Last year I bought a PS2 to play mainly Gran Turismo 3 and 4 as was feeling nostalgic. Last month, though, I decided to gave a go the PES 2013, which was the last PES released for the system in America. And it is surprisingly very good.

The first thing I noticed was the difficulty. This is probably the hardest PES I ever played. Generally, I starting playing the hardest difficult and after 1 season in the ML, I good enough. This time, I suffered a lot more. I had to spent 3 seasons in the second division before being able to reach the access to the first division. I had to check every tactics option the game has to offer, and also read the manual to more insight in some of the commands. Even with this, every match felt like a war. The satisfaction at end though was incredible, though. I really felt like I had to give everything of me to win.

The game uses the old stats system from PES 5/6, and for the first time I felt like every single stat matter. Height also matters a lot, which also makes the Jump stat matters a lot more outside of just being good at scoring headers. Condition, which is something I usually don't care much when playing other PES, has a much bigger significance here. After I sold one of my midfielders with good condition, I started to noticed I was having a harder time getting a line-up with two DM/CMs in good condition, even though I have 5 players who can play there in my squad. When I checked their condition, I realized why. Two of them have a Condition of 3, and another one have a Condition of 4.

The downside is that there's much less teams to use. The game does have a lot of NTs, but you can't edit or play with most them. You can only face them in a championship. The game have teams and players from the Libertadores, but they're like in a parallel universe. You can only use them in the Copa Libertadores mode, you can't edit them, you can't even add those players to the NT. Fluminense, as an example, has Deco in the team, with original face and everything, but you simply can't put him in the Portugal NT, and he doesn't seem to exist in any other mode.

Anyway, I highly recommend you guys to check this game. It is my favorite PES right now.

What an interesting post! I suppose that you are a very challenging gamer and that you delight in difficult games. I, too, felt the PS2 version of PES 2013 was tough(Thanks to my modchipped hardware, I could try it out here in South Korea also). I would like to say, for a wild, struggling gamer like you, this game does suit, but in terms of some major details such as shooting and dribbling, it wasn't satisfactory to me. I think the PS2 version of PES 2013 gave up those points mentioned to satisfy challenging gamers, but anyway I agree it's a very good game overall. Imagining how you make use of all your skills, tactics, and soccer knowledge just to win a match, I wish I could watch your gameplay. That would be awesome! Again thanks for an interesting topic!

This title had all the tools to become the best PES ever, in my opinion. Unfortunately, this

was a big downside that didn't even make much sense. If you develop a game with enough space to add those teams, just make them editable.

I really don't know why they went that route. It's a bit frustrating you can't even touch those teams. And some choices of teams are also weird; like Asia have UAE but not Iran; Africa have Zambia but not Senegal. At least the game allows to make custom leagues/championships with both NTs and clubs, so I could edit some teams to make them look like NTs. But first I'm gonna focus on the teams that are already available.



I like hard games when they're fun and the difficulty actually makes sense. I despise when a game is hard just for the sake of being hard though. I do have a capture card, but it doesn't have component inputs, so the quality of the video would be very bad. Maybe I can capture some gameplay.

Another thing I didn't mention is the capability of using Sweepers that actually work like classic Liberos. At least in PES 2011 which I used to play, you couldn't assign a SW for the CB Overlap strategy. In this game you can, so you can make the SW go forward all the time, though in this case they tend to run towards the opposing area instead of keep in line with the ball. I tried putting an arrow for the player to go forward instead of using the CB Overlap too, and it kinda works, but the player doesn't go forward as often as I would like.

I uploaded a video to YouTube: https://youtu.be/deQrR-tWiD0