I have never considered myself a sporty person. While I’ve played plenty in my time I’ve never considered myself a fan and don’t actively watch any regular games or events. I do however love a good sports game. Nintendo have been especially good with their sports roster for many years so it seemed only fitting to review the latest Mario football game (or soccer for my cousins across the pond). Mario Strikers has an iconic new look to it with an almost cartoon/cinematic flair to it. The power ups we’ve come to know have been given an additional snapshot style, coupled with an emphasis on flaming eyes and projectile trails (I can only assume to represent the flames of healthy, surprisingly violent competition). The only thing that dampens these fantastic visuals is the gameplay itself, which as you can imagine for a Nintendo fan boy such as myself, is a little bit heart shattering.
Platform and Languages
Mario Strikers is a Nintendo Switch exclusive and, although it came out last year, is still fairly expensive (as most Switch games tend to be). This wouldn’t be such a bad thing if it weren’t for the fact that it’s so lacking in content. You can pick this up for £20-30 online but it is still an eye-watering £50 on the Switch store!
The language options cannot be amended in game so you will need to go into your Switch console language settings and restart the whole console in order to set the game in Japanese.
Glossary
Usability
Now don’t get me wrong. Mario Strikers has a veneer of high polished and beautiful art work. Nintendo don’t build games that look bad so you’d be forgiven for being excited when whirring this game up. You will swiftly come to find that the variety of areas is slim, the included characters (even after free DLC) is smaller than you’d like for the price tag and the gameplay is incredibly derivative. Once you’ve learnt to play, even while playing against your friends, you’ll find that tactics and skill don’t really come into it. Even the specials, which are meant to be awe-inspiring are samey and repetitive, and seem to be randomly ineffective with no metric allowing for this. It may seem like I’m really blasting this game but I think the reason I’ve taken this angle is because we’ve also been equally let down by the readable content.
The first items you’ll likely come across are the tutorials. The are lead in text format by the aptly named Foot-bot. He’s a charming character and his text boxes are neatly laid out in a clear and attractive font. The reading level in beginner to intermediate and would be all the better if it weren’t for the sporadic katakana. I know this is frequently used for characters with robotic or unusual voices and is that much of an issue but I’m in full grump over this game.
The tutorials are mostly redundant and over simplified but do feature a healthy volume of text. Due to the nature of football, many words are either written in katakana or are contest related and reasonably low level. While the tutorial can be reloaded multiple times (typically a good feature) you may find that the length and ease of them outweighs the reading benefits.
The language throughout the match set up, character selections and actual playtime is also quite limited. Again most of this is just headers and is in simplistic kanji or katakana. The amount of variation based on game mode, characters and even the gear, which is meant to be it’s own interesting mechanic, is dire. Most gear is named using generic, English descriptives and each character has the same selections of armour too. The teams and characters follow much the same trend, and when you do get in to the matches there isn’t any improvement. When you score within a match you’ll see commentator’s comments on how “spectacular” the goals are but these are very small, especially when in handheld mode, and don’t stay on the screen for long enough to look up any words if needed.
One of the only saving graces in the whole game is the Game Guide and hints section that can be accessed from the main menu. Here you can find a breakdown of characters, gear, arena, parameters, items and more. The items and game modes in particular are easily recognisable as the best. Each entry has a decent block of text and full and extensive sentences. There is also relevant visual supplement from the gameplay to satisfactorily validate what you’re reading. This also applies to the surprising addition of “frequently asked questions” which, credit where it’s due, does scratch the itch that has been so greatly missing. On the other end of the scale the entries you’d expect to be huge and interesting, such as the roster of Mario characters (with their centuries of deep lore) is painfully brief and only tots up some of their stats in terms of gameplay. In many games character back stories make up the biggest volume and most descriptive text so to see this level in a cast that are 30 years old is actually a little insulting.
All in all I wasn’t best pleased with Mario Strikers: Battle League. The whole game can be experienced in its entirety within an hour, which for a big title Nintendo game, is ridiculous. Perhaps for some this may not be much of an issue but I genuinely struggled to play this game in English, on my own or with friends, so trying to play it and maintain a level of commitment to study was a waste in my eyes. By all means, play the game if you enjoy it but I cannot reasonably recommend it for a learning tool.
Challenges and Methods
Read it all, put it to bed
As you can see from the examples we’ve seen so far, even at a beginner reading level you could search and learn all of the vocabulary used in Strikers and learn it to a comfortable level within an afternoon. I worked to find as much text as possible and quickly exhausted my options so I’m certain you could do this to. Aside from this there is very little in the way of repeatable and sequential segments of the game.
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