Game:

Legendary Fishing (2018)

Duration: 1:23:37

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I tried it with my brother and we only had 1 rod and a few lures. I had to unlock more stuff. It's the classic story: play Budokai to unlock everybody's movesets so that the next time you play there's more variety.
Regarding gameplay: it took a bit to grasp, but once I hook a fish, I need to follow the fish such that the fish is within the UI ring. If I pull the fish in by holding the B button while the fish is in the ring, I make a lot of progress. However, I make miniscule progress otherwise, and risk letting the fish go. Fish can use an "attack" in the form of opening and closing their mouths while hooked. If they do this, pulling is risky and harmful. There is no startup to when they do this, but they can flap their lips 2-5 times, and the last flap is always just for show, as a cooldown. Fish can also jump out of the water, during which time their movement is very predictable, leading to easier spurts of reeling a fish in, especially since jumping has a large cooldown.
To my knowledge, there isn't a particular way to know where any fish are, let alone where a specific fish is. I try to cast my rod where I see splashing, and that has treated me pretty well overall, and doing otherwise sometimes has resulted in being near fish, sometimes not. The splashing may just be for show. A lot of missions will task you with catching a specific fish specie, and of a minimum size, and sometimes in a required quantity. As far as I am concerned, locating a fish before casting the rod is luck-based. I know that once you cast a rod you can decide to hook a given fish who bites, and not doing so will let you try a runner-up fish. However, once you let a fish go, they won't try again, meaning you need to be sure that letting that medium-sized bass go is worth the potential larger bass who might show up.
Line casting is done on rails, and you can't move the camera. Once the line is cast, you watch the bobber, which you can move left or right, and which you can reel in. Fish might be anywhere nearby, including outside your field of view, to the left or right outside of your range. They might also be between the bobber and your character, offscreen, unable to be seen, meaning you can never truly know all of your options when deciding whether to hook a given fish or not. This is important because if you decide to hook none of the fish or can't decide by the time everyone has gotten a bite, nobody will bite again until you cast the rod again; and you can't cast your rod again until you take a hefty walk of shame back, reeling your line back in, taking like 15 seconds.
This is very significant because every mission is timed. The timer would be pretty generous if you could simply find all of the correct fish and reel them in; you'd have lots of extra time. However, between needing to gamble on getting the correct fish, having a chance to cast your line in a spot with no fish at all, and being punished with a slow reel-in with no alternative, makes single mistakes very punishing.
If you're given say 4-and-a-half minutes to catch 2 bass of over 5000 each, and catching one takes 2 minutes, then you only have 30 seconds of buffer time to successfully cast your line and find the fish, not to mention the celebration time for getting any fish takes up time. It's way strict. I suspect that getting better rods will make fish combat easier and therefore faster, but you need to do missions to level up to get better gear, and you can't get new missions until you complete 7 missions. It's a design decision I took issue with in Breakers and I'm annoyed with it here too.
Regarding fish combat: The UI circle is larger for smaller fish and smaller for larger fish, which makes sense: it should be tougher to reel in larger fish. However, the speed at which you can move the camera is lower than the fish's speed, and the UI awkwardly is limited to the water's edge meaning if the fish is near the surface of the water, you have less room to line it up. The fish like to dart around, too. It's a wonder that these are earlygame missions at all. Battling a fish is a large undertaking which can last several minutes; so it's very cool that if the short timer runs out while a fish is hooked, you get booted out of the level and don't keep the fish. I got to be like half a second from catching a fish and I ran out of time and failed because of it.
I've been getting unlocks at a pretty slow rate, with very minimal stat increases or with even blatant stat decreases. I wonder if I'll need to grind stages I've already completed in order to get good enough gear to beat some of these stages. Missions done in part but failed earn 0 experience and don't progress the season, so if there's a good chance to fail, it's not really worth doing.
A lot of questionable design decisions, but the multiplayer is ok. I'll probably keep this game on my radar to continue sometime so that eventually I can play multiplayer with lots of customization options and stuff. Could be nice.

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