Over the years, the Madden games have been rightfully accused of being rather cookie cutter. Single player “franchise mode” has been seen as little more than a roster update, with a few small changes here and there. On the whole though, it’s followed the “college textbook” approach; a few small changes, but still charging at least sixty bucks for the “new one” every year. They get basic graphic updates as well, but barely enough to notice.
An interesting new addition, starting with Madden 2018, was a story mode called “Longshot,” with a sequel the year after. From there, they changed the title to “Face of the Franchise,” which is what it is known as today. The basic premise is that you are an NFL-hopeful player that has to overcome various challenges in his life to actually make it onto an NFL roster, where you’ll be able to play single player franchise normally, but with your player as the star, instead of the team’s usual starting quarterback. Some of these game modes are decent, others… really bad. Today, it is worth ranking them from Madden 2018 to Madden 22, worst to first.
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#5: Face of the Franchise Madden 2022
The story: you’re the hottest college prospect in decades. Yes, even more than Trevor Lawrence, the actual hottest prospect in a decade that year. You spend most of your time with your best friend who is in charge of your social media presence, and your other friend who is a greenhorn sports agent. Most of the story is about you shopping yourself around to the NFL with only one real choice: go to an event for Nike or go to a charity game in Hawaii, an easy choice.
The story mode is only about an hour long at most, compared to the two or three hour long stories of the previous games. The protagonist is completely vanilla and uninteresting in every way. You start out as the greatest QB prospect since Peyton Manning and all everybody around you does is rave about that fact. You have a friend who is your manager and another who is your social media assistant. I guess the idea is that you get to project yourself onto the protagonist, but the game could have done a little bit more to make him interesting in the slightest. While it’s not the most important thing, the graphics have taken a noticeable dip in quality as well. It’s boring. It’s all boring. The main thing that the mode has going for it is that it’s mercifully short.
#4: Face of the Franchise Madden 2020
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The story: you’re a small-time high school QB who gets to choose which college he plays for. You have to play several games to bump up your draft stock and try to win the championship for your wide receiver best friend, whose brother died. You also try to be the hero for a sick little girl who asks you to throw her four touchdowns in your NFL debut. Your agent is vaguely amusing at times and barely knows what he’s doing.
Another blank slate protagonist. One of the big dings against this mode is that you don’t actually get to choose the team that you get drafted by, unlike the next two entries, and there are only about four or five teams that draft you at all. So, if you’re a Broncos fan (like myself) and your character is sitting there on draft night, the last thing you want to hear is “this is Jon Gruden, head coach of the Oakland Raiders.” If that happens and you want to try to get drafted by the Broncos, oh well. You have to start the entire thing all over again with un-skippable cutscenes and hope, hope that you get the call you want. Your choices mean almost nothing. At the end of the day, they boil down to “will you be at the actual draft on draft night, or will you get a call in a hotel room letting you know that you’re the sixth round pick of some team or another.” Actually getting to play football a fair amount does help, but overall, mediocre at best.
#3: Face of the Franchise Madden 2021
The story: you’re a player who hasn’t played all that much, but there’s enough potential that you’re added to the high school team as a backup to the star QB. He’s aloof, but not a complete jerk most of the time. You find out that he has a heart condition that might affect his NFL career. You have several choices before you, which actually change things between playthroughs. Your choices also determine which position you ultimately end up playing.
A bit of an upgrade over the last one, but still not great. Your choices affect things a bit more than usual (such as even choosing the year you actually enter the draft) but it’s still not all that interesting. Yeah, the story is more about you getting to the league itself, but it would be nice if your character was interesting. Things get frustrating when you get to college and have a coach who doesn’t really seem to care about you regardless of your successes. You could turn in the three greatest games in the history of the sport, and he still says “if you enter the draft now, you’ll be a third round pick, if you’re lucky.” Uh. No. In real life, if a college player won both playoff games, then the championship 73-0 (very possible in Madden 2021) most of the NFL would be tripping over themselves to draft this guy. Overall, a slight improvement over the year before, seeing as some of your choices actually mean more than other games.
#2: Longshot I
Story: Where to begin on this one? Madden decided to make this into a full-length movie. Literally. A full playthrough is over three hours, and not a lot of it is spent actually playing football. You play as Devin Wade, a quarterback hopeful with a troubled past. He lost a lot of his passion for the game after his father (played by two-time Academy Award-winning actor Mahershala Ali) died. The story is called “Longshot” because that’s what he is. He’s not like the protagonist from Madden 22 who is a superstar from the first minute of the story. You’re playing with your friend, a wide receiver named Colt Cruise. As the story progresses, you’re invited onto a reality show, fittingly called Longshot, which chronicles your journey to becoming an NFL QB. And that’s just the first half of the story. There’s a lot more to it, but I’d have to write an entire article just about that.
“Longshot” is a major improvement over the other three games I’ve talked about so far. You don’t spend a lot of time playing, but in terms of the story and the experience, you actually get kind of invested. You’re more there for the story than playing the football, which is odd for, you know, a football game. You legitimately want to see Devin and Colt make it into the NFL. It and the next addition do get a bit of a ding because of the fact that, for every 15 minutes of football you’re playing, you have to watch 45 minutes of cutscenes.
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#1: Longshot II
The story: you follow both Colt and Devin on their respective paths through life after college. Devin is a third and fourth-string quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys, and Colt keeps hoping that a team will call him for a tryout as he also tries to get an amateur music career off the ground. His plans are complicated when his deadbeat dad drops his half-sister off with him that he didn’t even know he had. His old high school coach wants him to stay and coach the team and Devin tries to sneak onto the roster in a more secure capacity, but has to impress a perpetually grumpy coach. By the end you need to save the local stadium from a businessman who wants to merge it with another school district.
They seemed to be trying to go for the Oscars here, with limited success. Once again I was genuinely invested in the characters and their struggles, as each of the choices that they had to make carried some actual weight to them. You want to see these characters succeed, even if success might not be what they originally thought it would be. The businessman is cliché and just needs a mustache and white cat to complete the evil look, and there’s the cliché scene where he tries to get Colt to stop trying to raise money for the stadium by tempting him with his dreams. As if we haven’t seen that a hundred times before. Once again, the story takes the front seat here, and there is very little actual gameplay. You’re watching a movie that occasionally becomes interactive, which, given what they managed to do, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Still, you popped the Madden game in to, you know, play football, so they could have balanced that aspect of it a little bit more. While it feels like it’s going for Oscars and doesn’t always succeed, I could tell that they put a lot of time and energy into it and didn’t just turn in the “first draft” like they did in the “Face of the Franchise” games. Is it some of the best video game storytelling of all time? No, but for a Madden game, they did alright.
Only time will tell if EA puts actual effort into a story mode for Madden 23. They’ve been more interested in the “Madden Ultimate Team” for years now, because that’s the mode that makes them more money. It’s highly unlikely that they’d put as much effort into the story as they did with the “Longshot” story, especially if the last game is any indication, but we’ll just have to wait and see. The basics of the game won’t change, and the accusations of the new game being a roster update with some slight cosmetic changes will stick, but they had something good with “Longshot.” Maybe they’ll revisit it.
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