Football Drama

[got_quiet]

Name: Football Drama
Status: Complete
Site: https://open-lab-games.itch.io/football-drama
Rating: PG
Pairing: Gen, maybe M/F?
Description: A soccer management sim with some VN elements

Football Drama is combo of a Football (soccer) simulator where you have to manage stats and direct play by play in a series of games, and a choice-based dialog game where as the general manager you have to deal with players, the press, and ownership. The two sides of the game interact with each other, but the majority of my time was spent playing a weird little soccer sim simply because the games are very long and the dialog moments are extremely short.


 

 

This is one of the more professional looking games in the collection that I've hit. Everything looks crisp and the interface is clean and well thought out. The art has strong style and is appealing. The writing is brisk. Even though you chat with people scene after scene I didn't feel like I was doing a lot of reading, because everything goes by in very short sentences. For example, in the beginning of the game it appears you can decide if your MC is French or English. You do this by deciding if your cat says "Meow" or "Miaou!" It's humorous and quick but when things get a little thorny, like when you need to figure out the right thing to say to your boss while he's unimpressed with you, the very brief options are sometimes a hindrance, as they don't give out much information for exactly how it is something might be taken. One time the simple option of "Bonjour" got me a negative response.

Feedback in the dialog is pretty good. You will immediately get little + or - hearts when you do something that has an effect on your relationship with someone, and after a dialog is over there will be a brief screen telling you how things went overall. In addition to relationship changes, these dialogs also have an effect on "Karma" and "Chaos" which seem to be the "nice" and "not nice" states, and those appear to have some effect on the football game once you get into it.


 

So so far Football Drama sounds like a relatively typical text based game based around dialog. There's an overarching plot (told very vaguely because the sentences are so short) about you maybe being a little bit of a disgrace and needing to win back some respect, on a team that is also struggling. All standard stuff. But this is only the little filler in between the main gameplay.

Then we get to the football games. The game opens up by throwing at you a fuckload of stats. There are something like 20 team stats that seem to affect something, but it's difficult to say what. On top of this there is a stress system, and a control system. A rather well done little top down view of a field pops up, a little graph appears apparently to show you relative ball control, there are three stats under that that oscillate, and then you've got some buttons that equate to going easy or going hard, which you have to pick for each turn. On top of all of that, there are these things called cards, which you can only play once before you lose them, and which will boost one of your team's stats if and only if they work, which seems to be just based on some rate of chance.

It all looks very complicated. Numbers are everywhere, what they mean is not particularly well expressed in the beginning of the game, and in my first match I just ignored most of it and concentrated on clicking the "go hard" button when my stress was low and the "go easy" button when I wanted to cool off before the ball got close to a goal. This worked out pretty good and I ended the game 4-0. For each goal attempt there is a little animation of dots bouncing around and making the kick, which is in the beginning at least a little suspenseful and entertaining, because you just don't know if that ball is going to go in! But I was sort of done with the experience by the first half of the first game, and by the the second was starting to get impatient, because this part really does feel like just pressing button A or button B with initially shallow tactics.


 

I played three more loops of this process, but the football games didn't get any more interesting outside of hitting button 1 or button 2 depending on how high your stress was, and the VN part of the game remained very thin, so I ended up dropping the game. The full campaign was 18 games of a regular season and then maybe more (or at least that's what the ui seemed to suggest) and I wasn't willing to devote what was probably 5 hours or something just for the sake of the review.

 

My main problem with this game is I can't tell if it's of any interest to someone who likes a lot of number crunching, because I couldn't determine if those numbers had any serious effect, and I can't say that it is worth it for anyone interested in any of the VN elements because they require such a long break in between. The simulated soccer game is at least mildly interesting, but a few hours in it didn't show any actual depth, so it lost me.