Career mode is where your story takes place but before you can embark on the legendary journey of becoming tennis' greatest legend, you must first design your tennis athlete.

Your athlete's gender determines what circuit your player will be part of (Men's Tour or Women's Tour). Just as in Virtua Tennis 2009, in this game also, once you save your character, you can not alter your gender and jump in between tours.

Character creation is a lot more complex in Top Spin 3 compared with Virtua Tennis 2009.Top Spin 3 is a lot more detailed and the graphics look sharper giving you a wider array of choices in customizing your characters. Under the female character creation for example, you can change the color of the makeup in 4 different areas (2 for the eyes, 1 for the cheeks and 1 for the lips). You can read more about the characters under the 'Sounds and Graphics' section of the review.

You can only play through a career once with a particular created player; if you want to go through the career mode again, you'll have to create another player. In Top Spin 3, you start your career as an Amateur and as you win matches you advance to Challenger, Junior, Pro and if you have the goods you can advance all the way to Legend. Advancing in rank at the early stages is not hard, but once you make it to the Juniors strategy and player development really start making a big difference. Player development is a complex process in Top Spin 3; you only earn experience for winning matches and you have to distribute that gained experience towards 8 different player skills. The 8 skills are: Serve, Return, Forehand, Backhand, Stamina, Volley, Power and Speed. How you decide to distribute your experience and what skills you improve will shape the kind of player that you are. Did you ignore Stamina but have a killer Serve and Backhand? Are you quick but are you lacking in power? Are you a well-rounded player? How each player develops is left entirely up to you. Your player's ultimate goal is to become the world's best tennis player.