fun little golf game. as a kid, never made it past the third cup. as an adult, it was joy-inducing to see all the little uses of characters/items in each course as you progressed. so many things to love: character choices, mechanics, color pallete, modes, and unlockables.

one big thing for me were the animations for each character upon completing a hole. these are the animations I feel like i wish came back to modern games in some way - not that modern animation is anything to scoff at, but the character and charm of these old ones feels unparalleled in the present. double bogey as wario? accidently crush yourself with a boulder and then waddle around in anger. hold-in-one as yoshi? flutter around in excitement. definitley nostalgia for me, since I grew up playing prime gamecube, but those old character models/voices will never get old for me. it feels like the same boo model is in literally every mario game on the gamecube. they just never changed it.

i really enjoyed the mechanics presented here, even if I didn't know that you manually had to toggle where you're character would hit the ball, as opposed to only selecting the target pre-shot. that was fun to learn while on the back 9 of my last tournament. finessing each shot by changing up my club, power, distance, and location of where I hit the ball made it so that no shot ever really felt impossible.

lastly, if i didn't have save states playing my *legally back up physical copy" on emulator, i don't know what I would do. i was only able to complete this game in 10 hours because I could mess around with my options and see what would work best. unlocking shadow mario through completion of the ring attack mode would've taken me at least four times as long could I not have saved my spots.

a lovely, inoffensive game that is great to relax with and enjoy the vibes.

I am genuinely surprised at how Nintendo made a near perfect and fun Mario Golf game on their second try and at how much I enjoyed it. Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour takes everything that worked from the original Mario Golf, cuts out all that didn't, and adds a lot more stuff to make it more akin to the Mario Sports formula we know now.

The core gameplay is still basically just golf like in the first one, but with a ton more bells and whistles that make it just feel better, like the auto swing feature that helps you effortlessly line up a shot in the general direction you're aiming for so that the gameplay feels smoother and less tedious. Another great thing the game does in terms of gameplay is having optional tutorials that actually teach you the games mechanics, something that was completely missing in the first one and was detrimental to my enjoyment of it. The tutorials genuinely helped me understand what the game was asking of me with each shot and when made things all the more satisfying when I started consistently doing well in the game.

Another great thing about this game is its variety in courses and characters. The characters in this game actually feel very different from one another in playstyle and that makes it fun to try different ones out over the course of the game, I found myself using several different characters by the time I beat this game and each one served the purpose I needed them for well and were just fun to play. The courses in this game are also insanely varied and fun as well. Whereas the first game just had golf courses with different backsplashes of areas that ultimately didn't feed into the gameplay, Toadstool Tour actually has courses that feel unique and different from one another. Several holes had really fun gimmicks to them that were felt almost more like puzzles that I had to solve rather than just three or four straight strokes with slightly different angles.

In terms of unlockables and progression this game hits it out of the park as well. Instead of making the four unlockable characters become available as you progress through the main tournament mode like so many Mario sports games do, Toadstool Tour locks its characters behind its various side modes, and it requires you to learn how to complete what those are asking of you to unlock things which is really neat. If I have one complaint with the game it's that the error for margin in some of these side modes was really unfair and led to me repeatedly throwing myself at a specific challenge over and over to much frustration (I'm looking at you ring shot mode), still though I can't be that mad as I did eventually find myself beating everything and feeling really accomplished when I did.

And finally, like all other Mario sports games up to this point the game just exudes charm and personality. Each character has unique animations after a hole depending on what they get as a score (Birdie, Par, Bogey, Double Bogey, etc...) and all of these are fun and funny to behold.

Overall, Mario Golf Toadstool Tour is an exceedingly fun game that not only manages to improve on its dated predecessor but also proves itself to be the best iteration of the Mario Golf subseries in the process.