I've been reading this forum in the past days (from about page 480) and I'm really surprised of the stuff I've read, but I'm going to explain my thought because I'm sure there's more folks that think like me. First of all, so people know what my opinion is based on, I'm a PES fan since the very begining on Playstation, and I always considered FIFA a piece of garbage. I loved PES 6 (or 5, I don't remeber which one was it because I had all of them), I think the best football game ever made. I loved the gameplay (not perfect, but almost), the editing possibilities, and the Master League. My goal was always to make a winning team with only the fake young players that would come every season, making them evolve game after game.
All that said, I feel extremely disappointed with PES and Konami nowadays. Yeah, PES 2011 is a big improvement from the 2010 (that was a joke of a game), but still is veeeeery far from what it should be. And I'm not talking about the gameplay, which I would say is pretty good... when the game works. And that's my bigest complain here. The game is FULL, FULL, FUUUUUULLLLL of flaws and glitches that ruin any good moments that you can have. It's truly unbelievable. I've had the game for 2 weeks now, and played it A LOT (mostly online), and I'm about to give up on it and return it. Why? A I said, all this flaws ruin most of the games you play in every aspect. The shooting system is a joke, any defender runs faster than any attacker, offside many times is called for a player that has nothing to do with the play, almost no rule of letting the play continue when you're attacking and you get fouled if you keep the ball's possesion, passing system works sometimes and others does completely weird passes, players stuck to the ground when fighting for a high ball (yeah, even when you press R2), players that you can't control because they're stuck in some sort of stupid animation, player switching (many people complain about it, but for me is not one of the worse flaws), players that simply don't react to your orders like shoot or pass or they react 1-2 seconds late... and these are the ones that I can remeber now, but there are a lot more.
All these things don't happen all the time, but they happen very often, TOO often, and many times decide matches. You can be doing super well in a match, controlling the game, having a lot of chances to score (and of course missing a lot, but we can assume that it's for realism), and then the opponent scores thanks to whatever flaw comes up in his almost only chance. This happens ALL THE TIME. And the same when you attack, many times you have the feeling that you're not controlling what is happening, or that the goal you just scored (even a nice one) is not what or how you intended to do. And all this just ruins the satisfaction even for winning.
So my general impression is that this game has been released too early, because seems that no one tested it before, and all this glitches and flaws should have been corrected before making people pay $60 or whatever currency is in every country. Yeah, there might be updates, but I seriously doubt that they're gonna fix any of this flaws with an update...
And here comes the second point of my discussion. I'm really sorry to say this (it hurts deep inside), and I know the general opinion in this forum, but I have to be honest and say that FIFA 2011 is a better football game. I know it because I had for a week and returned it because I don't like the gameplay proposed in it, but I have to admit that FIFA's proposal is much better resolved than PES's proposal. They're different, yeah, and I like PES better, but all those flaws and glitches that I commented before almost don't exist in FIFA. The game itself is not as fun as PES 2011, I particularly hated how boring games turned out, with very few goal chances, but when you play it, it feels solid, accurate, responsive... unlike PES 2011. And I'm not saying it's perfect (as I said I returned it), but it has a better finished football proposal.
Well, to all of you who read until here, sorry for the long post! I just had to speak my mind and express my disappointment with this game. Thanks for reading!