Man oh man, this game surprises me to no end. Cramming the gameplay of Mario Golf onto the GBA with pre-rendered assets and faux-Mode 7 could not have been an easy feat, and yet it plays so effortlessly.
Camelot applied their work on the Golden Sun games to full effect here. All the graphics look distinct, with the character sprites looking particularly nice. Music and voice clips sound very clear for GBA sound chip standards. While most of your golfing will be done from a top-down perspective, you go in for a more typical angle for the shot, and it just works well.
It would be one thing if the overworld was just a glorified menu, but there's a lot of NPCs to talk to, minigames to take part in, and even secrets to find. Walking off the beaten path and talking to people provides countless distractions from your typical game of golf. Completing any form of challenge will grant your character experience points, which you can dole out into stats of your choosing, tailoring your own playstyle.
While the RPG aspects of "plot and characters" are really middling, everything else creates one of the most fun golf games I've ever played. A chunk of content is locked behind connecting your GBA to Toadstool Tour on the GameCube, and the controls take a bit of getting used to (they managed to cram all the necessary mechanics onto the limited amount of buttons available), but what's on offer here is more than enough for a GBA title. The only reason I'm stopping for now is because the Links Club Tourney keeps kicking my ass lol.
Camelot applied their work on the Golden Sun games to full effect here. All the graphics look distinct, with the character sprites looking particularly nice. Music and voice clips sound very clear for GBA sound chip standards. While most of your golfing will be done from a top-down perspective, you go in for a more typical angle for the shot, and it just works well.
It would be one thing if the overworld was just a glorified menu, but there's a lot of NPCs to talk to, minigames to take part in, and even secrets to find. Walking off the beaten path and talking to people provides countless distractions from your typical game of golf. Completing any form of challenge will grant your character experience points, which you can dole out into stats of your choosing, tailoring your own playstyle.
While the RPG aspects of "plot and characters" are really middling, everything else creates one of the most fun golf games I've ever played. A chunk of content is locked behind connecting your GBA to Toadstool Tour on the GameCube, and the controls take a bit of getting used to (they managed to cram all the necessary mechanics onto the limited amount of buttons available), but what's on offer here is more than enough for a GBA title. The only reason I'm stopping for now is because the Links Club Tourney keeps kicking my ass lol.