It feels appropriate to start my post on 2007’s version of Pro Evolution Soccer in the same way as my post on 2006’s. Throughout the early 00s, the tale of Pro Evo versus FIFA was one of Konami carefully iterating on success, and EA flailing about hopelessly. By 2007, momentum had utterly switched. FIFA 08 was another improvement, including the PS2 version which remained the fastest-selling. Konami had not yet switched to the flailing role that would eventually be theirs. Instead, their problem was stasis.
I said that with Pro Evolution Soccer 6 Konami “struggled to distinguish the new game from its predecessor in any meaningful way”. That was better than Pro Evolution Soccer 2008, though, where the visible changes are decay setting in. Nearly everything plays the same and looks the same in-match, meaning the same weighty and strategic game of football is still present. That excellence, at least, could still be taken as read. But EA were managing to make leaps in appearance even on the PS2 version of FIFA at this point, while most of the peripheral bits of Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 managed to get worse.
The only licenced Premier League team being Newcastle United is a pretty obvious downgrade from the Arsenal, Manchester United and Chelsea of previous years. There is an irony to be read in the associated cover star being Michael Owen, someone who much like Pro Evo peaked as an incredible prodigy around the turn of the century and had trouble kicking on from there. The main menu is a horrendously misguided thing which shows one giant option at a time and needs memorising to be navigable. If you’re a newcomer trying to work out the controls, you can turn to an in-match command list, but it’s a scarily verbose thing which makes its fighting game equivalents look simple.
There is a painful lack of attention to detail elsewhere. Emmanuel Eboué and Tomáš Rosický get their surnames rendered with the accented characters out of proportion with the others, like they’re in POKéMON and confined to a Game Boy screen. Teammate Cesc Fàbregas just gets his accent removed. One match I started was introduced with a commentary statement that “there’s no love lost between these two teams”, but the two teams in question were China and North London.
Occasionally, the trappings around Pro Evo’s still-strong game of football do add to the charm rather than taking away from it. And not just in the wry retrospective smile sense of its none-more-2007 advertising boards for MySpace. The selection of in-house music aims wide, and covers not just the tremendously-named instrumental “Ambiguous Tea” but also the self-explanatory surging pop of “Go for the Goal”, a daft balm for anyone who grew up on Sensible World of Soccer’s “Goalscoring Superstar Hero”.
One new mode is the world tour, a series of increasingly difficult challenge matches with the occasional twist (again, rather like a basic fighting game mode). It’s a simple idea, but an effective one. As the first match against a randomly-selected Asian team came up with Oman, I was instantly taken back to childhood days playing Microprose Soccer on the Commodore 64. While Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 may not offer 360 degree banana kicks and pitch-length slide tackles in the rain, stripping its proposition back to such a simple level does help to emphasise the joy still present in its own recreation of football.
Top of the charts for week ending 27 October 2007:
Top of the charts for week ending 3 November 2007:
