1958: The Way to Get Me Interested in Football is Exactly What You Think It Is

I hate football. Loathe, despise and detest it with a passion only normally reserved for my A-Level four-part harmony teacher (at the time, anyway; I’m sure we’d probably get along just fine now), several of my past managers from previous employment (the same is not true for these cunts) and anyone who uses the term “problematic” more than once a month.

It’s not as though I haven’t tried to like it over the years. I recall begging my parents to be allowed to go and hang out at the pub to watch some World Cup matches while I was at school (and being turned down, as I recall); likewise, I remember getting so drunk so early in the evening on my brother’s stag night in Brighton that I actually quite enjoyed an England vs Poland match; I’ve bought a few installments in the interminable FIFA series over the years in an attempt to enjoy them with friends; and I even tried picking a team and following their progress for a little while before just getting so completely and utterly bored with the whole thing that I gave up completely.

Turns out what you need to do to get me interested in football is send it to space. And position it so that the fate of the universe rests on the outcome of matches. And make most of the players pretty anime girls, and the remainder pretty anime boys and penguins. And make matches last approximately a minute of real time. And put it on my phone with a rockin’ electric guitar soundtrack. In other words, make it almost entirely unrecognisable as football.

Enter Soccer Spirits from Com2uS, a South Korean mobile game developer-publisher whose past work I have enjoyed to varying degrees. As with most developers from the region, their focus is exclusively free-to-play games, and they have a pretty wide portfolio running the gamut from the ever-popular farming game tapfests to more complex card battle titles. Soccer Spirits falls into the latter category, and it’s actually one of the best examples of the genre I’ve seen to date.

Soccer Spirits places you in the role of… well, it’s not entirely clear, since the player’s presence doesn’t appear to be acknowledged at any point, but I guess you’re effectively playing as the whole team. You pick one of two characters to begin with, and these also come with a few friends to start off your team. It’s not long before the existence of the Galactic League is revealed, and for some reason that isn’t made entirely transparent through the game’s borderline nonsensical but nonetheless entertaining story, you and your team are selected as Earth’s representatives in these sporting conflicts that are supposedly held in lieu of “proper” wars. In space.

The basic metagame involves the usual process of collecting cards of varying degrees of rarity, “feeding” them other cards that you don’t need to power them up, “evolving” them to more powerful forms and attaching various bits and pieces to them to boost their special abilities. This is all executed in fairly traditional fashion — though it must be said, the game does a much better job of explaining things than many of its peers — but it’s how you actually use these cards that makes the game so interesting.

In many mobile card battle games, battles are either abstract or completely non-interactive. There are exceptions — Brave Frontier springs to mind with its JRPG-style turn-based battles, and Love Live! School Idol Festival puts an interesting twist on the formula by turning your cards into the markers you tap on in a rhythm game — but a more interactive style of play is something that some developers still seem to be trying to get their head around a bit. Soccer Spirits succeeds admirably, with an enjoyable, fast-paced game that bears very little resemblance to actual soccer, but is fun nonetheless.

You put your cards into formation on the field. Each card has preferred positions it likes to play in, and putting it in one of them will give it stat bonuses. The match itself is played as a sort of turn-based affair with a bit of Final Fantasy Active Time Battle system going on. Cards gradually fill an “Action” meter over time, and when one fills up, that card gets a turn. Depending on its position, it will have the option to pass the ball to someone on the same line as it, attempt to penetrate the next layer of defensive cards, shoot at the goal or use a skill. Skills vary from attacking skills that boost power to buffs that assist the overall team, and many cards also have passive boosts that help your whole effort out, too, with particular benefits coming from the player you select as your “Ace”.

Conflicts on the pitch are resolved as RPG-style battles in which stats, abilities and elemental affinities are compared between the two cards, and they inflict “damage” on one another accordingly. If a card’s HP is reduced to 0, it is out of action for a short period — though not eliminated completely — and this allows an ideal opportunity to penetrate or shoot. In many cases, penetrating or shooting is combined with an attack — striker-type characters tend to have skills that enable them to make particularly powerful shots that will usually flatten weaker defenders.

To win a match, someone just needs to score one goal — no playing to 90 minutes here. In many cases, this means that a powerful team of cards can obliterate its opposition in a matter of seconds (though the game represents this as a number of “minutes” of sped-up time) which helps to keep the game admirably snappy, interesting and enjoyable — though given that I was showered with enough goodies to recruit what appears to be a virtually unstoppable team right at the outset of the game, I wonder how much strategy there will be as I progress.

Like many other mobile games that I’ve been pleasantly surprised by recently, Soccer Spirits is unobtrusive in its use of premium currencies and energy bars — though doubtless this will become more of an issue as I progress further. It’s liberal with the rewards, meaning you can get your hands on some decent cards to add to your collection pretty quickly — but there are also a lot of incentives to try and collect as many as possible, particularly if you’re able to finish “sets”. It’s a good use of the formula, and the artwork — clearly the work of several different artists, each with their own very distinctive styles — is absolutely gorgeous.

So there you have it. I’m playing a football game. (Kind of.) And enjoying it. What next? Cricket? Hahahaha.