When your star striker finally breaks a run of bad form you’ll feel relieved for him. There’s newspaper reports, social media feeds, and board meetings that respond to your team’s results, but there aren’t cut scenes or dialogue choices, per se.īut you’ll find yourself writing little stories in your head as your campaign as manager pushes on. There’s very little story written into the game. Football Manager 2022 has this in spades. That “come from behind win” is an emergent narrative. Then you wake up, snap to attention, and somehow turn the fight around. An easy example of an emergent narrative is when you’re playing a fighting game like Dead or Alive, and you’ve spent so much time admiring Marie Rose that the opponent gets the drop on you and knocks you down to a slither of health. We talk about emergent narrative a bit in video games – the idea that games have stories that aren’t written down, as such, but emerge through the player’s interactions with the game. All of that is done through data-driven spreadsheets, and while it sounds tremendously dull to anyone who hasn’t played a Football Manager, once you do, it all clicks very quickly, because you have such intense granular control over your team that you do feel responsible for them. I can’t usually stand spreadsheets, but put them in the context of this game and I end up pouring over the mountains of data, making the tweaks that I need to my team, sweating over the results of the transfers and auctions, and begging my star player to renew their contract for another year. Putting aside those issues, however, Football Manager remains Football Manager, and that’s a fundamentally compelling experience. It’s not that I’m bitter as I’m a big-time Kawasaki Frontale fan and I just want to be able to have the same experience as the three people in the world that support Hougang United… it’s that I’m really bitter about this. The rosters have been updated, but not the leagues, and I’m at the point now where I really need to vent: why is the J-League not part of this game? I understand that it’s always a nightmare to license stuff out of Japan, but it’s ridiculous that the leading Asian football league is not in the same game that features nonsense minnow leagues that very few people (even in their own nations) pay attention to – like Singapore and India. Beyond that, the other problem that this year’s iteration throws up is that very little has been done over the previous edition. The navigation through menus to make even basic actions happen using this other interface option is less entertaining than pulling your own teeth out. That mouse pointer is itself clunky, but manageable. The big new feature was supposedly all-new controller navigation, to enhance play when the console is docked and therefore the touch controls are out, and yet I found myself defaulting back to the virtual mouse pointer almost immediately. I will say upfront, though, that Football Manager 2022 Touch on the Switch is the weakest effort we’ve seen from this series on this console yet. I just can’t stop finding these things compelling. But then the annual Football Manager lands, and there goes my chill down time again. As the Christmas season arrives, and I finally knock out all the major game release reviews that I need to, I look forward to things easing back a bit and that I can spend a bit of time doing other things (this year in partar I have a game of my own to finish writing).
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