Mario Tennis Open

Genre: Sports (Tennis)

Players: 1-4 Team Competitive (Local Wireless, Online), StreetPass Support

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Review:

Mario Tennis Open, released on Nintendo 3DS in 2012, is that platform’s requisite entry in the Mario Tennis franchise. This game’s main additions to the franchise are the use of both optional touchscreen controls and optional gyroscopic motion controls.

I’ll start things off by saying I do not understand the hate that this game got from reviewers. While there are certainly areas where I wish this game did better, I don’t think that this game’s issues counter the fact that this is one of the best games in the series. That’s right, I said it. Come at me, bro.

The presentation here is solid, though not perfect. The 3D characters all look great and animate well, and there’s a good variety to the courts too. I do wish the courts had a bit more detail, but they still look pretty good overall. The sound is somewhat less successful – the cheerful music is largely forgettable, and many of the Mario characters’ voices seem… off…

When it comes to the core gameplay, this game features some really excellent core mechanics, and gives players multiple ways to control the game. They can opt to use a more traditional gamepad control setup, which requires combinations of button presses for some shot types. They can use a combination of the circle pad and the touchscreen to make different kinds of shots, with each different shot type represented by a large “button” on the screen. Or they can augment one of these control methods by holding up the Nintendo 3DS and using gyroscopic motion control to aim their shot.

I found myself favoring a combination of the buttons and touchscreen – I found that traditional gamepad controls mostly worked well for me, but sometimes I wanted to make a specific shot type quickly without thinking about the button combination needed, and the touchscreen came in handy for this. The gyroscopic aiming, though? Not so much. This just felt gimmicky, and before long I felt the need to go into options menus and tell the game to stop automatically swapping to this mode when it thought I was holding my 3DS too vertically.

Overall, I think the core gameplay here is fantastic, with a good amount of depth, but also a lot of accessibility for more casual players. Newer players can even take advantage of marking showing where a shot will land and giving them an opportunity to respond with a particularly devastating return shot, though of course they can ignore these markings and make their own calls too. I will say that I do think that Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash on the Wii U would go on to refine this game’s core mechanics even further, but overall I think this may very well be the best handheld Mario Tennis game in terms of how it controls.

In terms of content, though, this game does leave a bit to be desired. There are no “special” courts with unique features and hazards like some prior Mario Tennis games have had, no RPG elements like the earlier games in the series on handhelds, no option to play with cartoony Mario Kart-style items or anything like that… it’s largely just Tennis.

The one exception to this is four minigames – Ring Shot has players doing a back-and-forth volley with a computer-controlled character, aiming for rings to score points. Super Mario Tennis is an odd experimental mode that has you hitting a ball at a rough approximation of the original Super Mario Bros., collecting coins and items and defeating enemies. Galaxy Rally has you doing a rally like Ring Shot, but with floor tiles you need to avoid. And Ink Showdown has you returning balls and ink splats spat out by piranha plants while getting them around a computer-controlled player. Of these four minigames, I felt like the two rally minigames were decent distractions, while the other two seemed more gimmicky than fun.

One other thing I need to mention here, though at this point it probably won’t surprise anyone. Like most Nintendo 3DS games, the online lobbies for Mario Tennis Open are empty, so if you want to play this game in multiplayer, you’ll need to bring your own friends with their own Nintendo 3DS systems.

In the end, while it could do with more content and its presentation could be a bit better, I believe that Mario Tennis Open is still overall one of the best games in the series. There’s certainly room for improvement, but the core gameplay is excellent, and overall this is a solid game of Tennis. If you’re a Tennis fan or simply looking for a fun Mario Sports title on the go, this is an excellent choice.

tl;dr – Mario Tennis Open is the Nintendo 3DS entry in the Mario Tennis series, and it features solid, well-crafted gameplay, but is a bit lacking in features and presentation, and the online lobbies are empty. Overall though, Mario Tennis fans should be pleased with this entry in the series.

Grade: B+

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