It obviously must be down to gameplay, but what aspects particularly shine?
Bearing in mind it was only an 8-way control system and the 360 degrees control wasn't brought in until 2010.
You're making a mistake, you're looking at it with the optic of today's football games standard. But for the standard of the times when it came out, the game was simply great and felt an incredible game.
Many of us obviously became much more demanding, to the point where the same type of gameplay but with today's standards into it (360º and so on) would not be enough, and a modern PES 6 would be too much arcade for our likings. To the point that we want a complex, much more simulation grounded gameplay, and even a PES 21 with all the scripting out, would not sufice for us, since it is too easy to score a goal compared to a realistic match.
I won't say that all of us wants a game leaned towards playing 90 match minutes, but probably a lot of people wants to play 30-45 minutes and not have too many goals, and have at the same time a realistic gameplay, and there's not too many gameplays that provide that, if any. We actually want changes of pace, having to move the ball around, and be able to do it calmly, having to observe the big picture... I repeat, is not easy to explain but the whole point is that the game needs much more effort into it to be revolutionary, needs to seem much more a real life match to actually like it.
We didn't have that level of exigence back in the '00s, also cause we never dreamt of the technology to do so, so we were ok with a game were you had to use your brain a bit, and did not put so much attention to detail. You gotta understand something. The exigence of the people comes tailored by what industry show that can do. Back in the '90's, games were not that good technically and graphically speaking, but the PS2 game, proved that there could be a new level of graphic fidelity. From that on, graphic fidelity started to be a standard. I think that way of seeing videogames, of putting attention to detail, being much more realistic physics wise and such, came at the end of '00s and start of '10's and that's when we started to be much more exigent with gameplay, further than not bein sluggish, and became a standard to have a more polished and realistic gameplay. Don't get me wrong, there was also a gameplay leap from the '90's to 00's, but the graphical leap was so big that it outshined it. But PS3, while being graphically superior than it's predecessor, it was not that big of a change, and on the opposite, most of the changes came in attention to detail, even when we speak about graphics. How water deform when a helicopter is over it, how the ball gets that sweet curve and deforms the net at the impact, how a football player behaves when jostling with another... And that last thing exactly is where it started to get interesting, when detail affects gameplay and playability itself and changes it completely. When the games started to be more realistic wise in a physics term, we adopted that mentality of emulating the reality much more into us. Mid '00s is when first driving hardcore simulation game started appearing (cause before that there was only rally games and GT as driving simulators, and were not even that close). RBR, iRacing, RFactor 1... it was a lot of them that started appearing mid '00s, and got grounded in the market as the time passed and reached the '10s and simulation became a goal for the industry. Once they decided to add that to the videogames it became something else to care about, also for the consumer. So it was then when we became to be more demanding in that way.
So you look now at PES 6 and obviously it looks quite meh, both graphically and in gameplay, but for it's epoque it was an extremely refined game that played really, really great, and that's what made it a legend.
