RetroPiece Theater: Chibi-Robo!

Rolling out a new blog series this year that merges my recurring RetroAchievements rundowns with a retro game review format. I'm going to try and publish two of these a month, one exploring an old favorite while the other examines a game that's new to me.

Chibi-Robo! (Skip, 2005(JP)-2006(NA/EU))

It's an auspicious time for little automaton fans as the original GameCube Chibi-Robo! saw its North American release twenty years ago this month (its 20th anniversary in Japan was last June, and the typically tardy Euro release will see its 20th in late May) so what better time than to jump into the micro-world of everyone's favorite inch-high cleaner guy? Both the GameCube and Wii run together in my head somewhat—both were renowned for their first-party games, as was the case for pretty much any Nintendo system, but also for a gaggle of eccentric titles whose developers probably figured they would fit best in the wholesome corner of the industry Nintendo had built for themselves after (temporarily, as it may yet turn out to be the case) losing their overwhelming dominance during the divisive N64 era. A while ago I posited that there might exist "the most GameCube game" and tried to narrow down precisely what I meant by that, and Chibi-Robo! is one I championed as a possible exemplar: a small, cute underdog working hard to find an undiscovered niche to fill in lieu of anything more reliable by way of the ongoing, usually multiplatform third-party fare that had previously established themselves elsewhere.

Back to Chibi, though. He's a tiny android that is bought by the Sanderson family to keep their home clean and tidy, albeit via one tiny crumb and paperclip at a time owing to his minuscule stature. Like The Borrowers, Chibi-Robo turns out to be surprisingly adept at communicating with beings small enough to escape humanity's notice including several sapient toys, a few animals, and his fellow synthetic kin. Chibi-Robo! initially sets itself up as a quirky 3D platformer with gigantic human furniture presenting your obstacle courses but you quickly discover that the structure is closer to a Zeldersatz with plenty of NPC side-quests and other objectives to fulfill, in addition to the game-wide task of cleaning up garbage. As you take on more assignments you'll find you're never short of goals to chase after and therein lies the game's "Buridan's ass" trap: you need to constantly retreat to plug sockets to recharge before you completely lose all power, as being caught short will have dire consequences (the permanent loss of a Retro Achievement for that run, for one). Thus, having many targets on your agenda at once might tempt you to push yourself to the very limits of your power supply: the dangerous thought of "well, if I'm trekking all the way to the second floor, I should try to do all three items on this list of shit I need to accomplish up there" could have you running yourself ragged with little juice to spare. The game doesn't really have any challenge to speak of for the patient and judicious, but those little efficiency snares are ubiquitous for those of us prone to overreaching.

The toothbrush is but one of many tools Chibi-Robo ends up repurposing for his own ends, and it's with the slow acquisition of these tools that the game feels closest to a Zelda.

All the toy NPCs have their own personalities and storylines to discover, and meeting a new one is always an event.

Even if you're being smart about your dwindling volts, any lack of challenge is quickly made up for by the game's charms, genial sense of humor, and an expanding lore of sorts behind what's going on with these little alien spider dudes everywhere, the domestic travails of the otherwise close Sanderson unit, specific varieties of drama between the collection of toys that have spread out from the child Jenny's room to fill the halls and living areas of the family home, and perhaps a few secrets about Chibi's own modular construction and the innate potential of even the most diminutive of clankers. The game helpfully lets you track all this via a set of stickers, which are more or less a prototypical version of achievements: you get one each for concluding the various sub-plots/quest chains occurring with the toys as well as general ones for completing mini-games with a high enough score or by finding full sets of collectibles, such as a group of ten frog rings you need to deliver to the Sanderson child, Jenny, to break her "frog wizard curse" and stop her (temporarily) responding to everything with "ribbit". Having in-game achievements presumably made things much easier for RA's worker bees to put this set together, which I'll of course briefly get into in the rundown below this review.

Chibi-Robo! remains notable for its open-world approach to adventure gaming, along with a still relatively novel day/night cycle that determines when certain NPCs become available to progress their storyline (the toys, true to Toy Story rules, won't respond or act if there's a human nearby), that strictly limits what you can do and where you can go at first in order so that the lifting of those restrictions feels all the more freeing. It's also funny, in a frequently dorky way, and has a positive message of spreading happiness through helping others at its core that probably made it far too wholesome for any other platform to unironically host beyond Nintendo themselves. It is the quintessential Nintendo GameCube experience. Just, well... if you decide you want to wait for a remastered or fan-patched version that lets you move through the game's many lines of text dialogue faster I certainly wouldn't blame you. OH!

RA Challenges

"Unbreakable"

There's only one serious RA-only challenge (that is, it's not baked into the game's own sticker collection) and that's reaching the game's conclusion without ever "dying". Unlike a lot of no-death runs it's pretty easy to stay on the side of the angels here (figuratively rather than literally, anyway) since you can just reload the last save if you ever mess up and run out of juice. Besides falling from high places or greatly underestimating the power consumption of certain actions—using the Utilibots to extend a bridge or ladder, for example—it probably won't be a factor if you're careful enough anyway. Still, they had to think of something for this mostly adventure-based game and I'm glad it was this rather than trying to no-damage that final boss or go harder on the mini-games beyond what's needed for their related stickers. Earning an S rank on the spaceship mini-game is hard enough already.

"Auditory Overload"

This one's a fascinating inclusion, and by fascinating I mean the "plenty of comments on the RA site suggesting its removal from the set" type of fascinating. It involves yelling loud enough into your GameCube mic to cause Chibi to collapse in terror. Now, you might be wondering a couple of things: how would that work with an emulated version, and how many people playing this on for real hardware even have a compatible GameCube mic for that matter? Well, I can answer the latter in the affirmative for my personal situation at least (thanks Odama) but the former requires some tinkering with Dolphin's peripheral settings and, ideally, a USB mic plugged in. There does also exist a workaround via the Stereo Mix options in your PC settings and I managed to freak out Chibi with the dulcet tones of Vtuber Oozaru Subaru screaming her way through Super Mario World (man, I love that duck) so that's probably the most novel way I've earned one of these so far.

RA Discoveries

"Running Smoothly"

I 100%ed the game back in the day so there wasn't much in this set I didn't already know about—the vast majority of these achievements involves earning the aforementioned stickers, plus general milestones concerning cleaning, ranking up, and collectibles like the Chibi-Doors and the Happy Boxes. There is one exception and it's this one, which you can earn by spraying any Utilibot with oil once you have the syringe. It apparently cheers them up (because robots love mysterious oil you found on the floor?) and rewards you a small bunch of happy points. As I suspected, there's plenty of largely hidden avenues through which to earn additional happiness in the Sanderson household: an ubiquitous resource required for the in-game ranking system, which in turn expands your all-important battery limit. On that note, there's also the achievement "Well Fed Fish": I knew you could feed the fish in the kitchen cookie crumbs for happy points, but maybe I never gleaned the fact that if you keep doing it they'll eventually breed more fish and you can earn more points with each feeding (8 per fish).

The only Nintendo cameo in the entire game is... that eggplant guy from Wrecking Crew. Who else do you really need?

With that mastery, I'm now ready to someday tackle the fan translation of the second DS sequel, Okaeri! Chibi-Robo! Happy Richie Osoji!, which follows after the gameplay of this original (rather than the more divergent and not-so-arguably lesser takes offered by Park Patrol, Photo Finder, and Zip Lash) and even has a higher Metacritic score, so that's encouraging.

As for what's next on RetroPiece Theater for the end of February, well, I gotta do something to celebrate Konami's big return to the fold and I've just the bushy-haired thief in mind for the job...