Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road Nintendo Switch 2 Edition Review (Switch 2)

If you’ve spent years of your life waiting for Metroid Prime 4, Silksong, or one of the many other highly anticipated games that spent substantial time on the horizon, just remember that it could always be worse — you could be an Inazuma Eleven fan.

Developer Level-5’s RPG-tinged take on football (or soccer, if that’s your bag) started life back on the DS, where the original game and its sequels cemented the franchise’s status as a refreshingly wacky alternative to the hyper-grounded likes of genre counterparts like FIFA or Pro Evolution Soccer. That success continued into the 3DS era with the Inazuma Eleven: GO games, and in 2016 that the company revealed Inazuma Eleven: Ares as the franchise’s exciting next chapter.

Unfortunately, Inazuma Eleven: Ares didn’t hit its original 2018 launch window target. It was delayed. And then delayed again. And again, again, again. As years went by, amid changes to the project in name, scope, and gameplay — and a frightening period in which a report indicated that Level-5 was pulling away from English game releases altogether — it was hard to hold out hope for Inazuma Eleven’s chances of returning to the field.

Yet, here it is. Nearly 12 years since the last mainline entry, the newly-renamed Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road has finally been released on Switch, Switch 2, and other platforms. It’s more of a relief than anything to finally have it out, but can a game with such an agonising lead-up to launch possibly live up to the hype? I’m happy to report that this return to the classic football franchise mostly delivers the goods and then some.

As with previous Inazuma Eleven titles, Victory Road’s big claim to fame is its core football gameplay. Across each of the game’s various modes, you build and customise teams of players with all sorts of specialised skills for the sole purpose of duking it out on the pitch against other teams. Matches follow the tried-and-true hallmarks of popular football games, with the added wrinkle of characters being able to pull off over-the-top, RPG-style moves that would most certainly get them disqualified in any sort of real-world scenario.

It’s classic Inazuma Eleven gameplay at its finest, with a staggering level of system depth and customisability that will feel rewarding to veterans and, admittedly, a bit overwhelming to newcomers. Level-5 does an adequate job of spoonfeeding the game’s most basic mechanics via Story Mode and optional tutorials, but for every concept that’s clearly explained, there’s another that’s left annoyingly opaque. It’s no stretch to say that having a solid understanding, let alone mastery, of all of the game’s intricate systems can only be accomplished with a significant time investment.

Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to spend time getting to know Victory Road. This long-awaited release can be summed up in one word: big. The game boasts two full-fat single-player campaigns, along with a bunch of side modes, including a social simulation-style town builder, as well as a robust PvP ecosystem for online matches.

It’s not strictly necessary to start with one particular mode over the others, but Story Mode feels like the most solid landing spot to start your journey. It follows new series protagonist Destin Billows (or Unmei Sasanami if you toggle to the Romanised Japanese character names), a teenager and new transfer to Nagumohara Junior High School. A former child athlete who was diagnosed with a heart condition, Destin has turned his back on his dream of playing football. However, a series of chance encounters with his new classmates reignites his passion for the sport, and he embarks on a challenging quest to restore the school’s long-neglected football club, build a team of unlikely star athletes, and take on Japan’s finest: Raimon.

You control Destin and progress the plot via world exploration, traditional RPG-style battles, athlete-training minigames, and, of course, football matches. While the format will feel familiar to anyone who’s played an RPG before, and the mode-specific mechanics are pretty basic, it’s a solid little adventure that spices up the core football gameplay with a bunch of other activities.

It also tells quite the compelling tale, with a cast of likeable, well-developed characters and a whole host of surprisingly emotional story beats. The production values are high as well, as the story features full English and Japanese voice-acting, a grandiose soundtrack, and a ton of beautiful, fully-animated cutscenes courtesy of anime studio MAPPA.

If there’s a major downside to Victory Road’s Story Mode, it’s that the pacing is all over the place. While it’s nice to have such a meaty campaign to progress through, there’s a feeling at times that everything is more long-winded than it needs to be. The basic RPG battles and minigames, while generally entertaining, can get pretty repetitive by the time the late-game grind sets in. There’s one point in the story where you’re scouting new team members, and you have to play the same slow-paced passing minigame a whopping 15 times in a row. Some of the fat could have been trimmed here.

Perhaps Story Mode’s most egregious pacing issue, however, is that it takes a surprisingly long time to actually start playing football matches with any level of frequency. The start of the mode is still entertaining enough on its own, but, strangely, you have to spend a decent handful of hours before football matches start factoring into the story in any meaningful capacity. That said, once it really gets going, Story Mode is a pretty fun ride all the way through its satisfying conclusion.

If Story Mode wasn’t enough, Victory Road also features a secondary campaign with its own distinct story and progression in the way of Chronicle Mode. This follows Victorio Cryptix, a boy from a post-apocalyptic future who travels to the past to assemble a team of the best football players from Inazuma Eleven history in the hopes of stopping the threat to his time.

Victorio’s journey retells the events of all six previous Inazuma Eleven mainline entries in visual novel format, and sees you progressing through all of the major story matches from each game. In essence, Chronicle Mode contains abridged versions of the series’ entire history of campaigns — an impressive feat that will tide voracious players over with hours upon hours of content.

That said, the mode can feel rather repetitive as it lacks Story Mode's gameplay variety and requires that each match be completed twice (once with a set story team and once with your own custom team) to progress.

Additionally, crucial bits of context for each historic match are often glossed over, making it far from the ideal way to experience previous games' narratives. It’s hard to complain too much, though, as having a bunch of the franchise’s history easily accessible in any form feels like gravy more than anything else.

If you’re still not satisfied, beyond the game’s two main campaigns are a plethora of side modes to sink even more time into. Battle Bay Stadium features playable dream matches between powerful teams from series history. Kizuna Station allows you to build your own Bond Town with collectible items and objects and interact with other players off the pitch. Meanwhile, Competition Mode lets you play free matches against the computer or other players online, testing the mettle of your hard-trained team.

Crucially, progression in most of Victory Road’s modes feeds into each other as you share obtained characters, items, and currencies within your central profile. That means that there’s really no wrong way to pass your time, and this freedom of choice in how you interact with its wealth of riches is commendable. Unfortunately, the game has far too many segmented currencies for obtaining items and summoning new characters to your roster, and determining what to do to gain a certain currency is way more complicated than it needs to be.

Performance-wise, Victory Road runs very smoothly on the Switch 2 with no visible frame-rate drops from its 60fps target during my time playing. Controlling everything feels just as responsive as it should. The game also looks decent graphically, though there’s a disappointing amount of shimmer in the background of various environments. Thankfully, the game’s clean and colourful art style keeps its visual identity strong and enjoyable to look at.