everybodys golf is chill, very chill and charming too! though underneath that chill exterior is one of the hardest games i've ever actually finished. first off why it's so difficult, for one i'm just bad at it, i'm not the best at games and i'm kinda proud of that because i can enjoy them anyway in spite of that lack of real skill and even here i managed to even with that, but the game also does have one major issue with me in that shots felt super impricise sometimes with the greens especially, never quite going where i expected because hills and the gravity and wind never being as clear as i'd like, leading to a lot of missed shots that, while my fault, i wish were better telegraphed with a line like a lot of later games would have, but this is also a game of it's time and the lack of those kinds of features honestly kind of made it more interesting, you really have to learn the game inside and out in order to get anywhere in the later versus matches and harder tournaments and play the game the way it wants, and i think that's fine. it helps that its still easily one of the most fun and polished games of its era! the game plays well beyond those few issues and it even feels in line with the later games that i'm more familiar with even this early on and there's a ton of content here to dig into if you like it, a versus mode that lets you unlock new characters, a tournament mode that serves as the main single player mode, just letting you go up against a bunch of AI players as well as a standard stroke mode and some fun mini-golf courses too! it's not a game that takes itself super seriously and the arcady nature makes it a more fun experiance than i found some of the tiger woods games of this era.

the visuals and audio are what really makes the game stand out though, the chibi characters are adorable and rendered in some super high detail renders that look super close to actual 3D models and the animations on them are all so cool, with multiple poses depending on how well you do and even little quirks with their swings! the cast is maybe not as charming as some later games, you don't have any fun cameos like gex or kat for example, and it does have way too many older guys that kind of blend in together for me, but it's nowhere near a bad cast at all, i always mained suki. the courses all look cool too, a little baron at times, even sometimes kind of spooky, but they have a basic look about them combined with the edges of the course stretching into a void that ads to a weird atmosphere that draws me in a little, kinda spooky. the 5 courses are all distinct though, from american country clubes, to seaside beach courses and even a city course in the minigolf mode, while you cant see far into the distance they all give the right vibe and they're nice spaces to golf in, adding to this massively is the music. the music here is amazing, being done by motoi sakuraba, of tales of and valkyrie elysium fame, every song is catchy and fitting the vibe of the game and the courses, it had a very upbeat sound to it and it's all super listenable. there is one weird thing about the sound though, at first the game didnt have any music for me, that's because you have to go and enable it in the options, which is just a weird choice i don't fully understand, but if you know going in then it's not a big deal.

the weird thing about this though is that, unlike the later games made by klaphands this was made by camelot! the people behind the mario sports games and later on things like golden sun and it kind of feels that way. it has a mario golf-esque vibe to it and it feels like a very different experiance from the later games vibe-wise, you can feel that camelot flavour to it. like i said the later games from EB2 onwards would be made by claphands who kind of specialised in the series until they eventually stopped making the games for sony and went on to do their own game called claphands golf in 2022 for ios and switch. camelot as well would never come back to the series, sticking to making games from nintendo afterwards almost entirely. the games director however, Masashi Muramori would stick with te series right up until the end, being credited on most of the games up until now . the series would have a super long lifespan though, games all the way up to the last gen with everybodys golf (its like the 5th game with that title) and its VR port and there were even some spinoffs like a ps mobile party game and a tennis game for the ps2 and psp.