These Puns are going Balls Deep.
I can’t say that I had even heard of Dodgeball Academia before it showed up on not just the Xbox Marketplace, but releasing day and date on Xbox Game Pass as well. This bite-sized 9 or so hour sports RPG is rather enjoyable, allowing you to jump, roll, and dodge out of the way of a variety of spicey dodgeballs as you work your way through an inner-school championship, keeping an eye out for your friends, and an even closer one on your rivals.
Done in the style of a main series Pokemon adventure, complete with healing centers and similar musical beats to engaging in combat encounters, Dodgeball Academia is just as charming and enjoyable as most Pokemon adventures. While its cast of characters is not nearly as memorable, there is still a grand journey to be had here, complete with plenty of twists and turns, albeit a very predictable final battle that is still well suited to what the story ended up needing.
On your quest to be the best their ever wa… um.. well.. during your journey to win the Dodgeball Championship, you’ll play as Otto, a young man who attends this Dodgeball school to break away from his prior academic institution, hoping for better things for his life instead of a parent-chosen profession that he just doesn’t want any part of. While we learn more about this and where he actually has escaped from, the rest of the story follows his exploits to become the school champion, making some friends and a few enemies along the way.
You begin joining up with a few eventual classmates as you attend the opening ceremonies, where new students place their hands upon a charged mystical dodgeball that for some reason, also powers the school. Now, there is some lore to what the ball is and where it came from, but the ball also grants you magical powers as well. While Otto is lucky enough to be gifted with such extraordinary abilities, another student, Nino, isn’t so lucky, as he fails to absorb anything from this mystical and somehow still glowing ball. This creates a divide between them, setting him up to be your eventual rival. The game also does nothing to hide this, keeping him constantly placed in the story to build this rivalry up, even making him join Otto on a pretty odd school assignment. furthering the divide.
You’ll first meet Balloony, who will be your best friend during the opening moments of the game. You’ll slowly but surely build up your team, choose one of the awful predetermined names for said team, and start taking place in a tournament to decide the school championship. There are daily courses that work as tutorials. and a ton of challengers to your Dodgeball throne that you can battle all around the school grounds. Each day refreshes many of these battles, as well as granting you access to more side quests and slowly but surely, giving you access to more areas around the school, even if you don’t have much variety outside of the actual campus grounds. While much of the game takes place in front or inside the school itself, there isn’t any sort of map for interiors, making some exploration and objective tracking a minor inconvenience.
The RPG aspects of Dodgeball Academia relies on leveling up after battles, completing quests, earning spendable currency, learning new moves, enhancing your skills, as well as equipping a variety of equipment items that boost your defense, power, and overall health. Each member of your team can equip up to two items at a time, and there are also a wealth of consumables that can refill your health, boost your experience earnings, and permanently enhance your stats. It’s also a neat idea to have characters have preferences on whether they like a certain food item, or are just flat out allergic to it. These preferences impact how useful that item is as characters who love an item will see drastically better results from consuming it than someone who, for example, hates or dislikes it.
While you’ll have a few interactions that are just a bit of dialogue here and there, most of the time these distractions are settled through a game of Dodgeball. Now, there will be some variety here to contend with from match to match. As you progress throughout the story, new varieties of balls show up, some that slime you up in toxic sludge, holding you in place, or rip a bolt of electricity through you. Also, taking on other students in the parking lot will see cars driving back and forth on the screen, hitting you in the process if you don’t dodge out of the way in time. Most battles have you either depleting the other team’s HP and kicking them out of the game, or having them stay present in the round, but standing behind you, ready to scoop up any balls you let slip past you. I actually found a good strategy of using this to my advantage, taking one of my teammates out of the game to place them behind for a few cheap shots. It’s also the only time they were actually useful, but more on that later.
Now, each character has a different jump and block, or rather, a catch and this will vary from actually catching the ball, or using a bat to swing it back to its owner. These defensive skills vary across your team, as do their mobility and overall speed. Mina, for example, moves more like I wish Otto did, so more often than not, Mina was my go-to player, as her speed and dodge felt more suited to my playstyle. You also have a “Balltimate” move where you unleash a huge special attack, and every foe you encounter has one too. It’s a shame; however, that you cannot attack during these, and can only dodge the bullet-hell type mechanics that most characters use, despite having a ball in your hand and opportunity. Otto, for example, has a Haduken of sorts with his ability, which unlocks during a tense moment early on in the game.
While you will see variety in the courses, you don’t get much in the way of how it impacts the games themselves. Once you have unlocked the forest, which is fairly early in the game, there are a few areas where your battles will take place in the tall grass, another nod to the Pokemon games. These battles are not particularly fun tho, as it can be a bit of a nuisance to even track the balls you’ve missed. While your teammates will often nab them for you, they often will just be there as backup, letting you swap back and forth for whenever you need them. This is where the game does suffer a bit as while the other team has active players all moving around and shooting the ball at you, your teammates are really just there as lives while you take damage and leave the active field. I never really had them be active or take their own shots, and while there is a bland and bare-bones local multiplayer featuring the cast of the game and some progress locked locations, it’s a shame that the game didn’t feature local co-op during the campaign as battles could have been wildly more engaging and intense having more active players on the field, not to mentioning playing this alongside someone else.
Now, some battles can be rather hard, especially when you feel outnumbered due to your brainless companions. Thankfully, there is an accessibility option to let you adjust incoming and outgoing damage. Each time I would find a battle to be just on the tip of being a bit too much, I’d adjust it by 5 or 10 percent, making it fit within still being a bit challenging, but not too easy. For those needing a much greater assist, you can negate damage altogether, and boost your damage to the point where you can almost one-shot anyone in the game, allowing anyone to enjoy this title how they see fit.
The overall art style really shines here, coming off as almost a cartoon network show taking place in a bright and colorful 3D world. The characters are all nicely animated, and while many opponents all look the same with the exact animations, the varied cast of named antagonists are all different in their designs and animations. The lack of variety in environments does suffer a bit more considering how good the ones we have here are, but maybe we will see more unique locations in the hinted-at sequel, other than the very few options given to us here.
Accompanied with an ok but far too repetitive soundtrack and a barebones local-only multiplayer mode, Dodgeball Academia is still a very fun and engaging RPG due to some solid combat in the form of its take on dodgeball with a cast that more often than not is enjoyable to interact with. While the puns the game throws at you will have you cringing or sighing with your head in your hands, there are some genuine moments that did spark a bit of a chuckle. I do wish the game had voice acting, as I think a lot of its dialogue and character moments would have greatly benefitted from it, but I don’t feel it impacts the overall charm I still felt from the entire experience. As the game is currently on Game Pass, I do highly recommend at least trying it, and taking part in its fun gameplay mechanics, and while it doesn’t quite feel as satisfying to ping a ball off someone’s head as it does in Knockout City, there is an engaging world to explore and a cheesy light-hearted story that more than makes for a compelling experience nonetheless.
Developer - Pocket Trap. Publisher - Humble Games. Released - August 5th, 2021. Available On - Xbox One, PS4, Nintendo Switch, Windows. Rated - (E 10+) Fantasy Violence.
Platform Reviewed - Xbox Series X through backwards compatability. Review Access - Dodgeball Academia was downloaded off of Game Pass by the reviewer.