Mario Golf Super Rush (huge rant incoming)
It was the single game I was most excited for on the system. Played the sh*t out of World Tour on 3DS, especially the online tournaments, and was looking forward to those more than anything.
Game releases, no tournaments. But, they said, online multiplayer content coming soon! Of course they'll add tournaments, it's basically the only reason to play a golf game, might as well start leveling up my Mii so when they drop Ill be ready.
Leveling up your Mii is a nightmare. For one the "story" (I will get back to this) is nowhere near long enough to fully level up your guy, and you gain zero XP from free play, so you have to replay story rounds to keep leveling up. Over and over and over. Story rounds are also level scaled, so you've got to play the same course for the best XP, over and over and over. Best part though, every round in the story is set in stone; you play the same hole twice, the weather will be the same each time. The AI makes the same shot, each time. You will power up your power shot on the same shot of the same hole. Every. Time. You will play the same game of golf dozens of time over and over and over. But, it will all be worth it when those tournaments drop, right? Right?
Wrong! They excluded Miis entirely from online competitive play. The one character you're able to level up and customize and make your own, through great effort and practice, banned from competing. Their reason? The Miis are too OP and regular characters on the roster can't compete. Okay, well, who designed the skill curve on all the player characters? Why couldn't they make a fully leveled mii comparable to the Mario characters? Why did they choose to make it so you can sink hours upon hours into making the character meant to represent us online for no reason whatsoever? They made the last game, they know 99% of players enjoyed playing with Miis in tournaments, they know we like to customize and have a hand in the abilities of the characters we play, why else would they allow customized skill sets? Why wouldn't they create a separate tournament bracket for just Miis if they messed up and made them too strong? Why, god, why? I have yet to play in a single tournament, three or four years later.
Anyway, let's go back to that "story" I mentioned earlier. At first it just feels like a standard tutorial, you play through some practice holes and take on your first tournament at the rookie field, learn how to level stuff up, easy peasy. But the tutorial feeling never goes away, your hand is held the whole time until suddenly you're playing on the Bowser course (the only Mario looking course for a long time) and halfway through Wario and Waluigi do... Something? And then you have to kill a giant snowman and Mario comes out of nowhere for no reason, and it ends less coherently than I'm choosing to end this sentence. And that's it. Resets the game to just before you do all that so there isn't even a post game sense of accomplishment, not that it really matters because you'll never play this course in story mode again, since you're locked into the annoying boss fight every time (if you want the XP that is).
And from there the big gripes get smaller, but more numerous. The character models are poorly made and look like crap (DK doesn't even have teeth, looks horrifying), the animations are lazy and all NPCs of a certain model are just clones to the same animation; eg all goombas will, in unison, do a little jump in the air, all koopas will bob and dip their heads side to side, again in unison, and so on with ever kind of model. Wouldn't be so noticeable if not for the fact that crowds seem to just be plopped in in clumps, so all the goombas are together, all the koopas are together, etc. Super obvious, super ugly.
The course design is the most phoned in Unity asset crap I've ever seen, with some Mario esque details slapped in at less than the bare minimum. Most holes I couldn't even tell you came from a Mario game just by looking, literally feels like they were making a generic golf game, and a week before release somebody came in and said "hey it's a Mario game now" and they just scrambled or something. Terrible.
Finally, power shots. If you played the last Mario Golf game, you had two options to make your shot special, a power shot, and an item shot. Well, this team decided that was too much and combined the two, and also made it worse. First way they messed it up is you have to power it up. Can't just take that power shot on hole 1, literally have to wait until hole three. Then it's another three holes til you can use it again. Bullsh*t. In World Tour you could power shot at any time, and so long as you hit it perfectly, you got to keep it. Six total shots, could be gone in the first 9 if you suck, could keep all six til the 18th. Point is you could choose when to use it, and your skill determined how often.
Then there's item shots. In WT, these were acquired via hitting prize blocks scattered along each hole, could try and stock up or avoid them for closer shots. Also got a handful at the beginning of some holes, either way it was customizable, as in every character had the ability to use any and all items. In Super Rush, no, not only are certain items limited to specific characters (Yoshi does the egg shot, Luigi does the Ice shot, Mario does the fire shot, etc), but those characters are limited to just that shot. So Yoshi can only do egg shots, Luigi can only do ice shots, etc. It really limits what you can do with each character. Best part, there are fewer special shots than there are characters, so most of them double up on shots that feel like they belong to another character. So yeah, long story short, they destroyed items and power shots in one fell swoop and replaced them with a crappy, unfinished special shot system.
Taking all that you can see why playing the exact same 9 holes over and over and over against Yoshi every time, making that same egg shot on the same hole at the same time in the same weather, every game, can get annoying. And that they let you do it when ultimately there was no reason, ugh.
With all that said, and no, that's not everything but I decided to keep it brief, I will end it by saying it's not bad at the main part of the game: actually playing golf. Like I said, it feels like it was supposed to be a generic golf game until somebody decided to make it Mario flavored and also get it out the door a year earlier than it needed. Remove any pretext of this being a Mario game, and all the little bullsh*t they added to try and convey that, and it's a half decent golfing game that you can have fun playing. But the price tag says Mario while the quality doesn't, and also did away with most of what made the last game actually fun
