Captain Tsubasa: Rise of New Champions Character Mission Pass

I'll be straight with you: this is a DLC pass for a niche anime sports game, and it layers an extra purchase on top of a base game that already had a separate Character Pass selling nine entirely different players. The Character Mission Pass is not that. What you get here are alternate versions of characters already in Rise of New Champions - same faces, reshuffled stats and roles. Misaki shifts from a supporting midfielder into a defensive one. Matsuyama picks up attacking-mid traits with boosted offensive power. Schneider gets reworked fire shots that can trigger miracle goals, which is genuinely useful in online PVP if you know how to time the shot gauge. These are not new characters in any meaningful sense; they are roster variants for players who have already squeezed the base game dry and want edge cases for specific match strategies. The unlock structure is the other thing to flag. You do not receive the characters on purchase. Each of the nine is gated behind completing three story missions per character - thin bite-sized DLC story content that the community has broadly described as functional but forgettable. If you were hoping the missions themselves justify the spend as a content experience, they do not. They exist as a delivery mechanism, not a narrative. The base game's The Journey mode - with its Episode Tsubasa and Episode New Hero campaigns - is where the actual story investment lives, and none of that is touched here. For the online crowd, the calculus is simpler. Rise of New Champions sits in a weird online population spot - the servers have been running for years and player counts are thin enough that matches can take time to fill. If you are still grinding PVP and want the extra roster depth these variants provide, particularly Schneider's reworked shot profile for goalkeeper-draining strategies, there is narrow situational value. The base game's Spirit Gauge and V-Zone systems already reward character-specific builds, and alternate stat versions do extend that build variety slightly. But this is firmly a pass for committed players, not a gateway for newcomers. Bottom line context: the base game landed as a mixed-to-solid anime sports title - praised for fast, arcade-style pitch action and flashy special moves, criticised for thin content at launch and a PC port that never got as much love as the console versions. The Character Mission Pass does not address any of those underlying concerns. With Steam user sentiment sitting at Mixed and only 44% positive across a very small review sample, the community has not exactly endorsed it. If you are already deep in Rise of New Champions and want every roster option available for competitive play, this is a completionist add-on. Everyone else should spend the money on the base game first and see if it sticks. Fred, Scout Team