Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road is a football game that feels, almost wholeheartedly, like it’s not really about football. This is a sports drama through and through, focusing on the interpersonal relationships, the individual journeys, and the yearning for acceptance that epitomises our teenage years, rather than sporting glory. You play as Destin Bellows, a young man with a heart condition, who appears to hate football and attends South Cirrus Academy, a school where football is banned. None of this really screams the word ‘football’ – or ‘soccer’ if you’re so inclined – and yet, Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road also revels in the joy, the purity, and the companionship that football can bring. This juxtaposition also makes it one of the best sports RPGs you’ll find.
I’m a sucker for sports dramas. Maybe it started with The Mighty Ducks, a movie that took a rag-tag team of unlikely players who went from being woeful nobodies to the best team in the league. With Emilio Estevez! While there’s no Young Guns alumni here, there’s that same sense of camaraderie and overcoming adversity throughout Victory Road, starting from incredibly meagre beginnings, before working your way towards rebuilding the school’s football club and setting forth on a path to sporting greatness. It’s the characters that pull you through this drama though, rather than the extraneous bumps in the road, and you’ll quickly embrace Destin and his myriad teammates wholeheartedly.
Level-5 have made this character focus easy, because you won’t be playing football any time soon, at least not in the central story mode. My save file had clocked up an oddly impressive 4 hours before I played my first 5-a-side game against an ageing group of shopkeepers, and I kind of love the investment that’s been built into Victory Road’s narrative. To a certain extent, you won’t care that there’s no football, and when it does arrive, with its quirky stop-and-start gameplay, special moves and occasionally clunky controls, you’ll want to persevere, learn and get a grasp of it so you can lead the team you’ve built to victory. It’s something that wasn’t ably captured in Victory Road’s early beta testing, and it feels a lot more natural within its proper context.
The original Inazuma games were mostly exclusive to Nintendo’s DS and 3DS, using the stylus to move your players around the pitch, and selecting special moves as you went. It was a system that I loved across multiple games, and I was sad to see it go, but Victory Road’s updated take does a good job of replicating and replacing it, with more action and reaction than you needed before.
It’s best to think of Victory Road’s matches as a series of RPG encounters, strung together in quick succession, rather than a football match. Every time your player meets an opposing player, whether you’re playing offence or defence, it begins an encounter. Depending on the player, you’ll have basic options like passing, shooting, or dashing past, but you may also have special moves available to you, each wilder and more unbelievable than the last. That can mean creating clones of yourself to confuse defenders, or unleashing a shot that’s the result of a thousand kicks, but, with the level of variety on offer, it makes matches continually action-packed and exciting. It’s definitely not regular football, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun.
Destin’s tale is easy-going, and occasionally a little slow, but it’s all so amiable, and the characters are so likeable, that I found I didn’t mind all too much. Destin loves to investigate and collect data, so there’s a fair bit of running back and forth, and that’s interspersed with funny turn-based RPG battles/conversations that use rock-paper-scissors mechanics as you try to argue your way to victory. I preferred the original Japanese voices over the English dub, but only marginally so, and if you prefer to play in your native language, it’s perfectly satisfactory.
While the central story mode strings you along without any matches, there’s a secondary story that gets you into the action much quicker. Chronicle Mode brings a time-travelling tale to the Inazuma timeline, sending you back in time to form the ultimate eleven, in the hope of preventing a world-ending apocalypse. Newcomers might raise an eyebrow at first, but returning fans have been here before. Chronicle Mode manages to perform a whole bunch of functions at once: introducing people to the series’ extensive history, getting into the football sections quicker, and bringing an Ultimate Team-like experience to the game to boot. It’s a winning formula, and one that shows how strong the revised gameplay formula is.
Level-5 have given players an absolute avalanche of places to play in Victory Road. From the two story modes, you can then set forth with your created team into a tournament, in either single player, multiplayer or online modes, or there’s another mode where you can play with full-powered historical teams from each of the previous games. If you need a break from all that, you can even create your own Inazuma Bond Town where you can meet up with friends online, filling them with all sorts of decorations, buildings, people, cats or giant statues of Mark Evans. To be fair, it’s probably the weirdest inclusion here, and yet, it feels thoroughly Inazuma.
All of this is wrapped up in a lovely 3D anime aesthetic that ties really well with the traditional cartoon cutscenes. It often feels like you’re playing an interactive cartoon – a fact heightened by the story modes’ many cutscenes, and chapter-by-chapter framing – with Level-5’s design department clearly working at the height of its powers. It definitely bodes extremely well for this year’s Professor Layton and the New World of Steam.