Let's try to keep to the topic and keep an open mind without insults or stirring, please. You know who you are.
On-topic, and talking of "neutrals"... I spent four hours of my life last night playing football games. FIFA 17, PES 17, FIFA 18, PES 18.
My honest opinion - and I've spent hundreds, if not thousands, of gameplay across all of them (50/50 after playing more PES last year and more FIFA this year)... I just can't enjoy any of them any more (and Football Manager doesn't replace them).
FIFA 17 on Professional is a pretty balanced game with the right sliders - and the AI has more realistic patterns of play. But it's too easy, Legendary removes any illusion of variety between matches, and there's something missing compared to 18 (it feels more stiff in comparison).
FIFA 18's AI defenders are absolute arseholes. In-fact, nothing in FIFA has ever pissed me off as much as the blatant cheating/scripting in older PES games (hence why I ever gave FIFA a chance) - until now. I'm playing a 2vAI career with a friend, on Professional, and it's stupid.
I could write paragraphs about it, but in football you see so many moments where a player in a tight situation has the touch to squeeze past a defender and get himself a 1-on-1. In FIFA 18, a ball to feet anywhere close to a defender will be won by the defender. (By which I mean AI - human defending is IMPOSSIBLE.)
I feel like my players are on drugs (and I don't mean steroids, I mean sleeping pills). They'll win the ball off the AI, stabbing it away, but they never get possession back because they can't run with - or hold off - the other player. Defending is a nightmare anyway, but even when you do win the ball, all you're doing is delaying the AI's attack for a few seconds, because they re-win the ball back half the time.
As for the AI - look. It's terrible. Every team does the same thing - in the first two-thirds, it's "immediately pass forwards QUICK QUICK QUICK". Like a Sunday League team (gifted with incredible accuracy), every team just goes route one.
But in the final third, suddenly they turn into Barcelona. Triangle-passing, tiki-taka nonsense until they can set up a tap-in. Why? Because the AI knows the holes in the code and that's how to win. Diabolical code.
All of this being said...
PES 2017 and 2018 both rely on a system I really don't like, which is pass accuracy being perfect and the only loss of possession being caused by a defender intercepting a pass when his attributes outweigh the passer's.
I liked 2017 regardless because of the importance of the individual, and yet tactics made a massive difference too. 2018 is just first-time passes galore, a footballing masterclass from the likes of Brighton and Bolton. For me, it's the worse game.
But 2017 was rigid, and I ended up quitting because of one Europa League match I had that exhibited the absolute worst of the game. Every time I played it, I could feel how stiff and slow-to-respond my players were, because that's just how the game interprets attributes. A better team than you = your team become useless. When you witness that, I don't know how you then go back to playing it, because you know it's pointless.
PES 2018 though - for me, it's further away from football than ever. If you love Barcelona and that kind of football I can see why you'd love the game, but any kind of variety and genuine interpretation of different styles has gone, in my eyes. Super-fast, flowing, first-time-passing, backheeling nonsense. Shooting is so watered down that I don't feel like I'm taking a risk shooting with one guy opposed to any other (e.g. a defender instead of a world-class striker).
TL;dr: if you think either game is perfect, or close to perfect, you're dismissing real problems. Nothing wrong with preferring one to the other (I still prefer FIFA because I think it simulates more), but at the end of the day, you like it because it's different. Not better.
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