FIFA 19’s extreme illusion of narrative consequence
By: Nathan Roberts
Tags: Games, Football, Football Manager, Game Design, FIFA

FIFA 19 The Journey’s protagonists: l-r, Alex Hunter, Kim Hunter, and Danny Williams

The lockdowns and varying tiers of Covid-19 restrictions in 2020 enabled me to play and “finish” more video games through the year than I have done in a long while, but what drove me to pick up a sports game two years late?

When I first received the game in 2018, I was wrapped up in a compulsion to play the then recently released Red Dead Redemption 2 and almost neglected the sports sim. Save for a few cursory exhibitions, my only interaction with the game was dipping into the start of “The Journey” mode, picking up Alex Hunter’s story fresh off celebrating a Bundesliga title win in my FIFA 18 save, which in turn followed the first season of his dramatised career in FIFA 17.

Finishing “The Journey” was my only reason to drift back to FIFA 19 as 2020 draws to a close, and after completing lengthy narrative-led games like Final Fantasy VII Remake and The Last of Us Part II, it feels like light-hearted fluff, a palate cleanser. And with my compulsion to “finish” the games on my always growing backlog, revisiting and completing “The Journey” feels like ample playing time to tick it off the list. Yet, despite enjoying the easy-going run through, the game itself leaves a lot to be desired, especially as there’s a clearly demonstrable audience clamouring for the narrative fantasy simulation of progressive seasons, moulding your favourite teams, your dream-fulfilling avatar and winning trophies.

This mode, a much trumpeted narrative adventure within the straight-faced and almost entirely uncritical gaze of the FIFA games, chronicled the career of a teenage soccer sensation across 3 of the series’ yearly instalments. Like Goal and other media representations of football before it, the story stretches credulity to breaking point, yet provides a somewhat compelling reason to practice training drills and play a through a long series of matches. But for anyone who’s actually a fan of football, the sense of immersion is completely broken from the start.

To recap the story, a teenage Alex Hunter is released from an unnamed football club before attending a trial game and being signed up by a Premier League club of the player’s choosing. He’s joined by his also released childhood friend Gareth Walker at said club, and a playing time rivalry begins. Hunter falls down the pecking order after Tottenham’s Harry Kane or PSG’s Angel Di Maria is also signed for your chosen club. You’re then loaned out to one of 3 Championship (the second-tier of English football) teams, to recapture your goal-scoring form, being reunited with Danny Williams, a rival from the opening trial game. This loan is a success, with Hunter returning while an antagonistic Walker forces a move to your club’s biggest rivals (in my save, he went directly from Liverpool to Manchester United, which hasn’t happened since 1938). The rivalry reaches boiling point as both teams reach the FA Cup final, to finish the first season. In the second instalment, Hunter receives a speculative approach from Real Madrid which turns out to be fake, and after already handing in his transfer request, is shipped out to MLS team LA Galaxy. After moving to America, Hunter is reconnected with his absent father and finds out about his “secret” half-sister Kim Hunter, who turns out to also be a soccer prodigy, about to make her debut for the US Women’s National Team. Returning to Europe, Danny Williams is now at your former English club, whilst you get the choice of Bayern Munich, PSG or Atlético Madrid for the second half of the season, before a knee injury takes Hunter out of contention. Shifting perspective to Williams, whose career, despite being a Premier League level player, is somehow at risk of falling apart. Recovering from injury, Hunter’s favourite coach’s job hangs in the balance dependent on winning silverware, a league or a cup, to end this season. In the final instalment, Real Madrid’s interest in Hunter finally materialises, and he joins his fifth team in three seasons, the kind of journeyman career you can only dream of. This game splits perspective between Hunter at Real Madrid, Williams at your chosen English club, and Kim Hunter with the US team as they approach the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2019. The season progresses at a steady pace, suggesting to the player to shift between the characters at scheduled intervals, and culminating with Hunter and Williams facing each other in the UEFA Champion’s League final (added to this instalment of FIFA after the expiry of an exclusivity agreement with Konami’s rival Pro Evolution Soccer series), whilst Kim Hunter reaches the World Cup final.

Unlike playing your own “Career” mode with your chosen club as a created player or manager in FIFA, or the more organisational immersion of a Football Manager, “The Journey” manufactures struggle, regardless of your training performances or results on the pitch, with storyline sections don’t recognise what is going on. Hunter is punished and taken out of the starting line-up, because of insinuated off-field distractions, irrespective of the results you’re getting. You’re even set targets during matches, urged to “Break the Deadlock” though you could already be 3–0 up.

Story-line transfers are ignored across the instalments, as the realism of updated rosters is then blended with “The Journey”’s fictional inclusions. Harry Kane, whose transfer forms a key moment of the initial game’s story, returns to the Tottenham’s line-up in 18 and 19, a sadly unexplained change to reality, that’s reminiscent of 08–09 Robbie Keane, and something that’s never mentioned or commented on.

In fact, the soccer world’s reality is often stranger than the fiction in these games — with 19’s focus on Real Madrid, developer EA Vancouver were surely disappointed when not only Cristiano Ronaldo departed for Juventus before the game’s release, but head coach and former “Galactico” Zinedine Zidane resigned, both leaving after winning the club a third successive Champion’s League trophy. Zidane was to be replaced with then-Spain manager Julien Lopetegui, announced ahead of the 2018 World Cup. On receiving this news the Spanish football association immediately dismissed Lopetegui, whose reign at Real Madrid in turn then felt fated to be calamatious, he was sacked after barely more than 2 months, and eventually Zidane returned.

Lopetegui appears on the side of pitch during your games for Real Madrid throughout “The Journey”, becoming a curious ghost in this simulation, emblematic of a brief rudderless chapter in Real Madrid’s history that they’d sooner forget. That it wasn’t updated out of the game, ultimately offers a somewhat more interesting fantasy; what if he was given a bit more time? what if he had a new talismanic attacking player like Alex Hunter to replace the departed Ronaldo? It’s a what if scenatio that would definitely lead you down more rabbit holes than the narrative that you play through.

“The Journey” does attempt to give the narrative cut-scenes weight, hinting at text box choices having significant consequence, with icons that appear in the top corner of the screen to reflect that what you are seeing is the result of something you decided, or a goal you scored, before. But when the story’s major beats follow a set structure, it’s hard to see beyond these choices being anything other than narrative illusion, as crucially you never lose the opportunity to play simulated games of football in between those cutscenes.

What these illusions hint at is the idea of a sports simulation game with modular story design, where a player’s ongoing sporting career could be intertwined with dramatic role-playing. Whilst “The Journey” falls short of this idea, the fully realised alternative, a procedurally generated narrative drama truly reflective of in-game performance, would become a very attractive and game-altering prospect beyond what has been offered, a scripted and almost on-rails single player experience.

Sports simulation games need something to elevate the standard of Career Modes, that remain persistent favourites, and which already rely on an extension of role-playing imagination from the player. Yet, it’s hardly the top priority for a company already benefiting from producing incrementally changed yearly instalments, against the backdrop of extreme financial incentives from micro-transaction heavy modes like “Ultimate Team” and in turn its own e-sports popularity.

A series like Football Manager endures with its own version of addictive sports role-playing within a spreadsheet-like user interface and heavy data management. Every iteration revolves around an ongoing and somewhat believable alternate reality, persisting in spite of the player, that you can compare and contrast with how the real football seasons play out. Assembling your dream line-up, running your favourite club to success, or taking relative minnows up the football pyramid, all work mostly within the rules of the real footballing world. And whilst FIFA has included more attempts at verisimilitude with the likes of visualised transfer and contract negotiations, there’s a lack of depth or accurate representation for the life of a player or manager, that fails to compare with what Football Manager offers, at least within a text-only basis.

Not that Football Manager is itself without problems; there’s an over-reliance on stock responses as you deal with the media or team talks, that whilst accurately echoing football’s clichéd platitudes, quickly grow stale, there’s also the “dynamics” and “morale” systems, an illuminating injection of psychology, that can also cause your team to swing from undefeated to unbreakable losing streaks in a matter of minutes, amongst many other niggling issues that carry over from instalment to instalment, in spite of developer Sports Interactive’s constant refinement of the series.

My desired end point would be some combination of the two games, a dose of Football Manager’s realism interjected into FIFA’s satisfyingly solid and robust gameplay, and an evolved career progression that can integrate unique narratives. Perhaps some addition of an open world, where series like NBA 2K have begun to dabble, combined with a more rounded narrative like the charmingly laid-back Nintendo Switch title Golf Story by Sidebar Games. Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer, with the team-building “Master League” mode, already offers something of a progressive and league climbing career journey, though within a fictionalised alternate structure and lacking a rounded narrative touch, relying on the player to fill in any role-playing gaps.

EA shifted focus after “The Journey”, replacing it with “Volta Football” in the latest two instalments, an updated take on their previous FIFA Street spin-offs, including its own narrative adventure for a player-created character, but crucially drifting away from the tight structure and reality of a football season. Whilst I’m sure it’s engaging, taking the game further from the “pure” simulation of professional football is a disappointing blow for fans who want to create their desired alternate reality.

Here’s hoping that with the new console generation, and an already impressive visual upgrade, EA can return their focus to a realistic career-story mode that gives the player real choices and a reflective, personalised, progressive experience.