Pocket League Story

Genre: Management Simulation

Players: 1

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Review:

Without a doubt the most prolific developer and publisher of Management Simulation games on Nintendo Switch is Kairosoft, who specializes in games with a retro-style isometric pixel art style, often with the word “Story” in the title. As of this writing, Kairosoft has released 55 games on Nintendo Switch, most of them Management Simulations.

After their earlier games, Kairosoft had established a few templates for their Simulation games that later games would largely follow. Game Dev Story established a Simulation-style game more focused on managing employee time and focus, while Hot Springs Story established a Simulation style in line with Theme Park Simulators where you try to cater to guests’ tastes to maximize attendance and income.

When Pocket League Story was released on mobile devices in the US in 2011, with ports to Nintendo Switch in 2019, PlayStation 4 in 2020, and Xbox One in 2024, it went for the former of those two templates, being a game about managing your team’s time and your spending, with the team in question being a soccer team.

As I mentioned above, this game makes use of Kairosoft’s signature presentation style using simple retro-styled pixel art visuals presented in an isometric view, paired with cute chiptune music and sound effects. Everything about this presentation is really endearing, and the way the game even shows your cute little pixel characters playing is really delightful… at first.

The problem is, you have absolutely no control over soccer match as it’s being played, apart from changing strategies (a huge missed opportunity), and cannot opt to just skip the match and see results. And given how this game makes these matches a major source of income, this means that you’ll be seeing countless soccer matches as you grind for cash.

Beyond this issue, the other problem here is that there just aren’t many choices to make in terms of management. You can spend money to hire new players, spend points earned in matches to train up specific players or entice sponsors, and a few other things… and that’s about it. New options veerrrrrry slowly open up over time, but by that point you will be bored with the lack of things to do here.

While the idea of mixing Game Dev Story’s gameplay with cute soccer matches seems like a sure bet, in the end, Pocket League Story just doesn’t offer players enough to do to make it worthwhile, and in fact they’ll be spending a lot of time doing absolutely nothing as unskippable soccer matches play themselves. While Game Dev Story is far from perfect, it was still far more enjoyable than this.

tl;dr – Pocket League Story is a Management Simulation where players manage a soccer team trying to train, trade, and play their way to the top. This game uses the basic gameplay template of this developer’s earlier game, Game Dev Story, but sadly just doesn’t give players enough choices and options to make things interesting. The result is a game that feels inferior to the one it was largely based on. Unless you’re a soccer fanatic, you’re better off playing Game Dev Story instead of this.

Grade: C

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