The Best (and Worst) of NES Soccer Games

Whether you call it soccer or football, it’s one of the most popular sports on Earth. Europe goes apeshit bonkers for it, and that World Cup shindig always gets crazy viewership when it rolls around. Soccer may not be my personal favourite sport, but it’s still good fun to watch the pro players roll around on the pitch and whimper like little babies when they’re trying to net their team some free kicks. In the spirit of World Cup season, I thought I’d work my way through the meager handful of soccer games the North American NES had to offer. There were only five released in this region, meaning the pickings were shockingly slim for 8-bit soccer nuts desperate to get their fix. Which of these five are the MVPs of the lot? Let’s find out!

1. Tecmo Cup Soccer Game (Tecmo, 1992)

It’s typical that the soccer game I enjoyed the most is the one that doesn’t play like a soccer game at all. That’s because Tecmo Cup Soccer Game is actually an RPG! Instead of the traditional “attack / defend / item” commands, you get to shoot, pass, and dribble your way to glory. It sounds like a concept that shouldn’t work at all, but it’s a great game that’s easy to understand, and surprisingly engaging to boot. If you’ve ever played the Blitzball mini-game in Final Fantasy X, it’s very similar to Tecmo Cup Soccer Game (which is a nice way of saying that Square totally ripped it off). The Famicom original was based off of the mega popular Captain Tsubasa anime/manga, though all of the characters and music from the series were replaced with generic stand-ins for the North American version. This lineage explains the crazy dramatics of the game’s impressive animations, which help to keep the action feeling exciting in a genre that’s susceptible to combat feeling one-note and dull.

It only gets better as it goes on, too. Once you beat the first seven matches, you move onto the World Tecmo Cup with a dream team consisting of all of the best players from the enemy teams you beat before! Even if the reliance on RNG feels a little too prevalent near the end of the game, I thoroughly enjoyed the over the top antics of Tecmo Cup Soccer Game and was sad to see it end. This was easily my favourite of the North American soccer offerings, and it’s a crying shame the NES never saw any of the Famicom only sequels. If the concept of a soccer RPG sounds interesting to you, don’t hesitate to give this one a shot (har har)!

Final score:

2. Nintendo World Cup (Technos, 1990)

I’m not a huge sports game fan, but I live laugh love for any title that adds wildly unnecessary violence to a sport that has none. What little violence there is in real soccer is usually bookended by some of that previously mentioned “grown men clutching their shins and wailing” phenom, making it feel kinda lame. Lucky for those of us who like a little bloodshed alongside our sports, there are no red cards in sight on this pitch; it’s a total brawlfest until one team of testosterone fueled teenagers emerges victorious. The seamless marriage of the sports and beat-em-up genres is a delight; punch and slide tackle your way past your enemies, and score flashy goals using power shots to blow through the opposition’s goalkeeper. If you wail on the opposite team enough, members will collapse on the field and not get back up until halftime is over, meaning you can run some serious rings around them! If you’re looking for a realistic soccer simulation, you’d better look elsewhere honey, because nobody does over the top cartoonish violence like the River City / Kunio-kun series.

While NWC’s quick pace is a joy, the game’s got a quirk or two that holds it back from being a perfect smash; the first of which being that you can only control your chosen player character. The rest of your team is AI controlled, and there’s no way to switch to other players when they have the ball, as is the standard in..pretty much every other team sports game ever made before or since. You can command your teammates to pass the ball to you, or to try and score a goal using the A and B buttons respectively, but oftentimes your knucklehead team mates will respond to your commands with “I can’t!” as they proceed to do the opposite of whatever you told them to. It takes some practice to get a hang of the right timing, and that’s all well and good, but it just can’t beat to the total control of auto-switching to the character that has the ball. My only other complaint about NWC would be that it’s a bit on the simple side; the goalkeepers almost always throw to the same team mate (even if they’ve been K.O.’d, for example), and it’s not unusual to win a round by a massive margin like 10-0 up until the end. But don’t get me wrong; its still a damn fine game, bursting at the seams with chaotic energy and infectious personality once you adjust to its rules. NWC is a must-play for any soccer game fan; don’t miss it!

Final score:

3. Soccer (Nintendo, 1985)

Soccer on the NES. This is soccer in its simplest form: you kick a ball around the field, you score some goals, and that’s it. There are no fancy moves, tournament modes, or teams with varying stats here. If you want soccer, you’re getting the most soccerest soccer game that ever soccer’d a soccer. Soccer certainly isn’t bad, simplicity be damned, but it scores a zero in the replayability department; if you’ve played one round, you’ve truly played them all. I reviewed this game back in 2021, but that post isn’t much longer than this humble little paragraph, because there’s not much more to say. IT’S SOCCER!

Final score:

4. Goal Two (Jaleco, 1992)

Finding out there was a sequel to the unholy hellspawn that landed in last place on this list was terrifying. I didn’t want to face the horrors that lay in store for me on this accursed pitch. How does it fare when compared to its unbearable predecessor? Not much better, but better all the same. The music and presentation are a gargantuan step up from the first one; controlling the players is also much smoother and the speed of the game is worlds faster, which makes the whole thing more palatable. The big problem with this one (because of course there’s a big problem, it’s a goddamn Goal! game) lies in the passing.

In most team sports games, the pass button will automatically pass to the nearest team member when used alongside the correct direction press. In Goal Two, it’s a crapshoot – both figuratively and literally. When you hit the pass button alongside a direction, the ball just kinda…does whatever it wants to. It could stop in front of one of your teammates, it could stop in front of one of the opposition, and it could bounce into a spot on the field you didn’t even know existed. You’re supposed to use a technique the manual calls an “English”; when the ball is flying through the air, you can press and hold the A button, and then hold a direction to hook the ball in that direction. This feature was also in the first Goal!, and was possibly the only good thing about that abomination. In this one, passing is so reliant on this technique that it becomes a massive pain in the ass. I’m sure there are highly skilled players out there who have mastered this technique, but I don’t have that kind of time or patience to put into a game that’s so aggressively garbage.

There’s one very important thing about Goal Two that makes it leagues better than the first one: the ability to make a full game last two minutes instead of an agonizing fifteen! Thanks to this wonderful feature, Goal Two is easily over in an hour or less, which makes it worlds better than the first one. YAHOO!

Final score:

5. Goal! (Jaleco, 1989)

The phrase “the bottom of the barrel” is thrown around a lot, but have you ever dared to stare into the inky black abyss that is the barrel’s boundless bottom with your own two eyes? I have. When the abyss croaks out a whisper, you hear but a single, bone-chilling word:

“Goal!”

Goal! burst its way onto the NES to terrorize poor soccer loving children (and me) back in 1989. Playing Goal! is pain, of both the mental and physical variety. This is the only NES game I’ve encountered to date that’s given me a pounding headache out of sheer aggravation, and godawful hand cramps on top of that. The hand cramps were so frequent because I’d subconsciously hold the D-pad down extra hard in a sad attempt to make the characters go faster, because they move slow as shit across the bizarrely large field. Of course, it’s not just the unbearable speed that makes this game a chore. The isometric perspective sucks, the graphics are drab as hell, and the sound effects are dire; I don’t know who’s bright idea it was to add a constant droning sound effect that’s meant to represent a dribbling ball, but I hope they were never allowed to work on sound design again.

After the third round of the world cup, the enemy AI suddenly becomes god-like and will intercept EVERY SINGLE pass you try to make. During the fifth round and beyond, it becomes borderline impossible to steal from the enemy team, meaning you’ll never have the ball for more than a few seconds at a time, because they can and will steal it from you at every conceivable opportunity. One of the only strategies around this is to blindly kick the ball as hard as you can toward the opposition’s goal, and attempt to hook your shots towards your players that are hopelessly wandering around the pitch. Your team’s AI, by the way, is a total joke. If you try passing the ball to them, they’ll often stand perfectly still and happily let the ball roll past them and straight to the enemy’s feet. To reach the game’s ending, you have to endure seven, 30 minute soul crushing games of the World Cup. Every single element of Goal! is working against you, making what should be the simplest of soccer games into a masochist’s wet dream.

Any other game on this list is better. Goal! makes Wayne Gretzky Hockey look like a masterwork of video game engineering. This game probably called me an expletive when I had my back turned. Goal! is by far the sports game I’ve hated the most, and is easily one of my bottom five NES games to date. So far, at least – at this point in the challenge, I’ve still got something like five hundred more NES games to go. But with every future title, no matter how dire, I’ll be comforting myself with a simple mantra: “hey, at least it’s not Goal!”

To summarize, it’s bad. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. SO bad. Like holy shit this is bad. Wow.

Final score:

Final verdict:

Most of the games on this list make for a nice way to scratch any NES soccer related itches you may have that can’t be treated with over the counter ointments. Tecmo Cup Soccer Game was my favourite of the pack, with Nintendo World Cup coming in at a chaotically close second. Soccer is, indeed, soccer. Goal! and Goal Two should be shot on sight. Merry World Cup, one and all!