Chocobo de Battle was a Chocobo fighting game in development by Square USA and to be published by Square Co., Ltd.. It was announced in Famitsu in 1997 and was meant to be Square's first arcade game and would have featured 3D graphics with the capacity to display a whopping 80,000,000 real-time polygons per second. A port for the PlayStation was also being considered.
The game had a behind-the-character view rather than a profile view. The screen was split when playing in versus mode against another player. There was no joystick or buttons—the characters were motion-controlled, with the player moving their hands in front of a blue-screened motion-sensitive area of the arcade machine to move their character and execute combos.
The game's roster consisted in various fighters battling each other while riding chocobos. Three characters had been revealed: a red demon wearing a horned skull covering his head and riding a black chocobo; a girl wearing a helmet, a crop top and shorts with "Hana" inscribed on it and riding a robot chocobo; and a human-like gorilla smoking a cigarette, wearing sunglasses, a leather jacket and blue jeans and riding another robot chocobo. In addition to typical close combat moves, the characters could also shoot missiles at each other from a distance. However, the game was canceled.
Etymology[]
The name "chocobo" derives from a Japanese brand of chocolate malt ball by Morinaga, ChocoBall (チョコボール, Chokobōru?). The mascot for this product is Kyoro-chan (キョロちゃん?), a bird who says "kweh".
食う / くう / kuu is a rough way to say "eat", whose volitional casual form is 食え / くえ / kue ("let's scoff 'em down!"), leading to Kweh!
Trivia[]
- Although the game was canceled, a Chocobo was included as a secret character in Square's 1997 fighting game Tobal 2 for the PlayStation.