Sorry, I'm still banging my head off the ground at the removal of league mode.
I've never been interested in training poles or looking after budgets - if I want to play a manager game, I'll play a manager game, thanks... and a proper one, not one aimed at kids. It would be nice to do transfers, but I hate the way that after a year or so you've got Puyol at Real Madrid, Crouch at Barcelona etc etc, complete joke. League mode avoids all that crap, and you still get the Champions League and Europa League integrated, the officially-licensed ball and adboards (if the league is fully licensed) and so on. It's always been the only way to do a league season in PES games, ever since it was introduced. It's my thing; it's what I do offline. This is before you even get to the magic boots bullshit. (And anyone who thinks it's clever to say "my God stop moaning, are you that worried about something small like boots?" just blows my mind... is there any kind of piss-taking, realism-destroying, corporate-led gimmick that you feel wouldn't destroy the atmosphere of PES and turn the game into a laughing stock?)
This year, as a stadium nut, I'd already decided to play La Liga again, as my mouth was watering at the La Liga stadium pack, the answer to my prayers. More realism, deeper immersion than ever before! Har har har.
At best, I might be able to make a league format in Konami Cup mode, assuming it's that flexible. But what's the betting that there's an 18-team maximum for absolutely no reason at all, or something absurd like that? And you won't get the Champions League / Europa League included, let alone the official league ball. Perhaps I'm asking too much and it won't actually be possible to play any kind of league at all. What joy.
Last night, as I went off to sleep, I was wondering why Konami decided to remove this... and suddenly the penny dropped. Presumably they're forcing everyone to play ML. They're forcing everyone to play ML because of the whole boots thing. It's not just some ill-advised gimmick - it's front and centre in their thinking, the key aspect of PES 2013. All that supposed work on the gameplay, it's all secondary to the magic boots, which are the number one priority this year, to the point where the game modes have been butchered to force everyone to experience that joy.
Now why would that have happened? Could it be because the whole thing is some kind of tie-in with Adidas and Nike, and one of the conditions of receiving money from those loveable sweatshop-funded corporate teddybears is that no one must be allowed to play a league season without their magic boots being a key component? And to ensure this aspect of the game can't be overlooked, the visual realism of ML must be destroyed so everyone who isn't wearing a pair of magic boots is very conspicuously wearing plain black clogs from 1965? So that the whole universe of football sim Pro Evolution Soccer is ruled by corporate-branded boots with special powers? I'm only speculating here, maybe I'm wrong. But if I'm wrong, Konami really are the stupidest company in the entire fucking world. And if I'm not, they're craven sods who have sold "our" game down the river for the sake of cold hard cash (which we know damn well will not be ploughed back into licenses or game development, it'll go straight into the Konami coffers and stay there) and they should be told in no uncertain terms that if they ever do it again they may find any material gains offset by the sudden drop in the number of PES players. It's bad enough this year... we all know there are lots of FIFA players planning to try PES again - what are they going to think when they splash out the best part of forty quid, go into a season, and realise they've just bought some kind of Japanese card-collecting game?
I don't know... maybe league mode is coming back in some kind of DLC. But that makes no sense whatsoever, so I really don't think so. I'd be pacified if it happened, but I can't imagine that for a second. I think this is the way Konami have chosen to take the game. If they carry on down this road, they can stick their Fox engine up their backsides - PES2014 may as well not be released. At least as far as I'm concerned.