Among other contemporary titles are Mobile Suit Gundam Battle Operation Code Fairy, Arcade Paradise, Bang-On Balls: Chronicles, You Suck at Parking, and Syberia – The World Before for PS4 and PS5. PS4 players can look forward to Captain Tsubasa: Rise of New Champions.

As for Premium-exclusive offerings, there’s Arcade Paradise VR for PlayStation VR2. The Classics are arguably more endearing, though, as they include Armored Core 1, Armored Core: Project Phantasma, and Armored Core: Master of Arena for PS4 and PS5. Those who enjoyed Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon may want to check them out.

As for the lackluster PS4-only offerings, Sony already confirmed plans to wind down on the same, only occasionally offering them past January 2026. Head here for more details.

Firstly, players will be getting a new episode and new hero, focusing on Hirado Middle School, and letting players interact with characters such as Hiroshi Jito and Mitsuru Sano. The episode is free and also brings a new game mode, and best of all, is available today.

Additionally, the game will also be receiving a new paid DLC drop, called Episode: Rising Stars, which will focus on the story of three characters: Taro Misaki, Hikaru Matsuyama, and Karl Heinz Schneider. The DLC is slated to launch on March 31, with six more characters planned for the near future.

Captain Tsubasa: Rise of New Champions is currently available for PC via Steam, Nintendo Switch, and PlayStation 4.

Based on the popular and long-running Japanese manga of the same name, Captain Tsubasa: Rise of New Champions is an absolutely bonkers representation of the beautiful game that encourages you – hell, even nags at you – to stop worrying about fouls and penalties, about making mazy runs on the wings, about setting up the perfect cross, and tells you to just let loose in its world of arcade-y, over-the-top football. And when you’re on the pitch, the result is an enjoyable game based on a sport that has been pigeonholed into the simulation genre for well over a decade.

The focus here is on keeping the action fast-moving at all times, so the game encourages you to do things that you wouldn’t ordinarily want to do in a football game, like running to a striker at full speed and tackling him from behind with reckless abandon, or taking a shot on goal with maximum shot power from the halfway line. Just as an example, how you go about scoring a goal in Captain Tsubasa is quite different from how you’d ordinarily do it in most other football games. Goalkeepers have a spirit meter, and every time they save a shot, that meter drains, and how much of it is drained varies based on how powerful your shot was. The best way to score a goal, then, is to whittle their spirit meter down as much as possible to ensure that the next shot you take won’t be one they can save, which means you’re constantly taking shots throughout the course of the match. That doesn’t mean that’s the only way to score a goal, of course- particularly good shots can find the back of the net even against a goalkeeper with a healthy spirit meter. But that doesn’t happen too often.

"Captain Tsubasa: Rise of New Champions not only encourages you to keep doing these things, like far-flung shots on goal from impossible positions and crunching tackles that would get you sent off in a heartbeat in a real football game, it also rewards you for them."

Captain Tsubasa: Rise of New Champions not only encourages you to keep doing these things, like far-flung shots on goal from impossible positions and crunching tackles that would get you sent off in a heartbeat in a real football game, it also rewards you for them. Most tackles, for instance, result in you stealing the ball from the opposition, which means winning possession back and building up another attack is easy- but by that same token, that holds true for the opposing team as well.

The underlying mechanics in Captain Tsubasa are fairly simplistic. Stripped down to its bones, it might be a perceived as a game that’s lacking mechanical depth, but the real enjoyment comes from the gleefully silly way it presents them to the players. Special moves – such as crunching tackles, slipping past oncoming defenders with perfect timing, cracking shots from a distance, last-ditch blocks of devastating shots – trigger mini-cutscenes.

The camera immediately zooms in from your regular action to show off these brief moments, and then puts you right back into the game. What helps is that there’s a solid amount of variety with these special cutscenes, and which one gets triggered and when one gets triggered depends entirely on what’s going on on the pitch- which, of course, is entirely up to you as a player, like blocking a specific kind of shot with a specific defender, or letting a shot loose after successfully dribbling and dodging past two opposing players in quick succession.

"The underlying mechanics in Captain Tsubasa are fairly simplistic. Stripped down to its bones, it might be a perceived as a game that’s lacking mechanical depth, but the real enjoyment comes from the gleefully silly way it presents them to the players."

Of course, given Captain Tsubasa’s emphasis on flair and arcade-y fun over mechanical depth, there are some issues that are hard to ignore. Dribbling for instance, is far too simplistic and restrictive, and doesn’t allow you to build up attacks very well. Teammate AI is also not the best, and I can’t tell you how many times I was waiting for them to make the most painfully obvious runs into empty spaces, only to watch them just mill about restlessly in the same spot. Penalties are also a bit too simplified, to the extent that they more or less become a guessing game. All of these issues ensure that Captain Tsubasa is a game best enjoyed in short bursts rather than over prolonged sessions of gameplay.

Clearly, the game’s biggest strengths are on the pitch – as they should be – but the story modes don’t seem to understand that. There are two separate campaigns on offer. There’s Episode: Tsubasa – which sees you playing as the titular Tsubasa Oozora and his teammates as they try and win the Nationals for a third year in a row – and Episode: New Hero – which allows you to create your own custom character from scratch and craft your own custom story and journey, starting in one of three school teams and progressing all the way up to the international level.

Both of these campaigns – especially Episode: Tsubasa – seem oddly reluctant to let you do what you’re her to do- play football. In Episode: Tsubasa, between all matches, there are torturously prolonged periods of storytelling where characters ramble on and on about things that don’t matter. Fans of the manga will appreciate a lot of the interactions here, I’m sure, but storytelling here is done through static and awkward cutscenes, and the writing is predictably sloppy- seriously, characters go from being deplorable rivals on opposing teams who defile the spirit of the sport before kick off, to suddenly doing a complete 180, humbly accepting their losses, and cheering Tsubasa on as soon as their team loses. And it happens again and again.

"In Episode: Tsubasa, between all matches, there are torturously prolonged periods of storytelling where characters ramble on and on about things that don’t matter."

Episode: New Hero does stave off these issues to some degree, given the fact that a lot of the time between matches is spent on things that make an actual mechanical difference, such as choosing which characters to interact with and grow your friendships with in order to learn new skills- but there’s plenty of long stretches of clumsy and uninteresting storytelling here as well. Thankfully, you can skip most cutscenes and just keep mashing X to skip the absolute barrage of dialogue boxes to get back to the good stuff (relatively) quickly, while outside of the campaigns, you can always jump into a quick match, whether solo or multiplayer, if you just want a quick game of bizarro football.

Captain Tsubasa: Rise of New Champions is not a perfect game, and it’s not the most mechanically dense game, but thankfully, it doesn’t have to be. Its strengths lie in its unhinged, over-the-top on-pitch action and its delightfully silly presentation. If you’re looking for a football game that lets you focus on all the fun aspects of the sport while ignoring almost everything to do with tactics and strategy, this is the game for you.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 4.

Joining the recent parade of digital showcases, Bandai Namco Entertainment Southeast Asia has confirmed several live steams for this month. Dubbed “Bandai Namco Entertainment Fun Live”, the first stream will take place tomorrow at 5 AM PT. After that, you can look forward to streams on July 19th, 21st and 24th. All of these will be broadcast on YouTube and Facebook.

Tomorrow’s stream is relatively low-key – it features Captain Tsubasa: Rise of New Champions – but things pick up on July 19th. Doraemon: Story of Seasons and Fast and Furious Crossroads are scheduled while The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope and Little Nightmares 2 will receive trailers. The stream on July 21st will feature Mobile Suit Gundam: Extreme VS. Maxiboost On and Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris.

July 24th caps things off with Project CARS 3 and Scarlet Nexus. Hopefully, we’ll see new gameplay for all of the above (perhaps even some PS5/Xbox Series X footage for titles like Scarlet Nexus). Bandai Namco has already noted that there will be “exciting details” from the “producers and directors of your favorite games.” So stay tuned for more information.

Mark your calendars and join us over the next week online as we sit down with producers and directors of your favourite games to hear their passion for the games you love! #BNEFunLive pic.twitter.com/KjeV4nCye7

— Bandai Namco Entertainment Asia (@BandaiNamcoSEA) July 16, 2020