Mario Golf: Advance Tour Import Hands-On

Nintendo is a company whose foundation rests solidly on franchises. So if you expected never to see the Mario Golf series pop up on the Game Boy Advance, well, you were wrong! Au contraire, friends--Nintendo and developer Camelot will be bringing Mario Golf: Advance Tour stateside in June, and we recently got our grubby hands on the import version to see just how well Mario's golf game translated to the small screen. After a brief run through the initial part of the game, we're duly impressed at the strange and wonderful new direction Camelot has taken the series.

You might not know that Advance Tour is really only one-half golf game--the other half is an RPG. A golf RPG? Yes, but given Camelot's recent track record, which includes Golden Sun and its sequel, you shouldn't be too surprised at the shift in gameplay. You also won't begin the game by playing as (or even interacting with) any of your Mario favorites. Instead, you'll choose from a young boy or girl, whose names default to Neil and Ella, and you'll move around the gameworld talking to other golfers, engaging in golf minigames, and ultimately hitting the courses to test out your golfing skill. Eventually you'll level up and win enough tournaments that you'll be able to play against Mario and friends (this is Mario Golf, after all, and they're in the intro) and you'll get to play against those veritable golf masters. For now, though, we're stuck on the bottom rung, trying to improve our skills and make a name for ourselves.

The nitty-gritty of the golfing mechanics in Advance Tour ought to be familiar to anyone who's enjoyed video game golf, especially the previous Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour on the GameCube. Thankfully, the golf interface is also quite accessible to new players, as well--we'd gotten the basics down pat before we finished our first set of 18 holes. You start by viewing the lay of a hole's terrain from a high overhead perspective, and an arc will show you how far you can hit the ball with your selected club from your current position. It's easy to cycle through your clubs to see how the ball's trajectory and distance will change, and onscreen indicators clue you in about other variables that will affect your performance, such as wind speed and direction.

When you're ready to swing, the view drops down behind your player, and your attention will be attracted to a meter at the bottom of the screen that will let you control the strength and precision of your swing. When you hit the A button, the meter will begin to fill, and how full it is when you stop it will determine your swing strength. At this point you have two options, however, since you can stop this power indicator with either the A or B button. If you use A, the game will automatically adjust your precision for you, but if you use B, you'll be allowed to time your swing manually for even greater control. While the meter is in motion, you'll also be able to adjust where exactly you hit the ball, in case you want to put some spin on it or perform some other fancy trick.

The RPG elements in Advance Tour extend beyond just character interaction. You'll be building up the golfing stats of your own character as you play, as well. Though just about every shred of written text in the game is in Japanese, we were able to surmise that you'll gain experience when you play various courses, and as you raise your levels you'll gain bonuses in several categories, such as swing, accuracy, and spin. It seems as though various minigames will be available, as we stumbled onto a driving range that let us practice our shots without penalizing us for screwing up. We're very interested in seeing how the RPG mechanics in the game unfold when we get our hands on an English version of the game.

So far, the presentation of Advance Tour is very nice indeed. The RPG areas and the courses are all fanciful and brightly colored, and you'll see all sorts of classic set pieces, like green pipes, scattered here and there. The game looks an awful lot like any other RPG--one GameSpot staffer pointed out that the little emotive icons overlaid on the characters from time to time are taken right out of Golden Sun. The music is upbeat and catchy, from what we've heard so far, and there's also a surprising amount of voice in the game. You'll get little audible congratulations when you make a nice shot, or a big "whoops!" at the end of a hole if you go over par.

Mario Golf: Advance Tour really managed to win us over despite the huge amount of Japanese text and the short time we had with the game. That we were so taken with a game we can't read bodes well for the English localized version, which is due in just two short months. There seems to be a whole lot more meat in the game than we delved into during our initial play--there's a golf dictionary included, for instance, as well as the requisite multiplayer mode. The Japanese version of the game even came bundled with the new wireless GBA adapter (though Nintendo hasn't announced any such plans for the US version), so we're especially looking forward to finding out how support for this new device will be implemented in the game. Stay tuned--we'll bring you more information on Mario Golf: Advance Tour at the upcoming E3 and beyond as the game's release date approaches.