GOTY 2021 mini reviews: Dodgeball Academia

Continuing my (brandon's) series on games I had to review for competitions, here's one that surprised me! We talked about it in the GOTY episode, and I probably wouldn't have played it if not for the judging process, so hooray! This was in the RPG category, so I spent a lot of time talking about whether it was an RPG... it's probably not, 100%!? it's hard to say, even now.

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Dodgeball Academia.

This one took me by surprise! This game takes a very kunio-kun (super dodgeball)-style battle system, and mixes it with Scott Pilgrim-esque character designs, a Pokemon-looking world complete with similar styles of random battle (with a similar musical stinger), and music that's so much like Sonic Adventure that when I try to remember it I often actually remember Sonic Adventure music.

The story is about a young lad who comes from a family of referees, but wants to be a dodgeball player, so sneaks into the Dodgeball Academy. He gains a group of misfit friends and unravels the various mysteries and problems going round the school. You can upgrade your characters with gear, switch between them on the fly, hunt around for permanent upgrades and curatives, etc. You can pick volleyballs up all over the world, it's free roaming, and you can jump around and smack anything you want with volleyballs at any time. The areas you can get to are constrained, but open up more over time.

The story is brisk and engaging in my opinion, but very light. I like that, though! The battle system is pure Super Dodgeball, and I like that too, but it juuuust starts to edge out of RPG territory there for me, ALMOST. But you do build your team and give them gear, so I kind of give it a pass. I found myself playing this for around 5 hours which surprised me. I thought I'd pick it up and put it down because the very starting intro is not strong (I hate when games start out with characters in an empty void, especially when they've got so many nice graphics to show later). But it wound up hooking me and I played it quite a bit, and will probably finish it when I've got the time.

So what DON'T I like about the game? I have a few minor issues. One thing that bugs me is you start the game with a friendly NPC healing you after every battle. About an hour in, they take that away, and you have to go to a pokecenter-type place to get healed after that. It winds up making you run across the world for healing, or use curatives that you find. That's the real reason I reckon, they wanted you to have something to collect, and a reason to use items. But it 100% feels like what it is - a padding/band-aid to a thing they wanted to do. Healing after every match was great, so it diminishes the experience to take that option away. It's minor, but that kind of thing really bugs me.

Second thing I don't like is it's really not clear how to switch between characters mid-battle. And if you forget the controls, there's no easy way to refresh yourself other than going to the controller config and looking at the default mapping. Some things aren't even on there.

Lastly, and this is another thing that really bugs me but is not terrible, when you're in the world, you roll to move around faster. Keep hitting the button to move faster and you can really speed around. This is nice! But what sucks is that the roll button is different in battle. Just dumb. They definitely had a thing they wanted to do with the battles that meant they wanted a certain control scheme, but like... just integrate jumps and rolls across in-game and overworld, come on!! I keep forgetting how to roll in battle and since it's not in the controller config I have to *look it up on the internet* which is not cool.

Is it in my top 5?

Well, so far it's in my top 5 RPGS of the year, despite myself! I really like it. But I suspect it won't really stick in the top 5 for most folks with all these more pure RPGs out there and huge experiences. This is a smaller-feeling game and probably won't make the final cut. But I like it! So ultimately my view is top 5 in my book, but I doubt that'll be the sentiment of the group??

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Yeah - I would actually recommend insert credit pals give it a look, it's kind of an interesting curiosity!? You might like it!