[VARYING DEGREES OF STORY SPOILERS FOR CHIBI-ROBO: PLEASE PLAY IT IF YOU GET THE CHANCE, IT'S AN AMAZING GAME!]

This was an absolute favorite game of my childhood, one I held near the top, and always tried to tell people about how great it was and trying to give it more attention when I realized how obscure it was. However, like many games I loved as a kid, I never beat it. I used to game-hop a lot, whenever I would get stuck in one game, I would just transition to another, and often I would restart games multiple times because I enjoyed the feeling of those early levels so much before things got more complex or challenging. Which is why I wanted to go back and actually fully complete it, so I could prove I knew what I was talking about when it came to Chibi-Robo, and so that I could fully experience all the game has to offer. Revisiting the game confirmed to me that it is indeed still one of my favorites, and how impressive and charming it is, but also pointed out a few issues, nothing major, just things I didn't notice before, a lot of it that I never got to as a kid.

Let's go over the core of what Chibi-Robo is. Because this game isn't super popular, I'll explain the premise, which is that Mr. Sanderson of the Sanderson family purchases you as a birthday present for his little girl Jenny (who seems to believe she is a frog) which surprises Mrs. Sanderson because of budgetary concerns. Chibi-Robo and his "manager" Telly Vision are a popular line of assistant robots that help clean and maintain households. In split day-and-night cycles, you go around picking up trash, cleaning stains, talking to various characters, collecting and bringing them items, exploring, upgrading, using different suits, fighting robotic Spydorz, and learning more about what's really going on in the Sanderson household.

I'd most quickly describe the setting of Chibi-Robo as imagining a Toy Story-like world where a little robot helps humans, toys, animals, and more as a sort of intermediary counselor, resolving their dysfunctional relationships and solving their problems to bring resolution to their narrative arcs. The game presents itself as a cutesy robot cleaning the house and bringing happiness to people, and that is present, but it is part of a greater context. The cleaning is basically just grinding, to allow you to get more Happiness (the game's equivalent of EXP) or Moolah. It's not the core appeal of the game, it starts out as your intended function until you realize some more of what's actually going on in the household. Your real purpose is to fulfill everyone's narrative arcs, and you'll know you've done that when you've collected stickers. That means their plot is resolved. There is no reward for collecting all stickers, but they help signify you've done all you're supposed to for a certain character. That's what really keeps the game interesting. The cleaning would get boring fast. The exploring is really compelling, and the game's world is pretty big, but it's not big enough or interesting enough that you could just keep exploring it forever. What makes the game worth it are the stories involving this large cast of charming characters.

This game also has a really good progression system, which is part of why the real appeal is the stories because once they end and you get infinite battery power, the game loses a lot of its sense of consequence and appeal to continue (as it should) unless you really enjoy collecting reset collectibles again. You start out in just the Living Room, with a command hub for saving and purchasing, and with a tiny amount of battery power. You only get one room to start out in to get your grips on how traversing areas in this game works, and while the other rooms get opened up to you as story events unfold to keep you from venturing too far all at once, the more organic restriction is battery power. Instead of a life-bar or amount of hits you can take, your health is determined by a general-purpose battery life, which is used up by walking around, using equipment, taking damage, etc. So you can only do so much before you need to charge up somewhere and then resume your activities. It forces you to limit your actions carefully at first, but as new areas get opened to you and your battery life gets increased by reaching Happiness Point checkpoints, it organically increases the scope of what you can do before bothering to charge up again. It allows you to ease into being more ambitious in what you set out to do, and by later in the game you'll be able to do all kinds of stuff on just one charge when you could do barely anything before having to charge before. It also gives out various equipment, suits (which remind me of masks in Majora's Mask), utilibots, and purchasable items at a rate that feels like you ease into being able to use them instead of being overwhelmed at the beginning. It allows for natural growth of the game's scope, and in the way you choose to follow. The Utilibots are especially useful in cutting down time exploring to certain places that would stay tedious if you had to walk across them the same way each time.

The controls perfectly fit this kind of game. Chibi-Robo himself controls very well, he has really good momentum, especially how he approaches different surfaces, and he has a nice flow to whenever he's climbing or descending or anything. It sort of follows the Zelda rules (this game actually probably takes a lot from Zelda tbh) of no jumping but pushing forward toward something and then you climb it, and then you have to use hover to cross gaps or glide over to places. The system for swapping out equipment and suits and putting them away is really fluid and intuitive. It's very intuitive to use equipment (for the most part, sometimes there's a few things close together and it's hard to use the right thing in the right place) and to use suits. The way the plug works is really cool, Chibi-Robo has a plug as a sort of tail or something that drags along and you can pick it up to speed up and of course plug it into things. If one thing about control isn't the greatest, it's combat, which I'll get into a little later.

As I may have hinted, you eventually realize that all is not well in the Sanderson family, and it goes into topics you may not have expected from a game that looks the way it does. It's not super intense or incredibly sophisticated analysis of intricate themes, but it takes its themes a little more seriously and maturely than a lot of Nintendo games for kids would bother to go. What I'd say is that it genuinely bothers tackling emotions and themes in its stories most kids games wouldn't. Mr. Sanderson is an unemployed manchild who keeps buying toys he can't afford and trying to hide it. Jenny opens herself up only to you but is clearly very affected by the strife between her parents, and her frog fantasies may be an escape from that painful reality. Mrs. Sanderson feels completely burdened by the debt the family is in and annoyed at her irresponsible husband and bizarre daughter. She seriously contemplates divorce over their familial strife, and Mr. Sanderson has to try to prove himself to his wife in an effort to get her to reconsider. Among the toys, their stories involve unrequited love, self-image issues, isolation over physical abnormalities, the loss of a fellow soldier and the desire to avenge them, substance addiction, true death and the emotions of dealing with it, unfulfilled promises to a departed friend, and of course what drives a significant portion of the plot, the abandonment of the cherished Giga-Robo because he was too expensive to keep around. All these plots are great and I don't want to spoil too much of the intrigue in seeing them through on your own.

Another thing that really benefits this game is its style. Graphically, this game was not impressive at all at the time. Models are obviously not that high-poly, textures aren't the highest quality, objects collide through each other all the time, and there is a lot of reliance on reusing the same animations. And this game came out in America in 2006, when the Wii was already on the way and Xbox 360 was already out. I don't know if this was due to staff/budget/production time limitations or because the GameCube would have a harder time rendering so much at once or storing it all, or what. But this game overcomes graphical limitations with a strong emphasis on style. The characters have distinctive designs with strong personalities. They may be limited in the amount of animations they have, but the ones they do have are very expressive and indicative of what kind of character they are. You can feel a ton of personality from how everything is designed and animated. Color choice is vibrant and atmospheric, and the various areas are super pretty to look at and well-designed to traverse and explore, even if every now and then some part doesn't look quite as great or is a little odd to get around. It's also useful how whenever you're behind something there's a sketch-style outline of your character to indicate where you are, the camera is generally great but sometimes it has issues so this helps a lot.

Another really strong element of this game's style that needs to be noted is sound. The soundtrack and sound design on this game are top-notch. Once again, often there are a limited amount of sounds for things. Characters will use a sort of Banjo-Kazooie style of talking with randomly selected sound clips. There are only so many so whether a character is shouting or talking normally or talking slowly it will just use whatever and fill it out to whatever length the speech needs to be (reminds me that it would be nice if you could go through some text faster). But each one is great. The sound clips for each character are distinctive, easy to remember yet perfectly fitting for the character. Sound cues for everything are well-considered, the sounds for like going through menu's and choosing answers are so infectiously charming. Chibi-Robo himself is extremely musical, his footsteps create little musical notes, and the instrument changes based on what textures he's walking on. Using certain equipment will play certain melodies. Even warnings for falling off a ledge, climbing a rope, taking damage from a fall, charging up, they all have a musical quality to them, and it all flows perfectly. The game just has a really pleasant sonic soundscape to it, even the more ambient sounds are great.

Now it's time to get a little more into detail with how I feel about the end of the game (without spoiling too much) and covering what I feel may be some of the game's faults. For the time being, this is still in like my top 3-5 GameCube games but there are some things I've noticed about it that could be potential issues. So the game's main story (which I do encourage you focus on after you complete some side-quests, they're not as fun to do once you've beaten the game) really kicks off when Mrs. Sanderson gets frustrated at Mr. Sanderson's continued spending and suggests divorce may be possible. And let's just say some pretty out-there elements get involved afterwards, though ones that were hinted at earlier on in the game. These are mostly fantastic in bringing some diversity to the game, though one of the elements (I think you can infer what I mean if you've beaten the game) seems cool at first, but doesn't do much towards the rest of the game aside from setting in motion some stuff you can do later. It's nice that it exists but I wish it wasn't so limited a thing for how much it's built up. But what this all leads to is a climactic finale, to solve the main narrative concern and provide something epic from a gameplay perspective in the form of a final boss. And I'd say, this may be the weakest part of the game. And that's because it has to do with combat.

Combat is probably the least interesting thing in Chibi-Robo. Even more so than cleaning. To give Chibi-Robo a more adversarial threat, there are these robotic Spydorz he has to fight, that he can use for scrap to make new stuff. In theory it's a great idea, but fighting the Spydorz is not that interesting, because combat hasn't been fleshed out in this game. You just sort of equip your blaster and then you can fire either normal shots or charged shots, but in third-person you pretty much just run around, shake them off if they get on you, and hope you can line your shot up to blast them. In first-person, you can't move around, and the Spydorz move a lot, so you'd have to really position yourself in the right way to start shooting them with precision. It becomes just sort of a necessary thing to do that isn't super interesting, and you eventually get a suit that can just kill them all at once. So now we get to the finale of the main game, and I guess they wanted to have something big to build up to in a more traditional gameplay perspective, and that it could tie into the family drama and resolution as well. Narratively it mostly works. It kind of happens suddenly that you're thrust into these final events, but the characters respond to them really well, and the way it brings the family together to understand each other and take responsibility in a crisis situation, and the atmosphere of it all, is solid. The problem is the gameplay doesn't make it feel as satisfying, and it feels like the kind of finale that the game just "has to do" but if they had the opportunity they probably could've done it better or built up to it better. That's because the combat was never fully fleshed-out, and the game up until this point didn't push combat as a big enough deal. Suddenly you're fighting tougher enemies that you have to more seriously evade their moves and launch a few hits at them to kill them, and you have to clear a couple before you can move on. And the combat is implemented a bit clumsily and you don't really feel prepared for dealing with this kind of gameplay. And as soon as you start getting used to it, you don't have to deal with those kinds of enemies anymore, you're on to the final boss. And this final boss is pretty lame. Because it's the only boss in the whole game, so clearly bosses couldn't be focused on properly. You just sort of strafe in a circle in an area that's too small and shoot at it when it's vulnerable and escape if it traps you. And then it changes form, and you move around a little more and dodge as you shoot at it, but not a lot changes. Only truly stressful thing was potentially running out of battery. And then you defeat it and the family is saved. And then the inevitable happens and you get the chance to restore Giga-Robo and the family is in harmony and the credits roll and you can continue anything you meant to do after you beat the game. The game losing consequence after you beat it is understandable. But it's the boss, it's not terrible or anything, it's just underwhelming and it makes the ending feel a little anti-climactic. The game has a sort of vignette feel that could've fit some of this kind of content well, but not at this point, that's supposed to be the exciting climax. It makes the ending feel a little less impressive. Especially because there's actually a little bit of downtime between beating the boss and reviving Giga-Robo, that kind of lets the emotions cool down too much.

But overall this hasn't really diminished how much I love this game. It's a stylistic, charming, and quirky open-world, narrative-focused, puzzle-adventure game. The stories and writing and visual flair and sonic landscape are great, the characters are compelling and memorable, and the game creates a nice atmosphere throughout its areas. It's a little rough around the edges and could've done with some polish, especially in making combat and the climax more impactful, but I still love it, and I absolutely recommend it to everyone. Give it a try if you have the chance.