Baby Luigi sucks ass at tennis, and I'm tired of pretending he doesn't

Mario Tennis Fever has a rather divisive adventure mode attached to it. Having played through it myself over the weekend, I’d swap “divisive” for “mildly disappointing.”

See, there are some really great ideas and missions in Fever’s Adventure mode. But all of those great matches only appear after a painfully laborious Nintendo Tutorial (TM) — a tutorial that genuinely lasts about as long as the adventure mode itself.

And then there’s the real problem with the adventure mode: That Luigi kid? Your sidekick? The baby one? Yeah, that kid can’t play tennis for shit.

The story (yes, there are cutscenes and everything and it’s surprisingly important to this discussion) behind Fever is that Daisy is real sick for unknown reasons. So the gang — which includes Wario and that creepy pervert he’s always hanging out with, for some reason — go to find some golden fruit to heal her. They find the fruit and get attacked by some nasty smoke monsters. But because the gang isn’t good enough at tennis and don’t have real rackets ... they all get turned into the baby versions of themselves. This is how you, Baby Mario, end up at the tennis academy.

The academy is where the literally 90 minute tutorial takes place. There are plenty of things to learn about different ways to hit the ball, which helps build out a “just technical enough to be interesting, but still simple enough to be fun” arcade tennis game. But the thing about tennis is that sometimes it’s a solo game, and sometimes there are doubles matches. And that’s how you first get stuck with your brother, Baby Luigi.

To graduate, you’ll have to win matches against multiple teams, so you and Baby Luigi will square up against a variety of Bowser minion duos and, of course, the creepily tooth-filled Baby Wario and Baby Waluigi. 

Now, I consider myself a fan of the cowardly green guy that Baby Luigi grows into, but this baby version of him is just a turd out there on the court. I’m not much of a tennis guy in real life, but I understand the pretty basic principle that you need to be able to rely on your duo partner to win. In order for me to cover my parts of the court, I have to believe that Baby Luigi will cover his side just as competently. And competent is not the word I’d use to describe this kid’s performance.

Basic slices just fly past this dude. And even when he’s deliberately playing up and I’m receiving in back, the little guy can’t hit a Drop Shot to save either of our lives. It’s an arcade tennis game and this little shit is having me screaming “you have to hit those” at my TV like a problematic parent in the little league stands.

I never lost because of this second-rate son, but I certainly ended every match resentful of the amount of overtime I had to put in to get the victory. And it left me pretty nervous to try another doubles player for the rest of the game. This turned out to be weirdly unfounded, as (spoilers) Donkey Kong and Daisy are perfectly fine tennis players and duo partners who I trust with my very life. This makes the Baby Luigi situation that much more confounding. It’s very clearly not the game’s AI — I’ve seen what they can do — this kid just doesn’t have it, man.

Anyway, once you get past how talentless Mario’s only brother is, the adventure is a pretty great time. There are normal tennis matches to be had against some classic Mario villains, but the campaign mostly consists of battles against the flaming walls of an airship, or those big cloud enemies that blow you around. It’s pretty damn cute, and as a lifetime Mario enjoyer, it had me smiling ear to ear for most of it. Which is a shame, because it’s only about 90 minutes long once you get out of the tutorial.

Even so, the adventure mode showcased a tennis game that’s arcady and fun enough to make me interested in some of the other game modes — the first time a Mario sports title has done that in quite a few years. I think I’ll be sticking around to try out the solos tournament, or maybe even some online play. But if I ever dive into the duos tower, I know one partner I’ll be avoiding at all costs.