Everybody's Golf

The first hurdle is the ersatz-Mii, flea-market puppet custom characters that infest the world, getting stuck on each other on the course and running up to you eerily in the hub. The second, and much more more major one, is the decadent progression system. After stepping foot into the Clap Handz land-out-of-time and accessing the tournament counter, it becomes apparent that you only have access to the front nine of the starting course, reconfigured with different hole sizes, tee positions, and weather patterns over and over again until you grind out the requisite experience points to unlock more locales. Your next rank only gives you the back nine, leaving you to churn through the course several more times and fight three separate bosses to finally scrape your way into the next tier. From here on you unlock three more 18-hole courses in the campaign at a regular clip, but the drudgery of the early game lingers. Even with the hard settings turned on, which doubles the experience in exchange for a modicum of challenge, unlocking a single boss takes around 27 holes, which you have to do three times per rank, and there are six ranks to hit the credits…

The courses themselves, however, are immaculate. Opener Eagle City tests very little outside of a few doglegs and rivers cutting the fairway in half (which makes the prolonged grind even more frustrating), but its follow-up Alpina Forest instantly toys with elevation. Holes routinely snake up to greens that loom over the tee and sit precariously close to gaping voids to the side, letting wobbly balls with lots of lift slowly roll down to their demise if not placed with care. The fourth course, Vortex Valley, leans into the opposite effect, thinning the fairways and testing the player’s control of their run on downward sloping courses with strict boundaries. In the former, thick conifirs clog the edges of each hole, limiting rescue attempts, while the latter threads its holes through gulches and ravines, blocking errant shots or letting them drift away in lateral hazards. The course sandwiched by these two, Kanaloa Beach, veers in this direction, surrounding each fairway with endless beach bunkers. It also features some of the cuter gimmick courses in the bunch; the front nine finishes off with a par 5 where the final segment is a slim, L-shaped appendage jutted up against the end of the main fairway and littered with foot traffic, while hole 17 tucks the green behind a row of bungalows and a pesky metal bridge. These holes fall between more standard fare in a tempo of doglegs, bunker-riddled wide-open fairways (especially on Imperial Garden, a traditional links course pockmarked with pit bunkers), and par 3s with deep drops or encroaching water. Placing each hole in the same continuous topography, freely explorable by the player, helps mandate the sizing variation, and the spatial context helps differentiate holes outside of the infinite backgrounds that separated each course in prior titles.¹

Hole 5 of Vortex Valley is rather short for a par 4, but the extreme elevation up to the small plateau with the greens makes it impractical to hit for a standard player, since your woods have too little lift and your irons can’t approach from this distance. The player has the option to get into the ring around the plateau and chip it high up without bumping into the structure, or they can go on this fairway stretching to the top left, which has a more equal height with the greens. Or, as this player with custom clubs does, they can just slap it straight in for an albatross. [src]

This series in general fits nicely into a niche I think of as “arcade style with sim characteristics”, or games that have no pretension of accuracy up-front but run a more sophisticated engine under the hood than you might think.² Lie, wind, nitty-gritty terrain, and spin all get dynamic treatment here with a thoughtful heads-up display making every element crystal-clear. This is especially important given, as mentioned prior, the variety in the terrain for each of the courses. The unruly Alpina Forest, barren Vortex Valley, and soggy Imperial Garden all hinge on delicate simulation of the ball’s movement, where getting grass caught between your club and the ball may send it absolutely flying, or where an errant hit onto asphalt will let it roll away, near frictionless. The power shot system, which tacks on an extra 10 yards of arcade-y headroom to any given shot, seems limited at the start but ultimately exacerbates the game’s problems with ridiculous driving distances as it becomes more and more accessible, and it only gets more potent when combined with super/ultra topspin, which significantly increases the ball’s run. Even though the super variants of the ball spin give much more control over the behavior of the ball, the dynamics still take charge when it comes to final placement, and it ends up providing much needed variability to prevent the wilder elements of play from taking over completely. For those of us still hitting a perfect impact less than 50% of the time (this series’s final click in the traditional three-click golf control scheme), aiming around our own erratic placement adds little moments of decision-making back in even when the correct route through the course seems obvious.

That’s for the approach anyway, since the driving may as well be free. This iteration of Everybody’s Golf operates on a stat-growth system where using each club in various ways raises an associated attribute,³ and bombing it down the fairway repeatedly will inevitably lead to crazier and crazier driving distances. I was regularly getting drives over 325 yards by the end of the game, which obliterates the challenge on virtually every par 5 and can occasionally put you into putting range on descending par 4s. Per the game’s tracker when I called it quits (tried one Imperial Garden tournament in the Special Rank and then dipped), I was barely halfway to my maximum potential for my power stat, and that’s even before considering the custom club grind that makes up the endgame. Acquire gems from playing (or paying…), funnel them into your custom club set to up its stats, rinse and repeat; an unfortunate setup for the “real game” after what is effectively a 30 hour tutorial even with expedited progression. Since online play has been down for years, applying your turbocharged junk towards anything other than repeating randomized single-player content is impossible. It would feel less demoralizing if the game had ended on a more triumphant note. The final boss of the campaign, a member of a mysterious high-level golf team, challenges you to match play on Vortex Valley with the stipulation that any hit into the rough or a bunker will set you back an additional stroke. This boss’s AI then bumbles through the course, almost purposefully hitting it out of bounds or far short of its maximum distance to give you the advantage. Not exactly a thrilling on-ramp to the slog to come.