If you asked me what my favourite football née soccer game is, it wouldn’t be anything as prosaic as FIFA, Pro Evo or Football Manager. It wouldn’t even be Sega Soccer Slam – though that’s a close second. It would be Inazuma Eleven. The fact that it is as much a Pokémon-esque RPG where you’re collecting football players as it is an actual game of football only makes it better. As does the fact that it, and its mainline sequels, were all played with the Nintendo DS’ stylus. If I’m being honest, the fact that it’s only vaguely a football game at all is probably what makes it my favourite football game.
The problem is, we live in a gaming world now largely bereft of styluses, so the careful drawing of routes between other players and the tap-tap-tap of selecting special moves simply isn’t going to happen. With Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road, Level-5 has opted instead to give us an action-based football game that carries the RPG legacy of the original Inazuma Eleven games. The mix, based on the most recent multiplayer beta, is somewhat confusing.
This is a game that has sown the seeds of dread into fans’ hearts, thanks to it’s seemingly perpetual stay in development hell. Originally slated for release in 2018, it’s not only six years late, but it’s had four name changes, suggesting that Level 5 not only doesn’t know how to make that jump from the cosy controls of the DS, but also doesn’t know what to call it.
You now control your players with the analog stick and the majority of the Nintendo Switch’s buttons. It’s a good start, I suppose, but one that tricks your mind into thinking this is going to be Captain Tsubasa rather than what it is. Much like the original series, when your player comes into contact with an opposing player it starts a mini-battle, slowing time down while you make a choice. It’s still a choice that you have to be relatively quick about, but there’s certainly more time than you’ll get when a player is sliding in for a tackle in EA Sports FC or FIFA.
What this means is that every tackle – and I mean every tackle – results in the game stopping, and you trying to choose the correct direction in order to run past the opposition. If you make things too easy, you’ll lose the ball, and they’ll make their run towards your goal instead.
Some of your players have special abilities, though. Now, we’re not just talking that they have a 99 Speed rating, this is more that they have lightning attached to their feet, or they can inexplicably ride the wave created by a heartbeat rhythm. When you’re shooting, it’s all hurricanes, snakes and dragons that are powering the ball towards its target, with only the loosest of arrangements between your players actual legs and feet.
This was one of the things that I loved about Inazuma Eleven, and if you’re a long time fan you’ll get a real kick out of seeing it all playing out on a bigger screen in high definition. It’s not the easiest of systems to get used to, though.
If you’ve managed to string together enough passes to arrive at the goal, you have a limited amount of time to aim your shot with the reticule, and then choose whether you’re using a crazy special move or a regular old kick. In that time, your opponent will be mounting a defence, which in this game means that they’ll be raising literal castle walls that reduce your shot’s effectiveness by a serious amount.
If, by some miracle, you’ve managed to make it past the castle wall, you then have to contend with a goalkeeper who has his own special powers to keep the ball out of his net. That includes central character Mark Evan’s classic ‘God Hand’ – a giant goalkeeping hand – which stops nearly everything. And once it does, you’re back to square one.
In a regular football game, that push and pull of attack and defense feels organic and timely. However, at this current point Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road feels more demoralising than inspiring. I felt as though I was crashing against an insurmountable wall of anime football players, and despite steadily improving my skills (and the team levelling up after each game), my efforts seemed almost meaningless in the face of the computer’s might.
Perhaps that’s a skill issue, or perhaps it’s a difficulty issue, but either way the things I loved about earlier Inazuma Eleven games are not all immediately obvious in the latest effort. The beta also has to do a lot of heavy lifting in terms of getting players up to speed via constant tutorial pages, and there’s no way to sample the story mode at this time. The narrative and the loveable central characters are truly the reasons that I love the series.
With more time I may suddenly find the revised match systems all fit together perfectly, but as it stands I’m now only tentatively excited for what I was hoping to be my new favourite football game. Still, I trust Level-5 enough that I’m willing to wait and see.
