Not too long ago, Nintendo released a new game for the eShop in Japan. It hasn’t made its way to the West yet, but there’s probably a reason for that. Battle Sports Mekuru is available for a little over a thousand yen, yet the content within is almost like that of a demo. The only modes available, as of this time, are local and online multiplayer. Even then, the latter’s servers either don’t appear to be online or no one has been playing the game these past few days. That leaves the player to local multiplayer. Should the player not have anybody to play with, that means the only thing to do in the game is play against CPUs. All the other features are blocked off as “Coming Soon”.
No matter where you live, this isn’t a good move on Nintendo’s part. It’s bad enough that Nintendo’s entered the realm of DLC, but to release something so below bare-bones with the promise of free updates is unacceptable. Sure, Splatoon got to embrace its limelight by starting out with less content than it would eventually have; however, it did have full-featured modes (save for local multiplayer, ironically) that held their own. They had just enough to offer for players to stomach, and future releases like Arms are planning to follow a similar model.
But Battle Sports Mekuru? It doesn’t have anywhere near the amount of content Splatoon had on launch. There’s no single-player campaign, no functioning (?) online play, and no other ways to play than an average versus mode. If this game is going to arrive in the West, it’s going to need a huge content overhaul if Nintendo wants it to gain any momentum.
