"FIFA Soccer 2002" - Gamecube

Let me just preface this by saying I've literally never played a soccer game before other than Soccer on the NES when I reviewed it, so that's all I have to compare this game to.

FIFA International Soccer, sometimes called FIFA '94, was the first FIFA game ever made. It was simply called "EA Soccer" when it was in development. It was also the first game to acquire the official license from FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association (that's a mouthful)).

FIFA Soccer 2002, then, was the latest of the becoming-more-lengthy-by-the-year catalogue of FIFA games by EA, in 2001. The previous game had only been on the Playstation and Playstation 2, so this was their outing onto the Gamecube (I mean, the Gamecube had just come out so I guess that makes sense). Also, believe it or not, the last PS1 FIFA game was all the way in 2005.

With that context in mind, let's go ahead and play the game:

I've been staring at this for 10 minutes trying to think of a joke.
So far I have "something something Fat Albert".

----- Playthrough -----

FIFA Soccer 2002 has a handful of game-modes for you to try out. We have "Friendly," "FIFA World Cup Qualification," "Season," and "Tournaments." We'll start out with "Friendly," which is usually called something like "Exhibition," in other sports games (and is code talk for one match) and talk about how the game works first.

This is gonna be the friendliest ass-kicking you'll ever recieve.

The game starts you out on Amateur mode by default, but after playing for a little and getting some basic FIFA advice from one of my friends (who I would totally namedrop but I don't know of anything he has that he wants repped), I started getting goals and decided it was time to step it up to Professional and lose. Difficulty settings seem to do several things, but in general it makes the AI play a little better and smarter and that's the main thing.

Standard play in FIFA 2002 is a little like Soccer on the Famicom, but more advanced. On offense your A button passes the ball, and your B button lob passes the ball (up in the air). You can hold these to get different powers, but you want to use a power that's appropriate or you may pass it too far or too short. In general you pretty much want to pass it whenever you're approaching the opposing team.

Quick, pass it to McDonald's!

The other buttons at your disposal are X, which shoots the ball or otherwise kicks it hard downfield towards the goal, and Y, which is your sprint button, which utilizes the little energy bar you see in the bottom right of most of my pictures. You can pretty much sprint for just about forever, so there's not a lot of need to worry about that, but I was also playing with an against decent teams and not using 1 or 2 star rating teams.

Ultimately, the point of the game is to use some combination of the above tactics to kick the ball into the opponent's goal, so you can watch your guys do a perverse victory dance while others look on.

Woah, guys, I said perverse, not pornographic.

The next mode is the World Cup Qualification mode, which is basically just a tournament, so let's talk about that mode too. In World Cup mode, you're divided into a section of teams from your classification (for instance, the CONCAFAF is the American confederation). Presumably if you win this tournament, you'll be sent on to compete with other confederations until you eventually win. In-between games you're welcome to save, mess with your team, and generally look at the stats in the tournament.

I picked Mexico for my journey to the World Cup, but I took second in my section of the tournament after four or five matches, and I figured that was probably enough of that so I didn't bother to reload and try again.

I felt like I'd pretty much seen everything I needed to see at that point, anyway.

The last remaining game mode is "Season," which essentially amounts to a series of games with the teams in your confederation in which you try to come out on top with the best record. I'm unsure if you continue into another season after the one you play with your stats, which would be cool, but I wasn't really willing to play a whole season just to review this game (sorry).

There's a few other things of note in the game: A "Creation Center," where you can create your own teams and players, complete with color schemes and player rosters. It's pretty basic, but it's there, and it's not bad for 2001 on the Gamecube (based on nothing but my low expectations). "Team Management" allows you to mess with created teams or official teams by playing around with the rosters.

I used these tools to make a custom team based on my Discord consisting of only players rated '69'. Classic.

And finally there's "Rewards," which seem kind of like achievements in modern games (you get them for doing various things in the game) but actually have rewards associated with them so they're not completely useless (even though I can't help but try to get them anyway, even now...).

As far as I could tell, that's pretty much all there is to FIFA 2002.

----- Review -----

How long did I play?
3 hours.

How much did I beat?
I won several matches in various modes but disqualified on all tournaments. (Pure skill!)

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Intuitive Design: 

How easy is it to intuitively understand the game?

FIFA Soccer 2002 (I can probably stop typing that all out everytime) does that thing where on the loading screen it shows you an image of a controller with all the available controls on it, so at least in that it's able to teach you what the controls are. I'm not really a soccer person, so the chastising comments from the announcers didn't really help me any-- they use a lot of soccer terms I don't really know the meaning of.

My friend, who was watching me play the game at the time, pretty much robbed me of finding out whether it was intuitive to figure out strategies by telling me some basic ones to get me started, but I imagine with some time you'd come up with some on your own just by messing around with the game.

There isn't a tutorial, by the way. There is a video you can opt to watch which teaches you what's new since 2001.

I legitimately almost fell asleep (it was late) while it was playing though, so I skipped it.

Gameplay / Difficulty: 

How rewarding does playing the game feel?

The game's pretty tough but fair on Professional mode as far as I could tell, but I've always disliked how stats seem to mean so much in sports games. I'm sure if you're a good enough player you can overcome the stats disadvantage going against better teams to some degree, but it seems like better teams should just have better AI, and most teams should have basically the same stats... I don't know if that's a hot-take because I'm not a sports gamer, really.

Getting a goal is actually tremendously rewarding feeling with how difficult it can sometimes be, and the whole loop of panicking when the ball is on your side and cleverly scoring when you get aggressive is actually very fun, I'm not going to lie to you.

You can get up and do this across the room after every one, nobody's going to judge you.

Depth: 

How deep/long is the game?

I imagine there's plenty here for a soccer/football fan to dig into. Ultimately it's just about playing individual matches, whatever container you put those matches into. So if you enjoy the main game loop, everything else just seems like an excuse to experience that main game loop in a larger context, which only slightly matters.

Sound / Graphics: 

How's the sound? How are the graphics?

It looks pretty good to me, especially for 2001. Most of the game takes place at such a distance that you can't really see the quality of the models, and I'm sure they probably swap out between LoD models when it goes to the game to maintain the speed, and to the higher quality models for the goofy victory dances. The close up models are really dated/comically bad in some instances, but from a distance the game actually looks good.

I feel stupid giving credit to the music in an EA Sports game because they literally just license music, but in this case they used the Soulchild remix of "19-2000" by The Gorillaz as their title music, and I love that song so, mild cred awarded, EA Sports.

Personal Chord: 

Does the game have that undefinable "something" for me?

I've never watched a single game of soccer in my life so you may have a suspicion that it doesn't, and no it really doesn't. I did have a lot more fun than I expected, but there was little chance a 2002 sports game would ever make it into the inner sanctum of titles that I proclaim to be my favorites because of their unique aesthetics.

Should You Play: 

Is there a reason to even bother with this one?

I mean, I don't expect you to play a FIFA game from 2002. You should probably play one of the new ones, like FIFA 20, or FIFA 19 or 18 if you're a penny pincher.

I don't really know why you'd ever play this in this era, unless you're doing something like I am.

And if you are, I guess you don't really have any choice.

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