I've been playing through Beastieball recently and I've never had this much fun with a creature collector RPG. There's so many thoughtful, creative design elements that just make everything work for me. The combat is fast-paced, crunchy, and challenging even when you have complete knowledge of the opposing team's movesets and stats (which is crazy how they pulled that off; every other RPG only works because you have imperfect knowledge!). But the main thing I want to talk about is the narrative.
Beastieball is very transparent about being not just an RPG but a sports RPG. It is both a sports game and a game about sports. The combat is basically volleyball: you hit a ball to the other team, scoring points by either hitting an empty area of the court or by wearing out the other Beasties. Then there's the story, which takes Pokemon's kid-from-Pallet-town formula and mashes it with the drama and politics of a sports league. Before I talk more I'm going to attempt to make a meaningful distinction between narrative and story.
Let's say that narrative is form and story is content. The narrative of Beastieball greatly resembles Pokemon, as does it resemble every other RPG. You start weak, and grow strong. This is also the sort of narrative that arises in professional sports (though certainly not the only narrative). I've never been into sports, but I can always get behind cheering for the underdog during a finals game, because that's the kind of narrative I find most exciting. There's always a winner and a loser; there's always a hero and a villain (though which is which depends on who you ask).
Beastieball's story operates at a layer higher than its narrative. First of all, there's the Sports King, who sees you as the literal protagonist of the Beastieball League and does everything he can to rig the rankings. He says that if you become rank 1, he'll stop the construction of an arena on a nature preserve in your hometown. It's a manufactured story. No one really likes the Sports King, because they want to play real Beastieball, without the influence of some guy who doesn't even play the sport himself. Every victory of yours is "real" (except for the tutorial, but I'll wave that aside), but still feels like it's sort of inauthentic. Would you still be here if the Sports King wasn't trying to make you a hero?
So maybe the real villain in our story is the Sports King, a guy who isn't even part of the narrative of the sport itself. I think that's what sets Beastieball aside from other sports games. It doesn't stay on the court. We aren't just worried about the moment-to-moment action of a Beastieball game, or even a player's career. We're worried about the health of the game itself as its "realness" seems to crumble because of capitalist interests. We don't want to tell the story of the league, we want to tell the story of Beastieball.
Postscript:
Maybe sports games are overlooked because gamers hate sports, which is valid given the state of the sports industry (though both sports and games have been taken over by gambling, so we have that in common?). It's cool to see Beastieball engage with sports as a storygame and I hope other games do the same.
Anyway, check out this great Side Story episode about sports and games
