I should not be sitting at work and have the word “chocobos” pop randomly into my head. That’s just not normal. And even if it is a normal thing, I shouldn’t have to put up with it.
But there I was, thinking about NFS, and which protocols are enabled out of the box, and right then it pops into my head: Chocobos. I can’t figure any relation whatsoever.
Chocobos, for the unenlightened masses, are bird-creatures from the Final Fantasy series of games. They’re big things, and you can, at least in some of the games, breed them, and use them like horses. They’re like anime ostriches. No, they don’t transform. But like any good anime creature, they come in all sorts of colors. Default is yellow, but, through selective breeding, you can get a rainbow of colors. Oh, and abilities, because differently colored chocobos can do different things. Or access different areas, somehow. I don’t really know, because I couldn’t be bothered to spend even more time playing Final Fantasy VII just to breed birds. If I wanted to get to that level of obsessive detail, I’d play the Sim games. Or compare the drying times of various brands of paint.
Let me make something very clear: I rarely ever think of chocobos. In fact, I only think about them when they’re referenced in some way. Now, since I read articles about computer games, and news bits about computer games, and online comics about computer games, the term does come up every now and then. Not all that frequently, though. So there’s really no reason why the word should have popped into my head at that moment. I haven’t thought about Final Fantasy in a long while, and I haven’t played any Final Fantasy games in, well, a longer while.
Oh, no; I lie. I do play a bit of Final Fantasy: Tactics Advance on my Gameboy. But I haven’t seen hide nor feather of a chocobo in that game. You can’t buy any; no one rides through the battlefield on one…bah, no. I think I recall that there’s a Chocobo Rush spell that some character class can learn, but none of my party members have it. So, except for having that spell used against me once, I’ve had a chobobo-free experience. Plus, I play a few missions over the course of a week, get a bit bored, and put the game down for a while. It’s something like 100 hours long, so I think that I can be forgiven for that.
It’s a turn-based strategy game. Not real-time strategy, which is an evil genre spawned from Satan’s festering anal boils, which renders unclean all who partake of it. Plus, it’s made up of small scale battles, from four to six people per side, and not a freakin’ click-fest with armies of units flung from one side of the map to the other in a frenzied rush to stem the tide of enemy tanks with your crappy little buggies, which will probably be eaten by sandworms before they get there, and if they manage to avoid that will get stuck on a small rock and refuse to defend themselves because they’re just that stupid so all you get are warning messages stacking up while you’re desperately trying to building something of value but your stupid harvesters are stuck on different rocks and…
Er, sorry. Dune 2 flashback, there. So. Chocobos. No, I really have no idea.