Of all the big shounen anime of my younger days, Beyblade is the one I look back on with the least fondness. Its anime was somewhat fun, but didn't grab me or anyone I knew the same way other licensed anime did. The actual game attached to it was just straight-up garbage. Real-life beyblades were fragile little pieces of shit. The cords would break after just a few uses and there was nothing to it besides watching your little spinner do its thing. In that regard, this video game adaptation for Playstation 1 perfectly captures this mediocre fad.
The game is kind of an adaptation of the TV anime, but not in the same way that other anime games are. It has the characters and Beyblades, but that's it. There's no story mode that covers events from the series to work through. Or any adventure at all, for that matter.
You pick your gender and starting Beyblade, then get barfed out to the main menu. From here you can either play through a preset tournament, play a custom match, or customize your Beyblade. That's it. The game is nothing more than some standalone matches or a tournament with minimal dialogue. You don't get to interact with the cast of characters much or experience the franchise's world in any meaningful way.
An optimist might spin that by arguing that at least the game is focused on the series' most interesting element: the matches. Such optimism would be misguided however. The matches are... nothing. You press a button to release the Beyblade and then just watch it go. It spins around the arena and clashes with your opponent's spinner. Eventually either one of you spins out of the arena, stops spinning entirely, or takes enough damage to fall apart.
The key issue here is that all of that happens without your input. It only feels like you're steering the Beyblade because it plays loose with physics to go in the direction you would want it to. Its drawn towards your opponent most of the time and tries to pull away from risky edges. It doesn't need you to do that. In fact, with the magic of save states I was able to confirm that games play out 100% identically regardless of what I do. I could reload the same round over and over again. I could steer as I intended to, steer in opposite directions, or not even touch my controller at all. At one point I sodded off to pour myself a glass of whiskey and saw the same scenario unfold again from across the room.
What's the point of playing this then. Your input barely matters and there's nothing to play through even if it did. You can only grind out the same tournament over and over again. This gains you small handfuls of points to invest on a minuscule selection of parts. These are overpriced too. You'd have to win several matches just to afford the cheapest of upgrades. Keeping in mind that custom matches don't award this currency. So each time you have to fire up the tournament and click through all of its dialogue and splash screens.
Even if you have more nostalgia for Beyblade than I, don't bother with this game. It is the laziest, most shallow cashgrab imaginable.
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