Developers chose to portray the character Chibi-Robo as attractively as possible rather than creating a new character that could be commercially successful. The developers wanted to look at the role of Chibi-Robo from a "different perspective", with Chibi's role being on a much-larger scale than that of earlier games; Chibi is now saving the people of the world. The game was not created with a coherent series timeline in mind, opting instead to use Citrusoft, a company established in previous games, to tie Chibi into the world. However, they still wanted to keep some of the characteristics of Chibi-Robo, such as his role as a garbage cleaner. Throughout the game, Chibi interacts with a series of toys that appear within the levels. The toys were an idea of Skip Ltd., and were intended move when people are not present; Toby, a toy airplane, was used to demonstrate the concept in the E3 demo.
