It gives me no joy to write about Mario Golf: Super Rush, Nintendo’s latest entry in the underappreciated Mario Golf series. It should; the basics of what made Mario Golf: Advance Tour and World Tour such wonderful experiences are intact here, at least at first glance. But as the hours pass and the game opens up its various courses, modes, and mechanics, there’s an undeniable identity crisis at the core of Super Rush Nintendo never resolved during development.
The result is one of Nintendo’s more half-assed entries in recent memory; though their last sports title, Mario Tennis Aces, was certainly divisive among fans (especially its extremely annoying story mode), the game was still an experience, with a distinct sense of what it was trying to accomplish, and what it wanted players to feel. With its mishmash of random, undercooked new ideas, Super Rush lacks structure, confidence – and most importantly, that little bit of unexpected joy Nintendo’s signature games always have.
Let’s get this out of the way first: the actual golf in Mario Golf: Super Rush is fine. The controls are responsive, the HUD elements are functional, and it is as easy as ever to step up to the tee and hit a drive that feels good. In this sense, the first 15 minutes of Mario Golf: Super Rush are akin to Super Mario Odyssey or Metroid Prime; there’s a sense of unexplored depth that brings intrigue to the player, but the game’s basic mechanics bring joy from the first moment… unfortunately, that is the high point of the Super Rush experience.
After a brief intro, Super Rush offers players a familiar suite of game play modes. There’s “play golf”, where 1-4 players can hop onto one of the game’s five courses and play a variety of modes (we’ll talk about those a bit more later). Or players can hop into the single-player career mode, where Advance Tour made its bread – and built a fervent fan base that’s been neglected for the past two decades.
Immediately, the half-assery of it all begins to come into focus; every single character talks too long, their simplistic text boxes redundantly cascading across the screen as the story, courses, and challenges are introduced. Everything is told, and nothing is seen: as you might expect, much of Super Rush‘s story is not told through cut scenes (even though the use of player’s Miis in the main story seems like a natural path to immersion… hardly the only corner cut here, unfortunately).
During the story’s first three hours, occasionally the barrage of words will subside, and players can engage with the actual golfing, as the game introduces players to new courses and the aforementioned game play modes. Problem is, the new game styles are all uniquely underwhelming, to the point any tournaments or rounds longer than 9 holes feel like repetitive slogs, running from shot to shot (why did they think we wanted to do this all the time?) while managing a stamina meter and avoiding the occasional obstacle.
This works somewhat well in battle mode, where powerful items and the inherent chaos of multiplayer allow for some fun, Mario Party-like randomness. In single-player mode, running around each course trying not to run out of sprinting “energy” is a Sisyphean pursuit, one that comes with the added joy of hearing your character’s three canned lines repeated over and over (and over and over) again.
Any golf game worth its salt (*cough* Everybody’s Golf *cough*) understands there has to be beauty in repetition; it is mind-boggling how badly Nintendo missed the mark here. Shooting the ball is fun – there’s a lot of variability in shot shaping, and ball control is fairly simple to learn – but chasing the ball is absolutely not, and about 35-40% of the experience of Super Rush, at least in story mode, is chasing that blinking motherflippin’ icon for no reason, until one begins to question their own existence, the banality of our cyclical, cosmically insignificant lives digitally reflected in Yoshi’s shit-eating grin, or Wario’s increasingly dystopic laugh.
I want to love Super Rush – as someone who still rants and raves about what NBA 2K could learn from Advance Tour‘s RPG mechanics, I was hoping this would finally deliver on the rantings of internet message boards for the past two decades, and make this the golf RPG we’ve all dreamed of. Instead, we get the world’s most basic, straightforward progression systems, where the only real excitement comes from the opportunity to add weird clubs to your bag (like ones that skip balls over water, or sacrifice accuracy for power, etc).
After playing Super Rush for about two dozen hours this month, however, I don’t feel like Super Rush wants to love me – or that it even loves itself. I mean, there are only five courses in the game, which is bare bones even for a modern golf game; I’m sure more will be added later, but boy does it make the world of the game’s story feel small and insignificant pretty early on (even when the story takes a number of strange turns in its second and third acts, which turn an innocent golfing adventure into something with undeservedly high stakes). And on some level, with its budget-friendly graphics and barely-there sense of personality, Super Rush knows it is insignificant, something Nintendo could quickly throw together and push out when development shifted to remote during the pandemic (which, given the noise around the industry, hit Nintendo much, much harder than most other developers and publishers of its scale).
Super Rush could’ve been something really awesome akin to the Smash Bros. Ultimate of golf: instead, it’s the New Super Mario Bros. 2 of golf, something that offers baseline pleasures of hitting golf balls with legendary plumbers and talking mushrooms, but lacks the subtlety, depth, and quality that would ignite a new generation of fans – or even satiate the old heads in the clubhouse like myself, eating their overpriced burgers and dreaming of the days when there was nothing but potential lying ahead for the Mario Golf series. Now, I’ll be dreaming of Mario Disc Golf; something I know will never happen, which is far less disappointing than the tangible greatness I’ve already savored from Mario’s Arnold Palmer of Mushroom Kingdom oddities and solid golf mechanics as a youth, a taste left thoroughly unsatisfied by the knockoff blend of Mario Golf: Super Rush.