Okay, so how’s about this for something just a tad different? Welcome to the world of pangya…a strange and mysterious island where a game of golf…erm, I mean a game of pangya (both the name of the game itself and the island on which it’s played) can settle the fate of the world! …I’m not kidding! …really! To save on the long-winded and complicated…and less than perfect explanations…pangya is a sort of anime-esque (although it originally hails from Korea instead of Japan) fairytale golf. I’ll be starting our journey to the land of the fantastic realm of…uh…golf…that is actually adapted from a popular (apparently) massively-multiplayer online golf game known commonly as pangya (noticing any important recurring proper nouns within this game?), I’ll be going through a sampling of the courses and characters this game has to offer. The main factor the game has to offer is swing-driven mechanics tied to the Wii remote, and honestly, having taken some golf lessons and played more than a few holes myself…I would tell you that a golf swing is something too intricate for what you might try to apply to a control gimmick like this, but I’ll tell you right now that I’m a converted believer, because it actually works better than you would think. Oh, and if you play the likes of Mario Golf religiously and can’t be separated from your three-point-swing meter, it can also be played that way. This is just a look at the intro video, a quick look at the menus, and a single match between Kooh and Scout on the easiest course, Blue Lagoon. Kooh is a pirate captain…or rather the daughter of a pirate captain who is for some reason missing and doesn’t really show any signs of where he is or whether or not he’s planning to come back…but if One Piece taught us anything, it’s that kids make excellent pirates…but apparently not very good dancers, as the case may be. She might keelhaul the ‘lubber who says anything about it, but that dancing of hers is just…not right, by any means. She has massive strength and is actually the strongest driver by default, although clubs and clothes can boost any character’s strengths or bring up their weaknesses, so the base stats are actually much less important than you might think when you easily get most of your total points in any of the categories from your chosen club set. Just to drive that point home, I’ve given her the Medieval Arsenal club set…by far strongest ones I’ve got, although the control isn’t as high as some others, that’s really only going to matter if your swing isn’t all too great…which mine isn’t from time to time after taking a long break from it like I’ve had lately, so that’s not the clubs’ fault. They still make her monstrously strong off the tee, although as I said, they’d have that effect on almost anybody who picked them up. The little ball creature that’s following her around is Dolfini, her usual caddie, voiced by Richard Horwitz, commonly known for lending his voice to Invader Zim and Billy of the Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy (among other things, but if you know those two, you basically get the idea what he sounds like and why he might sound familiar). Allegedly Dolfini is a type of dolphin that…eats the pangya golf balls (called a Phoenix). Then there’s poor Scout. He’s saddled with the game’s very weakest AI, this being the very first match in the very first set of Vs. Com matches. The computer players later on in the game are outrageously good at the game, chipping in effortlessly from anywhere from 40-60 yards and rarely missing a putt under 25 yards…but you’ll notice that this one is not nearly that skilled. Scout’s partner is Pipin…apparently a member of a tribe of time-travelers who freely wander between dimensions and eras just to go out to find people to play pangya…Scout is apparently one such invited player, but he looks like a normal kid to me… … …although apparently he’s descended from a legendary pangya player, unbeknownst to the lad himself. Whew…still with me? No? It’s probably for the best. If you like golf and this kind of atmosphere appeals to you, it’s definitely worth watching. I’ll bore you some other time with more about this game, but this is just the first of what I hope will be many to come. Unfortunately, for a game based on an MMO-golf sim, there’s no online play (In its second edition, no less! “Season Two” indicates that this is indeed the second Wii port to date that pangya has received)…which would seem like a shoo-in, but maybe Ntreev doesn’t want a one-time purchase to compete too strongly with their free-to-play, but pay-to-buy-pangya-currency game, I honestly couldn’t say.