I found Extreme much easier, the defence left more gaps than on Top Player. The attack dribbled more and so were more predictable.
But I get thrashed in top player, so different play styles, eh!
Yeah like i always said difficulty depends of how are your own playing style. I was very good in Defense on Fifa with or without tactical defense, but not that much in PES, my best skills was fast-passing play, Keeping the ball with dribble and found long shoot opportunities.
For example many people find that PES 3 is the more "balanced", but the way i play, i got pretty easy to score long range shoots and dribbling people.
WE7 and WE7I i agree that they're balanced, but not as good balance (in terms of reality vs score and action, so ATT/DEF) as PES5.
And multiple people said that WE9 was the more "sim" because scores where tight... But from my own experience, that game is perhaps very fun as we love to get difficult to pass a defence, but unbalanced in other way.
We did a cup and a league the time WE9 gets out (8 players, two teams), and the final top 3 was weird : PSG won the league and another half-strong team won the cup, Lazio if i remember (not the strong one we got in PES1)
We always choosed a first and a second team in terms of overall strength regarding real football + their Octagon. And not the stronger of us won the league with his second (so, the weaker) team. In comparison to all the palmares we got when we started from PES1 to PES6 / counting the WE translated so we did almost 12 leagues if i remember / WE9 got the less logic final result when you know the team's owner level and the team level itself.
I remember now that Seabass said that he wanted to make lesser big teams competitive on a certain version sorry to not remember what he exactly said but when (which PES) he stated it i remember more or less than it was around PES5. The purpose of it was that on WE9/PES5 times, to recompense the player first and also for people playing more their favorite small club and be more or less competitive on versus human or CPU.
Probably less in PES5 but the difference between players and stats were pretty low if you considers all of it, even if their playing style were pretty nicelely reproduced, even strenght and weakness : but defense part was too strong, so we can't call it "balanced".
JLWE2008cc is kinda subtle to defend as well as PES 2008, it's more AI than physically based and there's more space, and it's perhaps the one that you can feel that attacking and defending are superbly balanced. To me the most balanced of all or should i said the most "realistic" regarding actions / goals / saves (gk or def.) compared to real football.
But WE/PES 2008 got it too, a bit more offensive but scoring gap between the two aren't that consequent : attacking actions in counterpart are more numberous, and even if there's a good midfield battle on both versions, JLWE2008 is enhancing even more that part of the game : for sure there's more time spend in the midfield than the two others : but it's not a THAT big difference that will makes me give up on the 2 previous versions.... With national teams.
