eFootball Pro Evolution Soccer 2020

I’ve been playing Pro Evo for a long long time, my introduction to the pro evolution soccer flavour of Konami’s football series happened back in 2004 with the Xbox port of PES 4. Me and the series have fell out from time to time, I don’t think a video game has ever made me as angry as PES 2008 on the xbox 360, which then had me playing away with FIFA during the 09-14 period but me and pro evo got back together in a big way with Pro Evo 2015 on PS4. It’s obviously lacking the sky sports razzmatazz and the effortless, predatory evil underpinning the FIFA series, but the football just feels better in PES. And FIFA to my mind at least never made players feel unique enough to develop a bond with or reflect their real life counterparts. 

Its probably a bit of an unfair comment on the FIFA series but the main differentiators for players feels to be speed first and foremost, followed by the amount of skill moves they can perform. Pro Evo on the other hand appears to have basically condensed Gerard Deulofeu’s soul into code, with all that fleeting brilliance and lack of end product immortalised into a video game. I just haven’t experienced that in a FIFA.  

So this one is called eFootball Pro Evolution Soccer 2020, “eFootball” - it’s an interesting direction to go to, after all, Konami can’t hope to compete with EA sports and their monopoly on licenses so focusing on the gameplay and aiming to be the game in town when it comes to E Sports sorta makes sense… 

Now I’m getting old, I have a kid, I’m getting married & middle age is a thing very soon and in gamer terms I might as well be heading to retirement. But I can’t help but shake the feeling that this is a doomed approach, E Sports doesn’t strike me as a movement of purity and sporting intent, more of a way to sell energy drinks and chairs with go faster stripes. Take ‘eFootball’ for example with teams having professional players, if they can’t license the teams to begin with, they aren’t gonna have the guys who are hooked up to paying deals with say, West Ham United, or MLS picking pro evo over FIFA. In fairness though, my online football playing days are long over and this is already old man yelling a cloud territory. It would be a sad day for pro evo to go the way of metal gear solid and go quietly into the night. No more master league is a future I’m not prepared to contemplate for any amount of time. 

Why do I have to use a real person of generic mc generic man for my Manager? The edit tools are real powerful, let me use them!

Oh Master League… there’s been some weird choices from the PES team in this years iteration of Master League and I don’t like em. Firstly, managers, I have to pick a famous ex-player or go for a preset character that’ll be for all intents and purposes ‘me’ as I manage a team. So I end up being Lothar Matthaus, given that there’s a perfectly fine custom character feature in pro evo, I definitely resent the fact I can’t just make my own guy this time around. The whole cutscene aspect feels like wasted effort and oftentimes the questions posed to you don’t seem to amount to anything or are preposterous questions to begin with, like hey, newly promoted manager, are we going to win the league? 

Second is that the front end, which includes surprisingly little relevant or pertinent information for me as the player. For basic functions like checking my messages, I need to go into a submenu for that, and from that submenu I cannot ‘click through’ to the action point in question which in the space year 2019 (when this game was released) is almost unforgivable. Valuable real estate is allocated to the weakest part of the ‘simulation’ stuff like auto generated news stories and rumours. The calendar across the bottom displays the next five matches or so, but crucially also only displays the team logos, which given that the games default is to have fake team names for a lot of divisions seems a bizarre choice.

So I chose Rayo Vallecano, one of the few ‘workers’ clubs in Spain, recently in the news for a match being abandoned due to Nazi chants; they being chants accusing Albacete forward Roman Zozulya of being a Nazi. Sounded like a fine upstanding fan base to my ears, so they were the latest ‘pick a lower league club and guide them to greatness’ challenge, was Red Star FC (a little known Parisian team) in 2016 and CD Tenerife back in 2015. The thing is, outside of the football on the pitch, which remains largely excellent (although I do miss the older style set piece systems, they seemed easier to deal with and master than the current system). Some issues with modern day Master Leagues persist to this day that just completely wrecks the feeling of progression in the Master League.

Nightmare Fuel can be found in the most innocent of places

Free agency - it’s typically real easy to acquire out of contract players to massively improve your core squad in a few positions before heading into your first season for very little up front cost. For me, the simple solution here would be for elite level contactless players to demand hefty signing on fees (as is apparently a thing in real life). 

Player recycling - It’s so bloody weird getting several ‘regen’ retired players, say a 16 year old Pepe Reina in your youth team squad pool (complete with same appearance). I really wish this wasn’t a thing.

Youth Player Value - All players have a value in the transfer market, except even youth players can start out of the gate with mental valuations, say a regen Santi Carzorla appears in your youth lottery part way through the season, without him playing a single minute of first team football I could move him onto another club for 20million. It really cheapens that feeling of progression - that rags to riches narrative you know? Valuation should really be more fluid and take into account 

Anyway, back to Rayo, I’ve for the most part enjoyed the last couple weeks I’ve spent with Pro Evo and the Master League. Scored some cracking goals and built a squad that could probably challenge for la Liga in just two seasons (thanks to the broken transfer market and player development). In the past I might have stuck around for another few seasons worth of Master League and try and win the Champions League, but it just doesn’t feel like it’d be worth it. Even though as a videogame, it is almost by definition a waste of my time, there’s still the scope for you attaching unwarranted significance to proceedings you know? I still heart Yusuke Minagawa (now a journeyman striker in J2 for Yokohama FC) but in 2015 we conquered Europe together as part of a star studded CD Tenerife team. But that team was assembled by exploiting the above issues, Ive done it once before, I need something a bit fresher now. 

The next generation is upon us, the promises of even faster processing and graphics power, but what I really want is the next pro evo to really double down on the fact that it doesn’t have all of the licences, if they are prepared to do legally distinct enough recreations of Europes major leagues, lets just turn this up to 11 next generation, give me more fake leagues, stadiums, players and focus on the economic simulation that underpins the master league. 

I really couldn’t give a full time fuck about being able to manage as Maradona or adjust my sponsors on the board behind my avatar during the 5 cutscenes that fire during a 40+ game season. Make that eFootball world a more compelling and interesting place to be, the players have the personality on the pitch, make it pop, it feels like a lot of the framework is there, it just needs to be reflected in the teams and the leagues as well. And given that for the vast majority of cases, these leagues aren’t licensed anyway, just lean into it. 

Basically, I want a football RPG, but I’ve got too many commitments to lose myself in Football Manager. Sack off this eSports malarky Konami, there’s old man here who needs this ;)