So what happens when you take a silly anime TV show (something like that Megaman bloke) and mix it with Arnold Palmer.
You get Battle golfing. Which is a misleading title as you don't battle with the golf club, nor do you fight a person in any way shape or form. You compete against them on a golf course playing a game. I guess in this universe a golf game is the equivalent of a binding contract where the loser has to agree on the terms of service put upon by the winner regardless of what they are.
I love the idea behind mixing golf mechanics with a role playing game. Although it's not much for roleplay game, you don't exactly get a lot of options. In fact I don't think he get any options. It's just the story (and a strange story at that).
The opening cut-scene shows a girl being held in this strange iron lung looking thing. Where she's being roboticized so that she may join the ranks of the ''Battle Golfers''. There's this evil scientist dude who wants to use these golfers to take over the world. How does one take over the world with golf?
I haven't the slightest clue.
Maybe the defence budget got cut throughout the world and now the only military equipment anybody possesses is 'Dennis the menace's' slingshot.
None of this matters, the only way to defeat the mad scientist and save the world (or at least this golf course) is to win a golfing tournament. Or so it seemed to be at the beginning. You don't actually win a tournament, you just have to beat this one random chick at a golf game (a really long golf game.)So Yui (our protagonist) spends most of the game looking for her long-lost friend ''Ran'' who was also kidnapped and forced to be turned into a robot. While on her search for her she'll encounter a band of strange characters. The two male characters are both perverts. One of which wants to go on a date with her the other one wants her to dominate him and yet neither one will help her unless she can beat them in a golf game. Then there's the other character Kitako. She thinks Yui is a ghost.
however all these characters have one unique skill; ''To cause you stress''
There's one guy who's even willing to bypass a game if Yui is willing to go on a date with him.
Of course if you try the dating option Yui will tell you off. You might be okay with me dating this creep, but she's not.
See you get this golf caddie who has absolutely no reason to be there. She's supposed to be the person that carries your clubs around and tells you what the course layout is, but at the very end of the game you find out that the caddie was the girl you were looking for all along. Then you play the final stage where you don't have your caddie anymore and your character doesn't seem to be affected by carrying around her own clubs and you can still click information to see the outline of the course. So the caddie has literally no use.
The ''great'' professor wizard man who's supposed to run all this stuff is a horrible golfer. He super easy to beat. Your best friend turned enemy is a bit more annoying but that's because she uses this weird magic power that shoots the ball anywhere she wants it to go. And you play on these horrible courses were screwing up even once means your ball falls into Oblivion. And the normal rules of golf still apply. A lost ball is a two-stroke penalty.
The story overall is surprisingly short. And it's a little confusing, now I'm not sure if that's the games fault or if that's just the problem of playing a Japanese to English fan-made patch.
It's a strange premise this battle golf. It implies that you're directly competing with somebody when playing a game. Which is contradictory to how the game is actually played. Even in tournaments the Real Enemy to your golf game is your score. In a way you're playing against yourself. You want to see if you can get under par and just how under par you can get.
even in a PGA Tours the golfers aren't really competing against each other. Their scores reflect how well they do on a course, and their overall score is how well they've done on every course
One guy can absolutely destroy somebody on a particular course but if the other guys overall score thou-out the entire tournament is still lower than yours, then he'll win the tournament regardless. Because it's about limiting your points, not defeating the other player.
I shouldn't be having anxiety when playing a golf game.
Game Play:
The golf mechanics in this game are subpar too bad. Your strength indicator goes from underpowered to ridiculously overpowered with nothing in the middle. So it's a bit of a crapshoot if you're actually going to make it on the green or not. Then you have your wind indicator telling you how far the ball is going to drift from one direction to the other. But this too is out of whack. If the indicator says one then the ball will barely move but if the indicator says 3 your Ball will fly off course if you don't correct it at all.
Then there's the environment, half of the golf courses are standard, a sand trap hear, water hazard there, thick bush that you can't get past. ''A typical course''.
But then you have your wacky courses with Magma, ghosts and exploding trees. You have no idea what any of this stuff is going to do when your ball hits it. One item looks like a flat piece of terrain that your ball could easily fly over but if you hit your ball in his general direction it'll bounce off and go into the brush. But a similar piece of grass that looks almost identical is an exploding Hot Plate. If your ball hits that it will burst into flames and fly off in another random Direction.
All of this becomes increasingly frustrating when you realise that if you lose the game the entire system does a soft reboot and you have to redo it all over again. Add on the fact that you have to use those Antiquated passwords to get back any of your old progress and you're left with an incredibly frustrating game. If I wasn't playing this on PC with save commands that can instantly put me back in my initial spot I would have quit this game long ago.
I wish I could say I enjoyed this game. I certainly enjoyed the idea of the game, and I had a lot of anticipation before I played it. But the mechanics just don't work that well and the game's not that complex. Even the added on superpowers don't do that much. I got through 95% of the game without using any power.
Winch was for the better because I had no idea what half the powers would do all they managed to accomplish with me was screwing up my golf swing.
Although this game was a let-down I'd love to see somebody reattempt it. Make a modern version with more golfing mechanics, maybe some story progression that leans off in different directions depending on your options "hey throw a few puzzles into the mix as will''. There's only one puzzle in this game and it's a pain in the butt. Because you're not entirely sure what you got an a puzzle. It's a key code activation that you can only find out the code for after defeating one guy who tells you the optimal way to defeat one of his courses. Then you have to input in the right order which club to use to defeat this one guy's course into the key card panel. And then it's even more stressful when you realise that the ''I'' and the ''1'' look almost identical. I screwed that up several times.
Conclusion:
Sadly not a great game. Both mechanic or story-wise. I can't recommend playing it from beginning to end, but I do recommend giving it a try. Play one or two levels on the free play mode and see just what you can get away with. The idea behind the game is fantastic, combining a Leisure sport with role playing. And a grand story that goes all over the place, looks ridiculous with over the top characters. All interwoven into the simplistic but enjoyable game of golf. And if nothing else the character animations are kind of fun and I like the design of everything.
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