Fishing Star World Tour (Switch)
When you first boot up Fishing Star World Tour and meet the friendly young angler who’ll be joining you on your globetrotting, her leading with “The goal of this tour is to catch all the fish in the world!” could sound rather daunting. Luckily, in the game’s world there are only 182 things to catch, each species of fish can only be found in a singular specific location, and you know how many species occupy an area as you visit it. Your airship will definitely take you on a global tour, but the angling is speedy as well, meaning you’ll likely spend just a few nights trying to achieve this goal rather than an entire lifetime.
One thing that makes your ambitious goal much more possible is how exactly you’ll be fishing. Once you arrive at your desired fishing spot, your unseen character parks themselves in a singular spot looking out over some water that will always have some fish swimming about. There are shadows in the water you can aim for, sometimes they’ll even shimmer gold or have a rainbow glow if they’re particularly rare, but even spots without these shadows can sometimes have fish available. So long as you’re using a lure that the local fish are attracted to and drop it in the right spot, you can expect a fish to soon take interest and go in for the bite, it unlikely you’ll need to even wait ten seconds for one if you’re using the right gear. You’ll unlock more gear over the course of the game by completing missions, mostly by catching specific fish or a fish of a certain value based on its size that will be judged using a four star rating scale. Rods and reels are mostly just for casting distance and the strength of the line when pulling in the fish, but new lures will allow you to catch new fish and some areas you will have to return later with a lure you unlocked elsewhere. Luckily, lures tell you how effective they are in regards to the local offerings, so you aren’t just throwing your line out and hoping for something new.
When you do have that bite on the line, what happens next may depend on your chosen control method. Fishing Star World Tour offers three ways to play, although the LABO Toy-Con Fishing Rod is more a side mode if you happen to have that peripheral. In the main game, you can choose to use the Switch’s motion sensing controllers or play with buttons, and the game definitely feels more exciting and involved if you go for the motion control route. Having to pull one Joy-Con back like a fishing rod as you spin the other in the air doesn’t just feel appropriate considering what you’re doing, but it gives you a much greater degree of control than buttons and the control stick. You can more easily do cautious light reeling or yank the rod about, but the buttons do have a purpose still. The game’s legendary fish are often more about tiring out your target than doing expert angling, and with motion controls, you do eventually run into the need to recalibrate the controller to remain accurate. This can usually be done between catches, but those long hauls start to face mild motion sensing issues with no time to fix them and being a little wrong in positioning can lead to the powerful fish snapping your line. Button controls are more forgiving and better reset to neutral so you can easily give the line slack as required, so while they do make small catches less entertaining, they’re nice to have in the back pocket for the feistier fish.
When the fish takes the bait and you yank to dig in the hook, it’s time for a fight that won’t be changing much in design over the course of Fishing Star World Tour. Your prey will begin moving about the water, the player needing to watch a gauge at the top of the screen that indicates how much pressure is being put on the line. Too much and the line will snap, but too little and the fish will extricate itself from the hook and swim away. The low end is rarely a concern, but keeping the rod positioned right and choosing when to reel is key to balancing the pressure on the line and pulling that hooked quarry in for the catch. Most fish put up a bit of a fight but the actual reeling in will only take a few minutes, but there is potential to speed it up a bit more. One is a quick way to relieve pressure, the ghost of a rod position appearing on screen and if you position your equipment right, a huge amount of pressure is taken off the line and you can even reel in scot-free for a short bit. Whenever you spin the reel, you’re building up energy in your rod, and after a while, the the golden glow will trigger a short little event where the fish is now swimming in a set of concentric rings. If you yank the rod up during this event, you’ll automatically pull it closer to you a set distance, and the closer the fish is to the center of the rings, the greater that distance.
Managing the line will be your main concern for most of what you’re reeling in, but bigger fish will start to make you try to strategically build up power in the rod, boss fish in particular often being a bit feistier but surprisingly not always too tough to pull in based on your equipment unlocks. Boss fish often feel more like a way to conclude a certain segment of the world tour with something more intimidating, a required encounter with a tough fish rather than the optional ones you’d encounter if you take the game’s goal of catching them all at face value. There are quite a few fishing spots to be found in Fishing Star World Tour and they’re not merely just ponds and lakes. The game can whip up some legitimately gorgeous locations like a pond where cherry blossom trees are in bloom, a lovely mountain lake with a purple hue due to the light, and glittering waters on clean ocean coasts. You can fish beside ruins in the Amazon or find yourself at the stormy waters near a shipwreck, and some sights like an entire flooded neighborhood beneath the water definitely show a commitment to constant variety. Unfortunately the game’s translation isn’t always the best, the young lady accompanying you on your mission sometimes having bad grammar or typos in her level introductions even though she’s easy enough to parse. On the other hand, it also means that some lovely locales are given abnormal names like “Ocean of kangaroo statue” and “Tropic alien river bay” (which does not contain anything related to aliens). Some places that aren’t swamps still have it in their name, although the “Bernewda triangle” at least is a cute bit of wordplay for a game that seems to struggle with basic phrasing.
You can’t often tell what you’re reeling in before it’s pulled all the way in unfortunately, even things like crabs or old boots looking like fish shadows right up until they’re in your arms. This is a touch odd since the shadows can leap out of the water at parts, and something like a starfish is able to even yank at your line, although considering there are actual pieces of jewelry to reel in, the starfish having a little life in it isn’t so absurd by comparison. Smaller catches or non-living ones usually don’t thrash too much either, meaning in areas with something small like a frog you can start to learn if that’s on the end of your line, although there isn’t a way to lose a catch deliberately if it’s not fighting back. You have to reel in every old boot you hook, and it feels like some other conveniences were avoided in favor of keeping the game lean and clean. You can’t see how your available lures will appeal to the local fish population if you’re swapping from level to level but you can if you pop back to your airship and then go to level select for example, but since fishing is usually quick and load times aren’t too bad, it’s not too much of a bother to hop around when you’re trying to fill out the rest of the Fish Book that catalogues the best version of every species you’ve caught. There isn’t much of a finale for going everywhere and catching everything though, the game seemingly more about the process than the destination so you don’t need to be too bummed out if you don’t have the patience for the slogs that are some legendary catches.
THE VERDICT: Once you’ve caught your first few fish in Fishing Star World Tour you’ll have a fairly good idea of what lies in store for the rest of the game, the action not changing too much if you’re catching piranha, electric eels, stingrays, or whale sharks. The animals get better at fighting back so you’ll need to be a more diligent and precise for bosses and legendary catches, but playing with the motion controls at least keeps things involved and kinetic even during simpler moments of angling. Some gorgeous locales make up for some iffy translations and the lure system is accommodating to the goal of finding every species available, so for some reliable and accessible fishing fun, Fishing Star World Tour does its job well enough.
And so, I give Fishing Star World Tour for Nintendo Switch…
An OKAY rating. The speed of Fishing Star World Tour definitely makes it easy to get invested in it, constantly pulling in new species and hopping to new vibrant locations, but it’s when things slow down that Fishing Star World Tour shows it thrives mostly on that quick and easy angling. The long haul legend catches pull too hard for you to have a strong input, and if you’re stuck unable to go look for other fish until you overcome a boss or get the right lures, the slow waits and rougher searches for your quarries do feel grating. Fishing Star World Tour is a casual and quick fishing game that would feel like it’s meant to be played in short sessions if the Joy-Con reeling wasn’t so often involved and hard to do if you’re not in a good space for it. The buttons are too basic by comparison, but if you do want a simple straightforward fishing game, Fishing Star World Tour definitely aims to be that. It only really cares about you catching new fish, and while it can reward 2 or 4 star rated fish at times, you’re usually moved along rather quickly and some unlocks that require certain qualities of fish are quickly made obsolete by a simple unlock at the next fishing hole. It is definitely nifty to head somewhere new and see if you can pull in everything inhabiting that location, but there are definitely a few things that could have been done to make the search more exciting without undermining its simplicity. While keeping the identity of the fish a mystery while in the water makes some sense, if they’re leaping out of the water it could at least give you a clue what’s on the line with a more accurate shape. More fish could have more distinct approaches to resisting your efforts, a shark should be a more capable fighter than a placid herbivorous fish after all. The position in the level sequence more often determines how hard the fish fight, but a more robust gear system could have lead to you making decisions beyond using the strongest rod and reel plus the lures that draw in the right fish.
Fishing Star World Tour feels like it is missing out on those intense struggles between angler and prey that can make fishing so exhilarating. Most fish will be easy enough to pull in while the difficult ones are more a long drawn out affair, but it does thrive when the quick catches are in healthy supply and usually they’re not absolute cakewalks until you make your second pass through locations with the late game lures and gear. You do need to be attentive and reactive to pull in the bigger catches, but the base systems for pulling in your line are a bit too simple that they don’t really work well when drawn out. If you want some quick fishing fun, even for young players, Fishing Star World Tour is still a fine choice, but if you do pursue the goal of catching every fish in the world, don’t expect the rapid excitement to last.