E Football: about what I expected

Ultimate Destiny Achieved

Well okay then, I see you Konami; this is our punishment for not buying Metal Gear Survive, I get it. I still don't feel bad about doing so, but I'm really feeling the the general disdain for the video gaming populace that you seem to demonstrate. Though at this point I'm starting to wonder if 'dedicating yourself to making only bad video games forever more' is the correct way to go about this; I mean you could just as easily start your very own subdivision of anti-video game lobbyists like normal weirdoes. This whole 'infiltrate and destroy the artform from within' thing you've got going on just simply can't be cost effective! But then, I guess when you've already sold out your immortal soul to the Pachinko gods, that gives you all the requisite funds to flush down the drain on crap like E-Football doesn't it? At least, all that is what I hope is lying behind the scenes explaining why we got the game we got, because I just think it'll be too sad to think this was a genuine effort from a once storied game studio who have just simply forgotten how to make games.

For the longest time Pro Evolution Soccer stood apart from Fifa as the alternate option to the football space for those that were dedicated to the gameplay of these titles over just having the correct club licences (because PES rarely did. Instead they had a comprehensive customise-a-team suite so that you could make these clubs on your own), and that was the game owned and reared by old-school game-makers Konami, who once knew how to code. This was before the age where Fifa lost all pretence of pride and just decided to become a money-hungry caricature of a game series, a move which would sully football games forever and make EA stinking filthy rich. I'm not sure when it was during all of this that Konami fell of the wagon, but I'd imagine it wouldn't have been too long after Kojima left them, their company was hit with an internal practises exposé, and Konami ended up retreating from the gaming spotlight in order to focus on their gambling club efforts. 

Who could have imagined that their grand return would not be in order to give us that Metal Gear Solid 3 remake that's been 'leaked' constantly. (I believe it less and less every year. At this point I genuinely think it's BS smoke and mirrors to keep us with the name 'Konami' in our mouths) Instead we were given one supremely crappy Contra game, some smaller titles, and then one from 2020; E Football Pro evolution soccer. Yes, that was the beginning of their transition away from the PES title that they had stood by all these years, and toward E Football. An objectively terrible name for a game that will one day live up to that quality standard and then some. But I'm getting ahead of myself, first let me explain what makes PES and E-Football different enough to be worthy of a name switch.

As I mentioned before, E-Football is a free-to-play title that hopes to lure people in with the promise of playing high quality football action without spending a dime. Of course, the toss up is that for buying into that promise you'll be given access to no less than three teams (egads; what a deal!) and be able to play one game mode. Konami haven't framed this as a restriction, but rather a beginning, emphasising that E-Football is 'like a demo.' (to paraphrase) Which calls to question, if this is a demo then why not advertise it as such? Better yet, why even release it if the game's not done yet? Or even better than that, why sell microtransactions for the demo? That's right, you could pre-order microtransactions for this free-to-play wisp of a game with no real release date. So basically take all that we've heard and experienced with 'games of a service' over the past few years and heighten it to the worst case scenario; that was what Konami were proposing with this product.

But that just means if the promise is met then the final game will be questionable, what happens if that promise is not met? No, I don't mean to ask what happens if Konami were goofing and there's a actually an entire full game here to get everyone hooked before they start adding paid content; you know, like every single successful live service in history has done in order to get by. What happens if this isn't a high quality snippet of football game series which Konami have been honing their skills for during several years. What if, somehow, despite being a football genre title, and despite using the already established FOX engine, and despite only being a tiny fraction of a football game, Konami managed to deliver a broken mess. What sort of twisted reality would we have to be living in for that to be the case, how many inception dreams deep would we have to be in order to experience that? Well check your spinning tops right now, because that's this reality, baby!

I guess decades of making entire football games proved too much for Konami, because E Football has entire subreddits worth of posts since it's release, highlighting the many hilariously awful bugs. You've got deformed players, noodle arm Naruto runs, non-players who's entire body refuses to load in so that their clothes are floating, and one horror-worthy clip of a referee sunken flat into the pitch but still chasing after the action like a BT. Then there's the comparisons of how characters look when everything's working right and, surprise to no one, this is pathetic quality. Last generation games would just about get away with this quality, but it would be frowned upon; whereas for this generation it is an unmitigated disaster.

And Konami have not scooted away from all of this without consequence. Rather, their years of wasted development time spent, no doubt, losing money at Pachinko Parlours, has earned E Football the incredible title of worst user rated game on steam. That's no monthly figure, that's of all time. And this happened mere days after launch, before anyone had time to organise any 'coordinated hate ratings' or anything like that. This was just natural, it was meant to be, it was ordained by god. E Football is a travesty and every single sentient soul on the planet, even the typical sports game apologists, can clearly see it. But then, how do you apologise for a game that shot for the bare minimum, and couldn't even manage that? At this point you just have to figure that Konami want to be ridiculed and leave them to their self destruction.

So to answer the age-old question of "What is the line that sports game company's have to cross before their fans are forced to enact something akin to standards"; apparently it's providing a hardly functional nothing-game. Even when it's free. I guess the sheer insult of even suggesting this is 'good enough' for their audience was enough to flip that internal switch of "Okay, I can't rightly put up with this crap anymore." I think it's a good distinction to make, even though it'll likely just be used as fuel to propel Fifa 2022, which is horrible for it's own various reasons. At least Sports fans won't have to worry about two game franchises vying for their wallet for the next year, because I don't really think Konami are going to manage to worm their way out of a launch this embarrassing. (For their sake, I hope they're on their way out of the industry altogether at this point. Sell your franchises and dip, guys. You're a disgrace.)