Captain Tsubasa: Rise of New Champions is an arcade soccer game based on the manga and anime series. specifically, it is based upon the 2018 anime that had retold the story up to the middle school nationals. Being on the PS4, the visuals are great, for an anime-inspired game that is. The game doesn’t have a great tutorial as it quickly zips through the basics, and it can be a struggle in the beginning to get the hang of things. Obviously, to win matches, your objective is to shoot more goals than the opponents. When a character has the ball, they can dribble, or they can dash dribble using the shoulder button. Using the trigger button will allow them to dodge. However, an opposing player can take the ball in one of two ways, and whether you use the shoulder or the trigger button to counter their defence will determine whether the character loses the ball or not. It takes some guesswork as you try and predict which button to use.
There are several ways to pass the ball, X for a short pass, Circle for a long pass and Triangle for a through pass. When you’re playing defensive and want to take the ball, the controls are largely the same, except you can dash up and hold X at the same time to take the ball, or use a tackle by using the trigger button. Again, the other player can dodge your attack by using the right combination (or the AI cheating). Finally, to shoot the ball, you press and hold down the Square button to charge a bar. While you can release it to shoot without filling it, it is in your best interest to do that because most characters have a special shooting move that’s much more powerful.
A huge part of the game ends up shooting as much as possible in order to whittle down the goalie’s stamina bar. It’s annoying because basically the higher it is, the less likely a goal will be achieved. Every time the goalie saves a goal, the bar drops down. It’s not a bad mechanic per se, since it is reflective of how real matches don’t have players constantly shooting goals, but on the other hand, shooting ball after ball to drop the bar down to almost being empty to get one through can be repetitive and tiring. There are other factors at play later on, including abilities and special shooting moves that will break this pattern, but still not enough to drastically change things.
The game is flashy, and you must accept that it is an arcade soccer game based on an anime that’s know for over-the-top impossible moves, like jumping high into the sky to shoot a goal. However, that’s what makes it so fun and crazy, putting a smile on your face. The game does a good job at capturing the iconic moves of the characters, and it will have mini cutscenes for the special shooting moves, and epic saves. The first time you see Tsubasa’s Drive Shot, or Tachibana’s Skylab Hurricane, will definitely put a smile on your face, especially if you have watched the anime.
The game has two main story modes, Episode Tsubasa and Episode New Hero. Episode Tsubasa is a retelling of the Middle School National tournament arc in which Nankatsu plays through seven matches, rising through the rounds of the tournament to win it. There are basic cutscenes, and it distils the story right down to its core, so you need to have had watched the anime to fully understand the significance of several of the events. The annoying part of this mode is how there are scripted events. During matches, a cutscene will forcibly wrestle control away from you, and have a team score a guaranteed goal, or your character having a guaranteed miss at a shot. On the one hand, it’s cool to see the iconic events, on the other, it’s frustrating when you have no control like this.
Episode Tsubasa doesn’t take long to finish given it is only seven matches. It’s around 3 to 5 hours long, depending on how quickly you can finish the matches. You may have to replay some since this mode acts as a longer tutorial, teaching you more advanced techniques like how to do one-two passes or how to shoot straight after a long pass. While these tutorials are optional, they are useful. The biggest negative is that it would have been better if the story could have either continued further or had followed the anime and covered the elementary school arc as well. It feels too truncated as it is and there was so much more content after this in the manga.
Episode New Hero is the main chunk of single player content as it is longer than Episode Tsubasa. You create a custom character, who is a newbie for one of the seven schools. It takes place after the National Tournament and there is a new Junior Youth national, where teams play against each other to win the right to represent Japan in a new tournament in America. The first part has you playing against all the other Japanese teams again. This mode can be annoying in that it raises the difficulty every time you win by a large margin, and drops it when you lose or draw. There is no way to disable this, or to select a constant difficulty that you’re comfortable with. It ends up being tedious as it feels unfair when the opposing team has better stats and outright keeps stealing the ball, or the goalkeeper’s stamina bar does not drop enough to score within the short time limits.
Episode New Hero has RPG elements where, depending on your performance in several areas during a match, your customized player will gain stats. Your position plays a part in which stats are easier to experience growth on. Items that you get from the card packs in the in-game shop, can be used to help such as increasing stat gains or increasing friendship points. There are events before and after every match, including friendship events. Once the mode gets into the Junior Youth World Challenge portion, the game finally breaks out of Japan. This part is where the story cutscenes come thick and fast, taking up to 15 minutes at a time. It also shows how outclassed the Japanese team is when they face off against other countries early on. It’s an underdog story and serves as a de factor continuation of the manga’s story, albeit in such a weird way of forcing the player character into the cutscenes.
Once you start playing against other countries, this is where the adaptive difficulty’s poor implementation rears its ugly head. There really needed to have been an option to disable it. The reason for it is that the developers were worried that it would unbalance the game due to the custom player’s stats tied to it, and the fact that you can use the custom player online afterwards. A simple solution to this would have been making some penalty to the stat gains instead to incentivise playing on higher difficulty, rather than just a blanket hard difficulty for all players. It’s annoying when the AI can anticipate and counter every single move you do, and it’s problematic when you first face against Italy, who already has an overpowered special move.
Episode new Hero takes around 6-8 hours to complete, depending on your planning, if you need to repeat any matches, and how quickly you can read to advance the cutscenes. Despite the flaws of the game, it’s still quite fun in the end and the ending is awesome. The epic feel is completed with the end credits playing a rendition of the anime’s theme song. In addition to the story modes, there is online where you play against others, and a mode where you just play for mode against the AI. The game tries to keep you returning via a daily login bonus, and as a result, the main menu always has you waiting several seconds before you can do anything as it connects to the network. This happens every single time, even when you enter a sub menu and then back out immediately. This is an absolute waste of time and extremely annoying and obnoxious.
Overall, Captain Tsubasa: Rise of new Champions is a fun arcade soccer game. It’s not the most in-depth but it has enough variety in its moves to spice things up a bit. However, due to the way the goal scoring works, most matches tend to end up with the player attempting goal after goal to whittle down the goalkeeper’s stamina bar before finally scoring. This can make matches predictable and tedious. The graphics are good and the game has gotten plenty of patches to iron out the bugs. If you’re a fan of the anime, or you’re looking for a less serious soccer game, this this is a fun experience.
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