Month of Mario: Mario Golf (Game Boy Color)

Mario Golf on Game Boy Color takes an interesting approach to how it includes the familiar princess-saving plumber. While you can play as him and his brother Luigi immediately if all you care about is getting in a round of golf, in the game’s campaign mode, you can’t play as him at all. Instead, he is the legend you aspire to be, Mario’s incredible golf skills the inspiration for a character you help rise up the ranks in the hopes one they’ll be on par with the hero who is just as skilled at sinking putts as he is saving kingdoms.

A completely different game from the similarly named Nintendo 64 title, Mario Golf on Game Boy Color structures its story mode around a character you name. After selecting which of the four fairly normal looking young golfers to play as, you’ll find yourself joining the Marion Golf Club as you start your journey to become a golfing professional. Rather than just playing games and earning wins though, there is a range of activities available that shift up how you earn fame and improve your own abilities. There are four clubs to conquer, each one having their own tournament to tackle where you need to have the fewest points across all 18 holes to earn the trophy. However, you will also need to take on the club master in a Match Game, the focus for these shifting instead to outperforming the opposing golfer on a hole by hole basis. If you get the better score on a hole, you earn a point, ten points ending the contest in your favor.

Already having two types of play is a smart way to shift up the stakes involved in a golf game. In the tournament, weak performances on a hole stick with you, the player needing to be consistent when it comes to sinking shots. The match format though is more lenient, the player able to surrender rounds on troublesome holes but the club masters aren’t slouches, often conveniently missing a putt but generally they approach a hole rather well and it is still necessary to be a capable golfer to come out on top. However, while understandings of the game’s specific mechanics will definitely help you succeed, there is also an underlying character progression system, Mario Golf on Game Boy Color actually a role-playing game. Many forms of play in Mario Golf will earn you experience that goes towards leveling up, the player able to invest points into things like the distance of their drive, how high the ball flies, the amount of control you have over your shot, and if it curves in from the left or the right. If you don’t invest points in a skill it can start to weaken, but your character won’t ever suddenly become bad at the sport and you can likely learn to accommodate things like a character developing a hook with little issue. Beating tournaments and winning match play will earn you quite a lot of points towards leveling your character up, but Mario Golf also includes quite a few other challenges to help develop your game both in terms of earning points and actually teaching you.

In the world of Mario Golf, you actually don’t see many of the fantastical elements of the Mario series very often. You’re talking to other human beings in normal locations and until you actually earn the right to face off with Mario, it does feel like a fairly realistic golf game for the most part. As such, some of the side tasks to earn experience are unsurprisingly fairly realistic golf challenges such as trying to sink a sequence of putts, landing difficult shots such as having your ball land on an island or weave around tree cover to reach the hole, or figuring out special inputs to improve your ball control. Generally these practice sessions are just tests to see if you understand the instructions you just received, none of these really outlandish or requiring much more than a general mastery of the golfing controls and gauging your shots. They’re a neat diversion and give you more to do at clubs and on the world map than just go right into tournaments and they can help you actually learn new mechanics since the golfing dictionary the game thrusts at you is a bit too dry in the same way the physical manual is.

When it’s time to hit the links, Mario Golf strikes a good balance of being intuitive but having some depth to explore once characters start teaching you useful tricks. The process of taking a shot first starts with selecting how you want to aim and which golf club to use, the main difference between them being the distance traveled save for situational tools like wedges and putters, but the game generally will automatically suggest what it considers the best club and set you on a simple straightforward path to the hole. It won’t factor in some important variables though such as the wind, and the game is assuming you perform the shot perfectly, meaning you might want to change your club to accommodate for potential variation in the power you hope to hit the ball with. Once things are all lined up, it’s time to take the swing, an indicator moving along a bar to the left to gauge your power. Hit the exact far end and you’ll hit it as far as you can with that club, but regardless of how hard you hit it, the indicator then bounces back towards its starting point. Hitting the starting point is even more crucial than the power though as it determines the accuracy. Putting removes that second mark to hit, but there are a few more options to help you sink your balls more reliably. Power shots are a limited resource, letting you hit farther and harder but only so many times during an 18 hole course unless you can land those marks perfectly on the power meter. Pressing directions as your character winds up their swing can send a ball higher, add a hook, or reduce its roll, the player able to achieve a fairly strong degree of control over their shot but the timing-based meter system still means you can’t perfect it and waltz through each course with ease.

The courses available in Mario Golf are a varied and effective bunch, each club having a unique set of 18 holes plus there’s a more Mario-focused last set of holes to unlock that start to lean into more eccentric designs like being shaped like characters. Before then though, there are definitely courses with unique hazards and considerations, there even being different types of rough like heath that impact your swing a bit more. The regular courses do feel fairly believable save for little things like Dunes Club being so desert focused, but the shapes of the holes and their placement in tournaments are fairly smart. A long hole with a large par like 5 can be followed up with a hole you could possibly land a hole in one on since it’s fairly close, this also helping with shifting your fortune around in those longer tests of skill. Some holes offer risky shortcuts if you are willing to try and fly over out-of-bounds areas or risk landing in the water or sand bunkers, and trees can provide pesky obstructions if you mistake them for just course decor when lining up your shot. The putting green does lean on the common 2D golf game choice of utilizing arrows to indicate small slopes that impact the roll of the ball, this not as clean as the slopes seen elsewhere on the courses where they are rendered in a clearly understood manner. The arrows don’t overdo it at least so putting won’t get too confusing, the links doing their job in providing a wide selection that feels varied even if it’s in a manner more realistic than one might expect from the Mario sports franchise.

THE VERDICT: While Mario Golf on Game Boy Color isn’t impacted strongly enough by its RPG mechanics to make them feel incredibly meaningful, they do lead to an engaging story mode where you build up your golfer through practice challenges that teach you the game and contribute to the appreciably different match games and tournaments. The power meter system is simple to pick up but there is greater depth in getting your ball right where you want it to land thanks to the small touches you can add to your shot, the courses providing a good range of challenges so you still feel like you’re being tested until you sink that final putt and show Mario who the new best golfer in town is.

And so, I give Mario Golf for Game Boy Color…

A GOOD rating. Mario Golf definitely provides effective 2D golfing and an appreciably large set of holes to challenge, the controls striking a nice balance between being newcomer friendly but also having little touches you can pick up to further hone your golf game. It’s actually the information in the training minigames that perhaps does more than the experience points you earn, the simple impact of your invested points otherwise not much of a motivator to engage with challenges that are sometimes a bit basic rather than interesting twists on golf play. You certainly can’t knock the standard holes for their design or the range of considerations they bring up while remaining fairly grounded, this golfing adventure not exactly what most people would expect from a sports game featuring Mario but he opens the door to a rather human journey to improve at an enjoyable sport. Spicing up the minigame challenges to be more entertaining or even a bit more unusual like the one where you have to hit the flag in a hole to scare off a bird could improve this second side of the experience, but match play and tournaments already provide solid challenges that don’t need any odd complications to be enjoyable. That does mean it’s mostly just a well executed golf game structured in a fairly interesting manner, it not likely to win over people who prefer the Mario franchise leaning more towards fantasy sports with its design, but it is definitely a treat for golf fans and gives a stronger sense of progression than merely tackling courses one after the other.

Mario Golf on Game Boy Color would help to inspire the concept of a golfing RPG, a concept taken to more delightful heights with later releases like Golf Story that better handle pretty much everything Mario Golf attempts beyond this game surprisingly being the more realistic one. Mario Golf dipped its toes in the concept so others could run with it, but even without the progression, it still has a smart set of mechanics at its core and a good range of courses so that it works as a pure golf game as well. If you do just take Mario out on the course and ignore the story you’ll still have a good time, but Camelot Software Planning designed a game that effectively emphasizes elements beyond just sinking shots and it’s all the more interesting for exploring the people and situations that can emerge around such a beloved sport.