As an experience, it’s a pretty alright package. It definitely took a while for this game to actually feel truly finished, but the mechanics are still pretty fun and I quite like the character cast.

The thing is about Aces to me personally is that I have, or at least had, a very strong connection to it. The gameplay was strong enough for me that I got incredibly invested in online play. Over the summer I got better and better to the point where all of sudden, I was in top 30 of America, then top 20, even top 10. I would drop by on the Twitch streams of people who I had just played and comment something like “Hey, did you by any chance play against a Rosalina just now”. I’d face top three opponents and either put up a good fight or get my ass handed to me on a silver platter because pelupelu was an absolute menace.

I remember my last match before putting the game down for months was against a fellow Rosalina main who also resided in the US top ten with me. The match was by far the longest, most intense match I’d ever had up to that point, with volleys going on for God knows how long and the match extending deep into tiebreaker. I managed to just barely squeeze out a victory as my heart slammed against my chest, and I realized that this was it. This was the peak. The chance of having a match that great will never happen again. I’d been feeling a little bit of burnout at the time and this was the exact type of match I wanted to end it on.

I’m truly sorry if this came off as an odd flex rather than a true review, because to be honest, it probably is that, but this is how Mario Tennis Aces lives in my mind, and I really just need to get this experience off my chest. No way I’m talking about this irl that’s for damn sure. Really, I’m just happy this game was able to give me an experience like that. It was a bit of a cringy time in retrospect, but it was fun.

BIG[MAD], if you ever find this, I just want to say that that was a good ass game.

This game, by itself, is okay. It’s fun, it has decently interesting gimmicks and a wide variety of characters to play as (seriously why is this game’s roster better than Mario Kart 8’s?). But, it was the first of now many Nintendo sports games to release with not much content, only to add more content in free updates later on that should have just been there at release.

The game only got a story mode in an update post-launch, and after that, they only added more characters to the game. And much like the later sports titles, the characters don’t stand out enough amongst each other to warrant FULL UPDATES dedicated to them. These sports games are not the same as Smash Bros., just add in all the content from the get-go. I skipped out on Super Rush, Strikers Battle League, and Switch Sports because of this practice. It needs to die.