, from Toshiyuki Itahana's rounded spin-off hero to the more realistic birds of Final Fantasy XV (2016). Staff protests are said to have put chocobos back into Final Fantasy XVI (2023) after they were first left out of its world.

The chocobo belongs to a family of fantasy steeds that runs from Ariosto's hippogriff and D&D's trained griffons to the mounts of World of Warcraft. But unlike those borrowed beasts it is wholly a creation of the Japanese RPG, and its closest relative is not a creature of myth but another game mascot, Dragon Quest's Slime. Critics routinely call it the symbol of Final Fantasy, and it has turned up in games from other companies entirely, a sign of how far a lunch-break sketch has traveled.