- Game: Football Kingdom – Trial Edition (2004)
- Developer: Namco
- Platform: PlayStation 2
When you think about football gaming, the acronyms “PES” and “FIFA” immediately come to mind.
Despite the fact that football is the most popular sport in the world, and gaming is, nowadays, undoubtedly the most innovative art – whose popularity is ever-growing -; as of December 2019, only two football simulations remain on the market.
But it wasn’t always like this. For the young readers out there this might come as a shock, those who have been crying out for a 3rd competitor to enter the stale and boring FIFA-PES duopoly for more than a decade now, but the pre-PS3 scene saw an almost countless number of football simulations in addition to those two behemoths above mentioned. From Virtua Pro Football to Club Football, Libero Grande to David Beckham Soccer and much more; there were plenty of options for the football fan to make an informed and optimal choice. And even though PES and FIFA came out as the undisputed champions in this muddy war, therefore establishing their dominance for a long time in the post-PS2 era – a modern-day “dividing the world in two”, like once Portugal and Spain agreed to -, much remains to be said about the “losers” of this competition.
Certainly we’ll explore this untapped field in the coming future, given the vast majority of the football games that have to be considered as pertaining to the above-mentioned category were just completely overlooked when they were released. Why? Well, PS2-era PES was so unbelievably better than any other game that people didn’t really want or need any other football game. If you didn’t live to see this era you won’t understand this; but consider FIFA was by far the most popular football game – except for PES, naturally – and yet, it was obviously painfully inferior to its most potent competitor. PES was so good that it convinced us to play with Minandas and Castolos using Rekordmeister and its fake kits in a totally fake league structure supported by totally fake virtual currency, while playing in fake-named stadiums for each of the fake-named teams which belonged to a very limited database; whereas FIFA had all the licenses, teams, leagues, stadiums you could ask for.
So the prospect of playing a third competitor just wasn’t attractive – at all. If you, for some reason, weren’t enjoying your PES ventures, you had to wonder whether you still liked actual football at all. FIFA had the licenses, PES had the football: what was left for any other game to offer?
But in our modern times, after more than a decade of playing almost exclusively FIFA or PES, the thought of playing something else is more attractive than ever. It doesn’t even need to be good, it just has to be…that’s right, something else. Something to cleanse our palate from the stale taste of the same-old games. The one we’ll now be reviewing is one of those palate-cleansers that showed signs of promise when it comes to challenging the PES-FIFA dominance.
The game is Football Kingdom, released by Namco back in 2004. Right here on this sentence you might see the first of FK’s many particular issues: its release date. If I had been in charge of choosing any date for the release of the first iteration of my football series (spoiler alert: it was the first…and the last), literally any date from the past twenty years, 2004 would undeniably be one of the worst options – in my opinion, the worst of them all. And again, it all comes down to Pro Evo: Konami had just released that which was, at the time, a stupendously awesome football game – PES3. Nowadays, and more than fifteen years after its release, not only it is still played by countless fans around the world but it is also considered to be one of the best of the whole series, the football gaming equivalent of a Pet Sounds or The Sopranos. Football Kingdom never stood a chance against this, much like any other competitor out there.
If the above-mentioned is an understandable situation, inasmuch winning and losing is something that characterizes the whole history of the world from the beginning of time itself, the following is rather incomprehensible: FK was only released in Japan – ever. This poses a series of problems that affected people ranging from those that witnessed the very moment the game was released to modern retro-football enthusiasts, including yours truly writing this review: how to get the game, and how to play it?
Both legal and not that licit sources are available for he who truly wants to experience this hidden gem of football gaming, and much like any worthwhile adventure, it’s definitely not easily accessible by either of those means, so be sure to actualize your craftiness and power of will to get to play this game. This, however exciting it might sound for the adventurous types, is just not welcoming for the masses of football fans who’re far too used to the comfortable plug-in-and-play process; and in a modern setting getting to play FK sounds like scaling the Alps.
Yet, if this wasn’t enough already, there’s more: given the game was a Japan-only release, it’s…in Japanese, naturally. A FK player once provided a translation “patch” – which is still very much incomplete – but if you manage to get your hands on a copy of the game itself, and then you’re able to run it, don’t think you’ve made it: either you’re fluent in an exotically foreign language, or you’ll have to spend a few more hours a week on Duolingo to prepare yourself for this unique challenge.
The last of these problems is the fact that Football Kingdom’s full name is…Football Kingdom: Trial Edition: an honest admission that this game was the proverbial “dipping one’s toe in the water” to find out whether it’d be feasible to release the full version and perhaps building upon it to create a proper football game series out of FK. The question remains: was there actually a full version that no one ever got to play, besides Namco’s developers? We’ll never know. What one has to keep in mind is that this game, however flawed or impressive as one thinks it is, is nothing more than a juiced-up demo which simultaneously takes itself seriously enough to try to grab the gamer’s attention away from the usual PES and FIFA duopoly, while at the same time protects itself against the harsher criticisms by claiming its status as a Trial version.
So far, Football Kingdom builds up expectations alright: is it as good as it is inaccessible?
Let’s head into the actual game.
FK is far from impressive when it comes to the visual aspect of its platform – and we’ll see later on that these visual problems don’t end here. Not only the menus look far too juvenile, all the information is just poorly organized. I could blame it on the Japanese I couldn’t read, but since I’m using the above-mentioned translation patch, it’s really the game’s fault here: be it finally escaping from the team/settings selection menu(s), or trying to get a sense of my players’ skills as I read a horribly-constructed player attributes list; everything about this just makes me want to head up straight to the actual game and see whether the action of the pitch is entertaining enough for me to forget that nightmare. Perhaps this was intended on Namco’s behalf…? Nicely played.
The first major let-down of this game – menus are secondary, after all – is the lack of football clubs to play with as one tries to play a single match. If I’m pretty comfortable with this issue when it comes to the likes of, for example, ISS Pro Evolution, I just can’t accept it on a football simulation from 2004, when even PES itself – heavily criticized by its lacking database when compared to contemporary FIFA – was already providing a wide collection of clubs to play with on any game mode. Still, Football Kingdom manages to compensate with an impressive bunch of National Teams; neither FIFA nor PES at the time allowed one to utilize the likes of Iceland, Georgia, Liberia, Qatar or the UAE. In fact, I wonder whether this isn’t actually the most stacked collection of NTs of all football games before Football Kingdom’s release. Not bad for a so-called Trial Version!…
When it comes to match content, FK offers an acceptable collection of stadiums, from Old Trafford (you might know it as “Trafalgar Mid-Land Stadium”…) to Stade de France (“Concorde Stadium”), San Siro to Saitama Stadium. But what impressed me the most on the match settings screen was the option to play a match with a duration that ranges from 5 to…45 minutes! I get a sense that FK does not want to be just your typical arcade-y football game, it has admirable ambitions of its own.
Team kits are all unlicensed, though realistic enough to pass as the real deal, especially when seen from afar. As per the translation patch, it seems that originally the player names were PES-inspired – if not all of them, at least some. Most teams have correct player names but the likes of Netherlands or Germany feature their own unique virtual alter-egos such as Jaap Stam’s “Spam” – cheeky…- Oliver Kahn’s “Hahn” or Ballack’s “Dallack”.
As you can see on the team settings screen, Football Kingdom was definitely “inspired” by PES’ trademark player form arrows and, euphemisms aside, straight-up copied it to its own game. Tactically speaking, FK was miles ahead of many of its competitors and almost up there with contemporary Pro Evo – which is worthy of a standing ovation, given not only how far ahead PES was on this regard when compared with literally anyone else, but also how its developed tactical settings were one of the main reasons behind Konami’s series’ rise to stardom. FK lacks a bit more depth on team tactics; yet it manages to make up for it on the individual settings side with its “Player Roles”. Whereas in PES one gets a sense that player roles are somewhat “built-in” on each of the player positions, FK offers variations such as the Libero Goalkeeper role – a prescient look at the future of the GK position, popularized only many years after FK’s release by the likes of Victor Valdés in Pep Guardiola’s Barça and Manuel Neuer for both Bayern and Germany’s National Team -, the “Libero” (our favourite player role here at the Libero, obviously), the “Sweeper”, the “Volante” or the “Regista” midfielders (there’s 11 player roles to pick from just for midfielders alone!), and all kinds of striker types. We’ll find out later on how these actually impact the game; nevertheless, I appreciate this innovative attempt at expanding the complexity of the action on the pitch – which is yet another proof that FK takes itself very seriously.
Right, Miguel, we get it: cut the chit-chat, we want the football that we so dearly love: what about…it?
Well, the first thing that should strike anyone playing Football Kingdom for the first time is how fast the overall action on the pitch feels like; and here FK shows its arcade-y intentions for the first time – just not for me though, since I’m playing it on the PCSX2 emulator and, whether by my inability to tune the emulator properly or it’s just how it is supposed to run there, the game runs much slower than, for example, on the video above. Interestingly, I don’t think I want to fix this because the more patient pace is actually a much better fit and seems to allow FK to demonstrate its greatness – which is not so visible to the naked eye when everything runs at 120kms per hour.
Still, I’m aware that my experience doesn’t reflect the pace that the game originally has, and herein lies one of the major issues in FK, providing you’re looking for a more down-to-earth, somewhat realistic simulation of football – it’s just way too fast. Football Kingdom is electrifying action sprinkled with a few awesome details, and this speed often helps masking the game’s problems.
One of the things I enjoy the most about FK is how freeing it feels to control a player when on the ball – and to this day, this has to remain one of the main reasons to play this game. I can’t tell whether the movement is absolutely free, yet undeniably FK was so much ahead of its time on this regard. After a period of extensive playtests, I got back to contemporary PES games of the PS2 era and, honestly, Konami’s game felt massively underwhelming with is limited running directions. FK “opens up the pitch” and allows you to reproduce exactly what your footballing mind wants to see on the screen, as you would witness on a football match’s broadcast. Again, this freedom of movement would’ve shone so much more if the action were slowed down substantially, as I can tell by my emulator ventures with this title.
But FK’s offer of total on-the-pitch liberty doesn’t end there: passing the ball is as much of a joy, since one’s able to put the ball pretty much where one wants it, whether on airborne or low passes; even on goal kicks it is possible to freely control the direction and power of the ball. Consider for a second that PES, the undisputed best football game at the time, had an automatic passing system which didn’t even require a power bar for low passes – and had so up until PES2011, which shows how ahead of its time FK was.
Of course the surprisingly decent ball physics are a determinant factor on the passing system’s success. If FK’s default game speed is way too fast for one be able to fully appreciate this – starting to notice a theme here? -, at least on replays you’ll understand how rich the physics of the ball are; how it carries a bit of bounce in every pass, how realistic the ball trajectory and power are, how lifelike a curved ball looks like (even if at times the ball’s effect is exaggerated in a cartoon-ish way). From goal kicks to shots on goal, low to long passes, it feels you’re kicking an actual ball.
So far, and though I’m aware that what I’ll say is a very big claim, FK quickly and easily enters the select group of the most revolutionary football games of all time.
Yet soon enough, its flaws appear.
A great sports simulation is one that might not be have the most life-like animations, or potent high-end graphics, or ultra-realistic player faces; it has to be an all-around, polished experience regardless of its technological prowess. This is where many football games miss the mark: often, each one of them might be impressive on many areas of its product; yet, inevitably, there’s always this one thing that is completely underwhelming, disappointing, and over time, it infects your overall experience to a point where you can’t enjoy the rest of the game anymore because of it: I call this the “game killer”.
Football Kingdom’s “game killer” is definitely its AI – on both sides of the pitch, everywhere you look, from goalkeepers to strikers. I first noticed this problem when building up the play, an area that almost all of the non-PES games completely failed to properly acknowledge over the years. Football Kingdom, sadly, is no exception. In order to have a realistic, dynamic build up process, you need off-the-ball players controlled by the AI which are smart and active enough to look for space in order to provide passing lanes and confuse the opponents. In FK, except for the fact that you can send your teammate on a run (another interesting, creative bit), you just don’t see any action happening on the pitch on this regard; so, as in almost every one of the other football games, you can pass it around and hope for the best, as the AI will just awkwardly sit back and watch you play most of the time, or it’ll move mindlessly around the pitch.
The interesting bit is that according to the formation you’re using, you might be able to (sometimes) overcome the lack of an evolved AI. Playing with Portugal and its 4-3-3 formation was a nightmare: the three midfielders are static and easily subjugated by the opponent’s own midfield, the wingers hug the touchline and hope you’ll pass them the ball for them to go one-on-one with the sideback a-la-young Ronaldo/Figo; while poor Pauleta the lone striker puts the “lone” in “alone” and is hopelessly isolated against a bunch of defenders and defensive midfielders. I had less success playing with Portugal than, for example, playing with Sweden – which is supposedly a significantly weaker side – because Sweden employs a 4-4-2 flat in which its striker duo is always looking for space behind and along the defensive line – one of its strikers tends to drop to the side, closer to the sideline, while the other is keen on taking advantage of a sleepy centreback and find space behind the line. And given the build-up process is so limiting, it’s best to find any of the two attackers with a long pass right away instead of patiently passing it around looking for space. One could only wish these strikers’ dynamism would’ve been reproduced on all the other sectors but it’s undeniable: it wasn’t. As such, FK seems to have some potential to be able to produce Premier League-tier football and ends up lost on Finland’s 2nd Division.
The attacking AI is not much better.
That isn’t to say that it won’t trouble you at all offensively, or that you’ll be able to recurrently collect clean sheets a-la-PES5; the CPU is cunning and objective enough to kick you when you’re down, slap you in the face and make your (wonderful) goal nets scream in agony. It’s just that most of the time, the AI is rather sterile as a result of self-imposed limitations, which is very disappointing given the total freedom of movement provided by the game’s player movement, passing and shooting systems; the equivalent of a young man lying naked in bed with a beautiful young woman who decides to talk about the weather instead of going for it. Here too the lack of an intelligent off-the-ball CPU hurts…the CPU as well, as it becomes unable to properly build-up its attacking plays if it isn’t relying on solo runs, or the way-too-common long balls – “long balls” is an euphemism, it often looks more like a Hail-Mary-and-let-the-striker-deal-with-it. So when you combine the AI’s inability to help the player while on offense, as well as the lack of attacking competence on the other side, you get a stumbling simulation where both sides try to make the most out of what they have, which is little, and recurrently fail to reproduce anything resembling real-life football most of the time. It’s as if someone had put something in all of the 22 players’ drinks before they got to stadium – you can see there’s talent there, but they won’t use it.
I have found that the defensive AI is not that unimpressive, though. The players don’t act as much as a unit as in PES – this comparison might sound repetitive, but PES was truly the standard for football gaming back then -, nor do they react in a pro player’s way to the loss of ball possession; yet they do the bare minimum of intelligently protecting simultaneously the goal and the space inside their defensive bloc. Most of the competing football titles were not able to faithfully recreate this footballing aspect, so in a world where PES didn’t exist, FK would have had been one of the most impressive on this regard.
Defensive and attacking transitions are probably the most difficult things to code in a football game – even modern games have been struggling with this – and here FK is clearly sub-par. This is where the illusion is definitely shattered as you disregard what you see on the screen as actual football, for the players act as an under-7 team having their first-ever footballing experience; in this scenario, you are their coach and you scream your guts out, trying to somehow fix the mess developing in front of your eyes, an inglorious effort indeed. From the gameplay videos I’ve seen, FK’s frenetic game speed is somewhat able to hide this problem, but as my emulator slows the action down to a more life-like pace, it’s too obvious that more often than not, the players are on the wrong areas doing the wrong things – when they aren’t just standing there doing nothing. Defensive and attacking transitioning makes or breaks a football simulation – and explains why ISS/PES rose to complete and total dominance back then, as it was light-years ahead of anyone else on portraying this delicate aspect of football.
Before closing the AI chapter, I have to make a reference to the goalkeepers, which are a bit weird in this game. Often, when they’re about to face a shot, instead of staying on the middle of the goal, in order to protect as much of the goal as possible, they choose one side and then leave almost all of the goal open. This would typically be a huge game-breaking issue; the thing is, their reflexes are as admirable as the diving animations are realistic. I thought I’d be able to take advantage of this “bug” when I first spotted it but for the reasons above mentioned, I never could. FK’s goalkeepers struggle a lot with spatial awareness, not just on shots but on any goalkeeping action, but when it comes to saving shots and controlling the depth behind their defense, I can proudly admit they’re notably more impressive than its contemporary PES3.
Football Kingdom moves in a realistic way more often than not.
The passing animations are disappointing, as the players look more like they’re shooting rather than passing, particularly on long passes. In fact, this might be my only critique on this topic, as everything else just looks so good and truly admirable for a 2004 game. What impressed me the most was how amazing the aerial duels look, not because of an advanced player collision system – which there isn’t – but because of how life-like the heading animations are on shots, passes and clearances. It might be hard to believe this, but I feel it rivals even the modern football games’, perhaps it is even better than some of those titles. Utilizing sliding tackles is also a lot of fun; instead of falling down on the pitch in a quirky manner as almost all football games had reproduced it to be back then, the players actually slide to block a shot or get the ball back from the opposition, using the full length of their body to do so. FK looks elegantly realistic like few football titles of the whole of the PS2 era were, if any – just not on its default game speed, that is.
This wouldn’t be a Football Kingdom review if I didn’t mention the thing that made this game famous. Ask around about FK and the first thing that’ll come to the connoisseur’s mind is…the game’s wonderful net physics! Perhaps it’s comical that a particular football game’s legacy is founded on such a supposedly minor, unimportant bit of the simulation; however, I can confirm: scoring (or conceding!…) a goal is extra-satisfying when you watch the ball hitting the net. Over the years I’ve seen countless people asking for FK’s goal nets to be introduced in modern football games, and I can’t blame them for it. Sit back, relax and enjoy the swooshing show.
In addition to the usual varieties of National Team competitions, from Euro to World Cups; as well as customizable leagues in which those NTs can also partake, the game’s pièce de résistance is the Kingdom Mode – or at least it should be, given its name…? I was expecting to find a somewhat complex environment there, but it seems it’s nothing more than a glorified League Mode which is the only ingame platform where you can utilize as well as play against club teams. Once again, it is important to understand the context in which this game appeared: back then, even the highly regarded Master League in Pro Evolution games was very simplistic. Still, with that in mind, FK’s Kingdom Mode is pretty poor content-wise. You are asked to take control of ten fictitious sides, all of them having a collection of some of the world’s best footballers. Then, you can tune your squad according to your preferences on team name, kits and even…the squad itself, as it’s possible to freely choose players from all of the game’s National Teams’ rosters. After this, you’re good to go and it’s time to battle for world domination. Kingdom Mode seems to be a kind of discount Master League, yet gets far from reaching those highs.
If you can withstand the loading times, the game’s Edit Mode is complex enough to keep you coming back for more, allowing one to freely alter most of the database to his preferences. It was there where I understood how FK’s potential when it comes to players’ attributes was much more impressive than most understood it to be back then; particularly when looking at a kind of “player tendencies” setting, which sets out to define how likely a certain player is to shoot, pass or dribble when the AI is controlling him. Combine the three percentages for each player and you’ll get a picture of his supposed footballing “persona”: a modern-day Cristiano Ronaldo would have a very high shooting percentage while Busquets would have very high passing and low shooting tendencies, for example. Yet, to be honest, if in theory this sounds good, so far I just don’t see how this impacts the game in a practical way. As I said earlier, the game’s AI is far from being impressive and it definitely shows on not just the impact of the players’ attributes but also that of this exquisitely complex player tendencies setting. On this regard, FK follows the mantra all of the non-PES games of the era: talented players are better, mediocre players are worse; unlike PES’ intricate and obviously complex attribute system, one that was able to realistically define each individual’s strengths and weaknesses, in Football Kingdom’s world, none of that nuance seems to exist. This combo of player stats and tendencies was promising, but in the end it was a big nothing.
The Good
- Total freedom of movement and passing; FK was years ahead of its time on this regard. It’s all about having the control to explore the pitch as you want to.
- A few football gaming fundamentals: from realistic ball physics to player animations; the core of a decent footballing experience is definitely there.
The Meh
- Lacks club teams, whilst presenting an impressive collection of National Teams.
- The graphics. The game looks much better from afar; get up close and you’ll be a bit disappointed.
- Off-the-pitch content. Besides the many playable cups, customizable leagues and an underdeveloped Kingdom Mode, there isn’t much to do in FK.
The Ugly
- Hey. Slow down, will ya? Nope. Football Kingdom’s game speed is as frenetic as any typical arcade football game, yet when slowed down either by fate or a PS2 emulator, one sees that such speed just doesn’t fit the footballing platform the game provides. It’s just too fast.
- The game’s AI is poor on either end of the pitch, from goalkeepers to strikers.
- Virtually inaccessible: being able to actually play this game is a feat in itself.
Score: 6.5
Football Kingdom is a project of a simulation with a few interesting on and off-the-pitch details, even if it suffers from the lack of a congruent identity for its brand of football – it wants to be taken seriously as a simulation while appeasing the arcade-minded fans. In the end, as usual when one tries to appease both sides of the barricade, FK ended up pleasing neither. Still, it was able to build some decent foundations for a football series that regretfully never truly kicked off. One will always wonder how high FK would’ve had been able to climb if subsequent iterations had been released, for its first and only “Trial Edition” was more than good enough to be able to grab the attention of the few football fans who were able to play the game. In the end, we’re left with a promising platform which will impress you sometimes, though soon enough its flaws will strengthen their grip on the quality of the experience, in turn boring/bumming you out of Football Kingdom – maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your…week – until you turn it on again just to see those goal nets!
Libero Magazine 
I remember playing this game for a while, and what I heard back then was the a bunch of developers left Konami to join Nanco just for this game. Do you know anything about these developers moving to EA? There is a rumour among some Brazilian vloggers that these guys or other former Konami developers were the responsible for Fifa improvement since 2007.
LikeLike
Perhaps that might have some truth to it, I heard the same rumour, just without the part where they joined Namco for FK’s development. Anyway, regardless of the veracity of that, the fact is that the devs who worked on PS3-era FIFA had such an admiration for PES that they tried to get their own game’s gameplay on the level of Konami’s title. They were certainly inspired by the brilliance they witnessed on the PS2-era of PES.
LikeLike