One Year On, Is Anyone Still Playing Drag x Drive?

Lost in Sports, All Alone

The first time I played Drag x Drive was with fellow Nintendo Life contributor George Banks, and we had a fun time. I wasn’t very good at the game, but I remember winning at least one match and coming close in one of the many minigames that take place between matches. I also remember it being very annoying for George and me to even end up on the same team or in the same match, something I believe they fixed in its first update.

Drag x Drive is a game that has its ups and downs, and after one session I was fine putting down my Joy-Con and never touching it again. Nearly a year later, here I am reinstalling it and brushing the metaphorical dust off my generically helmeted avatar.

After a year’s absence, the first thing on the agenda was to relearn how to play. The controls are one of those cases where it sounds easy on paper but is difficult in practice. If you want to move forward, turn and shoot the ball, then it’s not too bad, but getting any more advanced, like jumping and tackling opponents, ends up being a lot harder than it should.

I think, more than anything else, the difficulty of the controls is the reason why a lot of people fell off the game. If the control scheme didn’t click immediately, then it never felt like it would.

“The interesting controls were a fun novelty I enjoyed mastering over the course of a few months, but they weren’t what initially attracted me to the game. I kept playing because I was good at it and it was just fun enough to be my go-to side game for when I had a few minutes to spare.”
– JasonBall48, Nintendormant Discord

Jumping back into Drag x Drive nearly a year later, one thing was immediately obvious: it was empty. This is a primarily online multiplayer game, and when it begins, you are plopped into a lobby with other players from around the world. That’s what is supposed to happen, at least, but instead I was dropped into an empty arena with only my thoughts and the balls that I would soon fling into hoops.

With all the time in the world and no one to get in my way, I soon found myself topping the leaderboards of every minigame in the park. I wasn’t breaking any park records; my abysmal six points in the hoops game indicated that, but I still topped the lobby leaderboards and received the coveted golden rings on both of my hands. The game had finally acknowledged I was the best Drag x Drive player around, and it only took being the only player around to do so.

“[Something] I like about Drag X Drive is how every player in one lobby can do different things at the same time. Games like ARMS, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, and Splatoon 3 have also had interactions going on between the players in the lobby/waiting room, but I think Drag X Drive might be the most impressive lobby experience in a Nintendo game yet.”
– Zubat48, Famiboards User

It would be a while before another human joined me, and I felt genuinely elated to witness the player count go from one to two. Finally, someone I could show off my rings to! The player was named Luboš, and we were soon to become best buds.

It was a rocky start – I waved to say hello, and they wheeled off without giving me a second glance. They were practising hoops on their own court, and I was passing balls to them when they rolled away. We even high-fived at one point, although whether that interaction was their intent or me guiding my palm into theirs will remain a secret between the two of us.

Eventually, though, our friendship blossomed and we were passing the ball back and forth and attempting trick shots together. Unfortunately, two does not make a DxD team, and you need a minimum of six players for a match to begin. Luboš and I could pass the ball around and take shots to our hearts’ desire, but without four other players, a real game could never begin.

And then, I made a foolish mistake – a severe lapse in judgement that I would go on to regret. I wondered: ‘Are there secretly more players in a different lobby?’ Was there a more bustling lobby just next door that I wasn’t aware of? I got greedy, not content with my new friend, and wondered what might lie in tarmac’d arenas beyond my current vision, and so I left. I joined a different lobby, and once again I was alone.

The Dragrooms

Image: Nintendo

One of the biggest criticisms the game received concerned its aesthetics. The faceless avatars didn’t appeal – you couldn’t imagine having a Drag x Driver amiibo on your shelf, or announcing the Driver to be your favourite gaming icon.

Matching those drivers, the generic grey arena, looking like a skatepark in a warehouse, didn’t really appeal to many players either. Both driver and arena felt like simple tools to get across the bare necessities of the game – the characters were the player, and the arena was the lobby and playing field, and that’s all they needed to be.

“I like the characters and vibes the game offers. As a puppeteer, I appreciate how expressive the arm & hand controls allow you to be with them. In that way, I almost think the choice to conceal their faces was a good one.”
– A Talking Sock

I personally think that the current popularity meta for a lot of online multiplayer games is personality and how it’s portrayed. ARMS was filled to the brim with personality, and I will always stand by the idea that Nintendo didn’t do enough to show this. Games like Overwatch and Team Fortress 2 are great examples of how to represent the characters in your game in a way that makes people connect with them beyond their in-game functions. If ARMS failed to achieve this, then Drag x Drive didn’t even bother to try. It’s a game lacking personality, and that may have been just as damning as its difficult gameplay.

However, as I sat in these empty lobbies, waiting for another living soul to arrive, I began to feel the aura of Drag x Drive. Not its intended aura, but a weird, liminal aura that I haven’t felt in a video game since Wet Dry World from Super Mario 64. Slowly making my way around what is just a big, grey, quiet, empty park gave the game a peaceful vibe, and I found myself genuinely immersed.

Listening to the satisfying sound of bowling pins being knocked over or the ball hitting the backboard, I was gaining a new appreciation for this game’s style, as if its lack of personality was a personality all of its own. Supposedly the game has background music, but it must be so quiet because all I ever heard was the ambience.

To my surprise, I was feeling something positive about a presentation that was previously a major complaint of mine.

Not Quite Dead Yet

Image: Nintendo

I needed to play at least one game for this article, and with no people coming into my lobby, I resorted to a bot match. Annoyingly, you can’t do this online while you wait, so I had to switch to offline mode, and that’s where I discovered the game has a bit of a single-player mode.

It’s not much, but there are 24 trophies to collect by completing challenges, including winning matches against bots of rising difficulty levels, with the final difficulty needing to be unlocked. I dived into the second-easiest setting and was reminded why I dropped the game: I am just not very good at it. I still won, but at that difficulty it doesn’t feel like much of an accomplishment.

But that’s a ‘me’ problem. There are surely plenty of players out there who came to grips with the controls, and the fact that I did run into at least one person online showed me that there are players out there.

If they weren’t going to come to me, I was going to find them, and so I took to the internet. While no one in my immediate circle still played the game, I eventually found some fans who are, and I wanted to know why. You’ve already been reading some of their responses throughout this article.

“I like the tech in Drag X Drive. I think the wheelchair controls are very impressive and something I have never experienced in a video game before. I also think it’s neat how it’s not only a wheelchair game, but also a basketball game. It’s another layer on an already unique concept.”
– Zubat48

And while I never ran into enough people to make a game online myself, I did learn about an active Japanese community of dedicated players. When looking for players to chat with, I came across a recent thread on the Famiboards forum simply titled ‘Drag x Drive is still alive’, and while not a thriving thread, it did show me that there are people still out there, dragging and driving on the court. It had posts from players celebrating that they managed to find a game and sharing some of the (frankly insane) playtime from Japanese players they had run into. It seems there is a dedicated community in Japan with several users having over 300 hours in the game. One even had over 1000!

It’s hard to say what Nintendo’s long-term goals are for Drag x Drive. They’ve been open about the game being a relatively small project, released as a download for £16.99 instead of a full-priced title like ARMS was. That would likely explain why it got so little post-launch support while ARMS received new characters, stages, and modes over nearly a year, giving people a reason to come back. Drag x Drive received only two major updates, mainly quality-of-life improvements and a single new minigame in Survival Tag.

they are leaving the lights on for the few draggers and drivers still shooting hoops in its liminal concrete park

But while other developers shut the servers of their competitive online multiplayer games once the party has ended, Nintendo has made no such moves. Instead, they are leaving the lights on for the few draggers and drivers still shooting hoops in its liminal concrete park.

I personally didn’t vibe with Drag x Drive, but it’s a game that I really appreciate, and I’m glad it got made. Some are quick to claim that Nintendo has lost its soul in the Switch generation, that the last quirky new IP they made was Splatoon, and everything else has been safe and formulaic. But Drag x Drive really proves that isn’t the case. It was always going to be a niche title; it’s a concept that is rarely seen in video games. In doing research for this article, I only found two other games about wheelchair basketball: a Japan-only Paralympic mobile game called The Pegasus Dream Tour and the simply titled Wheelchair Basketball VR for the Meta Quest.

Not every new idea Nintendo makes needs to be Splatoon-level. We need more games like Drag x Drive to provide us with unique gameplay experiences, and I hope its dedicated fans, putting in hundreds of hours and obtaining every in-game trophy, will continue to survive, if not thrive, for years to come.