Very fun story. I loved the quirky cast of characters and the creative way you mixed together golf with anime tropes. The presentation, from the custom sprites to the way they moved around the screen, was great.

My main gripe is that, while I loved the (very long) middle part of the story, the beginning and ending were much less enjoyable. You flashed out so well this fun set of side characters, and the competition among them was genuinely engaging, that the main ones ended up feeling kind of boring by comparison. The MC, while endearing, ends up not having much of a motivation of his own, which makes him immediately less engaging than the very strongly driven side characters. And the love interest feels like a non-entity for most of the story. The romance aspect in particular feels very shoehorned in and not what this story really wanted to be about.

Super well done on all fronts! I'm very impressed with the number of additional sprites created for this. I also love the resourcefulness with the whacky BG's and the premise was executed super well.

Rag pretty much covered all of the notes I had on the story, so I'll spare you all any repetition.

All-in-all, this entry slaps. You should proud of yourselves!

Very cute tale. Travels the common shonen beats that you borrowed from the genre with relative ease.

There were a lot of great jokes, but I think you may have stretched on the story a bit thin. We didn't quite have much focus on the romantic leads-- it kinda felt incidentally romantic, in the end. We understood that it was it was going to be romance by nature of the game jam, but we have at most lingering glances. While Del's wish makes sense with the path we see him take over the journey (including his dealings with his sister), the wish of Rom didn't seem quite to make sense with the epiphany he had of competitiveness in his regaining of his love of the game. I was expecting a wish relating to like, playing the tournament again with the others. We don't really get enough of the on-screen smoldering that drives a wish of wanting to ask out the wolf.

We do see Del and Rom staring at one another, but without any other meaningful interactions, it doesn't really define whether it's mutual admiration of a golf expert (not unlike the sort of theme of Rom's narrative arc that he shares, and Del travels-- not trying to play to win, but playing for enjoyment of the game) or actual romance.

Ashley feels like she has more presence, given she's sorta the "everyman". We spend more time with her, but she feels more like a tool of pushing the narrative along at times. We get dangled with the tease from Elongated Muskrat's child that there's more to the reason behind their parent's motivation for golf, but we don't get a meaningful resolution of this thread. Ashley is too reluctant to bring it up to Del-- so focused on enough on getting an arm for their father to try and get an alternative "win condition" from Elongated Muskrat, but not willing enough to confront the potential reality that the enemy set out.

I think we had too many characters, perhaps. The early setup for each of them just kinda felt like a joke checklist (some which we readdress in other means). We get two different DBZ references across time-- and I'm not quite sure the narrative purpose of the Herbert Scherbert(?) from an anime or referential purpose. I thoroughly enjoyed some of them, but it felt like it was sandbagging the pace of the plot.

Tournament arcs in shonen are partially bolstered by the strong motivations behind them from characters we already know. We don't usually start of with a tournament arc-- they're about having something to prove. We don't quite get enough room for that in this narrative.

STORY commentary aside, I think your presentation was great. Your animations for the golfing, the sound effects punctuating each moment, that great little moment with the piercing of the balls in the air. The motorcycle punctuating each speech effect. The spreadsheet tracking the values. The explosion of James through his powerup sequence. Even the usage of the manatee for the whole group. I think you spent a lot of time working on it and it shows, it was well done. Oh, and of course, the hard work on all of the sprites-- really harkening well to the various references you were pointing to all the time.

Like I hope this doesn't come off like too critically-- it was a pleasure to read it and the effort you put into it showed with each panel(is that the term? Idk lol). I'm engaging with it to this degree because I could see the effort put in and the engagement I had going through it.

 It was quite enjoyable, but I think one of the most difficult skills can be knowing when to kill your darlings-- an issue I no doubt still have trouble with, as you could see in what I did for this. 

It's still a fun experience and one worthy of having pride in it. Well done, as it goes without saying. Spectacular addition to the game jam.

instant classic. super fun. new FVN i show to my buds outside of the scene

FUN FUN FUN.

This FVN actually kind of blew me out of the water with how fun it was to read.  The Golf anime we never knew we needed.