YMMV / Chocobo's Dungeon

• Awesome Music: Par for the course with Final Fantasy, although Fables in particular has some divine orchestrated remixes of well-known themes:
  • A remix of "Battle on the Big Bridge" which is used as a boss battle theme. The title of the remix itself contains a spoiler about who the aforementioned boss is, but still, it's worth listening anyway.
  • Last Battle, which is a remix of "Decisive Battle" (Final Fantasy V, battle against ExDeath).
  • Leviathan Battle, remix of "Battle with the 4 fiends" (Final Fantasy IV).
  • Phoenix Battle, remix of the Boss theme from Final Fantasy III.
  • "Door Crawl", the theme song of the game sung by Ai Kawashima.
  • Alexander Battle, remix of "A Contest of Aeons" from Final Fantasy X.
  • In Chocobo Racing, the final race track's theme song, "Illusion", is a remix of "This Is The Final Battle" (Final Fantasy III), with a touch of Kenji Ito.
  • Chocobo GP has several, but the biggest stand-out example is Accelerated Alexandria, a fast paced remix of "Melodies of Life" from Final Fantasy IX
• Badass Decay: Leviathan has a big role in Final Fantasy IV, being the King of Eidolons/Summoned Monsters. Then he's a whiny Optional Boss in Chocobo's Dungeon 2. He's much less whiny in Final Fantasy Fables, though. This characterization continues in Chocobo GP where most characters tend to forget hes even around, and his wife Azura is very much the one wearing the pants in their relationship.
• Damsel Scrappy: The Everybuddy version of Raffaello. He is (initially) a characterless baby, who constantly, constantly, runs off without warning into dungeons, forcing you to risk your life to save him. Once he learns how to talk, he confirms that he's been doing that intentionally...and then does it again, never once asking how you feel about the situation. For some reason all the other characters love him (even though they've only known him for a day) and worry about him (even though he's clearly a magical being)...but they force you to be on the front-line of rescuing him (even though you're an animal, who doesn't even seem sapient at first, and they're fully capable fighters).
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Behemoths in Chocobo's Dungeon 2.
  • Komegas in 2 are an almost literal example: robot spiders that can shoot through you and hit your partner, and are very strong. If you're not up to fighting Superboss Omega, you'll have to get through all of these and pray Omega doesn't show.
  • Mandras in Fables, having projectiles, sleep, and a respectable amount of HP on top of being rather common enemies. Dragons trade sleep for slow, and can also recover their own status afflictions, but are mainly limited to the deeper floors of the "Guardian" dungeons.
  • Demons in Fables are a pain in the butt just for having the ability "Annul" which completely drains your SP gauge, forcing you to either take them out at range or just spend the time/resources to recharge the gauge. And they're fairly tough to boot.
• Fridge Horror: In CD2, killing an enemy by kicking a bottle at them nets you a bottle of red liquid, that enemy's 'essence'. Did... did the cute birdie just bottle up his victim's blood?
• Game-Breaker:
  • In post-game of the second game, you can replay the major dungeons playing as the sidekick you had when going there, all having their own abilities. You start alone with no items (you'll be asked to deposit your items otherwise they'd get deleted). The character begins at Level 1 and dying, exiting, retrying, or clearing the dungeon resets your level back to 1. Mog is assigned to the final dungeon. Seems hard huh? Except for the fact that his ability is stealing items from enemies, and early on you can steal a bunch of Level Up nuts and Hi and X-Potions. The final dungeon becomes rather easy.
  • Shirma meanwhile has no ability (back when you're Chocobo, her ability is casting Cure on you once per floor, recovering a chunk of HP, she can't do that in the mode where you play as her). To compensate, she has ALL magic feathers (meaning she can cast area-of-effect spells) and she starts at a decent spell level. But the true pull to her is that for some odd reason, her dungeon run has monsters dropping Mystery tags at a rather uncommon rate. Using a Mystery tag raises all spell levels by 1. This means she can pretty much raise her magic high enough to cause chaos, or alternatively, stock up so many Mystery tags and then escape the dungeon via a Teleport tag. Because items are kept when you escape or clear the dungeon, Chocobo now has access to these many Mystery tags!
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Lamias in the second game love to confuse you then smack you silly. Vampires can reduce your maximum HP, sometimes permanently.
  • Coeurls in Fables get two actions per turn and have specials to inflict Silence and Halt. Elementals take minimal damage from most attacks, but aren't particularly deadly themselves. Both can be terrors in the "1 HP only" dungeons, though.
• Narm:
  • Somehow, all the big threats and monologuing antagonists become considerably less impressive when you factor in that they're talking to a chocobo.
  • For example, the speech that the Phoenix boss gives before you fight it is instantly ruined on the first word by saying "Chocobo!..", and then it instantly becomes ridiculous, especially since some human characters at the start of the game are initially unsure if he can even understand spoken English.
• Nightmare Fuel: The dungeon shopkeeper in 2 is the Grim Reaper, named Life Keeper. He attacks you if you steal from him, attack him repeatedly, or stay on one dungeon floor too long, can morph every other monster on the floor into copies of him, and has insanely high attack, defense, and HP. What really makes him scary are the ominous messages when attacking him or staying on a floor too long, and that a weaker but still strong version of him called the Loot Keeper appears in random treasure chests and if you use or kick a Doom Card.
• Nintendo Hard: It is a traditional Mystery Dungeon roguelite game that heavily evokes Continuing is Painful with tough bonus dungeons after all...
• Paranoia Fuel: In the second game, the Grim Reaper can appear in random treasure chests and in a randomly-identifiable card item, making opening any chests or using any unidentified cards very nerve-wracking.
• Surprise Difficulty: Especially shocking for those used to its sister series, Chocobo's Dungeon leans a lot more into standard Roguelike fare^note most notably, losing a vast majority of your items if you die and is a lot less forgiving of recklessness than it's overall 'kiddie' appearance would indicate. Being walled by the first boss of Every Buddy isn't that uncommon to hear.
• Tear Jerker: In Fables, many times:
  • The history of Lostime itself turns out to be quite tragic.
  • Croma is nearly killed right in front of Shirma by the one she thought to be a friend.
  • In the final battle against the Destroyer, when Raffaello tries to regain control and yells at Chocobo to run. Even if it's not much of a tear-jerker, it's definitely sad.
  • Chocobo's Dungeon 2 has a cutscene where Shiroma says goodbye to Chocobo and reclaims her pendant. Chocobo does not take the impending separation well, and when she vanishes, he cries out into the wind and snow.
• That One Level:
  • The One-Hit-Point Wonder dungeons, where you can die from a single attack, but enemies get a chance to dodge.
  • In Fables, Claire's dungeon is among the worst of these. With ranged enemies, enemies that can easily outrun and overtake you, elementals that always take at least two hits to defeat, and monster houses all over the place that throw all of them at you at once (often impossible to avoid, if the staircase appears in the center of it all), there's no room for error. Even if you play a perfect game, enemy placement can put you into all sorts of unwinnable situations.
• Unexpected Character:
  • Chocobo's Mystery Dungeon: Every Buddy! allows even bosses to be buddies in your trek through dungeons. Who would've ever guessed that some of those bosses/buddies would be the bosses from the original Chocobo no Fushigi na Dungeon and Chocobo's Dungeon 2 (Devil Chocobo, Cryshale, Skullhammer, Glazguz and Eta) as extra bonuses?
  • In addition, Alpha from Final Fantasy XIV appears as a bonus buddy through Downloadable Content. Clearing a bonus dungeon included in the pack even allows the playable Chocobo to wear his Ironworks uniform.
  • Chocobo GP brought in a surprise by having the Black Mage of the game be Vivi Ornitier from Final Fantasy IX (rather than the Chocobo series' own Black Mage Croma), joined alongside Adelbert Steiner.
    • One of the last characters revealed for Chocobo GP was Mecha Chocobo, a boss mirage from World of Final Fantasy. Even in-game, the rest of the cast are surprised by it's inclusion and remain convinced that someone in Square's marketing department saw the design and forced it into the game based solely on its appearance.