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Captain Tsubasa: Rise of New Champions (PS4) Status: Stopped playing - Got frustrated I started playing this game on Saturday 22 April, 2023 // I stopped playing this game on: Thursday 27 April, 2023
Current opinion of this game
No comment, yet.
April 27, 2023 06:47:02 PM
So, after discovering the OTHER main menu - the one with the campaign...and starting to play. Well, I've thrown in the towel. Metaphorical. I was having fun playing the game, I felt like I was slowly getting better and understanding when to do what - BUT, and here's the big one - the game's story/narrative got in the way. Now, I never watched the show or followed it to really care about the characters or have an interest there - but I was enjoying learning about them and so on. The episode I played is basically the team's 3rd championship run and there's back story that they've won twice before (earlier seasons in the show? I have no idea). So, you meet the other teams, characters come around to tell you that THIS time they'll win, they've been training super hard, and so on. It's all super nice and kid friendly - in the "we're also gonna train real hard" and then you play some of the matches in the all-Japan school championship. Cool. THere's story stuff before the matches, in between and so on. BUT - I got to a match where, all of a sudden the other team scores - there's buildup and cut-scene stuff and all that, BUT, they got to score for free. It was unstoppable (AFAIK) and felt really unfair. NOW, if the game had been framed as "play the 2nd half, you're down by one" or whatever - that's fine. But this felt like a cheap shot. The other team scored because they HAD to and it sort of invalidated everything I had done until that point. So, I bailed. To be honest, I played the same match a few times, lost all of them, but also that's when I realized it was a scripted goal and that there was nothing I could have done differently. And, that was a real disappointment. There's a tough balance there to be sure - I thought it was neat when in-game situations cued up cut-scenes...but those felt like the arose naturally from the state of the match (perhaps I'm wrong here?). The scripted "other team will score now" felt very different.
April 22, 2023 10:16:54 PM
So I load the game up and it is quite clearly an online game - there's all sorts of pop-up tutorial windows, a brief tutorial playing a final match against Germany and then.. I was plopped into the "what do you want to do" where all the options were to play online. So, I did some of the tutorials - and wow, the game has more going on than I thought and it really plays up the super powers and stuff. The rookie tutorial has like 25 different steps and I only did 10 before going..ugh. I 'm not sure I can remember all this stuff! So, I try to play online. It's like 5 minutes with no matchup so I bail. This is not looking good. I've done all the offense tutorials (not the defense or special stuff - all this in the rookie section), but I decide to try a free-play match. I can steal the ball - good. I can pass the ball around - also good. I'm not able to strike on goal very well - bad. And...I just can't seem to catch the defenders. I'm losing 2-0 to Italy and I'm gettin ready to bail. I exit to the main menu - there's nothing but "press x"...so I do some more tutorials. Then I bail to the menu feeling very disappointed that there isnt some sort of story or campaign mode. The game is based on the anime after all! And all the interstitial loading screens feature the characters...so, what's up? And, somehow I end up on a different main menu - and this one DOES have links to a campaign (consisting of two episodes with a 3rd as DLC) so I start playing that. And it's SO MUCH BETTER. My limited skills let me make some progress and I'm even having a little fun! I thought this was going straight to the shelf, but I think I might finish the first episode just to see.

Captain Tsubasa: Rise of New Champions (PS4)