I've spent about 6ish hours across two sessions playing this today, and it seems to have been rushed out the door, as it's kind of a technical mess, with frame rate issues, and a few crash/progress bugs :( I've had to quit and reload a couple of times, but seem to have also run into a progression-breaking bug at the tennis academy. It's a shame, as I was super hopeful after really enjoying Golf Story, but I think that may have needed another 3-6 months in the oven to iron out the bugs and sort out the performance issues. Hopefully, after some patch-work, it'll be fixed, but to me (bugs/technical issues aside), it's not landing as well as GS did - to the point where I think I'm bouncing off after this progression issue...

To give my frankly unfair response: I’m not that surprised, when the dev is quite small and even their previous game had a few major bugs that never got patched out.

My Golf Story bug anecdote: somewhere in the spooky Halloween world, there is a hole where a significant section of fairway is visually solid grass, but is coded as water hazard terrain, so you’ll make a perfectly reasonable shot into “grass” and the ball just goes *plunk* and vanishes and you’re penalized a stroke. I played that game like 3 years after release and it was still like that. I found some forum threads from like the month of release complaining about that same hole, so evidently they didn’t have the resources to address all the bugs, or they didn’t have the finances to pay for Nintendo’s cert process or whatever. Either way, a fairway accidentally being coded as water hazard is WILDLY unacceptable in a golf game, so it kinda soured me on trusting the dev.

I didn’t even make it far enough to see any bugs. I got turned off immediately by the camera cutting and recentering on the speaker for each line of dialogue. I found that so disorienting and unnecessary that I put the game down after like 5 mins, then read about all these other problems and just hoping they issue some good patch work early next year. Such a shame, was really looking forward to this, but hopefully they turn it around.

I agree it seems rushed just from the opening cinematic that cuts to different music and is jarring. My game is crash and didn't load when I was leaving the mall. There are small things like icons still being above peoples heads even though you completed challenges. The frame rate isn't great, but didn't hinder my experience. I actually thinking about not playing any more, due to the devs saying they are working on a patch and maybe waiting for that to release. but the game is definitely lacking a final polish.

That's the path I'm going - I'm hoping that polish tidies the game up and brings it up to snuff. We'll see...

https://twitter.com/tend0g/status/1608282295584325632

Just leaving this here - apparently there's a hidden room only accessible by hacking that has representations of the devs in it and they're talking about being overworked and that someone higher up mandated the game be more ambitious than its original vision and that they knew it was glitchy but were made to ship it out anyway

@kainhighwind09: Looks like it's actually glitching not hacking, meaning this was an Easter Egg they intended to be findable.

@kainhighwind09: I think it's highly up for debate whether that room is "stuff the devs of Sports Story think about this project" versus "stuff devs in general think about their projects." It seems more likely that it's just poking fun at stuff devs say about their work, but obviously it's going to be viewed differently because Sports Story came out kinda half-baked and bad (pending significant patches).