Archive for the Birdie Wing Category


Birdie Wing: Golf Girls’ Story on Nintendo Switch, Guest Review by Eleanor W.

September 13th, 2023

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. 





Birdie Wing, Continued, Continued

April 25th, 2023

It’s not that often that I write a review and mere hours later, everything I said was *completely* wrong, but Birdie Wing has done it, by golf!

Golf changes *everything* here. It ruins the dreams of young women by leading them to defeat in a single high school doubles tournament, which clearly is the end of the road for any athlete.

Golf brings people together and tears them apart. It kills people (with the help of one of my favorite shoujo troupes, the cruise liner accident – and a love triangle between serious, yet dysfunctional, adults, a la Marmalade Boy.)

But all of this serves a purpose, I swear! If none of this happened, Aoi would pine after Eve and never really find her own golf. It is imperative that our protagonists develop an intense rivalry or they will just going on being a golf manzai partnership, with increasingly extreme reasons to not take their golf seriously at all.

As Steve Jones puts it on ANN, golfing hard is the message here: In Birdie Wing, “Golf becomes the axis on which the world rotates. You can golf hard enough to save your adoptive family. You can golf hard enough to cure amnesia. You can golf hard enough to die.” Surely, our protagonists can golf hard enough to be a happy couple, now that the most obvious twist turns out to be twistier than we thought.

Vipere returns this next week and the Birdie Wing fandom is (un)reasonably excited, as Eve – having helped Aoi win her competition, and unlocked her own memories*, is rewarded by being deported. Of course she is, that’s totally normal for Birdie Wing – and we love it.

Ratings:

Art – 10
Story – 10 
Characters – 10
Service –
Yuri – Now that they aren’t sisters, maybe Aoi might get that kiss. Probably not, though.

Overall – 10

My love for this series is endless.

*Remind me to tell you my theories about Eleanor Burton.

 





Birdie Wing, Continued

April 16th, 2023

The first “season” of Title Poster for Birdie Wing featuring an ensemble of high school girls playing golf, surrounded by adult men and women looking portentous and menacing. Birdie Wing was an absolute triumph that didn’t so much come to an end, as just stopped. ^_^ And now what was being called the second “season” is more or less a continuation of the first.

In the middle of what might have been a climactic arc in any high school sports story, for Birdie Wing, it was just another stepping stone from one plateau of unreality, to another. What began as a high-tension story about underground mafia golf and corruption morphed effortlessly into a high school sports drama, complete with a rival pair that Aoi and Eve would have to beat before moving on to re-address the cutthroat world of adult golfers and lingering threats. Only this is Birdie Wing, not any other story and when Eve and Aoi finally take on Himekawa Mizuho and Oikawa Kaede…..they are rendered instantly irrelevant by Eve’s orange bullet. Watching Himekawa crushed might have even been a moment of pathos in any other story, but here is a passing note of “yup.” We’ve seen the opening credits – there’s like another dozen people to get through. ^_^

Also, almost as an aside, it is confirmed that Eve and Aoi are half-sisters, but if this came as a surprise to you then wow, were you not paying attention. Why and how are also pretty irrelevant in this series and I don’t think it matters at all how they are related, when Aoi’s primary goal is to get a kiss from Eve and Eve’s primary goal is to eat lot of hamburgers. As this series has established, there are no rules which it will not cheerfully break.

I don’t think I have to exhort anyone reading Okazu to watch Birdie Wing, by now, but let me just remind you to definitely watch Birdie Wing. It is the perfect sports Yuri anime precisely because both sports and Yuri are entirely wack.

Ratings:

Art – 10 Loving shots of unreal golf
Story – 10  Everything is valid when nothing is real
Characters – 10 Delightful and nonsensical
Service – There are things that can be considered service, depending on how much on likes detailed animation of golf strikes
Yuri – Aoi’s desire for a kiss, not much else, but it doesn’t matter much

Overall – 10

This is still the greatest anime I have ever watched.





Birdie Wing -Golf Girls Story-, Season 1

June 29th, 2022

From the gritty world of urban decay and underground mafia golf to the well-manicured lawns of elite golf clubs in the shadow of Mt. Fuji, Birdie Wing -Golf Girls Story-, Season 1, has exactly none of the things you might expect if I mentioned I was watching a “golf anime.”

Birdie Wing has given us a sports anime that is very similar to the isekai of I’m in Love With The Villainess. In sports anime, there will be sweat and tears and hard work and competition and characters striving to reach their goal – this is a genre with rules. Instead, in between Gundam references and throwbacks to Yuri anime of the 00s, we have a a sports anime that gleefully flaunts the rules of the genre. Where ILTV took isekai and squeezed it until it told a story about social justice, Birdie Wing is doing the opposite. Sure, there is sweat and training, but there are no tears here.

In most sports anime, the arrogant and competent athlete is our rival…someone to try and beat, and having beaten, befriend. Not here. In Birdie Wing only the strong survive. Everyone on the screen is confidently arrogant about their skill, and competent enough to back it up: With the most arrogant being Eve and Aoi, whose supreme confidence in their skills turn errors into comedic moments, instead of tragic ones. There is nowhere for them to go but up, like the symbolically rising arc of their shots off tee.

Our team is, in actuality, a comedy troupe composed of two odd couples, a hefty splash of eau de Yuri and a soupçon of old school shoujo series wrapped in the sponsored gear of a sports anime…and an audience of adult Japanese men who are being wooed to play in beautiful, exclusive, undoubtedly outrageously expensive links. Last night, while playing around, I found the Raiou Girls’ School golf team clubhouse in the real world, a clear indication that you and I are not the intended audience of this anime, but merely lucky bystanders.


Season 2 of this delightful romp was announced before Episode 13 premiered on Crunchyroll. Visit the BW official site for spoilers and implications.

Will Aoi, Eve, Ichina and Amane being able to, I dunno, take down the evil, sexy mafia lady and fulfill Coach Gundam-injoke’s dream before he coughs up blood and dies? Probably not, honestly. But I am here for it, no matter.

Which brings me to the Yuri. Is this Yuri? The series has not been at all shy about implying that Eve and Aoi are sisters. In fact, it’s gone out of it’s way to beat us over the head with the idea. Eve is using kisses to coerce Aoi, in an absurdly cute and screencappable way, and Ichina has kindly noticed the Yuri score rising, but whether our ball is headed into the rough or toward the fairway we don’t yet know. (Yes, here at the end, I finally allowed myself a stupid golf metaphor.)

Sceencap by Hyperart Marcus-san

When I initially reviewed Birdie Wing, I asked for a smidge of Yuri…and totally got that and more. I called it “overtly subtextual” in my first review. Now it’s a bit more complicated. Eve is using her natural charm to seduce a willing Aoi, and it’s right there in the open. But will it be passionate platonic sisters or passionate platonic partners in golf or… passionate platonic something else that they’ll shoehorn in? And will we even care?

The good news is that we will get the end of this story, which has me absolutely ecstatic. But…will we get the end we want? Probably not, but we’ve been talking about this series a lot on the Okazu Discord and we think the series has a twist or two up it’s sleeve for us yet.

Ratings:

Art – 8 Great scenery porn and animated drives
Story – 10
Characters – 10
Service – 4 There is some service, but they’re keeping the creep low-key and tolerable
Yuri – What the heck, I’m going for it ……10

Overall – 10

In my recent video on Yuri Studio, Sports in Yuri Anime & Manga, I said that this anime was very close to being the greatest Yuri sports anime of all time. Here at the end of Season 1, Birdie Wing is even closer to being the greatest Yuri sports anime of all time….and I’m not even sure it needs more Yuri to hit that mark. ^_^

What a great anime this is. I can’t wait to rewatch it!





Birdie Wing -Golf Girls’ Story-

April 24th, 2022

In the world of underground golf, one girl reigns supreme, Eve Aleon, known as the Rainbow Bullet, is alone at the top of Nafrece’s illicit golf betting world.

Eve is a girl with one skill – she can hit a golf ball so hard, so far, so powerfully, that she’s able to support herself and her makeshift family of orphans by making dangerous bets in underground golf games. When Eve meets Awashima Aoi, a Japanese pro, the sparks fly between them and Eve finds a way to compete against Aoi in a professional tournament.

Birdie Wing -Golf Girls’ Story- is a magnificent mix of action, sports and fantasy anime that immediately recalled the Bee Train series of the early 2000’s. When the setting turns out to be Nafrece, the exact same city that appears in Madlax, the second of Bee Train’s “girls with guns on the run” trilogy, I knew I was going to love this anime. As I said in 2004, “Nafrece might be France or England or Japan, but it’s not. This gives the story a lot of leeway to adding fictive elements, like a arms-dealing conspiracy driven by magic…” Nafrece in Birdie Wing is less European and much more late 80’s New York City, with the kind of income inequality we have come to expect from that setting. There is a scene in which Eve is sulking in a series of 1980’s “NYC New Wave album cover industrial,” settings – a moment of absolute perfection.

So the point of this anime is to deconstruct the game of golf, apply non-Euclidian physics to it, give it Saki-like animated magical unrealism, and attach it to a world populated by criminal underground golf bosses, adorable orphans, and golfers shopping for personas straight out of a Spirit Halloween catalog.

And, AND, because this series is written by Kuroda Yousuke, the same man who did indeed give us Madlax, there is a hot cigarette-smoking crime boss lady sponsor, a shady suit-wearing lady sponsor for Eve and an incredibly intense, practically telepathic, rivalry between Eve and Aoi.

Honestly, Birdie Wing may be the best anime I have ever watched in my entire life.

I joke all the time about how much I want a sports anime – the intense competition, the blood, sweat and tears of sports and Yuri, but Birdie Wing has made me realize that I also need a criminal underground organization running it all, and near-magical golf swings. Who knew?

This won’t be a Yuri anime the way we expect one in 2022 – sadly, sexy smoking crime boss lady has already opted out. But for that old 00’s flavor of pairing up the women and letting our imaginations run, this is guaranteed to be a good time. I’m frankly shocked that there isn’t Eve x Aoi fanart already. This is the Yuri I grew up with; subtextual, but somehow in your face.

If you looked at the plot and thought, well, meh, golf, let me assure you this is not golf. There’s almost nothing actually golf about it, except occasionally, by accident. ^_^

 

Ratings:

Art – Outstanding
Story – Absurdist brilliance
Characters – Perfection
Service –  Low-key
Yuri – Overtly subtextual

Overall – 9

If this even has the smallest smidge of actual Yuri -give me a predatory lesbian golfer, or a couple in the background – it goes straight to 10.

For a review written with prose that matches the anime itself, I hope you will Steve Jones’ review of Episodes 1-3 on ANN. It was almost as much a ride as the episodes themselves.

Oh, one last thing of note – every single bet Eve makes seems like it’s really shady and involves sexual favors from these underage players, but always turn out to be something completely silly, like betting a rare Gunpla. It’s a total fanwank, but ends up being funny.