Developed/Published by: EA Vancouver, EA Romania / EA
Released: 27/09/2016
Completed: 29/08/2020
Completion: Finished a season with Partick Thistle winning everything, Scotland won the World Cup, and completed Alex Hunter’s Journey.
Trophies / Achievements:
Yes, I was still playing FIFA 17 in 2020. There’s a reason, though!
It’s a bit melancholy, really. I was moving out of my lovely wee apartment and leaving the city I’d called my home for a couple of years in a time of tremendous upheaval, and FIFA 17 was the first game I played when I moved in. I was deep in world cup fever and I fancied playing a FIFA, and at the time I was like “oh yeah, there’s that story mode they just started with FIFA 17, I’ll try that. Plus it’s like $8 now.”
Of course, at the time I didn’t even try the Journey mode. I just played all the other modes and I have such nice memories of sitting in my wee home, sweaty in the height of a heatwave, banging in goal after goal because it was too easy on Semi-Pro and too hard on Pro (lol).
Anyway, I knocked through the story mode, “The Journey” in my last couple of weeks in the flat to sort of say goodbye the way I said hello, and what a strange experience. To play a mixed-race Black kid from London while protests continued and in fact the NBA itself went on a wildcat strike right in the middle of it. I kept thinking about how Alex Hunter would have experienced race, of all the awful ways that Black football players and other players of colour have been treated on and off the pitch and I thought–ridiculously, I guess, for a yearly franchise and an instalment from three years prior [”Michael Brown was killed in 2014″–Ed.]–”I wish they could deal with this.”
Instead what you get, obviously, is cut-scenes here and there (far fewer than I expected!) a terrible meaningless Mass Effect-me-do conversation system and endless training sessions which you can’t skip because for some fucking reason Alex Hunter will pretty much always get Ds and Fs (but I still should have skipped them.) It feels like you maybe have a lot of opportunity to make the story go different directions but apparently you get game overs if you fuck anything up too badly, so you probably can’t. In fact you definitely can’t because even though I was able to keep Alex Hunter in the first team consistently Hunter’s social media is like “Alex Hunter should be in the starting eleven” so it definitely barely pays attention to what you’re doing. It’s your basic “struggle to the top” story where you suffer a setback and your pal turns out to be a prick that you have to defeat anyway.
FIFA is pretty fun though. I mean it’s no Sensible Soccer (too many fucking buttons) but it was a laugh for a while.
Will I ever play it again? Good question would be “Would you play FIFA 18 to continue Alex Hunter’s story?” Well, probably no for two reasons: 1) if you have to succeed when you’re playing in the England squad fuck that, because I’ll just turn around and pump in as many own goals as possible. 2) Apparently it’s still full of training mode shite. Maybe it’s easier to skip though.
Final Thought: As you might be able to tell I couldn’t give a fuck about English football, which made picking a team for Alex Hunter challenging. I went with Sunderland for two reasons: it was the most northern squad I could get and it said right on the selection screen they’re called the black cats and of course I bloody love black cats (even if they’ve only got three legs, like mine.) This definitely led to a hilarious sequence where Sunderland were somehow facing Middlesborough for the FA Cup.
It would be a couple of days later when I’d discover just how bloody hilarious that was by watching Sunderland Till I Die on Netflix, the weirdly entertaining docuseries following the club’s absolute implosion in the 2017-2018 season from mismanagement and having a disinterested arsehole billionaire as an owner. The lesson is that capitalism must be destroyed. The lesson is always that capitalism must be destroyed.
