ONM writes: "It's fair to say that Chocobo's Dungeon, at first glance, seems to be a game suffering from an identity crisis. On the one hand you have its rather twee pastoral setting, its squeaky-voiced characters and its cute-as-a-button protagonist. On the other you have core gameplay which is loosely based on an ancient PC game called Rogue, which was renowned for its punishing difficulty.
The 'roguelike' genre still has a cult following, but its games are generally extremely niche, attracting only the hardest of the hardcore. The sort of people who are happy to put up with often infuriating difficulty curves and dull, featureless random dungeons for the satisfaction of simply getting through alive. Yet the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games, essentially hugely simplified roguelikes, have achieved plenty of success, so perhaps Square-Enix still feels that there's an audience out there for such a game. Fortunately for the publisher, that audience includes us, because Chocobo's Dungeon - despite plenty of hair-tearing moments - is a superior example
of the genre."
