Basketball Club Story

This was my first Kairosoft game. I had some idea of what kind of games they made, but never actually played them. Tbh this was a very pleasant surprise. I'm enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would.

To be clear, it's not a very good basketball sim. If you actually like and understand basketball and stuff, this might bother you especially at first. It's very shortcut and a lot of rules and mechanics are very watered down and gamified, or straight up non-existent. To give an example, there's no fouls, no posting up, and no specialization of roles per se. So anybody with a high enough Shooting rating can shoot from anywhere, with no bonuses either way. Height isn't a factor at all. It's just Shooting rating vs. the defender's Defense rating. The games are extremely short so much that if a player has 4 points, they might be the game leader in points for that game. Some games might end with a score of like 8-4 if both teams were particularly strong at defense or bad at offense (or both). I really wish we had the option to lengthen the games to make bench players a little bit more meaningful. Bench players just aren't really useful after you've boosted your starters' Stamina up to a certain point. The only reason to put bench players in is to change up strengths and weaknesses. So yeah, it's not going to be satisfying if you were looking for some proper basketball action.

That said though, it's a very cute and appealing management sim, and that's where this game really shines. If you've played other management sims like Idol Manager, it's got a very similar core gameplay loop to that. You build up your basketball club/base of operations with various facilities, specify what kind of training your players will focus on, then look for matches or tournaments if you think you're ready. The players level up, and can get special skills that can help them perform better. You can also find new players to hire and add to your team, whether to be part of the main rotation or just to help boost training. You make sponsorship deals, build up your fanbase, do community programs to help with various things, etc.

It's really fun seeing how your little guys progress and perform, as it's all automated. You have no real control over the players' actions during matches except through some coaching strategies to influence how often they do things like shoot from the paint vs. outside, what kind of defensive formation to do and whatnot. And even if it's not the best basketball sim, the games are at least watchable. Some other basketball and sports management sims have horrible games. Like I'd rather watch numbers go up on a spreadsheet than watch the ludicrous displays that some of them have. But this game's basketball matches are actually watchable to say the least. The players are surprisingly competent, provided you're using a strategy that works best for your team against the opponent's team.

There's a lot of little systems, all of which are very gamified, and not all of which actually relate to how real basketball clubs operate at all. Such as giving items like chocolate and a deck of cards to your practice court so that all training done there is marginally more effective, or how you can combine 3 different types of players to get a boost to drills training in specific areas. Or building a bookstore or video game store in your club base to attract visitors. But the simplified gamification and lack of realism is ok since it's fun. It's not trying to be a game that beats out other more serious sports management sims or NBA 2K or whatever. It's about little guys running around training and playing basketball. And it's excellent at being that.

So addicting. Put yourself in there, spam jump training and dunk on everyone. Literally cannot find any other management game similar to this.

Fun game. Sometimes the AI makes some weird decisions. Instead of driving to the basket or taking a uncontested shot it decides to pass a bunch of times.