Jason DittonIt’s odd, the roads one ends up taking to arrive at a given destination, sometimes. I’m personally mostly unfamiliar with Inazuma Eleven as a franchise, outside of some old let’s plays and the occasional older YouTube collections of the handheld Inazuma titles, and designs, and a brief fascination with the series a decade and a half ago. I’d mostly completely ignored proper football and most sports outside of a(n admittedly really good) Captain Tsubasa title that a Dutchwoman’s review drew my attention to some years back, a few of those old NFL/NBA Streets titles back in the early to mid oughts, along with Aggressive Inline and Wakeboarding Unleashed Featuring Shaun Murray, of all things. I hadn’t even played sports myself since I was a child, growing up in Japan. There’s no real reason that Victory Road should’ve caught my attention the way it did, and has. Then again, Victory Road has had it’s own long course to release as it is.
Originally announced as Inazuma Eleven Ares back in 2016, intended to be in conjunction with an related series that, as far as I can find, at least, was not received well by those more dedicated to the series than I’ve been, has been in multiple forms of development for nine years, and 10 delays, for a variety of reasons that this review does not have time to get into at this moment. There are videos that released the day of Victory Road’s final actual release that goes into it further, that you can look into on your own time, but this game had its fanbase reasonably concerned, I feel, for the longest time.
Hollow Knight: Silksong had been in development for less time, and they largely had hope for how it did eventually turn out. This, as the team at LEVEL-5 and it’s head, Akihiro Hino had, had some serious hurdles to overcome with this. So, let’s shorten this part, at least, a bit. Nine years and 10 delays, was it worth the wait?
The Night Before The Game
Victory Road starts, after a brief period where you create a custom player for the game, and, if you’re like me, perusing the options and messing about with your initial team, on a field that you will not be a part of for some time, but in a situation that I imagine long-term fans are very familiar with. Two teams, the long-time usual player team of Raimon Junior High and Northbright Middle School facing off on the pitch. Then you transfer to a bus, where you meet the the story mode’s proper lead character, Unmei Sasanami, or, if you’re using the English dub as I was before I corrected it, Destin Billows. After a few additional scenes, upon which you discover that Unmei is a different sort of protag than what you might be used to for anime, you arrive at South Cirrus Junior High.
It doesn’t really escalate in the sort of stakes one would be used to, outside of some genuinely nice and sometimes heartrending emotional beats in the next few hours, as one walks around South Cirrus, learns about the school, and slowly gets to know Unmei, as well as a few other characters. You also go around kicking imaginary footballs for currency and other loot, get into rock-paper-scissors Dragon Quest-type battles, and overall get a feel for the initial hub for where you’ll be spending the majority of the first story.
Consulting The Charts
This continues for a few hours, meeting your first few party members, as it were, and getting to know their motivations. Jouji Sakurasaki, a rich delinquent that draws Unmei’s attentions with his legs after kicking a bunch of idiots repeatedly with them, Heita Kisogi, an extremely friendly young man, and Raika Shinohara, a young idol that was raised from a long lineage of a ninja clan, that Unmei recruits by challenging her to a freaking dance battle, to name a few. These are interspersed, since it will take you a bit to get to your first game, for genuinely totally understandable story reasons, with a series of training minigames, not entirely unlike LEVEL-5’s game from earlier this year, Fantasy Life I: The Girl Who Steals Time, which I also reviewed earlier this year. Which I still play and hold to the score I gave it back then, just as a note.
These are only three of the dozens of characters you can encounter and eventually recruit during this story, and just a small handful of the over 5,200 characters that can be recruited to your non this story team. Granted, most of those are obtainable through random drops in Chronicle Mode, which- I’m getting ahead of myself. This game’s main story mode, in a nutshell, is a full-length 52 episode playable sports anime, with excellent character and match writing, genuinely funny bits emotional moments for every main story character that you’ll meet… some annoying sidequests and one particular recruitment part that will not be fun on the replays of this mode that I will be doing when the ReStory mode is added notwithstanding.
Reading the Dossiers
Now, you’re probably wondering about a few things I mentioned in those last few paragraphs, and confused as to why I haven’t talked about the actual football itself, and you may be assuming I’m trying to hold off on discussing it because it’s ended up not being very good, or disappointing in one way or another. This would, normally, be wholly understandable, and even justified, given past repeatedly delayed games that none of us like thinking about anymore unless it’s as a punchline. However, and extremely luckily, this is not the case! Once you eventually get to proper football, whether it be in the Story Mode itself, or in Chronicle mod, the game itself is actually quite engaging and enjoyable, and can be genuinely quite challenging, and both have genuinely well-paced, and good tutorials.
Mind you, if one jumps straight into PvP with the default team you get without leveling and getting new characters from either story mode, or even reading the tutorial, I can imagine one having some… pretty severe problems with the game and it not teaching you any of those, but in that case, it’s completely on you, as it would be if you skip or ignore tutorials in either of the two story modes. You may also be wondering why I’m not discussing Chronicle mode’s story, and that’s because it’s an entirely different sort of story from the more grounded, character-driven tone of the main. More of a ‘go through the original series to play major story games and collect characters from the many individual games and animes that came before this one. I’d like it to the Dragon Ball Budokai — I want to say 2 — mode where you, as Victorio Anno, play through various sagas to advance it to, ideally, eventually defeat the outer space entity that destroyed the world with football. You read that right. No, I will not explain further.
Stepping Onto The Pitch
What I described isn’t even the end of it, since I’m not going into the Competition, or PvP, mode, or the Kizuna Station or Bond Town modes, where you can make your own little — well, town — and invite friends to matches. I’m not getting into the various player-specific systems, upgrades and power ups that you get access to as part of the, and I need to repeat myself here, full-length sports anime that the main story is, and that you’ll be introduced to through the Chronicle Mode for each series’ path. There’s nowhere enough time to discuss how much is in this game, and that’s without what LEVEL-5 plans to add to the game over time.
That’s not including the game’s music, from multiple composers and most of which is amazing, and in Chronicle Mode, accurate to the series it comes from, although certain tracks do have copyright claims attached, should you upload Chronicle Mode footage to YouTube. I didn’t have any issues from LEVEL-5 but it should be noted in case that’s a concern for you. There are minor concerns with certain level up mini-games that you will unlock as the game goes on.
So, do I recommend Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road? In short, yes. If you’re a fan. If you like football games and have ethical concerns with supporting certain real life football organizations? Yes. If you like engaging and genuinely very nice stories? Very much yes! At full price? I would also say yes, but that’s wholly and only if you can justify the expenditure, and don’t have a backlog of games already. It’s 2025, it’s been an amazing year, and we’ve a wealth of games to play as is. Did you play soccer as a child, and partly want to get lost in your own memories as you play it? That’s a considerably more personal statement, and I cannot comment on it. Although that does apply to me, personally. Do I, personally, love this game? If it wasn’t obvious, yes!
I’ll be looking into the proper anime in due time… after I look into what’s considered worth watching, this seems to be more contentious than I expected going into it. If you don’t fit any of those? I honestly can’t say, it is, despite my love for this game, still very much a niche title. Can’t hurt to try it, even then, but be mindful, as always.