Summon: Chocobo

Chocobos: Those giant yellow chickens that go 'kweh' or 'wark'

Appearances (as a summon): FFIII, FFIV, FFV, FFVII, FFVIII, FFXI

Boko the chocobo from FFVIII

The chobobos are one of the most instantly recognizable creatures from the Final Fantasy games. They are so popular and cute that they have spawned their own slew of spin off games. Within the main series of Final Fantasy games they are best known as steadfast mounts, useful for traversing the world without fear of pesky random encounters.

Chocobos do feature in several Final Fantasy games as summons. They are generally low level summons dealing weak non-elemental damage. In FFXI the chocobo is not actually a battle summon but rather an emote that summoners can use. The summoner can call forth a chocobo chick to land on their head. I think I would spam that emote. Mog teams up with Chocobo for a combo summon in Final Fantasy VII. This isn't the last time these two paired up in the games. The Chocobo summon in FFVIII took a bit of effort to acquire and isn't one of the standard Guardian Forces. For those, like myself, who played the original PS1 version of the game getting the chocobo summon was nigh impossible. A PocketStation peripheral was required in order to access a minigame where Boko, the chocobo summon, could be found. The PocketStation saw an extremely limited release in Japan and no release in the West. Interestingly Boko has several fire based attacks. Some times when a chocobo is summoned in battle the Fat Chocobo may show up instead. This is certainly the case in V, VII and VIII. The Fat Chocobo always deals more damage than a regular chocobo and, in the case of FFVIII, is able to exceed the game's damage cap of 9,999.

There isn't much to say about the origins of the chocobo's name. They were created by Koichi Ishii and the name may be inspired by Kyorochan, a mascot for 'Choco-Balls' Chocolate made by Morinaga and Company. Kyorochan is a bird like creature created in 1967 as an anime character to sell the chocolates. Kyorochan's predecessor, Chappy the space squirrel, just wasn't doing a good enough job. There was another anime series featuring the bird in 1999/2000. An example of how different Kyorochan is the the Chocobos can be seen in this commercial.

Kyorochan even had is own games.