My family have been avid golfers for at least four generations. My cousin has participated in many tournaments (and even won a few). My Grandpa, uncles, and dad helped build the Palisades golf course just outside of Manti, Utah. And, as a family we have made it a tradition to go to Top Golf every year on the anniversary of my dad’s passing. Needless to say… I hate golf. Although pretty much everyone else in my family has a great love for it, I have never had any skill in the sport, nor have I ever found much enjoyment in it. Even in gaming, I haven’t had much experience with golf. Aside from an obscure SNES golf game my dad bought, and renting the original Mario Golf for the N64, I’ve never had much interest. However, After hearing so much hype for this new golfing game that merged a sports game with an RPG, I decided to check it out.
Golf Story (GS) is indeed a golf sports game. You play rounds of golf, participate in tournaments, etc. But it mixes the formula up a bit by allowing the player to explore the world, take on side quests (or side challenges, as is more often the case), and do other things that would never be heard of in a game about golf. And for this, I do praise the developer, for attempting to make a sports genre more appealing to gamers like me, that would normally never touch it. I just wish it was executed better.
Being toted as an RPG, I expected GS to deliver on a lot of fronts. That genre comes with very specific expectations. And while GS delivers on those expectations, fulfilling the tropes of an RPG, it doesn’t do any of them particularly well. I’ll begin with the narrative.
The game opens featuring a father attempting to teach his son how to play golf. Needless to say, this hit home for me, as my dad taught me how to play. This is essentially the tutorial, the father teaching the player how to play the game at its most basic level (but I’ll touch more on that in a bit). After learning the most basic of controls, the game suddenly lurches forward 20 years. The player (who has no other name than “Player”) then gets a confusing phone call from a woman. The two then discuss that the player needs to pick up the game of golf after abandoning it years ago, for some unknown purpose (which is never made clear). The woman mocks him and hangs up. It turns out later that the woman is the player’s wife, or ex-wife… I’m not sure. Again, it is never really made clear. But it’s not terribly important as she shows up only one other time, to pretty much no effect on the narrative, before disappearing never to be seen again in game.
The player then goes on to find a coach, in turn making a deal with a sleazy course owner. You’re then tasked to pull off a bunch of underhanded tasks to make the first course better, which never actually happens.
The game’s narrative pretty much has that issue throughout. Nothing is really clear. And nothing really matters. Case in point, the player’s dad is never seen or mentioned again in the entire game. The game clearly isn’t trying to take itself too seriously, as you will encounter cavemen, fight an undead army, watch a rap battle between teenagers and senior citizens, and solve a murder mystery in which case you find out a dog is a werewolf (and no one was murdered).
I’ve nothing against a game that wants to be lighthearted, but there is a very distinct line between whimsy and just completely random crap. As I said, absolutely nothing in the narrative ever mattered. Allegiances change at the drop of a hat, your bitter rival does nothing to grow or change throughout the game, the old people remain set in their ways, the jerk pro is still a jerk, the player himself shows no growth whatsoever. No lessons learned. Nothing changed for the better or worse. The ending is literally just a bunch of people golfing. RPG’s need an engrossing story. This was not that. It was just random scenarios that meant nothing cobbled together, and then thrown away without a thought. To make it even worse, many of the pointless narrative heavy “cut scenes” in the game go on far too long. For example, the rap battle alone lasted so long that I was smashing the B button to skip through the dialogue (and I never skip dialogue).
Another trope expected of RPG’s is a leveling system. The player needs to see growth. GS does indeed have a leveling system. Unfortunately, it’s one of the most confusing systems I’ve ever seen. Each time you level up (by getting experience through completing quests and challenges), you are given 5 points to spend. However, almost every time you spend a point in Power, you lose points in other areas. One step forward, two steps back. I felt like I was constantly fighting my own growth, trying to spend points. What’s worse, you can only take away spent points in the power section, none of the others, so if you spent a point in Spin, but wanted to change your mind, too bad. You’re out of luck.
Another issue with the leveling system that I had was that none of it was terribly clear. I still have no idea what “Purity” is supposed to mean. But I did notice that if I ever had too few or too many points in it, I suffered some sort of penalty. I assume the same goes for the others, but I’m not sure. Again, it’s never clear.
And the final RPG trope that GS touches on, the classic side quest. GS is chock full of side quests, in fact I spent more time playing side quests than I did actual golf. The game is set up as a world of golf courses (each having a unique theme, a beach, a snowy mountain, a cemetery, an old school course, etc.), each course has a very large practice area complete with pro shop, and plenty of NPC golfers. A good number of these golfers will give the player some sort of challenge to perform. Usually these involve hitting the ball within some certain marker or circle. All of these are just attempts to give the player practice using the many different techniques of the game. And for the most part, the game succeeds here. It’s good practice. But there are times when the challenges are not remotely balanced properly. Many were far too easy, giving the player an almost ridiculous number of chances to perform a simple target hit. And there were a few that were so brutally difficult, I just gave up. Of course, giving up isn’t very simple. You are given a number of hits in each challenge, if you miss too many, and you know there is literally no way to win, you still have to keep playing the challenge, until all hits are done. This was very aggravating, more often than not, I’d just reset my Switch, rather than hit a bunch of pointless shots. It is obvious to me that this game went through very little play testing. Which is a shame, because it would have benefited greatly from it. A little more balance, and I probably would have praised the gameplay, at least, in spite of the narrative being awful.
In addition to these challenges, you are given more obscure quests. Find some person or object, run many races (why…?), drive an RC car, go geocaching, etc. They were all fairly random, but it mixed things up, giving the player a break from nothing but golf.
As I said, it’s good that there are chance to practice, because the game is incredibly complex. And it does very little to teach the player its complexities. In the tutorial, you are taught how to hit the ball, but not a whole lot more than that. A little later on in early game, you learn more, but it’s taught in such a way, that I figured out most of it by randomly pressing buttons and figuring out myself, before the game ever got around to teaching me. Which was my only real option in some cases because there were some techniques that the game never remotely explains. For example, throughout the game, I acquired several items that told me that I could do special things with while golfing (ignore wind, hit further, etc.). It wasn’t until I was almost finished with the game that I accidentally stumbled upon how to use these items. That is just lazy design. If you’re going to stuff your game full of mechanics, you had better be prepared to teach the player how to use every single one, in a coherent order.
After learning how to play, I still found the controls difficult. There were many control decisions that I questioned. Such as, when setting up a shot, you can use the left stick to change clubs by pushing the stick up or down. If you want to change your aim, however, you push the left stick left or right. Having these two wildly different controls relegated to the one left joystick caused me a lot of frustration, often moving the stick in the wrong way while trying to get my aim as precise as possible.
After all that, I will say that playing actual rounds of golf felt good, for the most part. They are set up like any other golf game, really. You get a preview of the course, start at the tee box, you get a reading on the slope of the course, and the strength and angle of the wind. All pretty basic. And at its most basic level, the game was actually fun. I did enjoy those moments. But even then, there were some severe balancing issues near the end that ruined my experience.
There were some clever additions in the traditional rounds. Every course had unique obstacles. Some had mole rats, that if you hit the ball in their are, would steal the ball and put it somewhere else. Then there were multi-colored birds, and depending on the bird’s color, it would either help or hinder you in its ball placement. Little twists like these added some much needed variety and strategy to the game, and I appreciated the inclusion.
To break up the monotony of just golfing, the developers also threw in some “alternatives” to basic golf. All of these ideas were extremely half baked, unfortunately, and I didn’t really enjoy any of them. There was frisbee golf (which had the most unruly controls in the entire game), miniature golf (which is done in the most boring way possible), drone golf (which required that you fly a drone over a hole, and just drop dozens of balls until one fell into the hole), and Galf. Yes, Galf, an unbelievably bad 8 bit golf video game inside a pixelated golf video game. Wo be unto anyone who even tries to play Galf seriously. It was clearly put in as a joke and nothing more. Complete with incredibly bad instruction manuals. Which I see as satire, but it misses its mark. Old game manuals were amazing. The Galf manuals were purposefully awful.
GS’s biggest problem overall is over-complication. It clearly tries to do too much. Many of the game’s modes are half baked. The narrative is all over the place. And there are just too many mechanics. If it had been simplified, then perhaps my experience with it would have been better. But as it is, I’ll chalk it up to being an incredibly realistic, and immersive golf game. Because it’s just as frustrating to me as the real thing!