“Going at it hammer and tongs” – Pro Evolution Soccer 5

[For this guest post I welcome back Richard Moss, who previously wrote about Sonic Drift. Richard is creator of the documentary podcast The Life & Times of Video Games, and is on Twitter as @MossRC.]

**Pro Evolution Soccer 5** (Konami, PlayStation 2, 2005)

It felt strange to return to my years-old Pro Evolution Soccer 5 savegame and continue like nothing had happened. Like I hadn’t abandoned my team nearly 10 years ago, four matches before the end of a season, nearly three seasons into a budding career with a team that I’d built from scratch. There was an alienness to it, as I was effectively muscling in on a former self — forcing my way in on his plans and dreams for the future. But also a nostalgia, as I was flooded with memories of that old self, of his hopes and ambitions, and of his singular obsession with mastering the Master League.

I adore Pro Evolution Soccer 5, and yet I hate it too. It was up to that point the best football game ever made, and in the same breath it was terrible. Awful. Just awful. Because it’s brilliance was imperfect, and its failings were its greatest vices. I’m not talking about the weak commentary, which had improved with every year but still sucked, nor about the uneven player likenesses or lack of player/team licences (I always thought the names of unlicensed players were a fun puzzle to work out). No, I mean the football.

Konami’s long-running FIFA competitor had always offered the more exacting, more flowing and authentic football simulation. Not the TV authenticity that FIFA strives for (and that Pro Evo fails at). Rather, the real, lived authenticity that leaves you feeling like you’re somehow embodying the virtual players and actually playing football. And here, in Pro Evo 5, is where that authenticity reached its zenith.

Players jostled for the ball, every contact a momentous physical challenge that even the strong and the skilful can overcome only some of the time, while the best players — as in real life — could do things that others find impossible. Referees actually used the advantage rule after a foul, rather than calling back every stupid challenge no matter what the circumstances. AI-controlled teammates made runs off the ball instead of ambling around aimlessly. Turning on a dime during a sprint was still possible, but it took time — agonising moments where the player visibly prepared for and then executed the move — that a defender could use to win possession. Shots often blazed over the bar or spun wide of the post. Technically-difficult passes regularly splayed way off their intended target. Football rarely goes as planned, and Pro Evo 5 had the flexibility to allow your plans to go off the rails.

It was insanely deep, too. You had three different kinds of through balls, five different dribbling speeds, four kinds of crosses, all sorts manual passes and tricks using the right analogue stick (eg push up and click in to manually pass it vertically up the screen, regardless of the position of your teammates, or spin it around in a circle to do a Marseille turn), and more. And most of it was achievable just with single, double, and triple taps of a single button — if you had the ball in the offensive corner, for instance, you could tap the circle button once for a regular cross, twice for a whipped cross, or three times for a low cross, or while the fourth cross type (a high, looping cross) required holding L1 while you pressed circle.

There were loads of other advanced moves, like feints and dummies and one-twos and chip shots and so on, and you could if you so desired take complete control over your team’s tactics and overarching strategies, but on lower difficulty levels Pro Evo 5 was perfectly accessible and playable with just a d-pad and two buttons (X for a regular pass or block tackle and square to shoot, challenge for a header, or make a clearance).

And once you got comfortable with the intricacies of the shot power meter, the best training mode that had yet made its way into a football videogame could layer on all the other skills you needed to play sexy football.

What was cool here is that a) training was not match play without the pressue of a match, as in most training modes I’d encountered in sports games before then, b) you were told how to execute different skills and then forced to master them in order to advance to the next stage, c) training was staged in a category-based level-progression system, and d) training rewarded you not only with newfound skills but also PES Shop points that could be spent on unlocking things like extra stadiums, classic teams, famous players who aren’t in any simulated club or national teams, a bonus six-star difficulty level, and loads of other stuff.

That six-star difficulty level was my Everest. It cost a fortune in PES points to unlock, necessitating untold hours of play in both the Master League and international tournaments like the faux-World Cup (er…the 32-team “International Cup”), but that only served as basic training. Just as the game itself was such a nuanced refinement on Pro Evolution Soccer 3 (I skipped the fourth entry) that I had to re-learn how to win matches at the default three-star difficulty even against inferior opposition, six-star difficulty was such a jump that matches I would have easily won on five stars turned into seemingly-impossible feats of skill. This is a good thing. There’s a reason football is usually a low-scoring game, with nil-nil draws and 2-1 wins and the like commonplace; scoring goals is hard. Really hard, assuming your opposition is at least somewhat competent.

Now, a great football videogame need not necessarily be hard to be authentic. Nor is a football game with regular goalfests (a la most FIFA entries or, in capable hands, the likes of Sensible Soccer) necessarily bad. On the contrary, those sorts of football games are loads of fun — especially in multiplayer matches. But if the objective is authenticity — if the holy grail is to imbue virtual football with the essence of the beautiful game, in its poetry and grace and glory and consequence and pain — then there must be a nuance to the cause and effect of its mechanics, and of its underlying systems. Not press a button to score; rather, press a button in just the right way at the right moment in the right place after having strung together a glorious sequence of passes and dribbles that were similarly perfect in their timing and geometric beauty.

Here, I believe, Konami soared closer to perfection than any before or since. Pro Evolution Soccer 5 was the last entry for which the PS2 was the lead platform. Pro Evo 6 began a shaky design overhaul on next-gen platforms (beginning with the Xbox 360), which meant a shift of focus that caused its double-platinum-selling PS2 release to be merely equally good, not better, compared to Pro Evo 5. And the PS2 versions of later entries (lasting until 2014) likewise offered marginal improvements cherry-picked and back-ported from the new engine that were offset by minor regressions elsewhere, as a no-doubt skeleton team received fewer and fewer resources to keep the legacy system alive amidst the struggles of the next-gen entries to manage the twin pressures of mainstream attention (because the series’s PS2 heyday had put it under the limelight) and a colossal technological leap in the fidelity of graphics, sound, and physics.

When we talk of the Uncanny Valley, usually we mean the unease of robots and virtual humans that are caught in a repulsive zone between somewhat and fully human — a sort of unsettling hyper-real familiarity tinged with eerie alienness. But virtual sport has its own form of the Uncanny Valley. You could liken it to a trap-door pit, masked by paint and leaves to conceal its presence.

The FIFA series has it in its commentary and analysis and crowd noise, which sounds exactly like a real football match right up until that sudden moment when the illusion shatters. So too does Pro Evo. In Pro Evo 5, for the first time, my football-loving father once thought he was watching a real match — until he noticed I was controlling it. For me, too, I would frequently find myself drawn inexorably into thinking this were real football and not just a crude interactive model of it. And here in these moments I would try to do things that model wasn’t designed for, or I would expect too much from its simple physics engine, and it would break. And then I would nearly break my controller.

But that’s what football does to people. Passion. It brings out the best and the worst in us. Its beauty can turn in an instant to ugliness. Its joys can simultaneously be its despairs. Football cannot be conquered. The underdogs can always win — as did Konami, if just for a few years. And no matter how many times I win the Master League, I’ll never master it.