The frenetic action of sports and careful planning of a turn-based RPG may not seem like a natural pair, but there have been some wonderful sports RPGs throughout the years. With the game-buying season arriving in full swing as the holidays near, these sports RPGs are excellent options if you’re looking for a change of pace with your sports gaming.
Dodgeball Academia
What it’s meant to be an RPG has changed through the years, particularly with a shift from traditional turn-based RPGS, more akin to playing a tabletop game like Dungeons and Dragons in a video game, and more to action RPGs with live-action play dictated by a strong stat or attribute system. While the gameplay may be a bit more frantic, the underlying elements of building stats and growing your characters as you play remain.
To that end, we’ll begin this list of sports RPGs with a game that feels much more like other traditional sports games in Dodgeball Academia. The game sees you in charge of a young dodgeball player as he attends a school fully dedicated to the sport and puts together a team of dodgeball players with special abilities and talents that grow and grow as you level up.
Inazuma Eleven
Sports are a common theme for anime, and RPGs remain a popular game style in Eastern video game designs, so it’s no surprise that one of the biggest series in sports RPGs is heavily anime-infused. The series began with the first Inazuma Eleven game in 2008 and has included not just sports RPG video games but manga, anime series, and films as well.
The most recent game in the series, Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road, dropped last month and sees players taking on the role of Destin Bellows as he overcomes his own soccer-related trauma to reform his school’s club team and battle toward the Japanese school championship. The game uses RPG-style turn-based interactions along with real-time style movement on the pitch, all while your players level up and learn special maneuvers to score, pass, and dispossess the other team.
Golf Story
One of the more beloved entries in the realm of sports games saw developers Sidebar Games taking an old-school approach with Golf Story. Combining SNES-era top-down pixelated art as well as a story mode that feels right at home with RPGs of that era, Golf Story sees you in control of a golfer looking to climb to the top of the sport.
The golfing itself is carried out through a control scheme familiar to anyone who played golf games before the twin-stick era, with the three-tap method (start the power meter, set the power, set the accuracy) of shot management. Like any good RPG, your character starts underpowered but develops new skills and traits as you play until you are ultimately driving straighter and farther than ever before.
Roller Drama
The world of sports RPGs comes with a diverse range of options to explore in both the sports being played and the gaming mechanics involved. Roller Drama draws in additional elements from the world of visual novels as you take over the task of managing a Roller Derby team both on and off the rink. In Roller Drama, you’re not just responsible for making sure your team makes the right tactical calls in matches to get the most out of their abilities and attributes, but also making calls on the interpersonal dramas that come with running a sports team.
Captain Tsubasa: Tatakae Dream Team
For a sport so well known for open, free-flowing play, soccer has a strong tradition in the world of turn-based tactical games and sports RPGs. Captain Tsubasa: Tatakae Dream Team is a soccer game all bout understanding and developing your players’ stats and special moves to build an unstoppable goal-scoring machine. Complete with anime-inspired art and RPG-favored Rock, Paper, Scissors style advantage systems, it will scratch your sporting and RPG itches.
Beastie Ball
The case could be made that, given combat sports’ role within the larger sporting landscape, the Pokémon series itself is a sports franchise. For a clearer example of monster training as sport, however, there’s Beastie Ball, which brings you all the excitement of raising and growing your own team of beasts without the part where you then force them to battle for your own amusement and acclaim.
Instead, you’re training your monsters to be elite volleyball machines. As you play, your beasts will develop skills and special moves to make it hard for the opponent to return your shots as you assemble a championship Beastie Ball squad.
Mario Tennis: Power Tour
There may be a lot of original properties creating interesting sports RPGs, but the big names want to have their say, too, and Mario Tennis: Power Tour for the DS is Nintendo’s foray into the genre. Mario sports games have a proud tradition with the franchises as players take to golf courses, tennis courts, or even Olympic arenas for sports competition.
In Mario Tennis: Power Tour, you control a human player progressing in the tennis world using the solid sports engines the developer is known for, while also looking to build and develop skills in RPG fashion to improve your player’s capabilities as you go.
Kairosoft Games
A company with an extensive collection of releases covering a broad range of fields and a uniform naming structure is the recipe for a content mill spitting out junk, but it’s also a description of Kairosoft Games’ line, which, for the most part, carries strong reviews from gamers.
What Kairosoft has is a team that is clearly adept at making a certain style of pixel art fun, and they have done it well for a variety of sports. I addition to RPG elements in the sports, there are also more traditional RPG interactions to be had with your characters in the gaming world. Whatever your sport, there is probably a Kairosoft RPG option for you.
