When I was a child, our Playstation had mostly just driving games, so I really developed a taste for that particular genre and even equate the whole platform on the great car games it had. I never played Choro Q back then, but there were almost no issues for me to dive right into this game. It felt right like going back home.

Now, despite it's cutesy and bright style, this game has some serious learning curve. The cars are really light and rather tall, so they spin out really easily on almost every curve. The cpu hardly does any mistakes, but takes the corners really slow so overcoming the difficulty in this game is mostly just about choosing the right tires and making those turns faster than your opponents. You can even use the slippery mechanics to your advantage and drift around the difficult curves, dominating everyone else. Once you get the hang of it, you feel like a god.

Little disappointingly, the difficulty drops after the second grand prix. At that point, you have most likely already mastered the driving mechanics and going into the third and last gp, the other cars are not that consistent with their placements. If you drive couple first races well enough, you can even come last in the final race since nobody can reach your point total any longer.

Still, this is a super solid game and I would highly recommend this if you like driving/racing games and want to have a little twist to the style.

The startup screen UI.

The file select screen.

The sparse MIDI acoustic guitar OST for the opening area.

The "SUCCESS" message.

Right down to the fonts.

Right off the bat, Soccer Story makes it clear that this isn't merely an homage to Golf Story, it's a flat-out copy in a shocking number of ways. This homework-copying is far more brazen than any of the games which have ripped off Overcooked; when something like Moving Out or Catastronauts reused Overcooked's format, they at least had enjoyable gameplay to back it up. But no amount of plagiarism can hide how dull and slow Soccer Story is.

Movement is sluggish, aiming mechanics are bare-bones, bland fetch quests and "find/hit 10 things" checklists are overly plentiful. Above all else, it completely lacks the charm and fantastic writing of Golf Story. There's no sense in aping another game's style and penchant for silly gameplay diversions if you can't make it enjoyable.

Derivative, but can't live up to what it's so determined to copy. Booooooo.

Unfortunately Soccer Story is a total misfire. I'm not sure whether it was capitalizing on the World Cup hype or attempting to beat Sports Story to the punch that made Panic Barn want to push this game out before it in this underdeveloped state, but here we are.

I really wanted to have a good time with Soccer Story. I love Golf Story to pieces and don't really care about the obvious influences if it means another fun sports RPG, but the devs just wrote down all the ingredients without knowing the recipe.

In concept it's great: open-world soccer RPG that you interact with using a magic ball, playing in matches to take down the hilariously villainous Soccer Inc. who banned soccer across the land. Kicking the ball around in the overworld is actually not so bad, and wanting to see where they would take that was part of what kept me going to the third area. The stylized graphics are nice, and they make the otherwise unexciting pixel art really pop.

But man does this game give you nothing exciting, no motivation to care about anything. I think the dialogue was the epitome of this.

The characters all speak using monotonous, abrupt speech that just feels like placeholder text. I cannot read the emotion on any character. When your player loses a match, the owner guy says "You lost the match.". And your player replies "Okay!". I feel nothing. If you've ever listened to a casting audition, the speech reads like the crew feeding the lines to the actor. No emotion, just words for function.

Besides that, the endless amount of bugginess in small (text cues not appearing properly) to big (softlocks) ways, the 2 pieces of music which are by no means bad but get a bit old after the 100th time hearing them, the far, far too easy matches that feel like a chore, the boring collectibles that reward you with boring rewards, the endless fetch quests to move the plot forwards, ALL OF THIS just sours the experience to a point where I can't help but get sucked out of the game and start wondering if this is really my time being well spent. It's not.