Just like how Mario Tennis makes Tennis more accessible to everyone, Hot Shots Tennis is similar in that regards too with its own take on cartoony-arcade tennis.

Suffice to say the core gameplay is good. The main mechanical difference between this game and Mario Tennis is how to achieve a perfect swing. Instead of charging your shot ahead of time, you get a powerful swing if you time a stroke with the impact of the ball. Hitting the ball on a Right-handed player too early will result in the ball going more left, or more right if you are too late. The game will even give you a tortoise or a hare icon to give you feedback on your timing. This actually makes late-game characters more balanced because not only do they have superior stats, but it also means they have much tighter windows for a perfect stroke.

I do think serves are overpowered in this game though. Serves, the first starting shot of each game, is fundamentally important in real tennis. However, in Hot Shot Tennis, you can hit a cross-court serve with an angle SO steep you have to run an entire court length PAST the boundary lines to even return it. They also travel VERY fast to react too! If you somehow manage to actually return a serve like this, since you're so far, the opponent will have an easy shot to volley (reflect) to the opposite side and you have no chance to run to that one. I've abused this so many times and it just works against CPUs of all difficulties.

The single-player mode is simple: Clear event matches to unlock new courts, skins, and characters. If anything the whole mode is significantly shorter than the golf counterparts, as you can play all the way to the final event in <5hr. Some matches have restrictions like no ball-landing preview. But one issue...

... They are SPAMMED in the later tournaments in a way that feels like it's artificially making the game harder for no reason!!! One of them is Character class restriction, which pretty much equates to you're playing against max AI opponent with high stats when you are restricted to only using starter characters with F stats. It makes the game nearly impossible later unless you have PERFECT positioning. The other gimmick is the least favorite of them all: FORCED STATIC CAMERA. So in this game, by default, the camera follows behind your character regardless of which side of the court you're on. For this gimmick, the camera is always on the same side so when your character is on the far side of the court, it will remain this way. This just messes with your brain, especially against a tough opponent where I was totally cursing against the game for this.

Also even though there are a lot of characters, the stats don't change. A beginner character will always have F stats and are obsolete to use very quickly asides from forced events. Post-game has you facing against a black pro-costumed version of each character with max AI, but the character stats STILL don't change so you're playing against an opponent with smart AI but still with terrible stats.

I do like how many characters from BOTH the NA and EU/JP versions of Everybody's / Hot Shots Golf 3 & 4 all cameo as background characters. A couple are playable, which include the franchise Japanese businessman mascot Suzuki, who's in every Everybody's Golf game from this point, and the fan-favorite Russian Gloria, who for some reason her accent is completely changed to be a southern cowgirl in the NA Hot Shots Tennis version.

Overall, this game is fun at its core but the single-player is complete frustration during arbitrary gimmicks. It's probably fun with friends, but I can't recommend it over the Mario Tennis games as a party game because of how much unlocking you have to do to get more characters/courts.