Mario Tennis Fever is one of Nintendo’s weakest titles in years, and certainly its weakest tennis title. This is tragic because I loved Mario Tennis back on the N64, Game Boy, and Game Cube.
Let’s start with the story mode. On the one hand, I do congratulate the developers for targeting a proper story mode. This hasn’t always been the case with the Mario Tennis series, and if you ask any fan of the series what they liked about the early handheld entries in particular, they’ll tell you that it was the RPG elements.
However, I would say “whoever thought that the story mode should be little more than a collection of Mario Party-style minigames should be fired,” if we still lived at a time where you could say something like that and be flippant. Today, with the suits desperate for any excuse to really fire staff, such a throwaway joke lands very differently (and very cruelly), so I won’t say that. They should be very sad that they came up with such a terrible idea, though.
There is very little actual tennis in this Adventure mode. Instead, it follows a Mario Bros.-like plot that sends the Mario crew across a world map, completing mini-game challenges where, in a normal Mario Bros. game, they’d be doing platforming levels. These minigames all involve some variation of hitting something in some direction. It might be that you need to whack bombs back at Bowser. Or that you need to hit bats into a frozen cloud to scare it away. Or that you need to hit things into a Chomp’s frozen tail to make it melt.
These mini games do serve a point, in that they teach you about the various shot types and how to effectively move around the court and work the angles. But I thought the Adventure mode’s tutorial would do that (it runs for an hour by itself, and you’ve only got five shots to learn and a small rectangle to play in, for chrissakes). But then you graduate the tutorial and… the minigames just keep coming.
Of course, you can play Mario Tennis. It’s just in the tournament mode, against friends, or online. So you’ll wade into these modes looking for tennis and… look, it’s still not good. Mario Tennis plays very quickly. Almost twitch-speed quick. Some might call it “arcade-like” but I remember the days of Virtua Tennis where there were still tennis skills and tactics built into the mechanics. With Mario Tennis, it’s more like a combination of Pong and Breakout. You bounce the ball back and forth until someone gets into a position to hit a sharp enough angle that they win the point. It’s almost impossible to mishit a shot and make it fly into the net or out of the court. With Mario Tennis Fever, points always finish with a winner, and the winner always comes from having a Pong-like understanding of angles.
The developer’s effort to try to break this almost-instantly repetitive gameplay is to introduce power meters and special rackets. Basically, by running around and hitting balls, you’ll build up a special meter. When it’s full, you can hit a super-powerful shot that, depending on the racket, can terrorise the opponent in various ways. One leaves patches of fire all over the court. Another creates an unsafe lightning zone for a while. Most of these abilities annoy the opponent’s rhythm, and deplete some of their health. If their health runs out completely, they’ll be almost useless for a while, which makes winning points easier.
Of course, your opponent has a special meter that builds up at the same rate, so all these special abilities actually add to the experience is yet more frenetic energy that balances the matches out, but adds almost no skill to the game. Let alone actual tennis.
To be clear, the developers do know how shallow all of this is. By default, matches are a tie-breaker (i.e. first to seven points). There’s no way to change that in online competition, and offline you have to really dig into the settings to find the ability to change the scoring to proper sets. Being honest, I can’t imagine anyone getting through a full five-set match, ever. I certainly got sick of the “tennis” long before playing enough points for a five-setter.
Mario Tennis Fever is as charming as always for Nintendo. The characters are colourful and bursting with charm. The cut scenes in the Adventure mode are frequent, and it’s generally a well-made game. I never had an issue with lag when I played online, for example. The way it’s designed is that anyone can pick the game up and have fun with it in about ten minutes. I’m certainly not suggesting that this is not well-made. But conceptually, it’s so far removed from anything resembling sport and so close to the most simple and simplistic arcade games that it’s hard not to be frustrated that Nintendo doesn’t understand that it severely lacks longevity for it.
On the Game Cube app, there is Mario Strikers. That is an excellent example of a time where Nintendo and its party sports developers had a handle over the balance between capturing the basics of the sport and making it arcade fun. Now, though, they’ve lost the plot entirely. I genuinely don’t understand who this is for, but it isn’t me. Or anyone that I know who loved what Mario Tennis once was.
