Fun golf game with solid gameplay and lots of variety. Definitely underappreciated.
The composure system could have been done a lot better. Essentially, this system affects the quality of your player's game. Supposedly, the higher your composure is, the farther you can hit your ball and the better your overall playing will be (which I assume means accuracy and control). I say "supposedly" because I have never felt it affect my game at all. Being "In The Zone", the highest composure level, doesn't seem to keep me from playing badly. Nor does being "In The Gutter", the lowest composure level, keep me from making great shots.
The result is that I never take my composure into consideration, so in some sense, this aspect of the game to me is broken.
One of several ways to bring your composure up is by beating the crap out of your caddy. This ability costs 1 "token" and can be earned by playing well. While beating your caddy is quite funny the first few times, the fighting sequence gets old quickly because of two reasons. One, you cannot actually fight your caddy. You just have to press the A button at particular moments. Not very involved, and therefore uninteresting. And two, pressing the A button activates a fighting maneuver on the caddy which, although it is unique per character, it is also always the same set of moves per character.
For example, Summer (GOD, SHE'S HOT!) will take her panties, whip it at her caddy's face, twirl around a pole that magically appears on the course, kicking the caddy in the process, and her caddy falls on a chair in sitting position. Summer proceeds to get on her lap, gives her a fairly long lascivious kiss, and then whacks her on the head pretty hard so her caddy falls... OK, I better end this sequence here because it's starting to sound like a sex story.
SO ANYWAY (phew), this very same sequence happens each and every time Summer chooses to beat her caddy. Of course it looks hot, er, I mean, cool, the first time you do it, but after seeing it maybe 5 times, it gets old.
But then again, the whole composure system feels broken anyway! So why would you need to beat your caddy? I almost never do. Sometimes, on the last hole of a course, whenever I remember to, I go ahead and beat my caddy anyway, just for the hell of it.
In other words, beating your caddy is not a necessary element to be successful in the game, in my opinion. The whole composure/beating system doesn't really affect the game much (or at all in my case), so the fact that it is somewhat broken is alright. The game holds its own very well even without it. It's too bad though that they couldn't have improved the composure and beating system. It would have been awesome if you could have more noticeable effects and/or have super shots available to you (like in Pangya/Albatross18) at higher composure levels. It would also have been awesome if the caddy beating was more involved with a lot more variety in moves.
Strangely, one of the best features of this game to me is not in the gameplay, but the soundtrack. Some of the songs have obviously been written just for the game, like several tracks with no lyrics, but many of the others with lyrics seem to have been very well produced, as if they were written and performed by well known bands. One particular song, "June", sounds so much like Soundgarden. I've been trying to get more information about the soundtrack, but so far, no luck.
If you like fantasy golf games and won't mind the adult-oriented nature of this game, this is something I'd definitely recommend for you. I've had this game on the Xbox for a long time now, and I still play it today. In fact, because I am going to give my Xbox to my nephew soon, I am now looking for the PS2 version so I can still continue to play it on my PS2. That's how much I like this game.