Video Game Review: RPGolf Legends

Developer: ArticNet

Publisher: KEMCO

Genre: JRPG/Golf

Reviewed on: PlayStation 5

Also Available for: PlayStation 4, PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox

As the mainstream games industry grows ever more stagnant, bogged down by battle passes, microtransactions, FOMO-inducing limited time content and cosmetics in single-player games, many gamers (myself included) are looking more and more to smaller developers to deliver games that have even the most marginal degree of innovation or creativity. RPGolf Legends, developed by ArticNet and the latest game to be published by KEMCO, is one such title, though I’m sad to say it doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its premise.

The Basics: RPGolf Legends is, as the name might indicate, a marriage between classic (non-turn-based) JRPGs and golf games. The player takes on the role of Aerin, a young woman who fishes up a golf fairy named Clubby one morning and is thrust rather unwillingly into a quest to destroy the magical barriers denying access to every golf hole in the world. The story very much takes a backseat to the gameplay, and the writing reflects that both in the main questline and side content, though there are a few fun gags and puns here and there. In order to destroy said barriers, she first needs to charge up Clubby’s powers by either fighting monsters or doing well at already unlocked holes, which creates a somewhat weird gameplay loop. The player is given a lot of freedom to move around the world and proceed how they want after the introduction, which means that unlocking the holes and progressing through the story can be more or less of a grind depending on how you approach it.

Killing enough monsters to unlock any given golf hole can take a while, but it is at least reliable, a slow and steady way to fill Clubby’s energy up. The other way to do it is by getting a least a par on a hole, which triggers a roulette roll for which some of the prizes are free energy for clubby (at intervals of 25, 50, and 100% of his energy bar). Holes can be replayed endlessly for infinite attempts at roulette rewards, and getting better scores than par unlocks more roulette rolls with increasingly valuable rewards. Regardless of how the player chooses to fill clubby’s energy, however, the process is honestly a little mind-numbing, and it makes the whole game feel too stretched out.

Aside from the odd loop of either combat-golf-combat or golf-golf-and more golf, the gameplay is fairly average. Fighting monsters is simple hack-and-slash fare (if you can call “beating them to death with a golf club” hacking and/or slashing) with little variation aside from what the enemies look like. Golfing, fortunately, is a bit more complex and satisfying, though some of its finer details caused me a fair amount of frustration as I was playing, especially the wind system. I understand that wind is genuinely an important factor in real-life golf and common mechanic in golfing games in general, but at times it genuinely felt like the wind was only ever blowing directly against me no matter what direction I happened to be going, making it less something to adapt to and more just something that was actively getting in the way. The game also has a tendency to try and auto-calculate the best trajectory and club to use for any given shot, which is useful about half the time; it will either be very accurate or completely off the mark with absolutely no middle ground. These issues are exacerbated in the second to last area (which also adds a few new ones unique to it) that is extremely obnoxiously designed and much harder than anything before or after it. Despite this, the feeling when you do get a birdie or eagle or even a hole-in-one is good stuff.

One saving grace for the possible grind of unlocking holes is that there’s a fairly extensive list of side-quests to perform, and since most of them require some level of monster hunting to complete it’s easy to combine them with filling up Clubby’s energy. Side quests also help make the grind for the money required to buy anything more tolerable, as do the tournaments with cash prizes that are unlocked for each region after completing all 9 holes in it. RPGolf Legends is pretty easy (aside from the second to last area), and death, rare though it may be, is basically free of consequence, doing nothing except sending you back to your last activated checkpoint with half a heart.

Oh, and since I know you’re dying, dear reader, to know about the most important part of any modern game: yes, there is indeed fishing.

All of this is to say that RPGolf Legends is okay. It delivers adequately on the mechanics it has, but it’s not good enough that it was able to hold my attention particularly well. For most of my playthrough I’d do a little bit at a time before having to go do something else and then I wouldn’t want to pick it up again until the next day. I could certainly see this game having a niche audience, but to most people I’d say that you wouldn’t be terribly missing out by skipping this one.