Another June has passed. Which means another year we've heard the familiar refrain: “PES is back.”

In the past, this is what usually happened next: October rolled around, the game is released, and the refrain is then amended to “PES is on its way back." It’s been like that for quite a while now — encouraging signs here and there, but still some ways away from a thoroughly polished product that can reach out to soccer gamers of every stripe, like the releases from its halcyon days. Yet every June, hope springs eternal, and PES is back.

Hey, at least the current outlook is nowhere near as morbid as those dark days in 2008-09, when the game fell into a funk, and you wouldn’t be completely out of line to legitimately question the future of the series. Now, we may disagree on how much improvement it has made and how it bodes for the future, but at least there is a future.

And just what will that future hold for PES 2014 and beyond? Will it be another 2010-12 when encouraging tales came out from E3 and ballooned from there, leading us to think that this is finally the year PES will become king of the hill again, only to find out that the hype was overblown? Or will the franchise, finally, be "back?"

It's by no means a certainty, but the stars are as aligned as they could be for the latter to happen.

For many, nostalgia and PES go hand-in-hand. Saying the series is back is to immediately harken to the good old days of PES 5/6 — the yardstick by which every subsequent release is rightfully measured against, and so far, all still fall considerably short of. Those were two incredibly addicting games, and it was during those games that the now bordering on cliched phrases used to describe PES were popularized. Now, like any cliché, they do arise from kernels of truth. And indeed, if there was a soccer game that ever came close to living up to that dreadful, lofty, word, “freedom,” it was PES 6. Since then, the series gradually drifted away from those roots. Eventually players became glued to rails, passes were predetermined and had predetermined outcomes, and AI teammates behaved awfully quirky at times. But from PES 2011 and on, the game has slowly tried to dig itself out of the hole. How do they do it? By going back to the things that made PES 5 and 6 so successful. Since then, in each subsequent year we’ve seen baby steps of the franchise try to get back to the way it used to simulate soccer — organically and realistically. But those steps were slow, and for everything the team improved on, there was something else that was ignored, or worse, regressed.

For a few weeks now, we've been seeing and hearing quite a number of encouraging signs. From glowing E3 recaps, to the immensely detailed features trailer, the compliments for PES 2014 ranged from pace of its buildup, the unpredictability of play and the distinctiveness of marquee players. But we've heard this song and dance before, so how is this time any different, as opposed to another one of those false dawns we've witnessed in the previous years?

This time around, the franchise, coming off the backs of a few years worth of gradually-improved releases, is on much steadier ground. There is a relatively new man, Kei Masuda, at the helm. His predecessor, Shingo Takatsuka is the one who started all this, and certainly deserves a lot of praise, but it seemed that toward the last days of his reign there was a sense of grasping at straws. To be fair, a few did stick, but you can sometimes feel, in PES 2011 and 2012, after another year of reset, that there was a lack of cohesiveness in the different gameplay mechanisms. In contrast, PES 2013, Masuda’s first release, built upon 2012's engine, expanding on the good while changing the bad. As a result, the play, even if it wasn't perfect, flowed more naturally.

Of course, in the grand scheme, gameplay was never a problem for the franchise. The weak link has always been its visual elements. The graphics were seemingly stuck in a time capsule during those first few years, remaining in the Xbox/PS2 era while the rest of the gaming world began to take advantage of the new technology. In fact, PES 2012 and 2013 seemed to be the only games to really start harnessing the power of current-gen consoles.

This is where PES’ trump card, the Fox Engine, changes up the equation. If the much ballyhooed engine, developed by Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima, lives up to its billing, this will be the crucial reason as to why things are different this time around, and that the comeback is truly on. While it's certainly exciting news that the technology can potentially put PES on level ground with FIFA’s visual glitz, it’s the promise that the Fox Engine can significantly shorten development times that’s even more valuable. The producers then can have more time to spread around, and hopefully tend to other parts of the game that got overlooked in the past years, like Master League, which has been crying out for a significant retool.

The fear of resources being spread too thin may also be the reason why the series decided to sit out the next-gen consoles this coming year. I will admit I was initially quite disappointed at the decision, but on second thought, sometimes the conservatism is warranted — all PES has to do, really, is take a look at its own disastrous transition the last time around. The other side of the coin, and an opinion that I am now starting to embrace, is that that the team wants to put all its eggs in the current-gen basket. From a commercial standpoint, yes, it lets FIFA get a head start and, no matter what you may think of the series, EA’s soccer game is no slouch both critically and commercially, and the extra year may see PES cede considerable marketing momentum to FIFA. But ultimately, it will still take a while for gamers to make the upgrade, and in the next few years current-gen games should still outsell the next-gen ones. So yes, this lost year is a deal, but it may not be such a big one.

Obviously, not everything is rosy and there are still a number of things PES still needs to do to improve. Sure, the videos did a decent job in quelling any large freakouts in that department, but ultimately it's the in-game numbers that will tell the story. In PES 2013, it wasn't hard to out-possess Barcelona, even on professional or superstar level. Yikes.

But the series’ big picture prospects? Haven’t looked brighter in a long, long while.