Collection essentials #413: Mario Tennis (N64)

After making Mario Golf, developer Camelot quickly got to work on making their second Mario sports title, Mario Tennis.

I’m not especially experienced with tennis video games, and I also don’t have a ton of play time with this particular game, so I’m not gonna be able to give a strong explanation of how all the controls and mechanics work. I can tell you that this game has a fairly simple interface that is nonetheless tough to master. The game uses two main buttons for making shots, but pressing the buttons can be utilized in various ways in order to hit much more than just two types of shots. For example, you can hold down a button well before it’s time to hit the ball to charge up a “power shot”, though that makes your character less mobile so it can be risky. You can press the two buttons together or multiple times in order to hit the ball with different levels of power, spin and height. 

The game also features a good variety of modes and features similar to Mario Golf. There is a “hit the ball through the rings” mode in this game, too. The main game is a fairly straightforward tennis affair, but there are particular modes that spice up the gameplay with stuff like a court that tilts and items to disrupt opponents. Like Mario Golf, there was a Game Boy Mario Tennis as well with RPG elements which you can connect to this version of the game to use the characters you’ve built up. There are also unlockables that can only be obtained by achieving something specific in the Game Boy title and then transfer the data over to the Nintendo 64 version.

There are a variety of playable characters from the Mario universe, which all have different attributes and thus unique strengths and weaknesses. Each character has a designated doubles partner for tournament mode. The requirement of a doubles partner actually led to a couple interesting character decisions which had long-term implications for the Mario series as a whole. Princess Peach needed a partner, so they decided to bring back Princess Daisy who debuted over a decade earlier as the damsel in distress of Super Mario Land for Game Boy and had seldom ever been seen or heard from since. Mario’s greedy rival Wario needed a partner, so they invented an entirely new character from scratch: Waluigi! Just as Luigi appears to be taller and (sometimes) thinner than Mario, Waluigi has a similar appearance to Wario but with more of an extreme height and weight difference, being much taller and very thin. Waluigi also sports a different color (purple) than Wario (yellow). Some sources early on declared him as Wario’s brother, but this was apparently redacted and now it is said that they are simply friends. Waluigi (as well as Daisy) went on to become a commonly-seen character in multiplayer-focused Mario spinoff games from then on, though strangely he has never properly appeared in any major Mario or Wario game at all. The character was initially met with mixed-to-negative reception by many fans, though it seems that he has grown more popular with time and has often been the subject of internet memes which has seemed to help his public image. I always liked Waluigi from day one and even dressed up as him for a Halloween party as a kid once.

Anyways, back to Mario Tennis. This is another game that my cousins PJ and Eric owned, which is how I learned of the game in the first place. Sadly I never got to play it a whole lot, and it’s one of those games that I definitely would have played a lot as a kid had I owned it. It’s probably still worth checking out today, though I’d say you’ll probably want to line up friends to play it with in that case. For being another quality Mario sports title and being the birth and rebirth of commonly-seen characters, Mario Tennis certainly earns its spot on my list of essentials.