World Court Tennis
System: TG-16
Release Date: December 1989
Developer: Namco
Publisher: NEC
Genre: Sports
World Court Tennis is the first Sports RPG game we come across in this chronological playthrough. It’s pretty easy to add RPG elements to a game and give it a new outlook on life. You can play this as a straight tennis game, I wouldn’t. Or you can play the RPG mode where battles are tennis matches. I wouldn’t…
You can play a singles game, doubles game, or go into the quest mode. No matter what, you’re going to be playing a lot of tennis. I tried a singles game to get acquainted to the gameplay. You hit hard strokes with Button I and soft strokes with Button II. Characters on court are floaty. You may play on three different surfaces, hard, lawn, and clay, each with their slight differences. There are normal tennis rules, with nothing crazy to worry about.
The Quest mode puts you in a typical JRPG world. You enter your name and are put on a quest to put an end to the Evil Tennis King. You have to travel from Chicago… to Tokyo, Toronto, and more as you earn money from random battles to upgrade your gear. Rackets make you hit better. Shoes make you move quicker, and shirts allow you to run away from battles. On the overworld, you run into a battle every fixed number of steps and hopefully you’re good, or you’ll be sent to the beginning to try again.
Fortunately, if you’re not great at the game, or just don’t want to play through it honestly, you can manufacture a password to get you through. There’s a great guide on Gamefaqs.com that teaches you how to make a password, which I used to jump to the end of the game. After beating the evil king, I got a password of all poops for another challenge. No thanks.
Graphics: 1.5
The tennis portion is chibi styled. The RPG overworld is worse than Dragon Warrior.
Sound: 1.0
Music and sounds are pretty poor in execution, you’ll want to turn them down.
Gameplay: 2.0
I appreciate the RPG mode, but that doesn’t make it any good.
Difficulty: 1.5
Everything plays very loosely and creates artificial difficulty.
Fun Factor: 1.0
Not a very fun time. The tennis plays poorly and the RPG mode is barebones.
Overall Grade: 1.4
World Court Tennis earns a D+. Again, I appreciate the idea, but the execution needs to be iterated on to have a good game.