Fifa 19 has nifty new features

Fifa 19 has a new ‘no rules’ option where fouls and offsides don’t count, writes Ronan Jennings

Yesterday, football legends turned out at Páirc Uí Chaoimh in Cork to honour the late Liam Miller. Defying naysayers, the match had sold out of tickets within days of going on sale. A decade on from their peak, those legends can still draw a crowd.

If Fifa has one thing over its great rival, Pro Evolution Soccer, it is the ability to tap into our love of the myth of football. The crowds will always flock to big names, the legends of the sport, and every year Fifa has something special to emphasise just that.

Two years ago it was The Journey, the fictional story of Alex Hunter’s rise through the professional ranks. This year, it is something much more substantial — the Champions League licence. In winning the battle with PES for the licence, EA have galvanised Fifa’s position as the only game that fully delivers on the fantasy of modern football.

If you want to win the European Cup with Juventus, with the Champions League Anthem blaring and a list of officially licenced teams in your wake, then Fifa 19 is the only option.

That change aside, Fifa 19 has some other truly interesting additions to the squad this year. The best of these might be the House Rules games, which put a fun twist on the standard gameplay types. There’s headers and volleys, for example, and the brilliant ‘no rules’ option, where both offside and fouls no longer count. It’s a bit like playing with a team of Sergio Ramos.

Even better, however, is the ‘survival’ mode, whereby every time a team scores, one of their players is taken from the pitch, leaving them at a disadvantage. This makes for some really cool games of back and forth, where scoring isn’t always the best option.

Unfortunately, House Rules is limited to offline only, but there are plenty of changes to standard gameplay too. The first touch system now allows for some lovely little flicks and set-ups, so you can pull off your own Bergkamp turn. Players seem a little slower than before, making attacks more about finding space. There’s even a timer system for shooting which can result in shots fizzing off your boot, or ballooning into the crowd, depending on your success.

Ultimately, however, choosing whether to buy Fifa comes down to personal loyalty and preference. It’s a bit like Declan Rice staring at an Irish and English jersey. For our money, PES is still the better football engine, producing the better balance of gameplay and certainly better player-on-player matches.

However, Fifa is streets ahead when it comes to glitz and glamour and presentation, plus it’s a fine football game in its own right. If you’re a Fifa fan, this year’s version has done more than enough to justify the season ticket.

DRAGON QUEST

Meanwhile, if you prefer the green grass of fairytale meadows, then Dragon Quest XI is worth tackling. While our patience for old-school RPGs isn’t what it once was, there’s no denying that the sheer colour, charm and polish of Echoes of a Lost Age is top class.

Journeying through the world of Erdrea is a real joy, with dozens of locations to visit, each one with unique identity and character. Every area has its own set of customs, architecture and even accents. While most of the cultures are based upon existing tropes, like an ‘Italian’ seaside town, it doesn’t stop Dragon Quest XI from being a real work of art when it comes to exploration and discovering a living, cartoon universe.

Your patience for the remainder of the game will depend heavily on how entertaining you find the story, the combat — or both, if you’re very lucky.

The combat is the weaker of the two, as it becomes repetitive very quickly, reproducing the same old systems that we’ve seen for years in Dragon’s Quest. However, on the flipside, it’s never too taxing and allows players to enjoy the journey. The story might seem a little saccharine at first, but with 70 hours of plot it eventually become a worthwhile investment, especially as the endearing cast start to become fleshed out and you begin to feel like you are living in an interactive anime.

As reductive as it might seem, Dragon Quest XI doesn’t really do anything to attract new players to its existing demographic — this is a game made for ‘Otaku’ (hardcore fans, in this context). For everyone else, the game might dragon a bit.