The truly good tennis games would come after this generation of consoles, but this is a step in the right direction. In general it seems that developers could not figure out how to make an elegant distinction between using the d-pad to position yourself and using it to direct the ball, so the player has to suffer. It requires too precise an input to play at a somewhat decent level, and the reward ain’t good enough, in my opinion. It just feels kinda random, like THIS time you somehow managed to make the controls do what you wanted. This is barely better than Super Tennis, which wasn’t a particularly good game, but where Smash Tennis absolutely fucking owns that game is in the graphics department. This is seriously a very pretty SNES game with a good if minimal art-style, and it shows that with confidence. If only for that, I think everybody should play it at least once.

Reviewed on Jul 16, 2023


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