I’m willing to bet that you haven’t played Chibi-Robo.
It’s fair to say that the game, released for the GameCube in North America in 2006, was always doomed to fail. It was the start of a new franchise with a strange gameplay loop released for a largely unsuccessful console at the tail-end of its lifespan. This all created a recipe for a surefire commercial failure — and what a spectacular failure it was, selling a measly 390,000 copies throughout its short time on store shelves.
With that said, I can’t blame you if you’ve never experienced Chibi-Robo. After playing through the game for myself, however, I feel it’s my duty to tell you that you absolutely should.
Chibi-Robo opens with its titular tiny, adorable robot being purchased for a little girl’s birthday in a suburban home in 2006. Chibi-Robo, a robot in a commercial line of identical replicas, finds itself purchased by the Sanderson family — consisting of the lazy and toy-obsessed Mr. Sanderson; his devoted yet frustrated wife Mrs. Sanderson; their frog-loving daughter Jenny Sanderson; and the family dog Tao.
As Chibi-Robo, you are tasked with making the Sandersons happy. This objective leads you to explore an oversized home from the perspective of a four-inch-tall robot. As you climb up enormous cabinets, find secrets under a giant bed and discover creative ways to manoeuvre around the Sandersons’ house, you’ll find various ways to improve the Sandersons’ lives. For example, you’ll use a massive toothbrush to scrub Tao’s muddy paw prints off the ground, pick up and dispose of trash lying around the house, plant seeds to harvest flowers for Mrs. Sanderson, explore the depths beneath the kitchen sink drain to find a lost wedding ring, help Mr. Sanderson cook the perfect burger and much more. Many of the tasks you complete are fairly rudimentary, yet there’s an undeniably cozy feeling to every job you finish. As you run into the Sandersons throughout the home, there’s a continued sense that you’ve become part of the family — an appreciated and welcome family member that everyone seems to love.
At nighttime, the household stays vibrant and alive as various toys spring to life. In the living room, you’ll find the action figure Drake Redcrest on patrol. Based on an in-game television superhero, the action figure believes himself to be the real Drake Redcrest and enlists Chibi-Robo on his quest for undying justice. Tao’s chew toy, Sophie, finds herself deeply in love with Redcrest, yet is too nervous to profess her feelings for him. A Barbie-like doll, Princess Pitts, watches over Jenny’s bedroom from the top of her castle, and you might want to help Mort — a mummified toy living in a shoebox under Jenny’s bed — build up the nerve to ask her out. Every room stays active through the night with unusual and deep characters containing their own motivations and interests, and the house is arguably even more exciting at nighttime because of it.
Perhaps my favourite toys to encounter were the Free Rangers, a legion of plastic eggs hell-bent on defeating the family dog Tao, who has kidnapped the smallest Free Ranger, Memphis. The Free Rangers claim the foyer as their base of operations, complete with toy guns used to defeat intruders — including Chibi-Robo, until you eventually befriend them.
As you venture into the storyline, you begin to realize that something troubling is surfacing. Indeed, not all is well in the Sandersons’ marriage: Mr. Sanderson is constantly between jobs yet spends all his money on toys, and Mrs. Sanderson is growing deeply frustrated with her husband’s immaturity. During the game’s opening acts, you’ll find him sleeping on the couch during the night, with Mrs. Sanderson sleeping alone in the bedroom. Eight-year-old Jenny, meanwhile, finds herself in the middle of the conflict, able to sense that something is amiss between her parents yet unable to express her feelings about it because she’s supposedly been “cursed” to only make frog sounds. It’s a strangely grim, realistic tale for a Nintendo game to focus on, which are often bright and bubbly in their themes, yet it made Chibi-Robo resonate with me even more.
Despite Mr. Sanderson’s half-hearted attempts to repair the marriage he knows is falling apart, their relationship continues hurtling toward divorce. Mrs. Sanderson eventually locks herself in her room and Mr. Sanderson begins sleeping in the hallway outside. He tries enlisting Chibi-Robo with tasks to help bring him closer to his wife, but at this point, she’s so finished with her husband that everything he attempts simply drives them further apart.
I don’t blame you if none of this sounds like fun. Divorce, and the effects that it has on children, are certainly not “fun” themes to explore in a video game. Yet, the true soul poured into the story, as well as the respectful way in which Chibi-Robo addresses its themes, drew me further into the game and its characters. I felt sorrow for Mr. Sanderson, who desperately wanted his relationship to survive yet couldn’t understand why his wife was falling out of love with him. I cared for Mrs. Sanderson, who had become rightfully fed up with her husband after years of coming second to his toys and collectibles. And I felt empathy for Jenny, as a child of divorce myself, understanding the pain she was experiencing at the hands of her parents while not being able to do anything about it.
Despite its consistent use of humour through its nighttime characters, it’s Chibi-Robo’s mature handling of difficult themes that solidifies the game as one of the strangest Nintendo products I’ve ever played, yet also one of the most beautiful. It’s a game that doesn’t shy away from being strange and difficult to explain; instead, it embraces its peculiarity and takes pride in its uniqueness. It’s entirely possible that this type of story ultimately hurt the game’s mass appeal — it’s hard to imagine GameCube buyers in 2006 lining up at stores to buy a game about divorce — but I argue that it was what truly made the game special.
There’s a lot more to be said about Chibi-Robo, but most of the excitement comes from experiencing the game’s quirkiness on your own. Some moments will leave you laughing, others will leave you in tears, and others will leave you wondering what the hell just happened, but it all culminates in an experience that deserves to be appreciated and celebrated even two decades after its release.
Considering the game’s massive commercial failure, we may never see another game quite like the original Chibi-Robo — but it still deserves to be cherished for what it is, even if we’re 20 years late.