I guess my favorite part of LoveFOOTBALL, aside from the insane name (yes that is the correct spelling), is the fact that you only control one player on the field. Pick a defender and you better be good at attacking players with the ball, pick an offensive position and you better like to drive to the goal. While this might sound incredibly revolutionary, and in some way it is, it’s also very limiting. Like if you pick to be the goalie you’re stuck in the goal with terrible controls and camera angles and have to leave 99% of the gameplay up to the stupid AI. That being said, there is an option buried in the settings that allows you to swap between all players on the field, but it’s not what the developers intended for the game.

Also if you pick a defense position you’ll have to rely on the idiotic AI to actually score which never ever happened for me. So in the end I picked mid-fielder most of the time just so I could be knee deep in the action 100% of the time. You may be wondering how you ever get your meaty paws on the ball if you only control one person and that’s where the “kick me the ball $#@!” button comes in. No matter where the ball is on the field if you push the A button; the player with the ball will attempt to kick it to you, and yes I did make up that name. This leads to a lot of retarded passes and a lot of really good maneuvers once you’ve had some practice.

Who put this *&$#ing arrow here?

The rest of the buttons do the regular football things like lob passes, shoot on goal kicks, slide tackles, and aggressive shoving. All that functions pretty well, but the star of the show when it comes to maneuvering is the right analog stick. Depending on which direction you point it you can juke a number of different ways to dodge defenders. Once you get decent at passing, asking for the ball, and juking you’ll be able to give and go the whole length of the field. There really is a lot of skill based finesse to be able to succeed when playing LoveFOOTBALL, but all the cool moves in the world can’t always save you from the disorienting camera angles and the retarded AI players.

LoveFOOTBALL surprisingly has a lot to offer elsewhere, the best of which is the single player story mode. You select from one of many players on the Japan football team to be the hero and from then on you shape his future and you get to see his life drama play out in slideshow cutscenes. Depending on which player you choose, different story elements occur and special things like unique banners show up in the crowds at games. I of course chose a guy with the last name Miyamoto, the same as Nintendo’s great game designer, so that I could hear the announcer constantly say it. As you win and lose games throughout the season new “supervisors” will appear and give you suggestions on what to do next. Apparently you can unlock a lot of stuff by completing the story mode over and over but I could only handle once through.