Earlier this year, I embarked on a pivotal journey, one that I’m sure upon finishing will change me for good: I started watching Haikyu!! It’s my first sports anime (when you’re a chubby little muffin like I was, you take more interest in Not Moving over Sports), an abscess in the lexicon of genres I’ve dipped my toes into, one I’m rectifying after all these years. And friends, it’s good eatin’. I even, incredibly briefly, floated the idea of taking up volleyball. Yet now I don’t have to, and it’s all thanks to a delightful, incredibly Wii Sports coded game called just volleyball.
just volleyball [sic] is a sports game that is exactly what it says on the tin. You are immediately greeted, in its demo, with an avatar customising screen not too dissimilar to the Mii Channel of Wii days gone by. There’s lots of hair options, some charmingly skewy face designs, you can set how your voice sounds, choose the number on your jersey, it’s all good stuff. And then comes the volleyball.
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Like in real volleyball, you can jump, bump, dive, spike, block and serve. Unlike Wii Sports, however, you have to be a lot more on the ball than just having a controller around. I played using a controller, and the controls work thusly: you move your funny lil guy around using the left stick, and with the right stick you aim where you want to hit the ball. That might be across the net to your opponents’ side of the field, or it could be towards one of your teammates. None of it is as easy as it sounds.
You have to be constantly vigilant of where the ball might land, and if you’re the one receiving the ball, you have to make sure you’re pointing your cursor towards a teammate, as it’s more than unlikely that you’ll score yourself a point that way. Serving is finicky too, requiring precise timing and tight skills so as to trick the opposing players. I never quite got the hang of it, but I at least made some headway with the other components.
Mostly what I feel towards just volleyball is delight. There’s hardly any frills to it, it’s clearly inspired by Wii Sports yet isn’t trying to be Wii Sports, just it’s own thing. Just, volleyball! If you’re interested in giving it a go yourself, then you can try out the demo on Steam ahead of its release on November 4th.