YMMV / FIFA Soccer

• Awesome Music:
  • Imagine qualifying for, and winning the World Cup, to the sound of "Song 2". You can do it in 98.
  • It also transcends beyond the in-game soundtracks. Take a look at the trailer for 16 and see how amazingly well Etta James' "At Last" fits with the images.
• Broken Base:
  • The tackling system seems to divide fans every game. Worth noting that every new iteration is likely to alter the tackling mechanics regardless of its popularity, meaning there will usually always be players left claiming They Changed It, Now It Sucks!.
  • Women's football for FIFA 16. Is it a cool new game mode increasing the representation of women in sports games? Or is it a redundant mode that hardly anyone will use? The second criticism isn't helped by the fact that it is impossible to play intergender matches (as it is in real life), and that FUT, the most popular mode, will be completely male because male players vastly outnumber the females.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Combined with Small Reference Pools, players picking the most famous/successful Euro Footy teams (Barcelona, Real Madrid, Manchester United, Juventus, Bayern Munich, Paris Saint-Germain) are really common.
• Critic-Proof: The Switch "Legacy Edition" ports from 20 and beyond invariably get exceptionally poor reviews from both professional critics and gamers alike. That doesn't stop the Switch ports being some of the best-selling games on the platform each year, thanks to it being the only real way to play this series on the go.
• Difficulty Spike: The earliest games had three difficulty levels: Amateur, Professional and World Class. While you could easily grow accustomed to Amateur level, to a point you could even curbstomp the other team effortlessly, the AI always took a level in badass when you moved up to Professional. And don't get us started on World Class. Thankfully fixed in later installments.
• Fandom Rivalry: With Pro Evolution Soccer players, to DC/Marvel levels as far as sports games are concerned.
• Fan Nickname:
  • "Beast" for players with high pace, strength, shot power and heading.
  • "Sweaty" for players with high pace.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Any player with both 5 star skills and a 5 star weak foot, such as Neymar.
  • "Beast/sweaty" players, who have above-average speed and/or strength.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • Possibly the most famous bug in the series: in the original game, it was possible to stand in front of the opposing goalkeeper when he was about to take a goal kick, causing the kick to ricochet off you and backwards into the net for an easy goal. This was understandably patched out starting with 95, although it creeped back in during the 7th generation console era. Unfortunately, this still existed in a fashion in '96; shooting the instant the keeper was to kick the ball (out of hand only, else you aren't allowed close enough to do it off a goal kick) would result in a diving header/scorpion kick and the ball would end up in the net.
  • The original game also allowed you to run away from the referee when he came over to book you, causing the match to grind to a halt while the referee chases you relentlessly across the pitch. Naturally, someone on YouTube has set it to "Yakety Sax".
• Growing the Beard:
  • Though each of the early games improved on the last, it's generally felt that Road to World Cup 98 is when the series really got good.
  • For most of its lifetime, FIFA was considered inferior to Konami's International Superstar Soccer/Winning Eleven/Pro Evolution Soccer series, to the point that the Konami games would routinely outsell FIFA in European markets, despite FIFA's longer list of real league licenses and players. With the jump to the PS3/360, Pro Evolution began to flounder as Konami had difficulty working with the new consoles (not unlike EA Sports and Madden); at the same time, FIFA 08 came out to widespread acclaim and boosted sales thanks to a much improved and reworked engine that focused on tightening the gameplay itself. In short order, FIFA became the best-selling sports series worldwide, including topping 10+ million sales a year, and was the first soccer game to land on the yearly top-10 best selling games; hand-in-hand, it also routinely outscored Pro Evolution in the reviews. Although PES has improved much towards the end of the generation (despite PES 2014 being a rather Obvious Beta for the Fox Engine), EA had seized the window of opportunity and now have a stranglehold in all markets.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • The special 95 rated Hero Elio Castro, given to Twitch streamer Castro1021 for raising $80,000 for cancer charities during a 50 hour charity stream. Manly Tears were shed that day.
  • After a plane crash killed nearly the entire Brazilian Chapecoense team, FIFA 17 added their emblem as a free to wear item.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!:
  • Fans were vocal about EA extending the life of their Wii presence by simply releasing FIFA 13 basically unaltered from FIFA 12 aside from transactions and updated kits. This trope reared itself again with FIFA 20 Legacy Edition and beyond for Nintendo Switch (a FIFA 19 update in effect), as EA implicitly gave up on the system regarding FIFA for various tech- and sales-related reasons.
    • Averted as of the Nintendo Switch version of EA Sports FC, which finally caught up to the PlayStation 4 / Xbox One versions.
  • By the time of FIFA 21 critics were increasingly beginning to call this on the franchise as a whole, questioning its business model of charging full price for annual updates when new features were becoming increasingly thin on the ground, problems with the game's mechanics and glitches weren't being addressed, and microtransactions were becoming more and more pervasive.
• Older Than They Think: EA made some negative waves when they announced FIFA 20 for the Switch would be a Legacy Edition, a term used for EA sports games on previous-gen consoles when a yearly title is unaltered from the prior season aside from transactions and uniforms/kits, especially when new features and engine changes would be incompatible with underpowered hardware. However, this practice dates back to even the 16-bit era, as EA and Sega released 'legacy' versions of MLB and NFL games in the twilight years of the Sega Genesis (through 1997), EA and Sony similarly did so with NFL, NBA, and MLB games for the PS1 through 2004, and so forth. While some fans and detractors cry foul over this tactic, it's a low-cost venture for publishers with established sports franchises; sports games sell just well enough with previous-gen gamers who have yet to make the next jump but crave current titles, but not well enough to divert resources and manpower from the next/current generation of titles that require more attention. While this flew under the radar in the 90's and 00's, it's easier to bring this to light in the modern era of gaming, with the advent of social media amplifying instantaneous fan reactions, on top of poorly-received business decisions from EA across their portfolio. FIFA 20 also drew more specific scorn since it wasn't an old system, but simply EA deciding to punt on the Switch regarding the series.
• Porting Disaster:
  • The PC ports really went downhill as the 2000s progressed, showing few improvements over the console versions (mainly because, until 10, they still based themselves off the PS2 version) and being prone to major glitches.
  • The Xbox 360 port of 07 was an odd case, as it featured a proper ball physics system for the first time in the series... at the cost of over half of the leagues from the PS2 and original Xbox versions, most noticeably the entire Italian Serie A (for some bizarre reason the only Italian club in that version was Juventus, who had been temporarily busted down to Serie B due to a match fixing scandal).
• The Problem with Licensed Games: Mostly averted with the main games, but The World Cup and European Championship games tended to suffer from this up until the Euro 2008 game. FIFA 2000 is notable among the main series for being the worst, especially considering the titles prior to its release were well-liked.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • FIFA 12's tackling system has its fair share of detractors, a common complaint being that slide tackling in the game favours the AI. Not to mention it's also seen as more difficult to perform tackles in the game than in real life. Though in fairness, tackling is always divisive in soccer games.
  • FIFA 15 has received much criticism and flak for its "price range" system, which constricts players selling footballers to only a minimum and maximum amount of coins. This has effectively ruined the Ultimate Team mode in general. To add insult to injury, the price ranges axed off coin sponsors, which is how many FIFA Youtubers get money so they can afford coins and make more FIFA videos.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: There are stories of 98 players who took on the Road to World Cup mode with inexpressive national teams and lifted the World Cup with them. Similarly in newer entries, taking a mid-to-low level team from a minor European league and going on to win the European Championship with it.
• Sequelitis:
  • 2000 was generally agreed to be the worst game in the series (or at least the worst one with 3D graphics) due to the glitchy AI, inconsistent difficulty and screwy controls, as well as a generally whitewashed feel (players only had nine attributes rated 1-7, and there was no option to adjust team management or choose a stadium before a match as could be done in prior games or in 06 and later). The following three outings got things back on track, but then the series hit a lean patch from 2004 to 07, with the games not getting any worse, but not really improving. Since then however, things have generally been on the up...
  • Until 19 came around and took the "throne" from 2000 (although in fairness it became the breaking point of a heap of problems that compounded throughout the last half-decade), thanks to the generally downgraded gameplay, mainly imprecise shooting mechanics, AI that can work both against and for the player thanks to Random Number God being in full effect, and inconsistent physics, leading to the general feel that EA has let a gold-foil package (€50 price tag and the UEFA Champions League license as a selling point) hide the pudding by focusing more on microtransactions via FUT than actually tweaking the core gameplay. Not for nothing it has one of the largest gaps between reviewer and user scores on Metacritic: 84/100 and 1.7/10, respectively (this in particular might be chalked up to review-bombing from disgruntled players, but still)!!! Things then went From Bad to Worse with 20, which launched in a borderline broken state with an extremely minimal number of upgrades over 19 — and that's before you get to the Switch port, which really did have no changes whosoever from 19 other than new teams and kits.
• Song Association
  • "Love Me Again" by John Newman, from FIFA 14, has become the unofficial theme song to the FIFA series, appearing again in 22 (as a remix), 23, and the trailer to EA Sports FC (also as a remix).
  • For the 2022 World Cup, FIFA 23 added 40 greatest hits from past FIFA games, many of which are still strongly associated with the games.
  • The opening themes in particular ("Song 2"^note From FIFA 98, "Tubthumping"^note World Cup 98, "The Rockafeller Skank"^note 99, "Bodyrock"^note 2001, "19-2000" (Soulchild Remix)"^note 2002...).
  • Others like Lionrock's "Rude Boy Rock"^note also 99 and "We Sink"^note FIFA 14 are hard to dissociate from the games.
  • 2000's theme song, Robbie Williams' "It's Only Us", was recorded exclusively for the game.
• Unexpected Character: Not one character, but the inclusion of J. League (the top-flight pro football league in Japan) in FIFA 17 can be seen as this, after so many years being exclusive to Konami's Winning Eleven series (the Japanese version of PES), and especially considering that FIFA hasn't even had a Japanese football team since 2003 thanks to the Japanese Football Association not allowing Western game developers to depict their players. On top of that, this is also the first official appearance ever of the league in a game for the international market (earlier games were sold only in Japan, including the Winning Eleven series).^note Technically speaking, the J-League had already appeared before in the Championship Manager series, but not in its Spiritual Successor, Football Manager. It also appeared in Sensible World of Soccer, but the names of the teams were changed.

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