Nay Golf, said parliament.
I say ostensible because, in reality, golf is everywhere.
Our heroine Aerins hometown is called Mulligandale.
It has two shops, one of them dedicated entirely to golf.
Folk shimmy about in golfwear, talking about golf.
Highly questionable bit of villainy, this.
To save the world from not having any golf in it, Aerin needs to play golf.
To play golf, Aerin needs to power up a talking golf club she fished out of a lake.
Then I realized Id read the quest wrong.
Not just any crab meat would sate this aging killer’s insatiable hunger for crustacean flesh.
I would have to kill the crab king itself.
This is how I beat the crab king.
I pressed the attack button once.
The crab king revved up, so I held the block button.
An opening presented itself, so I pressed the attack button again, once.
The king revved up again.
I know this move, I thought.
So I held down the block button.
Then attacked again, once.
I know this move, too, I thought.
This is the party before I wave goodbye to my hometown forever and venture off into the wider world.
This was the first big example of a comfortingly classic tone and structure the game runs with.
A bright, optimistic soundtrack plinks along as you murder slimes and imps.
While theres a few overt meta jokes, the writers actually show an admirable amount of restraint here.
The games humour mostly comes from earnestly leaning into its own premise and embracing the inherent silliness within.
A pleasant surprise, for sure.
Aerin travels the world first by boat, then by golf cart, then later on, by airship.
Each new area has its own twist on traversal, combat, and the golfing itself.
Take too long, and the tree gets a second wind.
These fights are excellently tense culminations of everything else the game does, and wonderfully novel to boot.
But what of the golf itself?
Well, its definitely golf.
Random weather introduces some slight variables.
However - and heres the rub - I will not happily spend four hours grinding in RPGolf Legends.
Its those energy bars.
You might get 100% energy, which means you might move onto the next hole immediately.
More likely, youll get 25% or 50%, which means grinding the same course.
Or, you could just as well get nothing, which means doing the same, only angrier.
A static back and forth.
Some of the slimes dont even care if you block.
They just jump on your face and sit there for a while, then steal some health.
First against the wall, these slimes.
Even so, I cant quite bring myself to hate it.
But I knew that going in.
