Is Mario Tennis (Game Boy Colour) what I thought it was as a child?
I look critically at my favourite childhood game over 20 years on...
One of the most engrossing gaming experiences of my life was playing through Mario Tennis on the Game Boy Colour. Revisiting it over two decades later, I’m curious to see if it holds up.
The Misdirect
Despite the name, this Mario Tennis is a Role Playing Game where none of Nintendo’s characters are part of the main story. Put yourself in my shoes as a 10 year old. Up until this point I had played three Mario games: Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64 and Mario Tennis (also on the 64). One Action Adventure and two Arcade games, all of which had you play as main characters from the Mario kingdom— that smorgasbord of colourful cartoon characters.
Booting up the game, there is one further piece of misdirection; the career mode is called a ‘Mario Tour’. I suppose clicking that button is the precise moment the Nintendo marketing team hand over control to Camelot, the developer, because it’s the last time you’ll hear the name Mario until the end of the game.
The Narrative
You play as Alex, the remarkably human looking boy, a rookie at the Royal Tennis Academy. The uncomfortable cognitive dissonance from seeing that this looks nothing like the bright, cartoonish world you expected melts away as your new coach takes you on a tour of the Academy Campus. This place is dripping with potential and the path to greatness is laid out before you. Once you get to playing tennis, you progress through the ranks of the Junior squad, completing training drills and beating the reigning Junior champion. From here it’s a glorious rinse and repeat, up through the Senior and Varsity level teams until you’re eventually selected to represent the Academy at the Island Open. After all the pomp and celebrations of your inevitable victory, the credits roll and the game boots you back to the main menu. This time, selecting ‘Mario Tour’ from the main menu finds your character invited to Mario’s castle in the clouds where he personally challenges you, the Island Open Champion, to a game to decide the greatest tennis player in all the lands.
The Gameplay
It’s not good. While each new opponent brings something new to the table, the first few points of the match will have shown you all they have to offer. If you can win a couple of points against an opponent, you can win them all.
The most interesting mechanic is how your own character builds in ability over the course of the whole game. This levelling up does allow for emergent strategies that leverage certain newfound capabilities, but again, all of this remains static within a single game. This monotonous play means your mind will wander to what the next opponent might be like, and whether a few extra stat points of spin will be enough to pull off a better drop shot. But it’s in these doldrums of always looking forward we find what the game is really about.
The Dopamine
The dopamine hits are real. When you’re a point away from winning a game, a set, a match or a tournament, the music changes completely. Throughout your journey, as increasingly important and decisive moments arise, they are matched by new musical motifs to underscore them. This sells the tension and severity which in turn, primes you for the release. Winning a match results in a slot-machine like visual payout and experience points are piled onto your character like a jackpot. What is clear to an adult but not a child, this glitzy reward cycle is a core pillar of the game. The drudgery of repetitive tennis matches only serves to heighten the feeling of a win and spending the reward on the next level up.
With the lens of addiction, the ending of the game is quite fitting. You’re taken to duel Mario in what could only be considered a literal depiction of heaven. Mario’s castle in the clouds sits behind a rainbow and, upon entering, you’re greeted by the pantheon of gods (read: core Nintendo IP not present in the rest of the game), all the characters you know and love from other titles such as Mario Kart.
The Nostalgia
Older games might be considered less refined and they’re certainly less considerate of accessibility. This looser relationship with user experience did lead to something that is much less common today:
There is a mysterious woman in a lake that gives you the tennis equivalent of Excalibur if you can swing your racket (press the A button) enough times in 10 seconds. The problem is, it’s hard. Really hard. To achieve this, I remember taking my Game Boy to a department store where I took the head off an electric toothbrush and held it against the button. Some may claim this is cheating, but the Lady of the Lake deemed me resourceful and had no qualms with the technique whatsoever. Here is a video of a guy using a massage gun held against his finger: https://www.facebook.com/reel/312907198523021
The Verdict
Even comparing it to games of today, it’s impressive how well paced the progression is. You’re always looking forward to the next promotion in the Academy, always looking for that next stat point on your character.
The gameplay itself is extremely repetitive and once you’ve found a strategy to use against a particular opponent, you can normally breeze through the rest of the match, exploiting this new found weakness.
At times the dopamine hits of music changes and level ups feel earnt and help solidify your accomplishments. Not so much if you’ve spent the last five minutes crushing your victim with the exact same combination of shots to win every single point in the match, then it starts to feel like dessert without dinner.
Looking at this game critically, I was shocked to see how much of the game relies on everything but the gameplay. A purist may care only about gameplay, narrative, music and art and consider visual/acoustic flourishes as merely icing on the cake. This game, however, serves as a reminder as to just how far you can push these things to add gravitas to a story, for good or for ill.
The Highlights
Story, progression, intrigue, music, nostalgia
The Lowlights
Easy to cheese, repetitive gameplay