Mixing genres has always developed some unique games. Roguelike and horror, racing and platformers, FPS and puzzle games. Sometimes it can be an effective combination, such as Metroid Prime, turning exploration into an FPS. Other times it’s less successful, leaving you with a broken mix of both games. A few years ago, a game called Golf Story came out from a small Australian studio. It mixed golf with role-playing games and was a surprise hit that’s fun to play. Now KEMCO has published RPGolf Legends from ArticNet, a title that follows in the footsteps of Golf Story. In the game, you play a young girl who finds a magic golf club. All of the golf holes in the world have been sealed by demons to stop people from ever playing golf again and the club’s magic can unlock the holes (hey, I didn’t write this…don’t blame me). Your goal is to unlock the magic…like a golf Oreo.
To do this, you’ll have to travel from town to town, building up magic by beating monsters, bears, bees, and other random creatures to death with golf clubs and using the magic their deaths generate to fuel your magic golf club and unlock each hole in order, one by one. Combat consists of close combat attacks, charge shots, and blocking. You’ll quickly find that it’s a tedious affair to fight enough enemies to unlock a hole, but don’t worry, there are only 54 of them! Charge shots use mana, which does not replenish and you get a whopping two of them. Luckily, you can go all the way back to your house in the first town to rest for free or use your hard-won coins to buy healing items. Unfortunately, the towns lack inns and there’s no gradual refresh of your mana, making combat a brutal slog, especially with your slow attacks and the long animations and attacks from enemies that you must wait and dodge.
Once enough enemies are finally defeated at, you simply walk to the crystal at each course and unlock it, then play a hole of golf. Play through the hole and then regardless of how you do, you move on to the next. Rinse and repeat. If you do manage to get under par, the magic club rewards you with bonuses including refreshed mana and gold. The actual golf is quite simplistic even on the normal mode of the game (and there’s an easy mode for both golf and combat). Simply hit the button when the bar is charged and then hit it again when the bar is in the middle on the right. Solid shot every time. If you’re even remotely decent at pressing buttons, it’s easy to come in under par almost every time unless you hit a sand trap. Get caught in a bunker and the second button’s meter spins wildly, making it hard to get out of the sand. Overall though, while the courses do become more challenging, they just take a bit of patience and unlocking them, which is the main point of the game, is rather anticlimactic.
In true RPG fashion, RPGolf Legends also has townsfolk that are entirely incapable of performing the most simple of tasks and their entire society’s functionality depends on a random young girl solving their problems for them. Really, it’s kind of a mirror of modern society when you think about it, but the chances are good that the devs didn’t intend that. Either way, there are quests all over the place which are entirely optional. None of them really seem to add much to the story and most of them are fetch quests with no real depth. “Get some strange grass and bring it back for me.” “Can you get my money back from the guy I lent it to?” “I want you to use a red golf ball three times and then come back and talk to me so I can tell you how beautiful red golf balls are and I’ll pay you for your time.” Weird fetish but ok, anything for a buck, right? You’re definitely not going to get a lot out of these quests, and for more reason than you might think.
Within some quests, you’ll earn various items, or find them along the way. For example, you might come across, say, a “long-distance golf ball” which lets you hit the ball further. That’s awesome because, at the driving range, there’s a girl who always hits 3 meters further than you in a driving contest. Sadly, this is exactly where RPGolf Legends transitions from a sub-standard RPG with golf elements to an unplayable mess. “I’ll just use the long-range golf ball…hey! Where the hell is the long-range ball? It’s not in my inventory! I picked the damned thing up. Where is it? Maybe I can get one from the store, now that I’ve unlocked it? Nope. It’s gone. Well, while I’m at the store, I’ll spend the 25,000 gold I’ve been saving up for hours on a 4th heart for my life bar.” You get 1 gold here and there from enemies, and find or earn gold in increments from 10-500…it’s very slow to earn. “Ok, now that I’ve got more health…HEY! WHERE’S MY DAMN HEART!?!!?!?”
Yup, items are borked in RPGolf Legends. They vanish from inventory, don’t always appear when purchased, and are generally a nightmare. Towns don’t have upgrades for your equipment, so as the enemies get more powerful, your weapons do less and less damage. It takes longer to kill enemies who give less magic per kill toward your power bar. Unlocking new courses takes forever and the game grinds down to an even slower crawl. Oh, and you can unlock magic attacks with your magic club but they use the same magic bar as the course unlocks, further extending the drag of gameplay. This is a fluffy game with light dialogue, to begin with and it’s not like you’re going to make a deep connection with the characters or the plot, so having the mechanics be this broken is honestly just painful. It’s a shame because the potential is absolutely there, but ArticNet simply dropped the ball here (pun intended).
Eventually, you’ll find out there are boss fights too. Get on the course, fight a giant monster, then shoot some golf before it wakes up. There are six of these baddies out there as you slowly unlock courses and they’re overpowered but not all that hard to defeat. There are some others hidden about as well. After you beat the big six, you’ll head to the tower to, um, rescue golf from the evil magic that has sealed it away. The potential for golf bosses is high but the fights just aren’t all that fun and they kind of feel tacked on. At least the sprites for them are kind of neat.
And did we talk about travel yet? The last big mechanical failing of RPGolf Legends is in the map/level design. The game is simply huge, and rightfully so as it’s covered in golf courses. However, to get anywhere, you only have a few options, especially once you’ve explored and you’re running about unlocking courses. Option one is a teleporter. You can teleport to any teleporter you’ve unlocked. Ok, that’s fine. It works. Sadly, they’re few and far between and most of the time, you still end up walking interminably, but hey, they thought of it at least. There’s also a fast travel mechanism. Travel from anywhere to a teleporter. Sounds good right? Well, there’s a time limit of FIVE MINUTES between each fast travel use, making fast travel a novelty. While you’re waiting for it to recharge, why not run tediously across the entire map? Wait. There’s no run button. Walk tediously across the entire map! Sure, you can pay 200 coins…to rent a golf cart for fifteen minutes. Rent. Not buy. Apparently, the devs forgot this is a game and it’s supposed to be fun.
These failures are across the board too, as the graphics and sound for RPGolf Legends are also fairly weak. There’s a nice cartoony style to the game, but the resolution and sprite size makes everything look chunky and unpleasant, especially when the Switch is docked and you’re on a full-size TV. It looks pretty good undocked on the Switch, but that definitely does not translate to the bigger screen and looking ok at this point isn’t going to cut it. Considering the number of excellent lush sprite-based games out these days, ‘it looks ok’ is pretty weak. The music is also brutal, running on a short loop with airy, tinny tunes that annoy the player rather than complementing the game. Since there’s no dialogue and the sound effects are minimal, you’re honestly better off just putting your own music on instead. It’ll be less irritating.
Suffice it to say that RPGolf Legends is a game of missed opportunities, failed mechanics, and tedious gameplay that never really pays off. Most players will find themselves tossing the game down in boredom before they even get to the first boss and rightfully so. It’s simply not a fun game. With the wealth of indie titles that are highly engaging and fun out there, there’s just not much reason to play this one. RPGolf Legends feels like it’s trying to capitalize on the success of Golf Story by cranking out something that could have come out back in the 80s on the NES. And even then, it wouldn’t have been the best RPG or golf game out there. If you’re looking for something to play while you wait interminably for Sports Story to come out, keep waiting. RPGolf Legends is a filler game that would be better off as a time-waster on a mobile platform and there are better things to play on the Switch.
This review is based on a digital copy of RPGolf Legends provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and played equally well on both. RPGolf Legends is also available for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and Steam.