rockstrongo
Retired Footballer
Yeah I get that you may have different view on these games if you play local multiplayer.I think the midfield game in 2020 is pretty good when playing on unassisted passing. I find I have to think carefully when playing out from defence, switching the play becomes really important, and passing between the lines takes some precision unlike PA1 and above.
I actually thought 2013 was an improvement on 12 in that sense! From what I remember, PES 2011 nailed the midfield play with its new passing system, then 2012 sped things up a little too much and made it easy to ping-pong from one end to the other. 13 was a bit of a middle ground between the two, and it fixed a few other problems with 12 (most notably the shooting physics, which were a bit too floaty in 11 and 12).
I'll still pick 2013, despite its faults, as my favorite because it's simply been the most fun game to play out of all of them. And I think the biggest reason is that it's perfectly balanced between attack and defence: it's probably the only football game I've played where defending is my favorite part. The player switching, which has been almost uniformly horrendous in the newer games, is completely on point, and your players respond instantly to loose balls (instead of doing ... whatever the hell it is they do in 2020).
One of the bigger complaints I remember from this game, especially in ML Online, was that it was a bit too easy to exploit pacy forwards with long through balls. But the beauty of the defensive controls was that you could anticipate this and manually control your deepest defender to position them to cut out the pass. Incredibly satisfying when you pulled it off!
I should also add that my experience with all the PES games is probably unique compared to most people on this site because I hardly ever touch the single-player or online modes. Local multiplayer only! So I've never really worried about how the AI cheats or what the cheap players online do, all that matters to me is how fun and realistic the gameplay is against human opponents.
Fore as a ML player I think 12 was very underrated.