COLOBALL 2002 Review

Note: I’ve never written a review for a game in English, so expect this piece to be a bit unorganized and messy. 

COLOBALL 2002
Vanpool’s Bizarre Sports？Game

-by Kuruma Tabetai

So to get straight to the point, Coloball 2002 is a PS2 game published by EnterBrain and developed by Vanpool. The game was only released in the country of Japan, and according to the character designer Kazuyuki Kurashima, “the game didn’t sell at all.” (全然売れなかった）

Although the game is super obscure and almost nobody has actually played it, I found it to be a very fun, charming, and interesting game, making it one of the most underrated LoveDeLic lineage games (when LoveDeLic is already underrated in general). 

Now, if you don’t know what the LoveDeLic lineage is, well, that’s a really deep rabbit hole I’m not willing to cover in this review, but to put it simply, Vanpool’s games are considered to be part of a broad set of games known as LoveDeLic “Kei” (LoveDeLic type). The most well known of these are games like cult classic PS1 game “moon RPG Remix Adventure”, Zelda oddity “Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland” (this one is actually made by Vanpool), and overused internet meme “Chibi Robo.”

    Although Coloball isn’t really like other games in this little group, it being part of this group is what motivated me to even pick it up. 

Anyway, with that out of the way, what even is Coloball?

Well to put it lightly, Coloball (short for Colosseum Ball) is a fictional sport that plays like a hybrid between board games and trading card games. It’s pretty hard to visually recreate the strangeness of Coloball with text, but basically, this game is like Pokemon Cards where you summon monsters to fight, but with the catch that your monsters fight on top of a soccer ball. You see, the “Ball” part of Coloball is how the soccer ball is the board of the game, where monsters (units) get placed on the corners of the hexagon. The ball is only spun around to place units, and not to move it or kick it or throw it or whatever a normal person does with a ball.

This might sound like a dumb gimmick for a card game, but it actually makes the game surprisingly deep. First of all, because you can’t move units after you place them, you have to carefully select each location to place these units in. Each corner of the hexagon has 9 potential corners that connect to it, creating numerous possibilities for fights, from the honorable 1 on 1 duel to the ganging up on one poor soul. Not to mention that the amount of energy you get determines which corners and panels your units are on, creating a conflict between valuing energy or killing opponent units. 

On top of that, the ball making every panel interconnect makes it so that there’s no dead end, creating an endless battlefield full of possibilities while making most locations (theoretically) equally viable. 

On top of those basics, this is basically a TCG so it has many other complex factors that play a part, and here are a good chunk of examples...

• There are 5 elemental types (red, blue, green, yellow, grey [rainbow]), and 7 if you include night and day.

• Each unit is one type among the five, and also a species/occupation of some sort. Their type usually reflects their cost to summon.

• Species/occupations have similar movesets and similar abilities exclusive to them

• Units have health ranging from 1 - 10 as well as attacks that range from 1 - 10

• 4 types of moves being close-range attack, projectile, guard, and dodge

• Each move has their own possibility of success, and their fate is determined by a roulette. 

• Night/Day energy are given every turn with a pattern of 1,3,5,3,1 and so on

• There are spells you can use once a turn outside of unit capabilities to change the tides of the game. 

• You have to choose 10 panels of color, which determines what energy you can potentially get.

• The spells you can use are dependent on what panels you choose.

• Each unit has a rank, and that determines how many points they are worth when determined (so if your 5 star unit dies, the opponent gets 5 points

• You choose the order of what units you get.

• Whoever defeats enough of their opponents units to reach 20 points (full rule) or 10 points wins (half rule)

There are more factors, but I think this conveys that this game can is pretty deep. 

This all may seem a bit too complicated, but because the foundation of the board game is really solid and understandable, it really isn’t more complicated than any other typical TCG. 

Another point to mention is that each move having a possibility to fail makes it RNG heavy, but the game also has enough factors of strategy that aren't seen in other TCGs to account this. Pre-determining the order of drawing units, having complete control for choosing where to place units, and other factors makes the experience less annoying and very rewarding instead. 

Basically, it's a really unique and cool take on the TCG genre, and I definitely believe it’s worth a try. 

Now besides the gameplay being solid, another factor I really enjoy about the game is the lore. This game has needlessly well crafted lore that’s mostly really dumb and I I just can’t help but adore it.

Vanpool went above and beyond and tried to make Coloball feel as authentic as possible, by the game pretending that Coloball is a real sport with real history. If you look at the manual, you will see a timeline of the history of Coloball which explains how the game got to where it is today, and even a picture of a real life man that is supposed to be the chairman of the World Coloball Association. 

The beautiful chairman himself

Heck, Vanpool even had an advert that advertises the game as if it’s some foreign game or something, where a happy gaijin family are playing Coloball with those fake gaijin expressions you only see in Asian ads. 

In fact, they did a pretty good job because if you look at a thread where Japanese players talk about the game when it just came out, you’ll see confused people believing that it was a licensed game or something. 

Apparently, Coloball was developed in a foreign country. Maybe license fees or something like that made it so expensive?

Personally, I especially love how the soccer phrase “Kick Off!” means to keep your feet off the ball in this world to a point kicking the ball is a taboo. “KICK OFF! IT’S A BATTLEFIELD” is probably one of my favorite taglines. 

This alone is a great touch, but Coloball also has great care into the lore of each unit. Besides Mr. Kazuyuki Kurashima being amazing and providing 500 great unit designs, all having mostly unique designs instead of basic color palette swaps, but there is even more to rave about. 

Every unit has a 2 paragraph-ish description/backstory as flavor text, as they are based on creatures and people who lived in that world in the past (according to lore). 2 paragraphs doesn’t seem like much but you have to keep in mind that there are 500 units! There’s a ton of lore to crunch through, and to make it even better, these flavour texts are very funny and interesting.

These texts range from descriptions of their species’ features, the backstory of that particular unit, and stupid jokes that don’t explain shit. My favorite descriptions are the ones that then connect to another unit, where someone’s backstory continues in another unit’s description.

For example, if you look at the description of Garfield, you will learn that Garfield the cadet was a writer who started to believe the saying “the pen is stronger than the sword,” so he fought a goblin equipped with a pen. He was instantly killed. 

That’s funny enough, but if you look at one of the descriptions of the Goblin, you get a continuation of this story. It saids, “he is worried about human technology, as he believes that the sword he obtained from killing a human is magical, as it spurs this black liquid.” It kind of makes me feel like I’m reading a grand epic in little bits.

Also, before I end this tangent, I want to talk about one other group of units, because it’s really fucked up. 

You see, there’s this species called Mentamer, which are revealed to be parasites. When they attach to a human, the human becomes a cyclops, and the mentamer takes complete control of the human’s body. However, the human actually maintains their consciousness despite losing control of their body, so they are forced to see themselves kill their beloved ones with their own body. Because they have this sort of lore attached to them, one of the cyclops’ description is literally a conscious human pleading for himself to stop killing people. Pretty messed up stuff right? 

Well, it gets worse.

There’s this unit called Peko, and it’s a little mentamer with a little body. And if you read the description, it’s from Peko’s perspective, where the little kid is asking why people are fearing him and calling him a monster, trying to kill him. 

Meanwhile, there is another unit named Mark, a businessman is looking for his missing son named Peko hoping he is safe. 

So yeah, even children aren’t safe and to rub it in even further we have a desperate dad looking for his son who is basically a lost cause (and on top of that the son is completely unaware of the situation). Like wow, that is fucking brutal. And this is a story from a fucking game called Coloball 2002. 

Needless to say, I really loved this part of Coloball. The Peko backstory made me almost drop one tear, and I was impressed because I never expected to feel something like that from reading descriptions in Coloball out of all places.

Anyway, the descriptions are top tier, and it will probably take forever to translate, but I think it’s worth it. Ehhhh maybe not. It’s not important to the game… But um, good stuff to look into if you know Japanese.

And that’s basically my positives with the game. I only casually mentioned it but the art is amazing, the lore is fun to read, and the gameplay is solid. Despite my overall praise, I also have a good chunk of gripes with this game.

First of all, the serial code system. So when you start the game, you have to look at your manual, which will include a serial code on the cover. This code will determine where you start on the world map and what kind of game you get.

Because this is completely random, there’s no level that warms you up to be a competent player. You basically get thrown into a pretty hard match with a pretty shitty deck, and this makes the first few matches a little slow. This was so bad that my first honest impression was thinking the game was a bit slow and shit, while feeling that I had no chances of winning. The game does quickly get better and better, however, but I still believe they should’ve made a better effort to warm up players, just to give a better first impression.

Another gripe I have is the same unit system. Unlike other card games, each unit in Coloball is an individual. Rather than having the same cards, Coloball goes the method of using palette swaps (they technically all have unique designs but they are still similar in terms of strength). This is actually really cool, but Vanpool decided that if one player summons a particular unit on the board, the opponent can’t summon that exact same unit... because of lore? I’m not sure honestly. But this makes some battles really annoying, and this was made exponentially worse in my first match for my file. My opponent kept on summoning monsters I had, and I couldn’t fight back at all because my turn was after him. And I slowly lost. It sucked. 

And besides the same unit rule, this sort of situation where a player cannot summon anything cripples the game. There is a level that gives no light or day energy, and because I summoned a character the CPU wanted to use before they did, they couldn’t summon their lower energy units to power their higher energy units, and I one that game by doing nothing. So yeah, remove the same unit rule in a future installment if that ever happens. It sucks. 

Another nitpick I have is that this game does not give you the option to forfeit, which is a basic mechanic in TCG video games. That just encourages a player to reset a game rather than forfeiting and gaining some money to earn new units, and it only makes the game more annoying than anything.

And finally, the 2 player mode. You need 2 memory cards and 2 controllers, but I find this to be strange because the game is turn based. You also can’t use one memory card and make two decks fight each other from that one memory card, which really sucks because it makes the game a lot harder to casually play with real people. I don’t have another memory card, so I haven’t tried 2 player mode, but from what I’ve heard, it seems to be a slog if you set up the game alone.

And for my final nitpick, I mean gripe, is the lack of content, but take that statement with a grain of salt. The game has 45 teams to fight, with each team having 2 decks for half and full rule. 90 fights is a good chunk of content, and the descriptions are a great time waster too.

However, there is no final battle at the end or anything like that. You just beat everyone on the map in whatever order, and with 90 wins, you beat the game. Honestly, I did not expect much from the story, but I was still disappointed with the lack of a final match, or something like that. It just ends, and there is no post game that unlocks new powerful decks to fight. It just seems like so much wasted potential, which is a shame.

Oh yeah and for real this time, my last gripe is the story. Okay this really isn’t a gripe but just a simple comment on it, but it’s not good (or bad). It is short, and isn’t really relevant to the game. I wish they incorporated the lore into the story, but oh well. I think they could’ve done a lot more with all the stuff they came up with, but I think I’ve been nitpicky enough.

And yeah, that’s basically what I have to say on Coloball. I might have sounded a bit negative towards the end, but don’t get me wrong. This is a great game. 

It requires Japanese to play comfortably, but from what I’ve gathered, it’s possible to get some fun out of it without Japanese as long as the player understands the basic rules and mechanics of the game (and with some help from google translate). It definitely deserved to get localized, receive a sequel, gain internet, but it’s sadly stuck on a home console, which really sucks. This game simply isn’t the best kind of game for the PS2, much more suited for something like the DS or PSP, but what can we do?

And I found this out after I basically finished this thing, but according to Mr.Kurashima (again), they did pitch the game to Nintendo for the DS. Oh what could’ve been. Such a shame. 

So yeah, that’s Coloball 2002. I wouldn’t even say it’s my favorite card game or LDL game because Card Hero and Chibi Robo exist, but I still found a lot of enjoyment out of it. And it did beat my former 2nd favorite TCG, which is Doraemon DS 2007. No joke, that game is really fucking good for some reason, but that’s a topic for another review.

Also can I just mention that my top 3 card games being Card Hero, Coloball 2002, and Doraemon DS 2007 all have no internet capabilities at all? I truly live in the worst timeline. I really hope some crazy dedicated person makes like a pokemon showdown esc version of these games, but that will never happen… Oh well..

So for real this time, that’s my opinion on Coloball. Hope you enjoyed it, and I also hope you enjoy the game if you decide to play it. There's a few tutorial videos for English viewers (notably by a YouTuber by the name of Tello) for the game on YouTube, so go watch those if you want to try it out.

If you give it time and don’t let your first impressions judge everything, I assure you’ll be in for a blast. Ok I won’t assure it, but you get what I mean right?