MSD's GOTY Indecision Blowout 2025: Best Start Believin' in Sports Anime if you want to save the nature preserve
I don't think I can truly commit to a 'Game of the Year' so instead I'm just highlighting stuff I really enjoyed.
๐ฎ check out the whole series here ๐ฎ
Beastieball
Note: I'm counting November / December 2024 releases for 2025 because they didn't have enough time to get on 2024's not-GOTY lists. My lists my rules!
Developer: Wishes UnlimitedReleased: Early Access 11/12/2024
Get it: Steam
It feels wild to me that I have two creature-collector games on my end of year lists. If you've read my Pokemon Legends: Z-A piece or seen any of my Pokemon Daily Dex blog posts you'll know that like, I don't go here, but Z-A gave me the itch something fierce and then I happened to check out GDQ's Games Done Queer event the moment they started the Beastieball run and I thought:
What's one of the biggest ideological problems about Pokemon?
We all know the answer to this. It's effectively dogfighting, if not slavery. We can sugarcoat it all we want but ultimately we are capturing wild animals and forcing them to fight each other for our benefit.
So Beastieball showing up and saying "Well hold up, what if instead of fighting, they were playing competitive volleyball. Voluntarily. And not stuffed into magically confined spaces between matches. Oh and mechanically speaking you get two at a time instead of one?
Sold
Created by Wishes Unlimited - which as far as I understand is effectively the same team that worked on Chicory, now as a formal company entity as opposed to how it was credited on that game as effectively "Greg, the guy who made Wandersong and his friends" - the game launched in Early Access at the end of last year and I'm giving it a pass for two reasons:
- It's changed a lot since that EA release
- I didn't play it till this year and it's my list!!
And the "combat" is SO fucking good
Ok so here's how it works: there's a net, two beasties per side and 4 locations (left and right columns, front and back rows) - you take turns serving, with the ball draining stamina (HP) from whoever either catches it OR is hit by it. Hits to empty spots are an automatic point (which is INCREDIBLY helpful when you are out-leveled) and generally two points is a match win (three for ranked matches and boss fights).
Instead of beating up random creatures and stuffing them in balls, the more you face off in sports against wild beasties, the more you learn what will allow them to want to join your team; then if you meet those conditions during a match with wild beasties not yet part of a team, you can offer them a jersey to join yours.
If the whole game was just "Pokemon 1:1 but more humane toward the creatures" I think that'd still be compelling, but Beastieball ups the formula in so many ways and is such a joy to explore the world. The incredibly small team has packed so much love and charm into this title.
The plot focuses around a nature preserve next to the small town your character grew up in; the Pokemon Beastieball League wants to demolish the preserve to build a new stadium, and in true "Fix it from the inside" futility, you are tasked with rising the ranks of the tournament circuit to get the people who run the league to knock it the fuck off.
Specifically this asshole:
Man, fuck this guy
From the friendship events with the various colleagues and coaches you meet along the way to the ever-present need for financial sponsorship and how those financial interests may be tied in direct oposition of your goals, there's this hopeful air of defeating capitalism and consumerism that oozes through every ounce of the game.
Wait so Should I Play itโข?
Maybe! Again, prior to this year I was not into the 'creature collector' as a genre but there's something in the Beastieball formula that clicks. Soundtrack is a banger, art is beautiful and it's so much fun to play the damn sport!! You know when you have nostalgia for an old piece of media and when you go revisit it, something is missing; you can't recapture the feeling you had when you first experienced it?
Beastieball is the opposite; it's like revisiting a game from the 90's and everything is better than you remember it
Thanks for reading. Here's your end of post cat, his name is Sloth
