Game:

Beyblade: Super Tournament Battle (2002)

Duration: 1:33:39

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4

My brother and I tried to play this game as kids, and we couldn't figure it out. I wanted to revisit it and I find that nowhere in the game are its controls nor its mechanics ever explained. I do not know how to deck my beyblade out with different settings; I do not know how to perform some attacks which computer players sometimes do which have effects such as dealing big damage or maintaining Spin. I do however have enough information to play.
I switched the difficulty down to Easy after a bit, and found that the main difference afforded from such is the lower aggression from opponents, and I stuck with it.
To win a battle, you must acquire 4 or more points: you get 1 point for outlasting your opponent or for if they fail to launch (which won't happen to them, but can happen to you); you get 2 points for performing a ring-out; and you get 4 points for depleting the enemy's health to 0. You can lower opponents' health by colliding with them to deal 1 damage to both yourself and to them, or maybe 1 and 2 or 2 and 1 depending on your beyblade's stats. If you just have a good matchup, breaking their beyblade is viable enough. You can also deplete their health by using a special move by pressing the B or R buttons (not sure what the difference is, if any, but the L button distinctly does nothing), or by bumping them into walls for 2-4 damage and 1 damage respectively. While destroying beyblades is nice if you have the numbers advantage and can simply lower their hp more than they can lower yours, it's also perhaps noteworthy that your health carries over between matches, and you generally earn less prize cash from winning than it costs to repair your beyblade. You do however have 5 retries for anywhere in the tournament, and using one will restore your health to full for free, resetting the match you lost to proc it.
Colliding with others lowers both players' spin and health, and charges their special attack meter to up to 3 tiers. Special attacks are the premier way to launch opponents off the map, but they also deal small damage and the more they're charged, the more Spin they recover. However, since both players always gain the same amount of meter and lose the same amount of Spin from colliding, paired with both players losing Spin at the same rate, winning via reducing their Spin to 0 is just another numbers game: get them to 0 before you do. It's not very interesting since you have an idea of whether you can outlast your opponent from the launch phase.
The story is nonexistent: you enter a tournament, and if you win you go to regionals. If you win that tournament, then you beat the game and the credits roll. That's actually it. I was thinking that I was missing out on some kind of interesting game, but it's bare-bones. The battles are either a competition to launch the opponent off the side, or a boring numbers game of who can live the longest. Launching itself is something I do not understand well, but my assumption is that it has additive velocity: if you use a special move, your opponent will be launched by a base amount at the angle between you and them, and it's only worth using a special move for this purpose if your opponent is already close to a ledge and you're positioned correctly, or if you can time your attack to be the instant after landing a collision in the direction of a ledge.
I suppose it's all to say that in the ~90 minutes of playtime here, I have beaten the game and I no longer have any reason to return to it in the future.

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