Capsule Review: Golf Story
A golf RPG with pixel art aesthetic and comedic tone. Progress through eight nine-hole courses with a huge variety of side content along the way. Golf is the main focus, and many optional challenges are contextualized drills on specific golf skills, but there are also one-shot minigames such as racing an RC car and more-developed side modes like mini golf, disc golf, and drone golf. There are also humorous story events and some adventure-game-like puzzles and fetch quests.
Completing any challenge awards experience to increase your skills and money for buying new clubs - but both of these progressions have more depth than straight-up upgrades. Most of your skills start out neutral, and as you put points into raw power to increase your maximum drive distance, your other stats decay and need points as well to stay (or rise above) neutral. Thus you can decide whether to be well-rounded or specialize in power or in specific kinds of control. Club selection also generally involves choosing between trade-offs, with new clubs giving you different options rather than superior ones and it’s still important to bring the right clubs to each challenge.
When you reach a new area, you generally need to do some exploration and complete some challenges before you can compete there - meaning you have an opportunity to familiarize yourself with the course and its idiosyncrasies before being tested on them, gaining experience and money along the way. The story doesn’t have a ton of depth or consequence, but it keeps things amusing and provides motivation for you to win matches and tournaments.
The result is a charming and well-paced adventure where you almost always have multiple things to do and good reasons for doing them. You do need to be able to enjoy both golf gameplay and basic RPG structure to have a good time here, but if you do, there’s a lot to love.
I Stopped Playing When: I finished the story and most of the optional challenges.
Four Stars: Great. Not only did I finish the game, I probably played through the whole thing again and/or completed any optional objectives. It's an easy recommendation for any genre fan.