Developed/Published by: Kairosoft
Released: Jan 5th, 2012
Completed: 17th November, 2014
Completion: One full career with a high score of 101,601. Beat every league and every cup except the Prin team match. They’ve got max stats! It’s nigh impossible!
Trophies / Achievements: n/a
We’ve talked about football several times here, but here’s a thing! I have no idea what a football manager does. I’ve never managed to get into any of those Football Manager-type games (nae luck, Kevin Toms!) because I just don’t care about club football, but I got back into Pocket League Story recently after—more or less—realising it had been sitting on my phone for the past year (or two?) when I stopped midway through a career in it. I’d just watched Scotland beat Ireland so it seemed like a good idea.
Anyway, then I watched Scotland get pumped 3-1 by England, seeing Gordon Strachan just sort of occasionally get up during the match, yell and point, getting increasingly grumpy looking in the stupid chairs that the sponsors make them sit in (they’re a car manufacturer, so they make them sit in race car seats… I assume. If that’s what they usually sit in, that’s absurd.) I thought… how does he affect the game while he’s there? When he puts a new guy on, does he whisper in his ear “do this, tell the guys to start doing this tactic”? Something like that?
I mean, when you’re running a national team… does he get up every day and go into the office? After the match, does he sit down with tapes of it, pinpoint the mistakes, make edited highlights, talk to the team individually or as a group, talk them through what went wrong, find out why from their viewpoint, and work on what they do next?
I really have absolutely no idea. I mean, I assume something like that happens, there’s four months till the next match, and even though all the players have their club teams to go to, I’d like to believe they do post-mortem matches with the players and plan extensively for the next one. But who knows? They might just all go home after, meet for a few days training directly before the next match, and be done with it.
Anyway. playing Pocket League Story is a bit like watching Gordon Strachan, you can’t really do anything while the matches are happening, other than possibly tap a player to make them go on fire (uh, not that Strachan has that ability… I think???) which makes them more likely to avoid being tackled/score. You don’t have much of a say in anything, you just sort of watch money flow in, build wee cute buildings, try and get sponsors, and buy new players when you have cash (which has a really weird mechanic in that you give them the money, then try and convince them to join. If they don’t, you lose the money. I pumped millions of dollars into trying to hire a monkey. A monkey.)
It’s hypnotic anyway, because watching numbers go up is brilliant, as we all know. Having an unstoppable team of powered-up football men doing footballing seems brilliant, even if you didn’t do really do anything. Which made me realise something: a watched game is a played game. After that England match I played the match over and over again in my head, thinking what should have happened at certain points. If only he’d done this, or if they’d made a change in tactics there. I played the game over and over in my head. Made me think that in some respects people who watch sports are—really—playing the game, more or less as much as I played this. In conclusion: sports are cool, don’t cuss people for enjoying watching sports. Unless it’s cricket, cricket is fucking crap.
Will I ever play it again? No way! I really really shouldn’t play any more Kairosoft games, they’re all pretty timewastey. However, I’m sure at some point in my life I will, regretfully, install Grand Prix Story. Maybe that counts as “playing it again?” I mean it’s basically the same thing.
Final Thought: My favourite thing about Pocket League Story is that I had David Beckam(’s facsimile) play for my team for ages, and I replaced him with the monkey. The monkey was better.
