Hello again. I’m back for another game review. You can find me lurking around the Internet @st_owly as usual. Today I’m looking at:

Birdie Wing: Golf Girls’ Story. The Nintendo Switch Game

I LOVE Birdie Wing, it’s everything I ever wanted out of a sports anime, so I was very excited to discover this was being localised, but…

When you first load the game, there’s a quick tutorial to show you the controls, then on you go to “story mode,” which loosely follows the storyline of the anime and sets up matches against various characters. And when I say “loosely” I mean it. There’s no meat to it, barely any of the anime story is actually there, it’s more like random characters appear, there’s a bit of dialogue and challenge Eve to a match. When you finally beat the last stage it just kind of stops and puts you back to the main menu so quickly you don’t realise what’s happened, and there’s no resolution to the story or anything. My main thought was “that’s it??”

There’s also a free play mode which is just the Nafrece U15 course and Anri’s putting shop. 

The graphics are fine; nothing special, but not terrible either. One big omission is that there’s no voice acting, even just yelling the names of the attacks when you/your opponent used them would be better than silence. The multi hole stages are also incredibly frustrating, as you can’t save after each hole, so if you fail the stage you have to go right back to the beginning. I lost count of how many times I failed the final 6 hole stage, but I do think the game learns when you’re bad at it and matches your opponent to your level. It’s very bizarre seeing Eve and co get double bogeys.  (I HATE PUTTING). 

The best way I can really describe this game is half finished and wasted potential. It seems like there’s so much more that could be done with it, but for whatever reason it was rushed out in this incredibly incomplete state. 

Let the record show that I did *once* get an eagle. I’ve never yet managed it again. 

The music is also just generic elevator music, the developers definitely missed a trick by not even having “Venus Line” as the menu music. The translation is also patchy at best, with lots of spelling errors and awkwardly constructed sentences. A Chinese translation is also available in the settings menu but I can’t comment on that.  

Example of the type of spelling/grammar mistake the dialogue is littered with. 

Ratings:

Art/music – 5/10. Thoroughly inoffensive and forgettable

Yuri/service – 0/10. Both non-existent. 

Story – 0/10. What story?

Characters – 1/10. Who are these people and why do they keep challenging me to play golf with them?

Gameplay – 3/10. A couple of little tweaks would make it so much less frustrating. I eventually developed a strategy which involved as little putting as possible and eventually finished the game, but it took *many* hours. 

Overall 3/10. It’s just a golf sim which happens to be loosely inspired by Birdie Wing. Don’t bother with it, even if you like golf sims, because it’s not even that great at that. And for the love of all that is holy please get a native speaker to proofread the translated dialogue before you release something.