- Joined
- Jun 18, 2018
- Messages
- 430
I got a Switch as my gaming-thingy for traveling back in 2017, when Steam Deck wasn't even a glimmer in Gaben's ballsack. As we all know its library is quite eclectic (and gotten even more so over the recent years), but it had its unexpected hits - such as Golf Story (for which we actually have a thread here). It's been a surprisingly fun game. Golf mechanics were on point, and the RPG elements were actually there - five stats you'd improve at level-ups + a number of woods/ irons/ wedges/ putters, some with special qualities, to juggle.
Come 2022, the game got its sequel, more generically-named Sports Story. I just played through it - and while it's far from perfect I've had quite a bit of fun with it. While golf is still the front-and-center sport here, there are also tennis, fishing, football, volleyball, biking, baseball, and cricket involved. A small write-up follows, but the tl;dr is that it's worth getting the game on a discount - although if you hadn't previously played Golf Story it might be the better point of entry into the series.
Come 2022, the game got its sequel, more generically-named Sports Story. I just played through it - and while it's far from perfect I've had quite a bit of fun with it. While golf is still the front-and-center sport here, there are also tennis, fishing, football, volleyball, biking, baseball, and cricket involved. A small write-up follows, but the tl;dr is that it's worth getting the game on a discount - although if you hadn't previously played Golf Story it might be the better point of entry into the series.
Got Balls?
The game picks up shortly after the first one left off, with the main hero going off for a "vacation" (which, as all golfers here are certainly aware is a codeword you use to hide that you're going golfing from your family*) with most of the main NPC cast from the first installment. What starts as attempts to procure oranges from tight-handed lifeguards - and involves a surprisingly solidly implemented volleyball match - quickly escalates into a ~25 hours epic involving woodcutters, miners, eldritch horrors from below the waves, signing up your life to an evil megacorp for all the right reasons, The Queen, Australia, and wizardry.
On this incredible journey, you will obviously resolve most of your problems via sports. Unlike in the Golf Story, though, there is much more emphasis placed on running around finding items and using them in the right spots. The way areas are handled is done a bit differently here, too - while in GS the whole continent comprised of a series of golfing fields, each having a set of its own subquests and minor challenges, in SS it's about 50-30-20 split between sports areas similar to the first game, dungeons and, uh, "others".
The nature of the game is much harder to define than the first one's. You'll still spend most of your time golfing (or playing other sports - as already mentioned golfing's front-and-center, though), but there is a lot (and I mean a LOT) of adventure-game-like fetch quests happening. Moreover, at some point, the game attempts to open up a bit and encourage you to explore one of its last areas, but it doesn't last long, and you're still gated from visiting certain locations by the need to finish specific quests anyways.
I think this identity crisis the game seems to have is one of the big clues that something went wrong during the development process.
* Or so I'd assume, as my only interaction with golf was building mini-courses as a kid, and playing them with a stick and tennis ball
Golf Your Problems Away
The game's attempt to cover a number of additional sports is charming, but I think it ended up in a failure. Authors of the game seem to be aware of that - e.g. during the final tournament you play golf-based versions of all the other sports.
You have tennis, which is mostly solid, but almost entirely limited to the tennis academy location. You also have volleyball, which is solidly implemented, but you only really play a single game of it throughout the entire game. One area is partially cricket-focused, but most of what you do there is stand in place and bounce balls. At one point you get a baseball bat, but you use it once, to bash some hardware being thrown your way. There are six bike races in the game, but they're all in a bit out-of-the-way places, and the only reason to complete them is to gain a bit more XP. Football boils down to either shooting penalties or running around kicking stuff through gates, and there again are only three or so places you can do it. Fishing is the only other one that got any love, but it's mostly story-focused, with your progression boiling down to bringing newly-found fish to raincoat-clad dudes.
As long as the game is about golf, it's fun. Tennis can be a bit hit-or-miss, as while the actual matches are nice, a bunch of sidequests requires you to hit something with the ball, and it's rather difficult to control. Others are just glorified interruptions, really.
This ends up feeling a bit strange. The first game was super golf-focused, but it also had its air golf (which was entirely different from the base version), GALF, and some one-off weirdness. Quite a bit of effort must've gone into coding up all the other sports (or at least skeleton versions of those), and the payoff is... not so great. You can even see it by how equipment is managed - there are still a few sets of golf clubs that can go into corresponding four inventory slots (and the accessory), but for all the others it's just a single item that unlocks the corresponding challenges, that there are no replacements for. Fishing allows you to upgrade your rod, but that's all.
Are Sports RPG?
Sadly, the RPG mechanics also seem to have been cut a bit, or at least slightly rebalanced. Gone are five statistics you could put points into as you level up. Now we're stuck with three, and we're not entirely free to bump them up as we see fit either. What's happening is that as your XP bar fills up, every now and then one of the stats will receive a +1. You can still manually add a point here or there after finishing up a major quest, but that's mostly it. Gone are the days when you could leave the first location being able to consistently pull off a 300+ yard drive.
I've already covered the equipment beforehand. One new addition here are special golf balls, which act as consumables. Those can help you ignore the terrain you're pitching from, guide themselves toward the hole, skim on water, etc. It's a nice addition, despite me never really using them too much due to the standard-issue RPG player hoarding mentality. It's also completely unnecessary - I was mostly saving them for the final tournament, which ended up not allowing you to freely select the balls you'd like to be using.
One last method to improve your character is license levels, but those mostly act as a parallel gating mechanism, encouraging you to stop and smell the roses by interacting with the side content. Every now and then you'll get a punch on your punch card, and once you get enough punch cards punched - you can get your license upgraded, unlocking new locations. It's very non-intrusive. I'm not a completionist, but the game's base gameplay is fun enough to warrant me looking for ways to engage with it; thanks to this I reached the highest possible license level somewhere at two-thirds of the game.
Going Down the Hole...
As much as the game's heart is in the right place, it's clearly visible that it suffered some sort of development hell. Most of the sports are shadows of what they could be, the ending feels rushed, and there is quite a lot of bugs within the game.
The worst offenders are those that impede your ability to interact with the game world - I thought I was stuck twice, as I wasn't able to deliver a certain package and place a duck on a conveyor belt. Going back to the world map, and trying to interact with these points from every feasible direction worked both times, but it was quite time-consuming. I've also had the displeasure of getting stuck on terrain once (had to restart the game) and experienced quite a few crashes.
Since I'm already complaining - I'm really not a fan of some of the adventuring and dungeoneering elements this game has. Guessing where are the items you need for a quest can be a bit of a challenge, as you are not presented with any advice regarding this. Dungeons usually boil down to being a series of riddle rooms, but the game consistently fails to signal what you can and can't do; my favorite example here is that in one of the dungeons you need to pick an item up through what's presented as a solid wall.
The Lush Green of the Fairway
The graphics are nice. Nothing groundbreaking, especially for Switch, which has its fair share of pixel-graphics games, but everything is a pleasure to look at. The soundtrack is also very much on point; shame it didn't make its way to YouTube yet. Audio-visual fidelity is, I think, one of the few legs this game has over its predecessor.
Humor is also very much on-point. This is not the kind of a game that'll make you laugh out loud, but I've been consistently amused whenever dialogues happened.
Bogey
It feels like Sports Story tried to be bigger and better than its predecessor in every regard - and failed. Its best moments are when you play golf, its worst moments are when you frantically try to interact with a glitched-out table or run around the golfing school without being sure what it is that you're looking for.
It is still a fun game, with the heart in the right place. Play Golf Story first (if you're not a fan of the Switch, I recall certain lemon-like fruit being able to handle it...), and if you'll enjoy it - you'll likely have a blast with SS as well. It's a 15 bucks game, and discounts for it will certainly happen
I'm happy we got the game, but it's still a shame what happened here. I think the first game was coded up in a year or so - this one took three years post-announcement to produce (with the release date being pushed back a few times) and seems to be much worse for it. Still, we are getting some foreshadowing for a sequel post the credits/ in the postgame, so I'm going to be looking forward to Games Story, hoping for an actual all-around improvement to the formula.
I shamelessly lifted the images from around the 'net.
The game picks up shortly after the first one left off, with the main hero going off for a "vacation" (which, as all golfers here are certainly aware is a codeword you use to hide that you're going golfing from your family*) with most of the main NPC cast from the first installment. What starts as attempts to procure oranges from tight-handed lifeguards - and involves a surprisingly solidly implemented volleyball match - quickly escalates into a ~25 hours epic involving woodcutters, miners, eldritch horrors from below the waves, signing up your life to an evil megacorp for all the right reasons, The Queen, Australia, and wizardry.
On this incredible journey, you will obviously resolve most of your problems via sports. Unlike in the Golf Story, though, there is much more emphasis placed on running around finding items and using them in the right spots. The way areas are handled is done a bit differently here, too - while in GS the whole continent comprised of a series of golfing fields, each having a set of its own subquests and minor challenges, in SS it's about 50-30-20 split between sports areas similar to the first game, dungeons and, uh, "others".
The nature of the game is much harder to define than the first one's. You'll still spend most of your time golfing (or playing other sports - as already mentioned golfing's front-and-center, though), but there is a lot (and I mean a LOT) of adventure-game-like fetch quests happening. Moreover, at some point, the game attempts to open up a bit and encourage you to explore one of its last areas, but it doesn't last long, and you're still gated from visiting certain locations by the need to finish specific quests anyways.
I think this identity crisis the game seems to have is one of the big clues that something went wrong during the development process.
* Or so I'd assume, as my only interaction with golf was building mini-courses as a kid, and playing them with a stick and tennis ball
Golf Your Problems Away
The game's attempt to cover a number of additional sports is charming, but I think it ended up in a failure. Authors of the game seem to be aware of that - e.g. during the final tournament you play golf-based versions of all the other sports.
You have tennis, which is mostly solid, but almost entirely limited to the tennis academy location. You also have volleyball, which is solidly implemented, but you only really play a single game of it throughout the entire game. One area is partially cricket-focused, but most of what you do there is stand in place and bounce balls. At one point you get a baseball bat, but you use it once, to bash some hardware being thrown your way. There are six bike races in the game, but they're all in a bit out-of-the-way places, and the only reason to complete them is to gain a bit more XP. Football boils down to either shooting penalties or running around kicking stuff through gates, and there again are only three or so places you can do it. Fishing is the only other one that got any love, but it's mostly story-focused, with your progression boiling down to bringing newly-found fish to raincoat-clad dudes.
As long as the game is about golf, it's fun. Tennis can be a bit hit-or-miss, as while the actual matches are nice, a bunch of sidequests requires you to hit something with the ball, and it's rather difficult to control. Others are just glorified interruptions, really.
This ends up feeling a bit strange. The first game was super golf-focused, but it also had its air golf (which was entirely different from the base version), GALF, and some one-off weirdness. Quite a bit of effort must've gone into coding up all the other sports (or at least skeleton versions of those), and the payoff is... not so great. You can even see it by how equipment is managed - there are still a few sets of golf clubs that can go into corresponding four inventory slots (and the accessory), but for all the others it's just a single item that unlocks the corresponding challenges, that there are no replacements for. Fishing allows you to upgrade your rod, but that's all.
Are Sports RPG?
Sadly, the RPG mechanics also seem to have been cut a bit, or at least slightly rebalanced. Gone are five statistics you could put points into as you level up. Now we're stuck with three, and we're not entirely free to bump them up as we see fit either. What's happening is that as your XP bar fills up, every now and then one of the stats will receive a +1. You can still manually add a point here or there after finishing up a major quest, but that's mostly it. Gone are the days when you could leave the first location being able to consistently pull off a 300+ yard drive.
I've already covered the equipment beforehand. One new addition here are special golf balls, which act as consumables. Those can help you ignore the terrain you're pitching from, guide themselves toward the hole, skim on water, etc. It's a nice addition, despite me never really using them too much due to the standard-issue RPG player hoarding mentality. It's also completely unnecessary - I was mostly saving them for the final tournament, which ended up not allowing you to freely select the balls you'd like to be using.
One last method to improve your character is license levels, but those mostly act as a parallel gating mechanism, encouraging you to stop and smell the roses by interacting with the side content. Every now and then you'll get a punch on your punch card, and once you get enough punch cards punched - you can get your license upgraded, unlocking new locations. It's very non-intrusive. I'm not a completionist, but the game's base gameplay is fun enough to warrant me looking for ways to engage with it; thanks to this I reached the highest possible license level somewhere at two-thirds of the game.
Going Down the Hole...
As much as the game's heart is in the right place, it's clearly visible that it suffered some sort of development hell. Most of the sports are shadows of what they could be, the ending feels rushed, and there is quite a lot of bugs within the game.
The worst offenders are those that impede your ability to interact with the game world - I thought I was stuck twice, as I wasn't able to deliver a certain package and place a duck on a conveyor belt. Going back to the world map, and trying to interact with these points from every feasible direction worked both times, but it was quite time-consuming. I've also had the displeasure of getting stuck on terrain once (had to restart the game) and experienced quite a few crashes.
Since I'm already complaining - I'm really not a fan of some of the adventuring and dungeoneering elements this game has. Guessing where are the items you need for a quest can be a bit of a challenge, as you are not presented with any advice regarding this. Dungeons usually boil down to being a series of riddle rooms, but the game consistently fails to signal what you can and can't do; my favorite example here is that in one of the dungeons you need to pick an item up through what's presented as a solid wall.
The Lush Green of the Fairway
The graphics are nice. Nothing groundbreaking, especially for Switch, which has its fair share of pixel-graphics games, but everything is a pleasure to look at. The soundtrack is also very much on point; shame it didn't make its way to YouTube yet. Audio-visual fidelity is, I think, one of the few legs this game has over its predecessor.
Humor is also very much on-point. This is not the kind of a game that'll make you laugh out loud, but I've been consistently amused whenever dialogues happened.
Bogey
It feels like Sports Story tried to be bigger and better than its predecessor in every regard - and failed. Its best moments are when you play golf, its worst moments are when you frantically try to interact with a glitched-out table or run around the golfing school without being sure what it is that you're looking for.
It is still a fun game, with the heart in the right place. Play Golf Story first (if you're not a fan of the Switch, I recall certain lemon-like fruit being able to handle it...), and if you'll enjoy it - you'll likely have a blast with SS as well. It's a 15 bucks game, and discounts for it will certainly happen
I'm happy we got the game, but it's still a shame what happened here. I think the first game was coded up in a year or so - this one took three years post-announcement to produce (with the release date being pushed back a few times) and seems to be much worse for it. Still, we are getting some foreshadowing for a sequel post the credits/ in the postgame, so I'm going to be looking forward to Games Story, hoping for an actual all-around improvement to the formula.
I shamelessly lifted the images from around the 'net.
and indeed has RPG elements.
