Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road is a long-delayed entry in Level-5’s long-running Inazuma Eleven series, and it is once again about a bunch of middle schoolers who are really into soccer and use absurd special moves. Victory Road‘s unique story pitch is that you’re playing as a kid who can’t actually play soccer because of a heart condition, so he acts as the manager and inspires his team from the sidelines. The unique point of VR that most people have heard about is its genuinely ridiculous amount of content: it features three distinct campaign modes, one of which takes you through the series’ entire story to this point, and over 5,000 recruitable players. It’s a game you’d need to play for hundreds and hundreds of hours to fully complete, but it probably shouldn’t have been.
Gameplay
But first, a quick overview of how soccer works in this game. As always for IE, this is the sport reimagined as a JRPG, so every character has skills, levels, and elements that play into their strengths. When two characters collide on the field, it triggers a focus battle that is resolved either by maneuvering in real time or by triggering a special skill, which gives the other player a chance to counter before playing a fancy animation for whoever won. Shooting works similarly: the shooting player can either just kick the ball normally or trigger a skill, and then the keeper either catches normally or uses a skill to boost their defenses. Keepers have a certain amount of stamina that drains with each shot blocked and further receive a permanent penalty to their stats after each block, so repeated shots should eventually result in scoring. Notably, it’s all but impossible to avoid this system: Even if you shoot at an empty net, the keeper will just turn into The Flash and get into position to trigger the RPG battle.
Story Mode
The right way to play VR for all but the most hardcore players will be to ignore all the fancy modes on the menu and just go right into the RPG story mode. This has all the charm you’d expect if you’ve played any other Level-5 game, and while the plot isn’t going to win any awards for originality or depth, it’s decently entertaining. It’ll probably take 20-30 hours to get through depending on how much side content you do, and it just about completely avoids the grind issues that plague the rest of the game until the very end. If you’ve enjoyed any other games in the series or just want a sports anime as a game, this is a very polished version of that. That said, the story really should have ended at about the 75% mark. The last quarter of the game is the same as every other sports game and the last chapter in particular is very weak. I ended up skipping most of the cutscenes at the end because I just couldn’t care anymore.
Chronicle Mode
Of course, what really drove me to that point was the rest of the game. If you’re like me and have only played a couple of the early games, then the logical starting point would seem to be Chronicle, which promises to take you through the story of each previous game by playing the marquee matches from the series. This would be a mistake for many reasons. The biggest is that Chronicle takes forever no matter how you play it. You need to play every single match twice at a minimum, once in the “history” mode to see abbreviated cutscenes of the original story and to act out the match according to a script, and then again with your custom team against low level opposition. The story matches, like the original games, are extremely reliant on the same trope where the enemy is unbeatable until a deus ex machina moment happens, but it’s infinitely worse here because all the other content of the original stories has been stripped out. So you’re made to play a bunch of matches that are all scripted to go basically the same way, and then you have to play the same match again with a custom team that is almost certainly wildly overleveled. If you want rarer player rewards, you’re going to need to play the same match a third time after that, and finally a fourth time if you want the very best rewards. Playing all four in sequence is mandatory for some cursed reason – even if you have a level 99 custom team, you have to waste your time playing the two lower difficulty modes before you can take on the highest one, which probably won’t be a challenge either. The only small mercy is that the second half takes half as long if you are up 3-0 after the first half and the game will end entirely if you are up 4-0, but you have to turn this setting on. Without it, my record was something around 20-0.
The Grind
Those pointlessly lopsided scores are a result of my team being massively overleveled, but also owe as much to the AI being terrible at this game. The higher difficulty teams have better stats and more moves, but still fail to make good use of passing and never develop an answer for just doing long passes to your forwards. Because of that, and as if it wasn’t enough that you have to play every team multiple times, it hardly makes any difference what team you’re playing. The same simple strategy will destroy every AI team in the game in every situation.
So I definitely don’t recommend playing Chronicle, but VR clearly wants you to. Once you reach Chapter 7 of the story, you’ll unlock the ability to recruit hundreds of new players to your story team. The good news is that this is completely pointless, because all the players you can recruit are statistically basically identical and the story barely gives you the opportunity or reason to use any of them, but most people are going to want to catch them all when given the opportunity. And yet, only 6.4% of people recruiter even 10 players in story mode even though 61% of players made it that far. Why? Because recruiting a player means you have to find them on the map, give them the random item they want, find them again in a different place, then find them again in the first place and have completed some arbitrary achievement that wasn’t visible until just then. That takes a while in the best case, but in most cases you won’t have the item they want, so you need to guy buy it and find them again. Then you won’t have completed the achievement they want, which could just be a side activity in story mode, but is most likely a requirement that you’ve done something a large number of times. If you’re not fortunate enough to have already done that by playing Chronicle or by blind luck, now you need to go grind out that achievement. But if you’re really unlucky, the requirement is something like using an ability that is only on rare players, so you’ll need to go do a tremendous amount of chronicle grinding to get one. Once you’ve done all that, you have finally earned access to a character with one of like four distinct personalities and the same stats as all the others. So that’s why almost no one bothered.
There’s a fan theory that this gacha without microtransactions started development as a regular gacha full of microtransactions, and I believe it. VR has the fun story mode you would expect from Level-5, but it also has the ridiculous basket of currencies you’d expect from a gacha and even more tedious grinding than most of them are bold enough to demand. I do think this is a good game and there’s a lot of fun to be had if you can stop yourself from trying to complete too much of it, but even then it’s a game that constantly gets in its own way. Story mode needed a use for recruitable players if it was going to include them, and recruiting needed to be dramatically more accessible. Chronicle mode is a brilliant idea for people who don’t have time to play all the original games, but then it’s so inconsiderate of your time that it would probably be faster to just go play them anyway. Online mode is pointless unless you’re willing to grind for hundreds of hours, and the remaining modes are just pointless in general. If some games require Herculean grind, VR demands something closer to Sisyphean grind.
Conclusion
Despite all that, I do recommend Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road conditionally. I had a lot of fun with it before burning out and really expected it to place highly on my best games of last year. If you are someone who can put up with a level of grinding that even Disgaea would consider excessive, this will provide an almost unbeatable amount of content. On the other hand, if you’re okay with calling a game completed when the credits roll even if there are thousands of unchecked boxes left in the menus, I think you’ll also have a pretty good time. For everyone else, approach with caution.
Rating: 75%
Time to beat: I played for 73 hours, which was enough to finish the main story and 2.5 Chronicle routes.
Price: $70
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