Chibi Volleyball (PC)

Some of the oldest sports video games only really required the player to move a pixel or paddle that represented their character to the right spot to hit a ball around the screen, and while they couldn’t capture the complexities or nuances of the sports they were emulating, they were often simple, serviceable fun. Whether it was something like Tennis For Two or an Atari title, the disconnect from the real sport made them accessible and straightforward, but you were still just playing as squares, rectangles, or blocky humanoid shapes. Chibi Volleyball, unexpectedly, revives some of the simplicity of these early sports games, but dips it into a cute anime coat of paint to make it more appealing to modern audiences.

Playing Chibi Volleyball is probably as simple as it could possibly be. You move whichever girl you’re controlling around her side of court, your movements restricted to a 2D plane so you only need to consider your right and left motion. You can also jump if you want to hit the ball while it’s in the air, but there is no button press needed to smack the ball. The moment it hits your girl, they automatically knock it away, the angle it hits them determining the angle the ball will fly after the impact. It’s easy enough to figure out how to position them to hit it far or high, and once you take the few seconds to understand how the ball and your chibi girl interact, you’ve learned all you really need to know about how to play Chibi Volleyball.

There are two main modes of play on offer, the player able to pick between a 1 on 1 volleyball game or a 2 on 2 style with four players on the court, although you can remove a player from either side of the court in 2 vs. 2 to mix and match the layout a bit more. You can play this game entirely on your own with AI opponents and an AI partner for 2 vs. 2. The simplicity of the play definitely helps it remain pretty competitive against AI or human players, it almost feeling a bit like air hockey where you just need to hit something at the right time to stay in the action. Of course, Chibi Volleyball uses the rules of volleyball to determine how points are scored, with the goal either being to hit the ball onto the ground on the opponent’s side of the court or have them hit it too many times before getting it over the net. There are no real ways to spike the ball, but a well placed hit can mean the opposing player might struggle to get in position in time or might bounce it in an odd way that makes it hard to return it in the limited amount of hits they get. You can edit the rules of the volleyball match quite a bit, the player given a lot of freedom to set various time limits to see who can score the most points in a set amount of time, a point limit for the players to shoot for, and even alter how many times you are allowed to touch the ball before getting it over the net. However, the hit limit is more stringent than the others, only allowing 1 through 5, which mostly serves as an issue in doubles since it could have done with a bit more wiggle room to accommodate that both sides of the court are small and boxed in by the edges of the screen.

While playing doubles with humans can allow you to work together for what little strategy you can eke out in this simplification of volleyball, AI partners have effective AI but with a few quirks. As opponents they can usually hold their own pretty well, especially in one on one where they are able to make almost human-level errors but also keep up a good volley so that you can’t just get easy point after easy point. Doubles is where they struggle a bit more. With a human partner they do their best and can still make the silly errors that help them feel less artificial… but if you’re playing against two opponents using the game’s artificial intelligence, it’s very obvious. AI opponents won’t really move until the ball is in their area of the court, but it’s when the AI doubles partners move in unison and on top of each other that it reveals they’re sort of pulling from the same tactics pool. They can jump with different timing or adjust if they have knocked the ball into the air, but the hit limit hurts them the most as they can end up bumping it between each other by accident when going for it in unison. Despite this quirk though, they can still put up a fight, they just hit awkward snags on occasion. There is an interesting detail in how the game lets you manage the players though, as not only are you given plenty of options for human players to join in as characters with different regions of the keyboard or different controllers, but one player can even control multiple characters, allowing you to potentially be both your doubles characters or even playing both sides of the court, although this is mostly a novelty and you wouldn’t really have a way to separate your doubles girls if they end up bunched together.

Already with these factors, Chibi Volleyball would at least be comparable to the old school sports games or the kind of small minigames you’d find in a more meaty title, but Chibi Volleyball does give you a bit more settings to alter to change the way you play. Besides the rules of play, there are many ways to alter the environment and physics of play. The net, for example, is usually just a hard surface the ball will bounce off of, meant to mark the area you need to get the ball over mostly, but you can reduce it in size to really allow the ball to bounce between players. You can choose whether or not the volleyball court has a ceiling, meaning it’s either another surface to bounce off of like the net and the sides of the screen or you can let it fly out of sight, an arrow telling you where it is before it comes back down. The volleyball’s weight can be adjusted too, heavy, light, and medium balls bouncing differently and mostly leading to harder and quicker matches when the ball is heavier. The most interesting and truly impactful option though is the ability to set up small barriers in the air above the chibi girls. There are a couple different arrangements of solid bars and circles you have floating in the air, serving as pachinko-like obstacles for the ball that will cause it to ricochet around in unexpected ways. You need to keep on your feet and set up your shots a bit more when these are in play, especially the busier layouts or the ones that hover directly over the net. They are simple in concept and won’t do anything like move or do anything technically different from the net, but this does at least allow you to inject some quick and easy variety between matches.

Volleyball is, of course, only half the title, the game boasting about it’s chibi girls and… there are only really two. Both girls have an alternate color, but for a game that has so many customizable options elsewhere, it’s a bit strange the game would only put two cute characters forward for you to play with, the color swaps existing just so you can tell them apart in a 2 on 2 match. Players can pick the same girls though, but for a game that announces its art style, it doesn’t seem like it was a priority. There are even just two court styles on offer, a beach and a library serving as the only places you can play volleyball, although considering the 1 vs. 2 and 2 vs. 1 modes were added after release, it’s not too odd to assume there might be new levels or girls added in some day. The courts and girls are just color for this simplified version of volleyball still no matter how much more is added in, but speaking of color, another odd touch of customization comes in the form of a color vibrancy setting, most likely there to help if the full vibrancy is a bit too much for the eyes. Dulling the saturation is an unexpected feature but one that doesn’t hurt to have, and it also allows for the rather silly option of playing black and white beach volleyball with the big-headed cheerleader girls.

THE VERDICT: While perhaps not what a fan of the chibi art style would want or a good adaptation of volleyball, Chibi Volleyball is instead a bit of a polished up and more brightly colored version of the kinds of extremely retro sports games where it was more about the physics of the objects on screen than being a true simulation. The gameplay is simple, reliable, and accessible, making it easy to play for a bit, and with AI opponents who put up a good fight despite being slightly robotic at times, it’s quite possible to get a decently challenging volley going in either 1 on 1 or 2 on 2. Some tinkering with settings will help with aspects like the hit limit, but Chibi Volleyball’s amount of customizability allows you to set up matches that feel different and have extra considerations like floating blocks and different ball weights. It does feel like an orphaned minigame rather than a standalone title, but its fundamentals are sound even though it would definitely have benefited from more content to prevent the inevitable staleness.

And so, I give Chibi Volleyball for PC…

An OKAY rating. The simple enjoyability of a game like Pong is pretty much what buoys Chibi Volleyball. The cute girls may draw in some players, but the real substance of the game could have been done with a few pixels on a screen. It’s a game mostly about the physics of the ball in motion and how the players or the obstacles impact it, and while the chibi art style could have made it more exciting or endearing, its options are too limited to really allow the look to factor into things. The mechanics are what makes Chibi Volleyball work, and that’s mostly because the game allows you to tinker with them enough that you can get around hit limit woes in doubles or spice up the game with the blocks floating in the sky. Its deliberately bite-sized nature means it doesn’t have the room to drag on or overtax the simple AI, so while having more than simple match modes would make a volleyball game more substantial and enjoyable, Chibi Volleyball simply dodges the ways it might wear out its welcome and focuses on being a game you turn on for a bit, play around with the settings to make a decently fun match, and then come back to some other day to do the same. You can only dump so many alterations to the core formula into the game though, the game needing more mechanics to increase its longevity and enjoyability but still handling the few it has well enough that it works as simple entertainment.

Chibi Volleyball isn’t much, even only just barely representing the expected parts its title promises, but the video game ingredients it uses for play means there isn’t much to hate about it either. While there are definitely more substantial games that are far more enjoyable, it’s got enough features to make for a mild amusement, and to say it was worse than that would be like belittling monkey bars or a playground slide. Just like the earliest video games, Chibi Volleyball taps into that simple desire to mess around a little bit with objects on a screen, hitting a bit of mild satisfaction at a win or mild disappointment at a loss.