Golf Story is a Switch exclusive RPG with a focus on golf. It has sprite / pixel artwork that works well on the smaller screen but still looks good on your TV. The game has you playing as a person who has decided to go back to be a professional golfer. He had played golf as a kid with his father, showing promise but twenty years later, you finally decided to make the dream come true. He returns to the club only to find it having been run down and neglected. He will work hard to climb up the ranks of being a nobody to being a somebody and participate in the pro golf tournament.
The story starts off being serious, but it quickly shows that it is anything but. There are a lot of cheeky bits as you go around helping odd characters. You’ll be tracking mole rats and defeating the undead in one section, while fiercely competing against others in order to secure a spot in another section. Instead of combat, you play rounds of golf. The controls aren’t explained well in the tutorial but it is easy enough to pick up once you’ve had a crack at it. When it is your turn to hit the ball, it is a three step process. You aim where you want to hit it (changing your clubs based on distance), then decide how much of a spin you want to add, and the final step decides upon the power. During this process, you can fine-tune a few elements. You’ll have to factor in wind and slope, these effects range from negligible to severely pervasive.
The controls exclusively use only the joystick which can be kind of annoying. You’ll probably accidentally change clubs instead of adjusting the angle. Being able to use the d-pad instead would have easily solved this issue but that is mapped to additional abilities. As you complete golf matches and other sidequests, you gain both money and experience. The use of money is self-explanatory, while gaining experience will allow you to level up and improve your stats. These improvements will allow you to hit the ball harder and further, be more accurate and other factors that determine your shots.
There are other things to do to advance the story than just playing golf. It’s surprising at how much variety the developers have managed to pack in. You may have to collect some things, race and find hidden objects. There are mini-challenges that have you hitting the ball into a specific area, or have certain handicaps, these can be fun and while most of them are easy, some can be quite challenging. You’ll end up doing most of these sidequests, even though they’re optional, because they’re quick and fun.
While you kind of know what you have to do, there are times where the game doesn’t tell you *where* you need to go to do it. Or that it doesn’t show you a button prompt to actually start it. Sure, it has a screen to tell you how to advance the story but there will be some times where you don’t actually know where that person is. This can be quite annoying and a waste of time as you run around trying to find them. A waypoint system would have been nice.
The game can be quite addictive. Just like the real game, you can be doing really well in a tournament, and you just need to screw up one or two holes to put you behind. This can be annoying but it’s your own fault… There will be maps where there are annoying obstacles and if you hit a ball within their (large) area, it moves it to a disadvantageous place.
There is potential for quality of life improvements but none of them are dealbreakers. There needs to be a way to quit a challenge and restart it immediately. As it is, you are forced to hit until the end even though you know you will fail it. Doing a challenge again will force you to go through all the text beforehand. There are a lot of little annoying instances of the game that are required for progression but is not fun due to repetitiveness. There is a lot of boring dialogue too. The autosaves can be very far apart. You cannot just up and quit partway through a map, you need to trigger a story even or leave the map, otherwise you’ll lose a lot of progress.
The final course is of course the hardest, and it can be very annoying and frustrating. All the holes are close to water, or out of bounds. This makes it really easy to have one mistake that ruins the whole nine holes and forces you to restart again. It is a course that’s already hard enough as it is with its design but then the randomized (usually extreme) weather makes the predicted trajectory of the ball all out of whack. Considering how easy the rest of the game is, this isn’t just hard, it is a cheap and terrible game design that leaves a sour taste for its finale.
Overall, Golf Story isn’t perfect. However, it is a solid attempt and is a surprisingly successful mash up of golf and RPG elements. It’s not long game as it takes only 10 to 15 hours to complete, so it doesn’t really have time to outstay its welcome. The characters and the story are cheeky, so it never takes itself too seriously which allows the game to be a relaxing and fun experience.
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