The Chocobo Was Not Inspired by Nausicaä, Apparently?
This is a post about video game birds: Final Fantasy’s Chocobo, which is more famous, and WarioWare’s Pyoro, which is less famous. Initially, I planned to write something short and simple, along the lines of “Hey, did you know these two seemingly unrelated video game characters share a mutual inspiration?” And I’ll mention that, but as I dug a little further, I realized that what was more surprising about this particular matter was that the thing that seemed like the obvious pop culture inspiration maybe wasn’t, despite all logic saying it should be.
In my post about WarioWare, I called little witch girl Ashley the breakout character of the series. But she’s not the only WarioWare character of note. There’s also Pyoro, a sort of penguin-looking bird who has a Yoshi-like tongue — and a surprising connection to the Chocobo.
Usually, this little guy usually does not exist in the same reality as Wario and his buddies do. He’s the star of a video game within the world of WarioWare, and the first entry in the series opens with Wario being inspired by Pyoro to create his own software studio. Once every microgame in WarioWare has been unlocked, the player is gifted their own Pyoro copy to play and enjoy. And the game is an arcade-style affair where Pyoro eats vegetables falling from the sky, before they hit the ground and take away one of the spaces he can walk on.
Some version of the Pyoro game has been present in nearly every subsequent installment of the WarioWare franchise. In WarioWare: Get It Together!, he’s even playable in a way that crosses the boundary from video game character to just another of Wario’s weirdo friends.
But surely Pyoro does not exist in a vacuum and was inspired by some other pop culture entity, no? Yes! Both his look and his name seem to be a riff on — if not an outright parody of — Kyorochan (キョロちゃん), the parrot mascot of the Japanese candy company Morinaga, the logo for which is, confusingly, a coquettish flying baby. Kyorochan’s names comes from the Japanese sound symbolism word kyorokyoro (きょろきょろ), meaning “looking around restlessly.” While the character debuted in 1968, when Kyoro replaced the original mascot, Chappie, a squirrel appearing in the anime Space Boy Solan, he didn’t take off until a 1987 commercial, and unless I’m mistaken, it’s this one.
I’m not going to pretend I understand what’s happening in this ad, but I will at least admit that’s a damn catchy jingle. Notably, while the company Kyoro serves is Morinaga, your ears may have caught the precise product he’s hawking: Chocoball (チョコボール), a round, peanut-chocolate treat. But that name should sound familiar to scholars of video game history, of course, because it’s also the source of the name of what might be the most iconic bird in video games: Final Fantasy’s Chocobo (チョコボ).
They may not resemble each other a whole lot — the Chocobo looks more like a yellow chicken crossed with an ostrich than anything — but longtime Square employee Koichi Ishii stated in a 2008 interview that when designing the bird for its debut in 1988’s Final Fantasy II, he was inspired by both Kyorochan and a pet chick he’d had when he was a kid.
Left: Yoshitaka Amano concept art for the Chocobo in Final Fantasy III. Right: The Final Fantasy VI Chocobo sprite.
From the first volume of the Final Fantasy 20th Anniversary Ultimania series, as translated by the website Kanabits:
It was originally modeled after a chick I got at a festival when I was in elementary school. I loved that thing so much. I made a little cardboard house for it and everything. But after raising it to adulthood, I came home from school one day to find it gone. When I asked my mom, she told me it had gotten too big to take care of and that she had given it away to someone in the neighborhood who raised chickens. I was crushed. Looking back at it now, I don’t think I’ve ever stopped thinking about that chick. I can still picture it clearly in my mind. … As I was drawing up the pixel art, I was singing the jingle from that one Chocoball commercial where they go kue kue kue, and I just thought “Hey, ‘Chocobo’ could work.”
In English localizations, the Chocobo’s squawk is usually rendered as kweh, but in Japanese, both the Chocobo and Kyorochan’s sound is rendered as クエッ, which I’ve seen rendered as kue, kwee and quee, depending on who’s writing it out.
I’m not sure if what you hear in this commercial represents how a Chocobo is supposed to sound, how an ostrich actually sounds or both.
While Ishii didn’t say so definitively, it really does seem like the Chobo’s call was lifted directly from Kyorochan, but if you look around online even today, you’ll find speculation that the various renderings of the name might all be a tip of the hat to the fact that Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind features a similar-looking bird creature named Kui (クイ). On paper, it seems plausible that Kui and her ilk could have inspired the Chocobo. In fact, it’s no stranger an explanation for how a video game character got its name than you’d read in any other post on this site. However, I’m not sure this is necessarily true, even as obvious as the connection might seem at first glance.
In the Nausicaä anime (released 1984) as well as the manga (debuting in 1982), characters ride around on ostrich-like birds called Horseclaws — in Japanese, トリウマ or Toriuma, literally “bird horse.” Given that Final Fantasy II hit shelves four years later and given how similar Horseclaws function to the Chobobo, it should seem weird that Ishii doesn’t cite Nausicaä as an inspiration at all. Even if the manga managed to fly under his personal radar, the movie was a box office success in Japan that also led to the founding of Studio Ghibli, which only became more famous in the next four years with the release of bigger hits Castle in the Sky, My Neighbor Totoro and Grave of the Fireflies. Nausicaä really seems like the kind of thing a guy with a flair for fantasy storytelling would have caught at some point. On top of that, it also seems unlikely that two different creators — Ishii and Hayao Miyazaki, who wrote the Nausicaä manga — would separately come up with the idea of fantasy heroes riding around on ostrich-like birds. And don’t try and blame the ones in Joust, either, because it only hit arcades in September 1982, seven months after the Nausicaä manga debuted.
All that said, the fact that Ishii so freely credits Kyorochan as the inspiration for the Chocobo makes it seem like he has no qualms on admitting what media influenced him. In fact, in that same interview I excerpted a few paragraphs ago, Ishii cites the horse Thunderbolt from the Wild West manga Kōya no Shōnen Isamu as what inspired him to create an animal character who could be the hero’s partner and companion — more than a beast of burden and even more than a pet.
Of course, that’s not what we see in Final Fantasy II. Ishii pitched his idea for how the Chocobo could work but was told no. As a result, his birds really are just modes of transportation with no meaningful connection to the story or the characters. This prompted Ishii to “correct” this with the version that appears in the first Seiken Densetsu game, over which he had more creative control. Here, it’s not *a* Chocobo but *the* Chocobo, a distinction that kind of works like our specific green Yoshi vs. the all the other ones, or the singular Pikachu vs. his generic brethren. In Ishii’s mind, his original conception of how the Chocobo should function wasn’t realized until Final Fantasy V, where protagonist Bartz begins the game adventuring with his trusty bird-steed, Boko. “Personally, I believe this is because the staff of FFV understood what I wanted to say in Seiken Densetsu,” Ishii says in that same interview.
So what the hell happened here? How do we account for the fact that the Chocobo really seems like it should be inspired by Nausicaä’s Horseclaws? Well, I have three options.
For one, I suppose there is a chance that the Horseclaws and the Chocobo truly were created separately, and it’s all just a coincidence. And for another, it’s entirely possible that Ishii is mistaken and just forgot to mention a very obvious connection between Final Fantasy and this famous, influential anime. He wouldn’t be the first. There’s a possibly apocryphal story about the origin of Pac-Man and pizza, for example, and in an upcoming history of a certain Super Mario character, I’m going to assert that the official story is just wrong, despite who associated with the company says otherwise.
Although it’s pure speculation on my part, I can think of a third explanation that accounts for the remarkable similarity without Ishii misremembering. I wonder if the rest of the FFII and FFIII staff, not knowing Ishii’s original intentions with the Chocobo, saw it more as a beast of burden because of the success of Nausicaä; they looked at his designs, and because they looked so much like Nausicaä’s Horseclaws, they treated the Chocobo as such. To be fair, Kui and her mate Kai both get character development in the manga, inasmuch as animals can grow as characters, but even with that considered, they don’t quite measure up to what Ishii has initially imagined. And they get less to do in the movie. They’re barely in it, in fact, and I could see someone watching it and leaving the theater just concluding that they’re animals being ridden as a means to an end. But yeah, I’m supposing it’s possible that in the absence of Ishii seeing his creation through the way he wanted, other people just pushed the Chocobo to functioning more like what they saw in Nausicaä.
If anyone else has any other theories, I’d be down to hear, but I guess I’m less interested in anyone conjecturing that Ishii purposefully obfuscated the origins, because why else would he be willing to own up to other inspirations?
Whatever the case, the Chocobo has thrived, in the Final Fantasy series and in various spinoffs as well. In fact, at one point, a collaboration between Square and Morinaga resulted in the product Chocobo’s Chocoballs — debut date unavailable, though it’s a marketing team-up that seems like it should have happened sooner than it did, whenever it did. I can only conclude that this would seem to affirm the Chocobo’s connection to the candy company — and enrage Wario that he has yet to benefit from any sort of commercial tie-in.
To tie it all back to where we began, I just think it’s interesting that WarioWare’s instigating incident is Wario seeing something out in the world and saying “yes that, but mine!” and turning it into a video game. But surely that is less a direct reference to the origins of the Chocobo than it is a commentary on the nature of video games in general. Right?
Miscellaneous Notes
Is there a more famous bird in video games other than the Chocobo? I’m trying to think of one and could only come up with Kazooie and Falco from Star Fox. For the sake of this argument, I will not accept the Angry Birds or Flappy Bird.
Earlier, I said that the Chocobo’s call usually gets rendered in English localizations as kweh, and while that seems correct to me, apparently it was rendered in early localizations as wark. I actually had trouble finding exactly when this began. Did the Super NES translations of FFIV and FFVI use wark? The earliest I could find was the [infamously bad] PlayStation localization of FFV, which I played back in the day but I don’t remember Boko saying wark. But clearly that’s what he said.
The debate over who prefers kweh and who prefers wark is ongoing, but apparently there’s a generic recruitable character named Clifton in the PlayStation Portable update to Final Fantasy Tactics who gives an in-universe explanation for the difference in calls. According to him, “The feral chocobo calls with a boisterous wark, not the domestic breed's mild kweh.” So there you go.
