I grew up in a town where some people hated the colour green, because they supported Rangers FC and green was associated with their rivals, Celtic FC. They would smash green traffic lights, green street cabinets, green shop signs…
I wonder what their reaction would be to Soccer Story, an “adventure RPG” about playing football-ish sports in a lush, green, almost Pokémon-like world.
Here’s the announcement trailer. Try not to smash your monitors, Rangers fans:
“It’s been a year since The Calamity™ tore apart the very foundations of soccer as we know it, and since then, Soccer Inc. has made dang well sure that not a soul has been allowed to even look at a soccer ball, let alone kick it,” says the blurb on the official site. Enter you, who has been chosen by “a magical soccer ball” to remind everyone why football is great.
Banned or not, the trailer above shows the protagonist playing in what look like football matches, with tackles and shots and everything. It also shows wave defense battles fought with a football, aiming mini-games, chatting with ghosts, turn-based combat, and a lot else.
I like games which take a sport and use it as the central mechanic for a different genre of game. The most popular recent example of that is Golf Story on Switch, whose developers are now working on a more expansive followup called Sports Story. Soccer Story is unrelated to those games and is developed by Not Tonight creators PanicBarn.
There’s no release date for Soccer Story yet, but you can sign up for a PC beta which is “coming very soon”, and find more screenshots over on Steam.