Dodgeball Academia (Xbox One)

In the world of Dodgeball Academia, everyone and everything revolves around dodgeball. As you go to school to learn how to play dodgeball you can read comics and watch television shows about dodgeball, and if you get a job that isn’t playing or teaching dodgeball, it’s probably something like being a referee or serving food to dodgeball players. In this wacky world where everyone is incredibly focused on this single simple sport being a facet of almost every part of their lives, it’s a little surprising that the dodgeball itself isn’t all that exciting.

 

That isn’t to say that the dodgeball is outright bad in this sports-based role-playing game. In Dodgeball Academia a typical match takes place on a horizontal court divided down the middle. Two teams will attempt to eliminate the other by hitting them with dodgeballs, but people aren’t eliminated in a single hit like in the real world sport it’s based on. Instead every character has a health meter that you wear down by hitting them, and to Dodgeball Academia’s credit it tries to mix in special abilities and techniques to try and expand your options. You can throw a ball normally, influence its speed some with the control stick, or charge the throw, and as your dodgeball team levels up by playing games, they’ll get special abilities that can influence different types of throws. A character may be able to have their charged throw hit someone multiple times or it can inflict status effects like sticking a person in place or causing gradual damage with a fiery hit. You also have Balltimate moves that build up power during a match and can do things like heal your team, throw out a special ball while time is frozen to guarantee a hit, or let you aim your throw in unusual ways. Lastly, characters can differ in their defensive options, some characters simply catching dodgeballs if you get the timing right while others counter it and hit it back to sender. Catching the ball won’t eliminate an opponent or let an eliminated ally come back in, but this is reasonable enough adaptation to the sport’s rules considering the health bar situation.

Those defensive options are a bit too effective at times though. Up against AI opponents you normally can’t gauge the moments they’ll be vulnerable to a dodgeball or if they’re ready to catch or counter it. Some characters will get dizzy after a dodge roll, but even if you try to hit someone while they wind up a throw it will probably just lead to the balls colliding in the air. The best strategy much of the time is to throw the balls and hope they’ll hit, few foes really asking you to evolve your tactics and few rewarding any effort to space out your throws until you know you can land the hit. Dodgeball in Dodgeball Academia becomes a little too basic because of this, your range of skills more a way to gain a small edge if the special throw goes through but there’s not too much penalty if the opponent does easily avoid each hit. Your own ability to grab and move around to avoid balls keeps things a bit interactive and finding those moments to utilize a Balltimate means the games aren’t mindless, and a few concepts in place can add interesting shakeups. Some matches have eliminated players assist from the sidelines by catching balls and throwing them back into play while others are one-on-one duels. Equipment is meant to help add some diversity to how you approach the action although the items that can heal you are hard to refuse compared to small stat boosts or slight shifts in abilities, but teammates can be swapped around as the active player you control during a match. Unfortunately the inactive teammates trail somewhat brainlessly beside you and can be punching bags if the opponents target them, but their different Balltimates can provide utility tools and it is still likely you will sometimes lose a player or two in a match, especially if you’re up against people with cursed balls that disable healing.

 

Cursed balls are one of the many types of dodgeball gimmicks meant to add some variety to the play. The earlier mentioned fiery and sticky statuses are sometimes an inherent part of a ball in a match rather than a skill you utilize and certain ball types will bounce less making for easier retrieval or they’ll move in strange ways on the ground that might mean a thrown ball rolls back to its thrower after a hit. You can carry multiple dodgeballs at once, but this also means you’ll probably get a stack of five in your hands and can’t afford to take the time to use them strategically, especially since it is viable to push into the other side of the court to grab balls even if the penalty is slow movement as you leave it and a gradual drop of any balls grabbed. You don’t need to be strategic in which balls you throw first even if the effects could have had room for it, their aspects more a nice bonus. Some shakeups like having the arena covered in ground-obscuring grass are just rather bland ways of breaking from the norm, but on the other hand the underground arena where any player can be on any part of the court has perhaps the most intense matches since choosing your moments and trying to actually score hits consistently is far more important when opponents can come at you from every side and even block your ability to retrieve balls. For the most part though, even as little attempts at interesting complications enter the picture, mostly the only way the game goes above decent fun to outright thrilling are those moments where you’re facing a foe who is clearly stronger and the stakes for getting sloppy become briefly tangible.

 

There is an adjustable difficulty slider for damage taken and damage dealt that can range from absolutely nothing to over tripling either one, but that won’t really lead to you squeezing any extra strategy out of the basic play. A multiplayer match against another human can at least have the slight predictability of human nature to lean on so that you can try to actually ensure a hit by learning your opponent, but the defense options are still likely to find strong purchase there too. Some smart ideas were put in place like the ball detonating if someone tries to stall by holding the ball without throwing it, but the game’s story does feel like it throws in a bit too many dodgeball ideas for how little true variation you’ll experience. People standing around will spot you and challenge you to a match while being fairly basic opponents, and while some variety can come from changing the size of opposing teams and what their Balltimates might be, those inconsequential battles do mostly just contribute more chances to build up cash or experience while potentially whittling at your health bar that persists between matches to justify much of the game’s treasures being healing items.

What ends up more interesting than the basic albeit flashy dodgeball is the story itself. You begin as Otto, a kid starting his first day in a surprisingly short semester at Dodgeball Academia. Very quickly you’ll notice that the students and staff take on all sorts of unusual appearances, your first friend Balloony having an actual balloon for a head, one of your teachers being a well-dressed monkey with an afro, and fellow students can have cube-shaped heads or act like a pirate without anyone finding it odd. Your time at Dodgeball Academia centers mostly around a small tournament and the activities surrounding it, Otto putting together an ever growing team, fighting against the efforts of other players who aim to sabotage his chances of playing, pushing back against runaway dodgeball-playing robots that nearly get the tournament cancelled, and attending class. Sometimes you will experience unique challenges as part of your studies like a dodging challenge where the balls come faster and in greater numbers the longer you last while other story events are more a way to send you across school to engage in normal dodgeball games with people you come across along the way. There are side quests to spice things up, some like the kid who wants to play you every day actually showcasing a few different ways an opponent could try and take you out while others might just send you off to play a few no-names in dodgeball.

 

The rest of the cast do end up one of the game’s highlights as does the sometimes silly places the story will head because of them. The egotistical square-headed Cubo is a constant inept thorn in your side while the school’s strongest player Boris serves as a benchmark of your progress as you get closer and closer to potentially matching his power. Suneko is a more serious but helpful member of the team to counteract Otto and Mina who are mostly just kids excited to play as much dodgeball as they can, but little undercurrents of deeper stories can make interactions more than a chance to be goofy about this dodgeball-obsessed world. It certainly does feel more like a low stakes T.V. show or gag manga, characters sometimes even showing some awareness of this, but it would have been a delightful and colorful framing for the action if the action was a bit more exciting.

 

Exploring the school and running into the same batch of characters repeatedly does make the whole journey more personal. Everyone in the tournament is familiar and sometimes a friend or well-established rival. The school has a few areas open up like the nearby forest so the constant walking around the campus won’t totally stagnate, and a roll used to traverse more quickly is a little bit of fun for its high speed and need to wrangle it around corners to keep momentum. It is a bit of a shame only a few characters seem to really grow in terms of how they play dodgeball, meaning some rematches feel like they’re lacking the pitch up in difficulty you’d expect from facing someone again down the line, but if you surrender yourself to a serviceable execution of this twist on the sport, the world is still inviting and amusing enough that the adventure can at least reach its climax without it being dragged down by minimal meaningful iteration.

THE VERDICT: Dodgeball Academia can be delightful when it’s focusing on its strange and silly ensemble of dodgeball-obsessed students, but the sport meant to be the backbone of the experience struggles to push beyond the basics. Abilities add some options to how you approach a match but mostly hurling balls and hoping and then trying to catch or counter the ones that come your way without too much issue makes up the face of battles even when gimmick balls or special rules are in place. Its commitment to fun characters and making a decent sports plot with things beyond just a tournament to focus on helps to offset the many standard matches that don’t even do much to shake up the formula.

 

And so, I give Dodgeball Academia for Xbox One…

An OKAY rating. Even if the action doesn’t often demand much strategy or smart skill usage, there’s still a bit of simple visceral fun, something fairly close to what you might expect out of actual dodgeball. Real dodgeball does have the risk of elimination for a bad throw though and the need to really decide if you’re going to try and dodge or go for the catch with the punishment being quite severe for misjudging it. The health system in Dodgeball Academia does feel like it leads to some of the issues then, as you need to be able to hit often enough to wear down the life bars of sometimes large teams while surviving yourself. Tinkering with difficulty sliders to find an ever shifting sweet spot would be a lot to ask of a player though, so instead the game just lets you have battles that often feel pretty basic even if you’re getting special powers or unusual balls thrown into the mix. Being able to bounce back or avoid damage is a bit too baked into how this form of dodgeball is played, so matches feel less interactive since you’re not often changing how you play besides sometimes whipping out a trick to heal up or see if you can speed things along a little. If the role-playing game elements didn’t demand more battles to increase your resources and strength in then perhaps fights could be positioned as tactical challenges rather than damage races where you still need to put in some good defense, but the plot at least makes it easier to look past the perhaps overabundance of simple matches and focus on the areas it succeeds like the humor and intimate cast of characters.

 

Dodgeball Academia’s world ends up more entertaining than the game everyone’s nuts about playing, but the dodgeball at least never dips into absolutely mindless territory and you do need to remain active to avoid balls. You would think this school and a society based around the sport would have found greater depth to it than some super moves and minor status effects, but Dodgeball Academia will mostly grab you with its strange story of an eccentric school life rather than gripping you with how its action unfolds. If it could get above being a test of your reaction times perhaps it would go further, but Dodgeball Academia has quite a bit of creativity in its setting to catch your eye even if it doesn’t lead to meaningful shifts in how the gameplay unfolds.