I Really Don't Love Eyeshield 21

Having a Japanese Wii gives me one advantage and several disadvantages. Among the disadvantages are the facts that the text in all my games is in Japanese, and that I can't buy games in local stores. The one advantage, however, is that I get most of the interesting games before everybody else. Well, not before the Japanese, though. And then again, even though the games get released early, I still have to buy them from Japan, which can be a bit of a problem. If I buy them from a site like Play-Asia, the price is definitely not the same as it would be in a Japanese store, where games easily cost half of what they do here.

But more to the point, I was browsing through Nintendo of Japan's Wii site to look at the upcoming games from Nintendo. Along with Excite Truck, Fire Emblem 10 and Super Paper Mario, there was one game on the list that caught my attention. Something called "EyeShield 21". A sports game. An American Football game. Before I go any further, let me tell you about my experience with sports games.

The only realistic sports game I recall having played on a console is Total NBA '96 for the first Playstation. I had my deal of fun with that game, but it was nothing special. I played it back in the days where a game was pretty much a game, and since I only had two games for the Playstation, and NBA '96 was one of them, naturally I played it for a while. Nothing wrong with that. When it comes to Fifa and such, I must admit that I have never tried it. I have however quite recently played demos of both Virtua Tennis 3 and Top Spin 2, both of which count as realistic sports games, I reckon. When I played those, I thought to myself: I'd much rather play Mario Tennis. It's more colourful and more fun.

So, back to the issue at hand. This "Eyeshield 21" is a sports game, but it looked like a cartoonish sports game, and not a realistic one. So it might be pretty fun, I thought. But then it hit me. Nintendo didn't create this cast of colourful characters for this game. This game is based on a Japanese comic of the very same name, Eyeshield 21. And that's when I lost interest in this game. Somehow, I very rarely feel like playing licensed games (more about that in a future post). Mario and friends are game characters so I'd love to play American Football with them, but the Eyeshield crew are comic book characters, and I don't want anything to do with them.

All in all: I'm not going to buy the Eyeshield 21 game.