Titling this article made me realize that since I started this blog in 2016, I have cleared out well over 100 video games (112 in this series, some of which featured two reviews, and a handful of others in my Pi Reviews series). I'm really grateful to myself for starting this project, because otherwise, a lot of these games would have just sat on the shelf while I burned time in League of Legends, Hearthstone, or some version of MLB: The Show or Madden, occasionally running through some old favorites. I've discovered countless gems sitting previously unenjoyed on my shelf, and gotten better exposure to the history of video games in general. If you find yourself in my shoes with dozens to hundreds (I'm still in the latter case, although my proportion of completed games is much better now than it was 3 years ago) of games in your backlog, maybe try this process of writing up your experiences. I've really enjoyed it, and I feel like I'm a more systematic thinker about video games and a better writer to boot.
Anyway, on to the true purpose of this article, a review of yet another golf game. Golf games are my particular sports video game weakness, as the genre has a widely utilized and perfect control mechanism, and a ton of great titles that utilize this system. Mario Golf: World Tour is another game in my favorite golf series, and is on the 3DS.
I'll be honest. I was BEYOND excited to get this game, until I read the reviews of it. No. Story. Mode. Mario Golf: Advance Tour is one of the very best golf games of all time, and one of my favorite GBA games, a system I think is stacked from top to bottom with quality. One of the main reasons why I love it so much is a story mode with RPG elements that just nails all of my particular gaming desires. You can earn experience to make you longer off the tee, more accurate, spin the ball harder, etc. You get to challenge increasingly difficult challenges on your way to teeing off against Mario and his Mushroom Kingdom friends to establish you as the true golf king, and everything just works perfectly. Tack on the fact that there are great single and multiplayer options separate from the story mode, and the game is, like Mary Poppins, practically perfect in every way.
So I was crushed to find out that despite being developed by Camelot, a company that gets pretty close to being on my top 10 list of 3rd party developers (another article for another time), it will miss out on the story mode that has been in the other two handheld Mario Golf games. And I just didn't buy it. It was at the top of my must-buy list before reading the reviews, and it dropped considerably from there. But I eventually broke, because I found a really nice minty in-box offering for cheap, and what did I do? Played it immediately, because I'm a sucker for golf games.
And curse it all if I didn't really enjoy it. To be clear, I still prefer Mario Golf: Advance Tour. The story mode, if you can call it that, cannot even come close to comparing to its predecessor. There is a Castle Club mode that basically involves playing a practice mode on one course, playing a handicap tournament to determine your handicap, playing one non-handicap tournament on three courses, and being declared the champion. I'm dead serious that if you wanted to, you could probably clear the story mode in less than two hours.
But with all of that, the golf physics have never been better, the music is fantastic, the visuals look great, and it has a bevy of online options that earlier games could never have dreamed of. You can play in online tournaments against other players, be put into rounds of golf through matchmaking, and play with friends, all of which would be great if you cared about online stuff (I don't, but I will review the game as though I did). Despite lacking a story mode, there's still plenty of single player objectives, with a robust challenges mode that has you trying to make par while getting giant star coins out of the beaten path, collecting a fixed number of coins through three holes, playing in match play against AI to unlock star characters (just characters that can drive farther than their vanilla version), time attack modes, and more. Playing through all of these challenges will unlock several new creative and enjoyable courses, giving you more than your money's worth. There are also some DLC courses and characters, but I didn't buy them, so I can't review them. Generally, Nintendo gives you your money's worth, and I feel like the cart included more than enough offerings in terms of courses and characters, so DLC here feels like the true purpose of DLC, adding on more than you'd expect for your 39.99.
But it just nags at me that they cut just enough corners here to irritate me. In the Gamecube Mario Golf (and maybe in the N64 as well, but I can't remember), each character has a special animation when they hit a "nice shot". Mario's shot turns into a fireball, while Yoshi's turns into a rainbow, just for a few examples. In this one, every character's nice shot is a rainbow, which is lame, and feels like they could have easily done this if they'd have wanted to. The story mode is just really weak, and I don't think it would have taken that much more effort to do it properly. Pay a writer to write some funny dialogue, your existing castle is perfectly fine, and give me a lengthy campaign with some match play, tournaments, and fun little challenges! It seems like the recent Mario sports games have focused much more on head to head play, and while that's a great focus, the mechanics do that themselves. What's more, we've had those basic mechanics set in stone since NES Open Tournament Golf in 1987! Throw us a little bone here! Each game in this series is basically a graphical update with some new courses, and that's fine. When you have magic, you have magic, and you don't want to break what works. But this felt a little too much like porting Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour (for the Gamecube), stripping out some of the visual effects, making some new characters, and calling it a day. I feel like Camelot, and Nintendo, can do better than they did here.
But I still enjoyed it, against all odds. It's a handheld and faithful adaption of the excellent Gamecube version, the new courses are great, and most things are better than you'd expect from a sports title. But I wanted that Nintendo magic of going above and beyond good, and this felt a little too generic for my expectations. I'll give it an 8.5 out of 10.
I'm still working through clearing out some challenges and unlocking everything in the game, because I'm neurotic. So I don't have any teaser, or any idea of what I'm going to play next, but I'll be back before you know it with a home version of What I'm Playing. I may finish up something this weekend, but we'll see.
-TRO
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