Captain Tsubasa 2: World Fighters Review – Flashy Footy

Captain Tsubasa 2: World Fighters is an over-the-top soccer game that’ll please series fans whilst also being an all-around pleasant arcade sports game for those who aren’t familiar with the source material. The pacing can be a bit jittery, but the gameplay and presentation are top-notch and will get anybody’s blood pumping.

I got to preview Captain Tsubasa 2: World Fighters earlier this summer and had a blast with it, despite having never read or watched the series it’s based on. Having played a few games since then, I went into the full title somewhat refreshed, and as was the case my first time around, I had a great time soaring around the pitch as quite a few extremely excited anime dudes.

The best way I can describe Captain Tsubasa 2: World Fighters is as a “ridiculous arcade soccer” game. As you might expect, you spend most of your time going back and forth on the field trying to kick the ball into the opposing team’s net, but the game goes a bit harder than most in pretty much every regard. Taking the ball from your foes typically means tackling or dive-kicking through them, while shots and passes become intense, high-flying blasts that feel more like energy beams than traditional kicks. It’s over-the-top and ridiculously fun to pull off, getting even someone as fairly uninterested in sports as I am excited about a footy match.

Even saving goals is more exciting than you might expect in Captain Tsubasa 2: World Fighters. When a kick is made on the net, the shooter chooses a direction for the ball to go in. The goalie then has to guess the direction based on the animation, and a correct guess lets you make a Perfect Save. This is essential for preserving the goalie’s energy, as blasting a ball through them while they have low energy can shorten their overall gauge for the rest of the match. I loved how much strategy and timing went into every aspect of a match, and I found myself way more engaged than I’ve been in almost any other sports game before.

Captain Tsubasa 2: World Fighters has a classic shonen manga story.

Since I haven’t read or watched Captain Tsubasa, I didn’t know much about the narrative. Captain Tsubasa 2: World Fighters covers the World Youth arc, but provides a quick and sufficient recap of the prior arcs (which were also covered in the first game). Even without much prior knowledge, I found the story beats surprisingly riveting. The core shonen principles of “Effort, Friendship, and Victory” are prevalent and as thrilling as they are in all the best action manga, and I quickly found myself liking certain characters and rooting for them.

A sizeable portion of the game is also spent in visual novel-esque segments, where your custom character can interact with the dozens of characters present in the story. There’s a bit of variety in the responses you can give, but they primarily just lead to brief reactions from the other characters. It’s a tiny thing, but it does well enough in making you feel like you’re a part of the narrative in a decently engrossing way.

The only thing I wasn’t too keen on was the way in which events and scenes would interrupt matches. You can choose to skip all events, but that makes you miss out on big story moments, yet they can also mess with the flow of a match by suddenly popping up at the worst moments possible. I’m not sure whether presenting quotes and the like during gameplay, or leading into the interruptions more smoothly, would be the ideal solution, but I figure there must be a less intrusive way to present these cool scenes.

Captain Tsubasa 2: World Fighters certainly emulates Yōichi Takahashi’s memorable art style perfectly, as the characters and story scenes look like an anime in motion. This is especially notable when you make your own avatar character, as the wide plethora of available features let you make your own Captain Tsubasa character that looks as close to the manga and anime as a fan could hope. I imagine diehards will really love making themselves in the game, as it provides you with the same kind of immersive feel as similar titles like the Dragon Ball Xenoverse games.