Sports RPGs

[ThePurplePantywaist]

Suprisingly this is a rather underdeveloped genre, although Sport and RPG have pretty obvious parallels.

Let's start with a bunch of examples:

On the one end of the scale we have

Captain Tsubasa: Rise of New Champions (Nintendo Switch)
You have your pretty standard soccer/football game, with the addition of Anime-style supermoves.
You play soccer, you get stronger. You fulfill certain conditions, eg score many goals, and you get even better (running faster, stronger shots etc). You win the (Anime) championship.
The story is your typical Anime wunderkind wants to become even better at the one thing they are already super great at.

on the complete opposite end there is

Pyre (multiplattform)
It can maybe be described as 3on3 Rugby-Basketball with Magic. Different characters have very different playstyle.
Story is in a (high)fantasy setting with a messianic return, a revolution and lots of hard choices.
While it is a RPG that circles around a sport, the sport does not carry the game. Every few meters there is a new gameplay twist.
The game is great, but not because of the sport.

[ThePurplePantywaist]

More examples:

Dodgeball Academia (multiplattform)
A game in a school setting, but the school is only about Dodgeball. Story and characters are... let's say quirky.
The Dodgeball itself is pretty super moves heavy and besides that not very thrilling.
I always feel bad harking on indie games, where people obvioulsy put so much love and work into it, but I just did not enjoy it a lot.

WWE2k23 - My Rise Mode (multiplattform)
This game is by Activision, so you have your loot box modes, your DLC parade and many other problematic things.

However, the My Rise Mode is a "pure" Sports RPG, with no microtransactions or loot boosters. You create your wrestler and follow one the 2 storylines "The Legacy" and "The Lock". You have your typical wrestling drama, you can - only sometimes - choose whether to behave like a Heel or Face, who to fight or who to team up with. You meet and fight a lot of real wrestling characters and a few, who have been created only for this game. You get experience points through fights (and sometimes more for winning fights) and your wrestler gets stronger.

My main gripe is, that the modes are too long and drawn out, and most fights are just 1on1 with your wrestler, and that gets somewhat stale after a lot of time. There is also no way to learn new moves or switch new moves.