For the most part, I don’t think sports games work that well on the Game Boy Advance. Outside of games made by Nintendo, or more prominent devs like Camelot who understand the breadth of what the Game Boy Advance can do, the vast majority of sport games feel underbaked, limiting, and frankly, generally unfun to play. This goes double for the annualized sport tiles that just *had* to worm their way onto every platform possible, the two biggest of which on the GBA were Madden and FIFA.

FIFA Football 2005 is a hard game for me to critique, being so far out of my sphere of awareness, both in my actual interest in the sport, and my general aversion to annualized sport video games. But I was pretty surprised at the depth this game has, mostly in the amount of ‘game’ you can wring from it. It is decisively mediocre in pretty much all respects, but, putting myself in the shoes of a young man with just a GBA and nothing else… I mean, if you really need some football games in your life, you really could do worse than FIFA’s 2005 offering. Thankfully, in stark opposition to my time with Madden 2002 (largely due to football being a largely more coherent game than ‘American Football’, which led to my fantastically shitpost-worthy review of it), FIFA 2005 was much easier to pick up.

Football In A Nutshell

Actually, in line with it being one of the simplest, most popular sports in the world, FIFA 2005 is just as easy to learn how to play. Much like its console cousins, you’ll be playing football in a totally traditional way, two-halves, get the ball in the opponent’s goal, all that - it’s pretty much a pseudo-simulator of the sport (or as much as the little console that could manage with it). Controls are simple: When in possession of the ball, you can tap B to pass between players to dart about defending opponents, or hit A when you’re ready to go for a scoring goal or a hail mary shot. Tapping B while not in possession of the ball will click you (usually) over to the player nearest to the ball, giving you a chance to swipe the ball back, which you can do just by just sort of… running into an opposing player. You can also tackle lightly or more fiercely, but since half the time I attempted this it just ended up with me getting yellow/red carded, I opted for the simpler ‘run into them until I get the ball back’ strat. You score goals, and at the end of a match whoever has the higher score wins.

Thankfully, controls are fairly tight and responsive, though occasionally it felt like my players weren’t shooting for goals when I hit the A button, letting the goalies just nab the ball away from them for nothing, but it never really bothered me that much. The only time I felt the ability to quickly jump between players hamstrung me was when the CPU were shooting goals - it felt that if my goalie wasn’t already in position to block the shot, I just didn’t have time to switch to them and manually block it.

That’s football, baby.

I’m… not really sure how to expand on this description. With the game throwing up the controls before each match, and football being a nearly universal language for some people, the game almost describes itself - especially being on a fairly simple console like the Game Boy Advance. There are a few more complex strategies, like proper goal shooting positioning and dancing around enemy players to keep possession, but again… it’s football.

The big thing is, I just wouldn’t call it the most engaging game in the world; once you get to grips with its ultimately simple setup, you’ll quickly fall into a flow state and start expertly getting the ball across the field without any real issue. Though, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a few moments that sent me grinning; landing an awkward shot squarely in the opponent’s goal feels *great*, and there was an almost sick satisfaction I got snowballing to victory in the game’s far-ranging Career mode. Really, the big difference maker as to how much you’re actually going to enjoy FIFA 2005 is how much you jive with that flow state, because beyond this core gameplay loop, the game lacks any real sense of depth.

Various elements that are probably core to FIFA’s console editions, like players being sent out on injury, or substituting players to focus on certain stats or whatever, feel like afterthoughts. Teams on the macro level, and players on the micro, largely feel as if they’re playing essentially the same, turning much of the more customizable elements of the game - picking your team and whatnot - into little more than set dressing. But again, this isn’t my genre, and this isn’t my wheelhouse, so maybe I’m missing some intricacies from my relative inexperience.

Wemberly Stadium, In Your Hands

Even with the obvious limitations that come with porting the game to the GBA, EA have tried to avoid cutting corners wherever they can, and that’s best represented in the sheer amount of teams and competitions you can engage with. There are probably hundreds of teams across more than a dozen countries, and more cups and titles you can play for than I can count - it almost made scrolling the list looking for a team and cup I actually know *almost* a pain! I

But when it comes to actually using those teams, FIFA 2005 features a handful of modes to play around with, with the bulk of your time likely being spent in the career and competition game modes. Whilst both feature you taking the wheel behind a team of your choice, the Career and Competition modes vary heavily in scale. The latter, Competition, will have you selecting a particular cup or tournament, then selecting a team to play out that specific tourney in a vacuum. To test out the mode, I picked the English Cup and then Tottenham to win the seven-odd matches that made up the tournament. Simple and clean, perfect for someone wanting to play out their team in a more limited setting.

Career mode, though, that’s where the meat of the game is lurking. Upon selecting your team, you’ll be placed in whatever league that team generally belongs to. You’ll follow a traditional football season schedule, with weekly home and away games, eventually leading to tournaments, playoffs, and all that trophy-related nonsense I don’t quite understand. A full season can take place across more than thirty separate matches, featuring full leagues of teams competing with their own wins and losses. Key to the progression of this mode - and a good reason to actually aim for some decent wins, is that winning matches and trophies will earn you points that, upon hitting certain milestones, ‘ranks up’ your power as a team manager and raises the overall stats of your team. They’re small boosts, but it’s nice to feel like your team is actually progressing.

Honestly, considering the obvious smaller scale, I didn’t expect something like Career mode’s scale. So many little details, and enough of a carrot of a stick to keep me engaged in a genre I don’t typically like… it’s cool! Ultimately though, it is just a slightly more souped-up version of the rest of the game; like I said earlier, though - the fact that player injuries and substitutions matter fairly little does weaken the appeal of the mode. Still, it’s 100% my favourite part of the game - having a better sense of structure, of goals and progression for my team of choice was great, and eventually getting the ability to essentially ‘level-up’ your team by playing well is a great bonus.

A Pitch An Inch Deep

Giving the game even a touch of progression did help me stick with it a little bit longer, but by the time I ended my first season, I’d pretty much tapped out. There were just so many matches to play, all of them exactly the same in structure, and even reducing them to only a couple of minutes in length had me burning out after a couple of hours play… and the fact that to ‘complete’ Career mode, there were four more seasons to complete is insane. And like I said earlier, though - the fact that player injuries and substitutions matter fairly little does weaken the appeal of the mode, but

I suppose since this is ostensibly a simulator for football, they needed the ability to simulate matches, but maaan, it really feels like a trap more than anything else. No matter what team I was playing as - teams being ranked out of five stars - it felt like 90% of the time I hit that Simulate Match button, it was going to be a straight out loss for me there and then. And it sucks, because it really felt like I *needed* to use it during my journey with Columbus Crew’s football journey. Like I said, a ~32 game season, of which there and five seasons, is a crazy ask for players to engage with, especially when the game is inevitably as stripped down compared to its more in-depth console versions, leading to matches that feel incredibly repetitive after a couple of hours.

Outside of the main competition modes, the only other thing to do in FIFA 2005 are the ‘Rout’ and ‘Comeback’ challenges, and these are pretty cute. They’ll take notable, historical football matches where a certain team was utterly devastated or came back after a notable deficit, and task you with replicating the feat from partway through the match. For someone a little more skilled with this game, they’d probably be a bit more fun, but I’m a fool who hasn’t quite gotten used to the behaviour of the AI (on both sides of the pitch) - throwing certain limitations, giving me only a few (real-time) minutes to score multiple goals can be tricky and rage-inducing in equal measure… buuuut, that’s just a sport-averse fool talking. It’s good to see something beyond just the exhibition and competition-framed modes of the game, because after even after a couple of hours, there’s only so much desire to play just *another* football match.

Because, honestly, the biggest issue I’ve been building up is just how quickly everything starts to blend together. Being a port of football’s biggest simulation franchise, I understand they want to keep that design ethos for the GBA version, but it really becomes a detriment before long. Being able to play out multiple seasons as a variety of different clubs is cool and all, but playing dozens and dozens of the same format, staring at the same graphics and rather middling difficulty even on harder settings really isn’t that engaging. And again, perhaps that’s why they kept the ‘simulate game’ function, but when it feels like using that option is an automatic ‘you lose’ button nine times out of ten, it really doesn’t feel like a way to offset how grindy and repetitive FIFA 2005 really is.

The big elephant in the room I haven’t addressed is how the game looks and… yeah. FIFA 2005 is certainly… unique looking. The zoomed out view reduces players to little more than brightly coloured rectangles with similarly rectangular appendages, with the football nine pixels of white with a dot of black to signify it as a soccer ball. It’s simple, it’s rough, but… I’ll be frank… I don’t mind how it looks. It looks cheap and trying to discern any actual detail is nothing more than a fool’s errand, but I don’t remotely *mind* it. It’s charming beyond all belief, especially when you’re actually playing it at GBA’s native resolution, and they actually do a great job with the game’s colours so that you’re not unable to glean exactly what’s happening.

The same can’t be said for the audio; outside of the menu having a banger vocal track that sounds pretty good for the GBA’s soundchip, the bulk of the game has no music, matches filled with just the gentle roar of the crowd, interspaced by the dull clunk of the football being kicked around. I know, I know, it’s pretty standard for sport games to go without music for the actual gameplay, but with the audiovisual experience on the GBA already being so hampered, it really could’ve used something a little extra to spruce it all up.

Overall, I think FIFA 2005 is perfectly serviceable, and even enjoyable at times. Like I said, sport game ports have it really rough on the GBA, and that goes double for annualized series, but here, I think they generally pulled it off, and made something especially worth playing if the GBA was the only way for you to engage with the series. For me, though, the most interesting parts of the game in the form of Career Mode quickly grew tiresome with how repetitive the game is, and the additional modes were only worth a glance a little more. There’s no real reason to go back to this game outside of some sense of curiosity, but I’m glad I did give it a shot - it’s just nice to see that any genre really can live, even if they may not thrive, on the little handheld that could.

…

I say that, but I’m NOT looking forward to my return to Madden…