I now have the game. My thoughts so far...
As I said months ago when I had only seen a handful of screens, this is a carbon-copy remake of the SuFami/SNES 'original'. If the field and sprites have been redrawn, its sure hard to tell--visually, this is identical. The cutscenes, however, have been redrawn, and now use pre-rendered sprites.
The worst aspects of this being a re-release of a 15 year old game come through when examining the playbook. The playbook is the exact same one from NES Tecmo Super Bowl. The old standbys of FB Offtackle Left and Shotgun Z S-in are still here. How is this possible? The same, 17 year old playbook? How half-assed can you get?
The Edit mode, while appreciated, is not what it could have been. There is no team logo Edit. You choose from maybe 16 Play-Dough logos (a star, a crescent moon, a skull, etc) and that's IT. Assigning team colors makes the uniforms acceptable, but not perfect. Editing players is a bit confusing. There is this "Skill Point" system that I do not understand, plus ability points to assign. The Skill Points revolve around various abilities you can assign, like Rocket Pass for QBs and Miracle Catch for receivers. What's bizarre is that even if you take away a Skill from a guy, you don't get the Skill Points that cost back. How you earn more Skill Points, I can't tell. Will have to play it more.
Team rosters are huge, to a fault. Do I really need a backup kicker, and punter? Backup offensive linemen? A third backup QB? A waste of time. I don't even know who the Broncos' backup kicker is, or if he even exists. Pointless.
The actual gameplay is, mercifully, un-fucked with and remains the same Tecmo style as always. The biggest change I can see so far is that now, every receiver on the field has a cursor, which enlarges as you select him to throw to. I guess this was meant for 2-player play, but its honestly not as good as one cursor, the old system.
All in all, its fine because its a new Tecmo Bowl that is the good Tecmo and not the ass ones that came after the first SNES game, but this whole thing sort of smacks of a lack of effort and creativity. The game has no style, really bland menus and "look". The new Halftime shows are okay, with sexy cheerleaders. I'm playing it right now, so its at least decent.
Review score: 6.0
Oh, I'm so going to recreate this a la Tecmo Super Bowl from the NES.