Author: Rich
Sports RPGs seem to be back in vogue the past few years suddenly. The Early Mario Golf games were the first to bring my attention to the genre, but more recent games like Golf Story and Mario Golf Super Rush, even if the latter is way less of an RPG than its predecessors, have proven the genre can still hit. Dodgeball Academia takes the sports RPG mentality, packs it with anime trappings, and tops it off with Pokemon references for a pretty impressive final product.
Dodgeball Academia ( PC, [Reviewed] PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X,[avaliable as part of game pass] Nintendo Switch)
Developer: Pocket Trap
Publisher: Humble Games
Release Date: August 5, 2021
MSRP: $24.99
The game opens with protagonist Otto arriving late to the opening ceremony of Dodgeball Academy after ditching his old school to pursue a career in this incredibly violent sport. Students are brought up to touch a magical Dodgeball that unlocks latent powers within them at the ceremony. A relic from the great Dodgeball War. It’s all insanely over the top and helps to quickly establish the tone of Dodgeball Academia.
The narrative mainly focuses on getting you from one Dodgeball match to the next. Otto and his party travel around the campus, attending class, helping faculty and fellow students with a litany of sidequest, and taking them on in Pokemon-style encounters some student dialogue before matches are ripped verbatim from Pokemon as a fun reference. The bigger story revolves around an interschool Dodgeball tournament, but Otto and his crew will do everything from explore school mysteries to fight evil robots before the credits roll.
The campus that serves as the main setting for the game is relatively small and samey, so it can get a bit boring running back and forth from the same locations in the roughly nine-hour campaign. The real fun comes in the actual Dodgeball matches and all the changes that the dev team brings to keep them fresh throughout.
Matches play out in real-time, and your team is composed of three members though you’ll pick up a few more than that as the story progresses. You might remember dodgeball from your school days as a single hit elimination game, but here you’ll have to pummel your enemy’s health bar down to zero to win. In addition to lobbing the ball at foes, a well-timed button press can help you catch or, in the case of some characters, deflect incoming balls to avoid taking damage.
Depending on where the match takes place, courts and rules can change dramatically. Games in the parking lot have to contend with oncoming cars, while fighting in the forest means dealing with grass so tall you can hardly see. On top of this, wrinkles like special elemental ball types can shake up how you play even late into the game.
Every character also comes equipped with special powers awakened by that magic ball I mentioned earlier. Some characters like Otto have elemental charged attacks, while others throw the ball in curved arcs or unique patterns. Every team member also has a unique Balltimate move that charges up as the match progresses. Otto’s Balltimate move is a straightforward Hadouken fireball, while some can use healing abilities or even just lay into enemies with limited but powerful strikes. These abilities can quickly help you recover and lend themselves as the most significant factor in deciding your team lineup.
The characters vary so much that it doesn’t take long to decide on your mainstays and toss others aside. Some characters I didn’t use more than once before deciding their slower movement wasn’t for me. The final addition to the team did manage to shake up my roster just before the big finale, though.
The cartoony art style pops off the screen and looks like a modern cartoon network show. While color palettes and general art design are pretty consistent, there seems to be no rhyme or reason to character design in the best way possible. From balloon people to Baboon professors and feral vampire children, this world has it all.
The soundtrack helps to keep your spirits up through some of the more mundane bits. As I mentioned earlier, the campus is well designed, but it would’ve done the story some good to branch out into more unique spaces.
There’s also a Vs. Mode that lets you go head to head with friends, but you’ll have to beat the bulk of the story to get all the characters, and the lack of online functionality limits how fun it is.
Verdict: Dodgeball Academia builds a fun world full of quirky characters that are all kind of assholes. The mundanity of running similar fetch quests can be a bit much after a few hours, but the excellent combat manages to keep you on your toes by constantly changing the rules and adding new wrinkles to how you play.
Buy it
[This review is based on a retail build of the game purchased by the reviewer]