[crossposted from my backloggd]
"When I saw Faker crying in the booth, I thought it was amazing. He had won so many championships, but he still had the passion for victory and anger for losing. It was really moving to see that." -- Jo "CoreJJ" Yong-in, on the 2017 League of Legends World Championship
"Ill never watch this stupid racist sport for the rest of my life for at least another 4 years" -- tumblr user @tamamita, on the 2026 FIFA World Cup
let's do a spectacular volleyball dunk on the elephant on the court first of all--beastieball is a lot like pokemon. you collect little themed creatures to challenge a bunch of wacky larger-than-life characters with their own teams of themed creatures in hopes of going to the little themed creature-off championship. it's a comparison the game wears on its sleeve (one particularly funny moment stands out where an NPC explicitly says "there's no super effective or anything like that", as does a running joke about Beastie-themed videogames). i first picked the game up on a recommendation stemming from me literally asking my followers for a game that was "like pokemon but good". but i was not prepared for How fucking good beastieball is.
one huge and crucial difference at the heart of what makes this game click so perfectly for me is that your beasties aren't battling or fighting; they're playing two-a-side volleyball. this gets you away from some of the uncomfortable rationalization and suspension of disbelief you need to get through most creature collectors, where you no longer have to dance around the existence of real-life animal bloodsport. but this also unlocks so much in terms of gameplay; because you don't have to Wipe the whole enemy team for a win, but instead simply score match point (1 point for wild beasties, 2 points for npc encounters, 3 points for ranked matches against coaches), enemy teams can have a full roster without dragging out encounters intolerably--which beastie has the ball and whether they're up by the net become two huge factors in how matches go down, opening up a deep library of support and setup moves across the game's beasties.
and the designers of beastieball clearly want every one of those beasties to have its own role and place in the game. this is perfect for a creature collector--if you have a favourite beastie, i guarantee you can build a crown series-winning team around it, even if it is a "silly" one with a design that suggests weakness (like Trat, the mouse that lives in a can of peaches). but what really wowed me is the strength of the encounter design. you can absolutely get through the first half of the game by overlevelling your starter and slamming down serves--but the ranked coaches in beastieball have gimmick teams, specific strategies that go far deeper than just an aesthetic or typal similarity (no complicated type chart in beastieball, thank fuck, just three damage types and corresponding defense stats). i found myself having to slot in new team members, or shuffle moves around, or switch up my starting order, or straight up get better at the game to get past some of the later coaches. (re: shuffling moves, your beasties never forget plays. i'm trying to review beastieball as a game in its own right nad not by comparison as much as possible, but please rest assured that nearly every quality of life feature i have ever wished for from a pokemon game is present here).
there's extremely little randomness in beastieball--it's a near-perfect information game, you can see each enemy beastie's plays and how much damage they'll do, so the trick is in learning to predict moves, how and when to tag in, when you can afford to drop a point to get your beastie on the bench and recovering… i haven't even touched the postgame content or the PVP, and my mind's been abuzz the whole back half of the game with this type of stuff. so purely as a turn-based battler, incredible.
i also have to shout out the absolutely amazing concept artists and animators on this project--webbounce, the clown spider with a beachball abdomen, and yueffowl, the little bird that holds its wings up like the dish of a flying saucer, are probably my favourite designs in any creature collector ever. there's always a little extra secret sauce to beastieball's designs, either a clever or innovative link (eg, yueffowl and its evolution albrax drawing on the history of UFO/alien/cryptid sightins that were 100% just An Owl Looking Kinda Freaky) or a sense of real thought put into how the beastie exists in the context of its environment, and the beasties that have animations feel so incredibly alive and charming.
that charm is a real big part of beastieball's emotional core. okay, i PROMISE this is the last time i say the p-word, but beastieball let me engage in the core fantasy of pokemon better than any pokemon game has--the fantasy of there beign a weird little creature that's your friend. before every match, you get scenes of your beasties hyping themselves up, or discussing strategy… you can high-five them all before going in. the reactivity is light, but it really sells the fantasy of like, the /team/, of this being an adventure you're all in together. the fact that beasties can develop relationships, becoming rivals or besties or sweethears, is the real cherry on top of this. by the end of the game, i'd become so dearly attached to my squad that seeing them all posed together at the finale made me a bit weepy.
and i say all that… all that, and none of that's even my favourite thing about beastieball. my favourite thing about beastieball is the story. it's a sports story. i've been a fan of esports for a decade. most of my positive memories of university were playing for my uni's Overwatch team. and i've been a fan of fútbol for--well, i'm a latin american who lived in the UK, do the math. and, like…
i mean, now, fucking look at the state of things, right? every other major esports event is an astroturfed saudi sportswashing venture. the world cup 2026 is a masterclass in showcasing FIFA's corruption and willingness to stand by whistling while a host country enacts punitive racism on competing teams. you can't watch any kind of sport or esports without being drowned in ads for gambling and cryptocurrency and gulf monarchy playground cities for rich white people. how can anyone talk about the "beautiful game" when the white house can press for red cards to reversed? how can i square my love of league of legends esports, the cocktail of lows and highs and thrills and joy i felt watching MSI, with riot games' institutional culture of racism and sexism?
unlike some other games in the genre, beastieball isn't about saving the world. instead, it's about… well, it's about the feelings i just described. it's a surprisingly down to earth, sometimes downright somber story about people and little themed creatures who love a sport, who have loved that sport their whole lives, who live to play it, and how that comes up against the realities of these sports as instituions and the people who make money off of them. the PC's best friend, riley, is the biggest representative of this conflict--even as you find out, throughout the plot, that the beastieball league isn't all it's cracked up to be, she still dreams about one day winning the championship. she confides in you how painful and strange it is to still feel that way knowing what she knows about the corruption and flaws of the organization… and damn, i don't know, that hits me like a truck. sports can be so beautiful and so powerful and it sucks so fucking much to love this amazing, wonderful thing for what it is at its best when you are constantly having the worst parts of it waved around in your face by some of the worst people alive.
beastieball would be a great game even if the story was just servicable, i think. i mean, like, i make it sound like a super serious meditation--it's mostly quite silly, and goofy, and light. it's a funny game. and i'd give it five stars even if it was just that, because it's a game that finally delivers perfectly on a fantasy that dozens of titles have tried and failed to hit the mark for me. but something about this story, told the way it is, told now, really spoke to me. shout out to EDIE #02, HATTIE #08, GOSSPER #96, DR LALA PHD #99, and BOAT #75, my crown series team and if i may speak purely as a fan of the sport, shoe-ins for the beastieball hall of fame
