I have been hooked on the Wining Eleven series ever since a friend of mine in 1998 told me about the series on the original PlayStation. In fact, it was the main reason why I bought a PlayStation. I had been hooked on EA’s FIFA series for some time (even buying 8MB of RAM just to have play-by-play on my Pentium 60 PC), but nothing could have prepared me for Winning Eleven. There was just something in the game that made me feel more interested in it than FIFA.

Now we’re nine iterations later and the game is still as fluid and as wonderful as I remember. However, that being said, it’s about time Konami really started to put more work in the game. The great thing about competition is that both EA and Konami have been producing better games year after year (take note American Football!).

So, you may be asking, what’s new in Winning Eleven 9 that Winning Eleven 8 didn’t have. The answer is either “not much” or ‘quite a bit.” Confused? That’s ok, let me make it easier: if you don’t play online, there’s not a lot more in this game than there was in last year’s game. Konami went out and purchased official licenses for some teams, but not all of them. Arsenal is now a licensed team (yay), but Manchester United is not (boo). There are some official leagues in the game, but I believe they were all in last year’s game.

The biggest addition to the game is online play. That’s right; you can finally play Winning Eleven online! The functionality is excellent – the largest drawback to me was that I was playing a European game in America, and by that I mean you’re more likely to play against a European opponent because, well, they like soccer more. With a five to eight hour time difference, plan accordingly if you want to play excellent competition.

Believe it or not, Konami has tried to make the online experience similar to a soccer league. They’ve created five different online divisions for your enjoyment. The first time you login and create an online account, you’ll start in the Amateur division. After you play ten online matches, your standings will be reviewed on a regular basis (weekly, I’m speculating), and you could be promoted to the next highest league. Of course if you get promoted and then underperform, you could be relegated back to a lower division. Now that is a very cool idea! When you aren’t playing online, you can spend days, weeks, months or even years in the Master League mode. You create your team and then you manage it. You hire the players. You create your team logo if you so choose and/or the color of their kits (uniforms). You negotiate with your players and pay them accordingly. You have a strict budget, and if you run out of money to pay your players, your game ends. Master League is mind numbingly deep but a lot of fun.

If there is ever a game that you better be sure you have the instruction manual for, it’s this one. The 46 page booklet is chock full of information that is enormously helpful when playing the game. It gives a great description of each league and how the rules are different for yellow card match suspensions (not to mention the details of Master League).

The gameplay itself of WE9 continues the amazing tradition of its predecessors. Playing WE9 truly feels like you are watching a game on TV or actually playing the game yourself. Player movements are so fluid and reactions are intense. The collision detection is simply amazing…players grab each other, trip up and some of the goalkeeper’s diving acrobatics are just what you’d expect to see in a real game.

Make no mistake; the AI is very good, even at ‘normal’ levels. Scoring a goal is about as difficult in this game as it is in real soccer. However, the incredible feeling of joy when you score a goal (usually they are very impressive goals) is well worth the difficulty. There is an in-game training option, and it’s very highly recommended if you plan on moving up in the online league.

Practically everything you expect in a real game is here. Players calling for fouls, refs giving the advantage and then blowing the whistle if there is no advantage are all included. At half-time and full-time, an LED-like display is shown giving the amount of stoppage time added on. Of course, these minutes are also accelerated, so it’s 3 “game-minutes” which might not even be one real minute and there’s no added time clock so you’re guessing how much time is left.

The game isn’t a graphics gem, although they are pretty good by PlayStation 2 standards. Flags wave, players are identifiable and player animations are excellent. Audio isn’t bad but the commentary has become blander than in years past. It’s a lot of “player name with ball” followed by “player name with ball.” Some of the commentary is plain goofy – for example, every penalty kick goal is amazing or incredible. Puh-leeze. Penalty kicks are difficult but aren’t as incredible as say a bicycle kick goal.