“Some great action in this game” – Pro Evolution Soccer 4

A little tweak here and there, some more evolution, and the best football sim around got better still. If there’s one detail to pick on to illustrate what makes Pro Evolution Soccer 4 work so well, I’d pick its players’ sense of balance. They are not, like video game football players of old, either perfectly upright or flat on the ground. A bump in the course of a tackle will knock them sideways into a state somewhere between the two. They may stumble, eventually fall, but they might also regain equilibrium, carry on, eventually make it away with the ball. Fluidity once again opens up possibilities at every moment, and that makes it more exciting when great things happen, or even when they don’t.

Pro Evolution Soccer 4 is once again a wonderful game. But it didn’t immediately induce hushed wonder in me in the same way as Pro Evolution Soccer 3 did. How could it? The further you refine, the less space there is to meaningfully refine further without ripping it up and starting again, and not doing that was Pro Evo’s strength. And so it plays a better game of football, but also has details like adding in a referee you can see while playing which are inessential at best and occasionally even counterproductive I spent half a game as AC Milan struggling not to attempt to pass the ball to the referee, because he was wearing all black and that is insufficiently distinctive from red and black stripes.

Minor refinements are also not the best way to get people to buy a yearly updated version of your game, when you have gone a decent way to maximising your audience and need repeat custom. At least when not joined by the draw of having the latest version of your team and their rivals present and correct and accurate. The first bullet points on the back of the box highlight the bind that Pro Evo was in: “Over 3000 licensed players” followed by “Fully licensed Leagues and teams from Serie A, Liga Española, Eredivisie”. 

I’ve commented before on Peter Brackley’s commentary tying the game into the lineage of Football Italia and being perfect for a certain type of British football connoisseur, so Serie A was a great fit there. Not to mention that the licences must have helped sell even more copies of the game in Italy, Spain and the Netherlands. But it also highlights that the game didn’t have the Premier League and provided another season of North London, Merseyside Red and West Midlands Village. An even more developed Master League mode was a great solution, throwing a lot of video game progression and mechanics at demonstrating that you don’t even need any real players for a compelling long term experience. But there was some folly in trying to take on a licence-rich rival at its own game when it could just stick “Authenticity as standard” well down its own list of bullet points and twist the knife.

In contrast to previous years, EA managed to outmuscle Konami in the release date shuffle too and put FIFA Football 2005 out a week earlier. Pro Evolution Soccer 4 easily knocked it off the top of the charts with even bigger first week sales than ever, before being replaced by FIFA again a week later. That fitted the increasing pattern of Pro Evo peaking high but not having the same long-term reach to more casual players. Not least because it had fewer formats to do it on. Pro Evolution Soccer 4 was the first Pro Evo game that Konami released on Xbox (though not until even further on in the year) but that was rather too little, too late, and would turn out in the long run to be more significant than they might have imagined. 

Meanwhile they could sell a million copies in a day in Japan, which FIFA was not getting remotely near (FIFA Total Football 2, as FIFA Football 2005 was named there, reached #14 on the Japanese charts when released, with sales of just under 25,000). But the problems of maintaining a similar position at the top in Europe were already becoming clear. Of course, this means that I have spent most of a post about 2004’s best football game taking its excellence for granted, nitpicking and wondering about all of the things that it was missing. That was rather the problem they had made for themselves.

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Top of the charts for week ending 16 October 2004:

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