To me, the greatest thing about the Mentality attribute is that one can't help but feel positively affected by the demonstration of bravery of a player with high Mentality...sometimes I'm losing a match and I kind of "give up" even before the match has ended; but then Stein (almost 90 mentality) starts leading by example with his fighting for every ball and he seems to play even better when the situation is adverse. One can't help but be encouraged just by watching him, and I get a renewed ambition to fight for that match. I feel like I can't let a guy like Stein down. This is crazy, but the ingame effect of the mentality stat is so obvious that affects the game itself but also affects us, in real-life. Maybe it's one of the reasons why Retro-PES is such an immersive experience.
Also the Teamwork stat is very important too. A team filled with high teamwork guys will play like a unit defensively and offensively (think Guardiola's Barcelona or Simeone's Atletico), and when you the player have the ball, a high-teamwork CPU teammate will be more intelligent when providing passing lanes for you. For me it's the PES equivalent of "football IQ". My newgen CMF Sousa has 89 TW and it's a beauty to see his off-the-ball play.
About scripting, I don't want to ruin your experience
@Special4988 but on the PSP versions it's definitely there. I don't see it as a bad thing though. In real-life you see awkward stuff like a team fighting to avoid relegation beating the previously unbeaten 1st placed (coff coff...Porto last year vs. Paços de Ferreira...), or a team suddenly unable to win matches as if a spell had been cast on them. Inasmuch I think it forces you to become proactive and change things up to get your team back on track.
Great analysis there
@Special4988, for it's leading you to a conclusion I'm still not certain of after much thinking about it, but I suspect it's true: 360 movement greatly augmented the difficulty to create a stats-based football game and current developer knowledge/tecnhology still haven't figured that out. But I'm far from a programmer, so I wouldn't know for sure.
By the way, welcome to the Corner (and Evo-Web)
@Cyrax77! Do you play any Retro-PES games these days?