Mario Strikers Charged

 

    Soccer never really interested me, I'll be up front. When I was a kid, my parents attempted to sign me up for soccer as I think is tradition for all parents, and I almost immediately became the one sitting down and picking at the grass. That disinterest bleeds into games as even now, even more more video game tuned variants like Rocket League don't particularly catch my eye, and you'll see me dead before you see me within the near vicinity of a FIFA game. Even with that, though, I think Mario Strikers Charged is worth talking about, because clearly Nintendo and Next Level Games thought that soccer was uninteresting on its own as well, and the way they set about giving it some spice is absolutely wild.
    Apparently in the Mario universe, soccer is the single most intense and deadly sport you could hope to play. The games are set in what I can only describe as battle arenas, with the ball being replaced with some kind of metallic energy sphere and the field being surrounded by an electric fence. Forget about traditional soccer rules; people are free to throw the battle with their hands, tackle and punch other people to get control of the ball, and the team captains have the ability to shoot up into the air in a burst of energy and kick multiple balls into the goal at once. Of course, there's power-ups too, which more often than not lead to you or your teammates being knocked back high into the air, with visible scars and damage marks as the match goes on.
    It is far and away the most abrasive depiction of these characters ever to exist, and I know that sounds like I'm overexaggerating, but you need only look at the cutscene animations to see what I mean. Almost every character has either been made incredibly sassy or extremely angry, and it's pushed to such an extreme where you can see things like Waluigi's entire team doing a crotch chop, or Wario pulling a Persona 3. It is downright bizarre and some would say clashes with Mario's established tone, but the sheer amount of effort that's gone into the animations is easily the best thing about the game. Characters that in other games only have one personality trait or unique animation to their name take on a new life with how well-realized they are here, and it's impressive how much of that is conveyed without a lot of dialogue. The fact there's so many of these one-off animations will make you want to keep playing, just to see what the characters will do next.
    Of course, for as much as this makes playing the game way more entertaining, it is still a soccer game, and I feel like you have to enjoy the sport at least a bit to get the most out of it. There isn't really a whole lot to do besides just play a bunch of matches, either in the free play versus mode or the single-player modes. The main campaign is a pretty typical “play a bunch of times to unlock stuff” sort of ordeal, which is pretty standard, but is hampered by the rather steep difficulty curve. As soon as you hit the second cup, the game stops being nice, and the AI will proceed to pummel you into the ground with how perfectly it plays, often leading to you ranking out and having to try the whole cup over again. There's also a challenge mode, which puts you in specific match-ups with certain stipulations to win, and has the same difficulty spike issue, though thankfully lets you retry as many times as you want.
    It's definitely not the most beginner-friendly of games, but it's clearly meant to be the kind of thing you play again and again with friends, or online if you can find a way to get that running in the modern day. In that sense, it goes above and beyond even what other Mario sports games offer, providing something uniquely over-the-top that manages to remain one-of-a-kind, even with the many Mario spin-offs before and after it. It is a loud game, both figuratively and literally, and if you want a soccer game with an extra bit of kick to it, then it's worth a look if you can find it for a good price. Now I just have to think about if that last bit was a good joke or not.