The mechanics are good enough in most areas, especially driving you're offered a surprising amount of control over how you hit the ball and where it goes, which makes placing shots correctly quite satisfying. (Disc golf, a massively underrated and underrepresented sport, is present as well.) Some of these side missions are a bit too repetitive, and there may not be enough actual golf matches in this game to satisfy some players, but it does provide a decent gameplay balance. This means that, for every standard golf match you're taking part in, there's side missions or mini games involving defeating zombies or cleaning parks, which just happens to be accomplished by-you guessed it-playing golf. Golf Story's most charming aspect is that, while it is indeed focused on golf, that focus is often quite blurred.

But since I can’t, even though there’s a red controller up there that says abandoned, I guess I’m not really abandoning it, I guess I’m stuck with it forever. Miyamoto, what I want is the basic freedom to throw away something I don’t want anymore.

Want to try one more time? Well, no I really don’t, Mr. Anytime I go there to get back into something fun again, there it will be, whispering at me, hey, you never beat me, did you? You gave up around the wellworn open where you have to go through the whole course which takes about twenty minutes and if you ever fail to make par like even once you have to pretty much do it over again to progress the story. But no, it’s in my permanent collection now, always there in the “redownload software” page. If I could just erase my record of owning Golf Story then I wouldn’t be frustrated anymore, I could just give up.

Celeste, Ghosts and Goblins Resurrection, and now Golf Story, are all games I played on the switch that made me wish you could permanently delete download purchases from your Nintendo account.

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