Mento's Alternative to E3 2012: Day 2

Day 0 (daaaay oh) and Day 1. But you don't need to read those to understand this one.

Welcome to Day 2 of that event we're not talking about! Because I've spent an ungodly amount of today Chocobo grooming/racing in Final Fantasy XIII-2 (which is thankfully far more truncated than FFVII's similar mini-game) I'm going to settle an eternal rivalry once and for all: Which is better, Slime or Chocobo?

I'll be presiding over this throwdown by reviewing a series of categories with which to judge the superior of Square-Enix's duelling mascot characters, analysed on a case-by-case basis. We'll total up the pros and cons for both and finally get some closure on this super important imaginary beef between a sapient blob of gelatin matter and a big yellow chicken.

Function

A Chocobo provides a useful if limited form of conveyance in many of the Final Fantasy games they appear in. They might also be attached to fun side-quests, used for storage and, in the case of the game I'm currently playing, allow you to pass through areas without incurring the wrath of random encounters for a well-appreciated breather.

A slime will attempt to kill you, poorly. I think most of the reason why people find the Slimes adorable is because of how quickly you're able to overpower them in any given Dragon Quest game. But then you have the intensely annoying Metal Slimes and their deliberately vindictive bait-and-run-off tactics, and eventually the Metal King Slimes who tend to somehow be craven AND indestructable AND have all the best gear. Grrr.

Winner: Chocobo.

Variation

Chocobos will often have a range of different abilities that are represented by the colour of their plumage. In games where you're able to actually use Chocobos in battle, like Final Fantasy Tactics (and XIII-2, again), Yellow Chocobos are ubiquitous, Blue are powerful magicians, Red & Black Chocobos tend to be aggressive and impulsive warriors, Green & White Chocobos tend to be friendly and therapeutic and Gold and Silver are usually fairly rare breeds capable of grand tasks, like striding across the very oceans to deliver you to priceless materia with five minute long summon animations. There's also a fat Chocobo and little Chocobos and one called Boko that vanishes for most of FFV. Honestly, there's not a lot of variation here, and it's not like most FF games don't just settle for the plain old yellow Chocobos and completely disregard the entire range of polychromatic poultry.

Slimes have always displayed a dizzying amount of variations. They began as simple palette swaps, that oft over-relied upon implement in the monster designer's toolkit, but evolved creatively to include the health-restoring jellyfish Cure Slimes, the crown-donning King Slimes, the metallic Metal Slimes and the spotty Spotty Slimes. Maybe the names aren't imaginative, but the designs are.

Winner: Slime.

Spin-Offs

You know, the Chocobo games aren't too bad. Currently, we have a growing selection of Mystery Dungeon knock-offs (which also include the little guy's Pocketstation adventures that factor directly into Final Fantasy VIII) and one mini-game collection slash RPG for the DS that was kind of fun. I'm still not quite sure how a giant bird with no arms that's built to reach rapid speeds across vast expanses of land is meant to fight its way through the narrow corridors of a dungeon, but I'm clearly not the Chief Executive of Squeezing Marketable Characters Into Incongruous Roles of Square-Enix. Pity, because I hear that guy makes mad bank.

The Rocket Slime adventures blow those Chocobo games out of the water though. DQH: Rocket Slime for the DS is absolutely subslime sublime. They managed to turn those rictus-grinned little sociopaths into a sympathetic society of gregarious little critters that are thrown into turmoil by the all-powerful organized crime network of Platypunks and have to defeat them in a series of duel battles between fortress-sized tanks, including a giant tree tank named Chrono Twigger. It's absolutely delightful.

Winner: Slime.

Fattest Monarch

It's important for any sovereign state society to have a corpulent King or Queen. The more well-fed your monarch, the better it reflects on the wealth and the bountiful harvests and game-filled forests of your realm. The inclusion of Fat Princess in Super Sony Smash Bros is a clear indication that potbellied potentates are especially valuable to the greater world of video games. With that in mind, let's compare the respective rulers of the Chocobo and Slime societies:

King Slime is portly, even for slimes. You can tell this from his adorably chubby cheeks. However, beyond those and a rather fetching crown that evinces his station among the Slimefolk, there's little to distinguish him from other slimes. He's a considerably bigger Slime, sure, but that seems to be it. Call it a limitation of the Slime shape that all slimes just look the same. Or maybe I'm just a filthy slimist.

On the other hand Fat Chocobo is obviously not a normal Chocobo. It's perhaps not accurate to call him the King of the Chocobos, but he's still clearly their leader. Simply because he's considerably fatter in comparison to his svelte and physically active avian subjects, I'll have to give the point to Chocobos.

Winner: Chocobo.

Music

Slime doesn't really have his own theme song. We can go back to Rocket Slime, but most of its music was repurposed from earlier Dragon Quest games. Like Mario, the DQ games tend to remix their own memorable themes and ditties over and over and - also like Mario - it tends to work for enhancing that whole nostalgia-based self-obsessive singularity these long-running series tend to compact into after a while. Subsequently, the Slimes don't really have any sort musical representation or leitmotif to call their own.

Chocobos, however, do have their own very recognizable theme music. This also gets remixed a lot, often depending on the type of tone the new Final Fantasy wants to set this week. Here they all are in this handy YouTube medley. They get increasingly idiosyncratic - though this is also in part because the technological advances in video game sound chips and console audio systems provides more opportunity to mix things up a little.

The clear winner here, then, would be our fine feathery friends the Cho.. oh, wait. I forgot about this.

Winner: Slime.

Goddamn Slime Puns

Goo the jell-o figured the constant barrage of terrible slime puns could blobably ever be a gloop idea?

Winner: Chocobo.

Complicity in Creepy Chauvinism

So I think we have our winner. The incredibly dubious sexual innuendo (HE THINKS THEY'RE BOOBS) of the Puff-Puff club is clearly the wors-

Oh... No.

Winner: Slime

So let's tally up: That's four wins for Slime, three for Chocobo.

It looks like the Slimes won! So glad we were finally able to conclusively prove this. With science. So hey, maybe we should all collectively forget this blog ever happened? Onto Day 3 of E3!

BONUS COMICS!

The Witcher II: Assassins of Kings

Final Fantasy XIII-2