Review
FIFA Soccer World Championship is EA Sports' first PlayStation 2 release in Japan. The game should feel very familiar to those who have played the World Cup series on the PC or the FIFA Soccer series on the PlayStation. You can select teams from the Italian, Spanish, English, and German Soccer Leagues, as well as U-23 International teams, and, of course, the World Cup International teams. You can also choose to play an exhibition game against teams from different leagues - such as Italy's World Cup International team vs. AC Milan from the Italian League. The training mode is still intact, allowing novices to practice their basic skills, corner kicks, and PKs.
The most obvious improvement is in the graphics, which are now much more realistic - the player models are made up of more polygons than have ever been seen in a soccer game. Although there is noticeable slowdown at certain moments during gameplay (especially when there are fast passes or shots), the game runs at a much smoother frame rate than the PC or PlayStation FIFAs. As in most next-generation sports games, the player models in FIFA have digital versions of the actual players' faces. Some of the faces are amazingly realistic - the Japanese professional soccer player Hidetoshi Nakata, for example, is quite noticeable. Still, there are elements such as the stadium crowd, which is actually in pixelated 2D graphics, that look quite ugly and keep the graphics from holding up to those of other PlayStation 2 games.
The replay function of the game sometimes has such a bad camera angle that you can't even see who shot the ball or into what part of the goal it went. Despite that, the replay mode - which you can access when the game is paused - makes for a nice recovery. Aside from the basic replay functions such as rewind, fast-forward, zoom in, and zoom out, now you can also rotate the camera angle 360-degrees with the soccer ball as the rotating point. This may not sound like it's a big deal, but when you've learned a few tricks with this rotate function, you can actually see replays that are similar in style to scenes in the film The Matrix. It's too bad there isn't a save function so you can record your best goals. The game also features the music of Jamiroquai - but you only get to listen to it when the game is paused, on the menu screen, or in the intro CG sequence. The live commentary doesn't feel as though it's been enhanced over FIFA 2000, which is disappointing.
FIFA Soccer World Championship is probably the best console version of the series so far, but keep in mind that it has only improved graphically. It's pretty much just an updated version of last year's model and plays essentially the same as the previous games in the series. If you are a newcomer to the FIFA soccer series, then you won't be disappointed. If you've followed it for a while though, the game will likely leave you expecting a bit more.--Ike Sato--Copyright © 2000 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of GameSpot is prohibited. -- GameSpot Review
