Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road is the latest game in the Inazuma Eleven series after being gone for many years. Does the game beat all expectations after all these delays?
Ive been a fan of this franchise ever since the 1st game and anime started airing on TV, so when they announced this game i was instantly hyped for this game. But has this hype been worth it for me? Was it as good as I hoped it was going to be? And the answer is YES, Inazuma Eleven Victory Road was worth the wait, especially with the amount of content in the game, with hundreds of unique matches to play and literally thousands of players to recruit, there is plenty of time to invest in the game.
After spending about 90 hours into the game, i dont feel like I’m anywhere near close to being done with it. The main story itself already took me over 60 hours to finish, without even having done the extended story that got unlocked after beating it. And you might think that 1 story mode wasnt enough, there is actually a full 2nd story mode that goes through EVERY match the franchise has ever had. There literally is so much content in the gam it can keep you entertained for i guess, 200 hours at least, and time does go by quickly when playing due to how much fun the game actually is. I believe Inazuma Eleven Victory Road is the best sports game of all time.
The 1st campaign is about Destin Billows, a kid who hates football due to an injury that left him unable to play, but pretty quickly, he meets some people who he sees potential in for being great players. So he becomes the manager of the school, but there is 1 problem: the school has banned the football club after a fight broke out many years ago between the football club of this school and the rival school. The game story has a lot of focus on rivalry; there is one between the football club and baseball club, the one mentioned before, and the main rivalry between Destin and Harper Evans. If you played any Inazuma Eleven game before, then the name Harper Evans might ring a bell, because he is the kid of the protagonist of the original games, Mark Evans.
So in Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road, you don’t actually play as the son of the iconic character, and you don’t even play for the school Raimon that every fan of the franchise knows and loves. The game kind of serves as a soft reboot in some way. You are the underdog once again, fighting for the right to exist and then become the best in the country. The story is extremly long, and sadly you dont even play any matches for at least the first few chapters and hours of the game, but the game perfectly explains it with its story na di honestly didnt even mind due to how good the story was, the battles early on are replaced with a rock, paper, sciccor mechanic that is fine enough before the football really starts.
There is only 1 thing i really missed in the game and those are the smalle 4V4 matches we used to have in the earlier games, there are only big battles now and some smaller matches, but the random encounters from back in the day were just a lot of fun to do and was a nice break from the basic walking around, something that did get a tiny bit stale after a while due to the amount of walking from A to B.
Another thing I loved was the subtle characters from older games that show up; they don’t rely on it much, but the handful of characters that do show up don’t feel forced and are a pleasant surprise. And speaking of characters, there are a lot to recruit in the story at some point, but you do need to play the other modes as well for some unlock requirements and also give them some rather expensive items at times making it a bit annoying at times to try and get them all, especially due to having to do a lot of grinding in the other modes.
Overall, the main campaign is one of the best things I played in 2025, and I can’t wait to see what Level-5 is working on for the next Inazuma Eleven. I personally hope they are going to do a World Cup story, something they already did in Inazuma Eleven 3, but now with brand new characters i see them being able to expand a lot more into it, combining what they did with Inazuma Eleven 2 and going across Japan to recruit the best players for the tournament and then play in it.
The 2nd campaign is a lot more streamlined and a lot more focused on the matches, as you go through the story of ALL older Inazuma Eleven games and have to make sure the matches go according to history without any changes, it’s pretty simple but very fun. You can unlock more characters here in the matches to put in your team and replay those matches to level up your team. It’s a very simple system, but it’s so much fun if you have played the classic games in the franchise. It’s a great mode if you are here for nostalgia, and as a plus point, you can farm players from a specific team you want on your team. You just have to get there, and with the number of matches there is, it might take you a bit to get to. And if you have beaten the main story mod,e you can even use players from there on the team.
What’s even crazier about this 2nd campaign is that they are not done yet; they are still adding new stories to it, like the one from Inazuma Eleven Go 3 that was never released in the west and also the matches based on the story from Inazuma Eleven Ares. It’s absolutely wild how much there is to do in this game, and I can’t wait to see how far they can take this game, especially because they announced that all your thousands of players you can get will possibly be carried over to the next Inazuma Eleven game.
If story isn’t your thing, you can also play online matches against others, but I’m not 100% sure how they work in terms of balancing, other than the level 50 cap. I only ended up playing 2 matches, but 1 of them was AFK or something for half the match, so it was a bit weird, but there you can also earn players to put on ur team, and you can use the team from the Chronicles campaign. There is also a town mode where you can place stuff and some other match modes that I personally didn’t get into yet due to spending much of my time in the main campaign mode, so i cant really comment on that.
The leveling is pretty good in the Chronicles mode, but it can be a bit boring in the main story mode due to the longer matches there. The scaling is done well, and if you have a number of goals in the 1st half, you win by default, which is nice. What also feels nice is that it doesn’t feel forced; you have some basic abilities that will work fine, but every time you unlock something new by leveling, it feels like an extra power you unlock as an addition, not something that felt left out.
I love how every move looks, over the many years a lot of new ones have been made and i think this game includes most if not all shots/dodges and catch powers, everything just looks absolutly gorgeaus and it just doesnt bore, even after watching the same move 10+ times because in between you see a ton of other moves, and if it does bore you, you can just switch a character in the team.
If you love football, then this is for sure a must-play, because this is by all means the best sports game of all time. It has something for everyone, and it’s basically 1 massive FREE ultimate team system. I’m so pleasantly surprised that it has no microtransactions and everything is within reach by just playing and enjoying the game. I have nothing but praise for this game, and it’s amazing seeing this franchise make a comeback. I just hope they manage to make even more like this extraordinary game.
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