Dodgeball Academia Review

Dodgeball Academia is a fun RPG that uses Dodgeball as a fighting mechanism. It takes around 10 hours, has some difficulty settings to make it easier, and has one missable achievement.

Approximate amount of time to 100%: 10h
Estimated achievement difficulty: 1/10 With accessibility difficulty options, 7+ without
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1
Is there a good guide available: Yes, You can find one here or here
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: Yes, the one for getting all the equipment, for more info check out the review below
Grinding Achievements: No
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: No, you can play with only 5% damage and doing 400% damage and unlock all the achievements
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No

Dodgeball Academia is a fun RPG/ sport type of game. The game is clearly an RPG, but the battles are in the form of a dodgeball mini-game. You play as Otto who takes fate into his own hands and decides to sneak into the biggest dodgeball school. He is the new kid in school, gets bullied, and doesn’t know the relationships between people but will figure them out during the course of the game. The most important thing is playing in the upcoming dodgeball championship and the steaks of winning that tournament get higher during the game.

The game has 8 episodes, aka 8 days you will play through. Each day has its own main quest, side quests, and duels to get through. You’ll be allowed in more areas around the school in later days, which will be led by the main quests of each day, which has multiple stages.

That Dodgeball Academia feels mostly like an RPG comes because you earn experience and equipment, but also because it took inspiration from the sounds in a pokemon game. Like when a dual starts or when you heal your team. I do like the music and sound design, but the art style is my favorite part of this game.

The achievements in Dodgeball Academia are for the most part very straightforward but can be so difficult if you don’t use the accessibility difficulty options. I don’t know how anybody can beat the challenges the teachers will give you with an S ranking without using those options. The are also achievements for getting a character to level 50, but that is quite easy. If you do all the quests during each day (which you should do) and do as many duals as possible, you will already be around level 45 or higher. There is a shop underground where you can buy a drink to level up, so you don’t have to grind those last levels.

After finishing a day, it becomes available through a new game to start on that day, so if you missed out on some achievements, it is easy to go back to a specific day, but there is one achievement for which this doesn’t work. The achievements for getting all the equipment will not work through chapter selection, so that is the only missable achievement. And to probably make things a bit harder, there are guides that say that your last equipment must come from a chest to make sure the game calculates if you have all the equipment and that it doesn’t work with rewards you get from battles. I’m not sure if that is the case because my last one ended up being from a chest because there are some sneaky hidden chests. If you want to make sure you have everything on each day, this guide might be useful. I hadn’t found that list while playing but I made sure I did every side quest each day, did every duel, and also bought as many from the shop as possible each day. The duels and sidequests are visible on the map, which is very helpful.

This review for Dodgeball Academia was written on 1 Augustus 2022, based on the current Xbox version of the game which has 37 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.