Cube Chronicles: Part 5 — Chibi-Robo!

The Nintendo Gamecube – the little purple prism that could...or couldn't. While the system's middling performance was a rough patch for The Big N, many young gamers grew up cherishing its library of games. But do they hold up today? Join Anthony on his quest to find out as he reviews every classic title offered on Switch 2's Nintendo Classics service

It was another day in 8^th grade, and like any other brooding fourteen-year-old, I was miserable. The sands of time have long since obscured why, but I can hazard some guesses: the emotional rigors of puberty, rough time at school, nursing the heartbreak of unrequited love.  The usual suspects. Whatever it was, there I was at my local GameStop, out with my Mom and partaking in some retail therapy.

“I’m having kind of a bad day”, I tell the cashier as I hand over my game of choice.

He smiles as we finish the transaction. “Nothing perks up a bad day like a new game.”

How right he was.

Chibi-Robo!, the game in question, stands as the most niche addition for Nintendo Classics’ GameCube lineup. Only the upcoming Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance could challenge that claim, yet Fire Emblem’s eventual vindication as a Nintendo tentpole stands in stark opposition to how Chibi-Robo!, well, never took off. Oh, how they tried: the titular Chibi-Robo character is mascot-coded top from bottom, with its teeny-tiny body adorned with itty-bitty eyes and teensy-weensy limbs, topped off with a cute foreign name that rolls off the American tongue. (“Chibi” being informal Japanese for “small”, albeit moreso associated with deformed, hyper-cute art styles found in anime, games and manga of all sorts. Chibi-Robo! doesn’t quite fit that mold, but the name’s stuck.)

Alas, it was never meant to be. Chibi-Robo! first arrived in Japan in summer 2005, when the GameCube’s waters had begun to recede. With the advent of HD and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess’s delay, users began to move on, and the little purple cube that couldn’t lost what little steam it had by 2006’s Western release. Such were the cards the series’ debut was dealt, leaving us with a curious oddball idolized only by a niche, dedicated cult as microscopic as Chibi-Robo itself. (The series itself is another story, although we’ll dive into that later.)

Those who fell into said cult, though? Boy, did we love it. Having considered myself a young ambassador to cult RPG hit EarthBound, I was hardly stranger to such curiosities, and it was little wonder that Chibi-Robo, the 10-centimeter eponymous robot, marched past my gloom and plugged itself into my heart. From the day’s beginning, I was but an irritable adolescent; by the night’s end, my best friend and I were eagerly theorizing that Sophie, the game’s lovestruck caterpillar chew toy, was an Eldritch monster confusing love with hunger. (A conspiracy that, I confess, still holds merit. Maybe.)

Here’s how it works: Chibi Robo, a little household assistant who costs an arm and a leg, spends its days cleaning up after the Sanderson family. Day and night, it picks up trash, interacts with talking toys, dons costumes, fends off robotic spiders, mends a broken family, and even dives into its ancestry – all the while earning Moolah for trinkets and Happy Points to climb up the ranks for Super Chibi-Robo stardom. Delightful comic adventures and poignant drama ensue.

Here's the catch: Chibi-Robo runs on a battery, and every step and action it takes depletes its energy. Only by plugging in its cord – dangling from its rear like a tail – can Chibi-Robo recharge. But for a pocket-sized robot, socket distance can prove fatal. Thankfully, your battery limit can be upgraded as you ascend the world rankings, but you’ll learn to be as economically frugal as Mrs. Sanderson in whatever action you take. Climbing that tassel? Descending the basement stairs? Choose your day goals wisely, because the day/night cycle consists of a five-minute time limit. (Another feature that, thankfully, can be upgraded; personally, I’ve found ten minutes to be a good balance.)

Being cast with such a diminutive avatar, Chibi-Robo! appropriately sets the Sanderson household on a grand scale in everything from Jenny’s automated playsets to the backyard’s towering tree. Perhaps owing to the game’s point-and-click origins, objectives are nebulous, leaving players to wander about the house and explore every nook and cranny. Refuse, crumbs and stains become as valuable as the spare change littered about, rapidly accumulating Moolah and Happy Points with every visit to the nearest garbage can. With every opened shelf, every beam ascended, an addictive gameplay loop emerges.

Some have trouble pinpointing where Chibi-Robo! falls in the pantheon of game genres, but director Hiroshi Moriyama pegs The Legend of Zelda as its source of inspiration, describing it as a “Zelda but without the battles”. Indeed, there’s distinct parallels to Shigeru Miyamoto’s famous hakoniwa – miniature garden – philosophy: each room of the Sanderson household is a puzzle much as they are inviting playgrounds, installed with innumerable secrets and tells that prod at your curiosity. Gadgets in propellers and blasters pave the way for new shortcuts and areas to cover, and just like the similarly-offbeat Majora’s Mask, the events and going-ons shift depending on both story progression and the time of day.

Marrying the wonder of Toy Story with Pikmin’s time-based management and Zelda’s discovery, Chibi-Robo is weird as it is heartwarming; cute as it is sobering. From the verbose language of its soundtrack to its Western-based setting and character design, it is profoundly expressive, evoking a sincerity even its critics can’t deny as anything but charming. Merely observe how the game’s musical phrasing brings it to life: like the mickey-mousing of an ancient Silly Symphonies cartoon, instrumental cues accompany every one of Chibi-Robo’s actions, from guitar-jamming for toothbrush cleaning to ragtime piano for spoon-digging. Even against the ticking clock and the risk of battery depletion, you cannot help but play along to its rhythm, right down to Chibi Robo’s footsteps conducting a tempo-based variety of sound. (My favorite being the fragile glockenspiel for the patio and basement.)

Chibi-Robo! is often cited for tackling issues typically foreign to the Nintendo pantheon, not the least in its dysfunctional family in the Sandersons. Be it little Jenny, acting out with her frog outfit as she communicates via ribbiting (a cry for attention, or retreating into a fantasy world amidst marital conflict? I’ll let you decide); Mrs. Sanderson, frustrated between rising bills and a tiring family as she contemplates divorce, and Mr. Sanderson, painfully oblivious to the familial strife he’s causing as he shovels down junk food and binges Drake Redcrest cartoons like the manchild he is. Chibi-Robo is the catalyst much as it is the antidote to their long-building problems, navigating through their compelling TV drama as yet another mess to clean up.

Not that it’s ever a cynical venture, with our constant reprieve found in the game’s gallery of talking toys – be it the egg-shaped soldiers at war with the family dog, a tale of forbidden love in a beautiful princess doll and a monster movie mummy, and the nectar-addicted teddy bear whose cravings produce spontaneous violence. All are as colorful as they are funny, humanized in complementing the broken Sanderson family with their respective brands of existentialist dilemmas. It helps that, barring a painfully off-key vocal song, the top-notch localization is ridiculously funny: Drake Redcrest’s self-indulgent ponderings over justice are a standout, but I’m also fond of the biting political satire found in fictional news program "Faux News".

Putting it this way: can love bloom between a caterpillar and a Super Sentai chicken? Likely not, but gosh, do I want to find out what happens next.

It’s here that the heart of Chibi-Robo! unveils itself. The Happy Points so integral to the little robot’s success are often earned from cleaning to scavenging, yet robotic chorework means little when faced with the more rewarding goal of making others happy. The gameplay incentive is compelling enough: becoming Super Chibi-Robo is impossible without solving each character’s respective story arc, so there’s no reason not to play miracle worker. But when coming across Jenny crying alone at night, you’d have to have a heart of stone not to set things right for the sake of it.

Chibi-Robo! may mystify with its experimentation: progression can be cryptic, combat feels clunky and tacked-on, and it gets talky. Really, the game just loves to talk, not the least in its bad habit of slow-crawling dialogue for emphasis – frustrating sequences that you can’t even skip. In an age ripe with quality-of-life accommodations, Chibi-Robo!’s conveyor belt of mandatory five-second sequences can prove irksome. (Thankfully, there’s nothing to fear with the emulation: barring some timing exercises with Drake Redcrest, Chibi-Robo! requires little of the precision necessary for F-Zero GX or Soul Calibur II, so input lag is largely a non-factor.)

But Chibi-Robo!’s checklist of puzzles and tasks isn’t just fertile ground for completionists; nay, it’s how in that as every character relates their problems in their funny Banjo-Kazooie gibberish, I find myself genuinely wanting to improve their lives. I help disillusioned toy soldiers,  having a crisis of faith with their military careers, find new work. I search high and low for Jenny’s Frog Rings so she can find her voice. I recharge the battery of a long-lost family member to reunite them with the Sandersons. In planting the seeds of found family, the hakoniwa that is the Sanderson household blooms with a brilliant field of flowers.

Sadly, Chibi-Robo!’s altruism never achieved the stardom found in-game. Sequels desperate to capitalize on the character’s mascot appeal sought different directions, seeking that elusive secret ingredient that’d surely catch the world by storm. It never paid off: everything from AR trivialities to clunky sidescrollers flunked at retail, succeeding only in turning off the franchise’s already-niche fanbase. (Only the Japan-only DS sequel, Okaeri! Chibi-Robo! Happy Richie Osoji! – rechristened as “Chibi-Robo: Clean Sweep” via fan translation – directly followed in its footsteps, although I’ve yet to try it for myself). With the decade-long push for Chibi-Robo! ending in failure, developer Skip disappeared from the gaming market.

Could a Chibi-Robo! exist today? While it’s difficult imagining Nintendo to go grave-digging for a fruitless property, this industry has witnessed enough forgotten IPs rise from the ashes for us to quote the old adage: “never say never”. Indeed, seeds of hope have begun to sprout in spiritual successors: Misc. A Tiny Tale, an indie venture starring a little robot exploring the outdoors, released this year to positive reception, and former Skip developers are revisiting the “tiny robot meets struggling family” concept in the Kickstarter-funded KoRobo. Both are wisely built off the bones of the first game, seeking to meld their new hakoniwas with a blossoming, beating heart.

But sometimes, franchises come and go, and it may well be that Chibi-Robo! will stand as one of many gaming curiosities that failed to penetrate the barriers of capitalism. Whether it was bad business sense or an esoteric appeal, I’m not too vexed about it: that this tiny act of kindness existed at all is enough, and its early representation on Switch 2’s GameCube library must surely indicate Nintendo’s recognition of the used market: at the very least, no longer do you need to sell an arm and a leg to buy a secondhand copy off eBay. (Well, aside from purchasing a $500 console and subscribing to a $50 annual service in this unpredictable age of economic anxiety, but you know what I mean.)

I mean, hey, it made my day better. True to its mission statement, Chibi-Robo! may do just the same for you. Spread the happiness.