I'm fairly deep into the game at this point. The general reaction to Sports Story has been highly negative, and while I'm not nearly as down on the game as most, I agree with a lot of the criticisms. There's no question that this game wasn't ready to release. I haven't run into the gamebreaking bugs I've seen reported nor have I been unable to finish any side quests (yet) but this game IS buggy. There are a surprising amount of glitches and they seem to get more and more prevalent as I get further into the game. And there's just an overall lack of polish, top-to-bottom. There are some really frustrating performance issues, namely that the game stutters often during the golf swing bar, which is just unacceptable. Lots of typos in the dialogue. And there have been a few occasions where my character got stuck on geometry and/or went outside the bounds of the level, necessitating exiting out of the game and restarting (there's also no auto-save, so saving often is critical).
A lot of these issues will be fixable via patches (there's already one planned). But even if Sports Story were highly polished and bug-free, the core game is really lacking. Compared with golf - carried over from the previous game - the other sports all feel really half-baked in their implementation, and for the most part aren't very fun. And there's really not a whole lot of it. It's much more of a point & click adventure with a little bit of sports mixed in. Even with most of the new sports gameplay not being very good, this is still disappointing.
And even though the writing is still fairly witty overall, I'm not finding Sports Story to be nearly as charming or as funny as Golf Story. I've chuckled at a few jokes, but that's about it. And the story is really all over the place and scattershot.
This really has the feel of the game that suffered heavily due to scope creep. Like they set out to make a sequel that had all of these other sports with the same amount of depth as golf in Golf Story, realized at a certain point that they weren't going to be able to pull it off, scrapped a lot of the game and cobbled together what was left. This may also explain why the story feels so random and disconnected from chapter to chapter. There are so many disparate parts and it seems they may have run out of time before they could make any of it connect. It's hard to not think they'd have been much better served course-correcting during development and reworking this into Golf Story 2, instead of sticking to a Sports Story concept that was going to fall well short of their ambitions.
I still highly recommend Golf Story, but it's hard to recommend Sports Story. At a minimum, I wouldn't spend money on this until it's been patched considerably. I wouldn't use the word "broken" to describe its current state, but it needs a lot of work. Even with a lot of the technical issues and glitches resolved, though, this just isn't a must-play Switch Indie in the same way that Golf Story was. I'll check back in once I've finished it to give my final thoughts, but it's fair to say this was not worth the wait.