Menus are messy and a far cry from the crisp, intuitive interface found in Golf Story. Single-use items that have already been used needlessly hang around in your bag with dozens of other items that have no way of being sorted. Obscure mission design and objectives permeate the experience, and the UI often feels like an additional burden. In a way, it does encourage exploration, but not everything is tracked via the menus and there is no map or waypoints to view where people are, so larger areas can result in a fair bit of aimless wandering as you try to find the next person in the chain of things to do. Multiple times I had to find item A to bring to person B, who would then give me item C to give to person D, with this process sometimes repeating nearly a dozen times. Unfortunately, this game relies heavily on tedious fetch quests to pad out each area. You’ll venture across a large overworld map, regularly stopping in at new locales filled with colourful characters and heaps of things to do. An option to slightly increase the text speed would have been nice, but aside from that, you’ll no doubt find yourself chuckling away at fantastical adventure and its characters. With sharp writing and witty humour, and excellent use of text speed, size and movement used to great effect to convey emotion, there is no shortage of laughs to be had. It’s all rather nonsensical and struggles to paint a particularly coherent narrative, but the beats along the way are plenty of fun nonetheless, and undoubtedly remain the highlight of the package. A somewhat incohesive series of events ensue involving gangs, a conniving mega-corporation, dungeons, espionage, pirates, royals, spirits, and lots of different sports. The story sees the return of your main character and his companions from the first game. That long development time has resulted in an overstuffed yet undercooked sequel not quite worthy of its predecessor’s adoration, but still has a lot to offer those willing to overlook its shortcomings. Fast forward five years and we finally have the long-awaited follow-up in Sports Story. Blending solid golf mechanics, satisfying RPG elements and a whimsical narrative made for a fantastic little game that could stand proudly alongside heavy hitters like Mario and Zelda in the Switch’s first-year line-up.

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