Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road Review – A Turbulent Comeback Finally Finds Its Footing

Overview

After a development saga that has dragged on for close to a decade, multiple rebrands, and a very public beta, Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road arrives with a lot to prove. Crossing 500k sales across Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, PC and mobile shows the fanbase never really left, but a sales milestone does not automatically mean the game sticks the landing.

Victory Road is a hybrid RPG and arcade football game built on two pillars. There is a fully voiced story mode that tries to reboot the series for a new generation while honoring a mountain of legacy characters. Alongside that sits a deeply featured online and team-building suite that lets you grind, scout, and experiment with more than four thousand players from across the series.

The result is a game that can be thrilling, generous and almost absurdly deep, but also fussy, grind-heavy and oddly paced. The latest balance patch that boosts EXP and tweaks Bond Star income goes a long way toward smoothing the roughest edges for newcomers, yet it never fully cures the core structural problems baked into the design.

Story Mode: A Strong Kickoff With Patchy Midfield

The story mode is the closest thing Victory Road has to a mission statement. Level-5 clearly threw money and time at presentation. Character models are crisp, cutscenes lean heavily on stylish camera work, and the dub work captures that particular Inazuma mix of shonen earnestness and football melodrama.

Early chapters are the highlight. The new protagonist’s arc of building a ragtag squad, earning their place in the academy hierarchy and gradually butting heads with the established powers lands well. You bounce between brisk dialogue scenes, light exploration and matches that feel tailored to your current power level.

Unfortunately, the pacing loses discipline as the roster balloons. Once the story tries to weave in legacy favorites alongside its newcomer cast, scenes start to feel overloaded. There are long stretches of exposition about tournament structures and inter-school politics where the football takes a back seat for too long. On handheld especially, these sequences drag in a way that the series’ older, snappier DS entries rarely did.

Matches scripted for the narrative are generally fun, often introducing a new mechanic, weather condition or rival archetype. The problem is that the difficulty curve is uneven. Before the EXP patch, it was easy to hit walls where a story match assumed you had done a fair bit of optional grinding or scouting. After the patch, that friction is reduced, but the underlying issue remains: story progression expects you to live in the side systems more than a lot of players will want to.

RPG vs Sports: Systems That Sometimes Trip Over Each Other

Inazuma has always walked a line between RPG stat-building and concise, arcade football. Victory Road doubles down on the RPG side. Every player has level-based growth, equipable skills, elemental affinities, special moves and Bond Stars that act as a meta-currency to unlock and strengthen relationships.

On paper this is intoxicating. The sheer number of combinations and tactical variants you can assemble is staggering, and for series veterans who love squeezing every last percentage point out of a build, Victory Road is a dream. You can sculpt a high-pressing, interception-focused team that wins by denying shots, or go all-in on long-range blasters and chaining special techniques.

On the pitch, though, the weight of the systems sometimes drags matches away from feeling like football. Long animation chains, frequent ability popups and constant pausing to trigger specials break up the flow of play. Wins often feel like the result of who stacked their buffs and Bond synergies more efficiently rather than who read the field better in real time.

The latest balance patch slightly increases base stat gains from leveling and pushes some power out of the most abusable special move loops. This nudges things back toward rewarding positional awareness and timing, but the fundamental design preference is still toward RPG math more than raw football feel.

EXP, Bond Stars and the Grind Problem

The biggest flashpoint around Victory Road has been progression speed. In the pre-release test and at launch, experience gain was stingy. Story matches gave meager rewards, friendly matches felt almost pointless from a leveling perspective, and Bond Stars trickled in so slowly that building the relationships the story constantly celebrated felt like work.

That tuning turned what should have been an engaging team-building loop into a chore. You would see a cool veteran character, scout them, then realize they needed an unreasonable number of levels and Bond Star unlocks before they were even viable for your current league tier. Rotating squads or experimenting became risky because under-leveled characters dragged the entire team down.

The recent patch directly tackles this. EXP gains from most match types are noticeably higher, especially in the mid-game window where many players were stalling out. Side tournaments and training matches now feel worth doing rather than a tax. Bond Star rewards have also been subtly reworked so that you unlock early relationship tiers faster, giving you a taste of a synergy before demanding a bigger grind.

For newcomers, this changes the texture of the game significantly. You can progress through the story at a steady clip while opportunistically leveling a bench, and it is far easier to bring a favorite character up to speed without hours of repetitive fixtures. The grind is still present and the late-game meta teams still require serious time investment, but the worst pain points have been sanded down.

That said, the economy is not what I would call elegant. There are a few too many overlapping currencies, meters and training systems that all feed into similar outcomes, and the interface for managing them is clunky. Swapping gear, spending Bond Stars and reallocating skills involves too many submenus and loading hitches, particularly on Switch, and the game does a poor job of surfacing which investments actually matter for your playstyle.

Online Play and Cross-Platform Performance

Online is the other half of Victory Road’s pitch, and in terms of feature set it is impressively robust. There are ranked and casual matches, seasonal cups, co-op events and a surprisingly flexible lobby system that lets you organize friend tournaments cross-platform.

Connection quality on console and PC is generally solid. Input delay is present but predictable, and matchmaking usually finds an opponent within a minute in the first few tiers. Mobile is more inconsistent, with occasional rubber-banding and disconnections on weaker connections, which is particularly painful given how dependent some builds are on tight timing for ability chains.

Balance online is a work in progress. The same EXP and Bond Star tuning issues that plagued the story also bleed into competitive play. Before the patch, players who no-lifed the early weeks had an almost insurmountable stat advantage. The new EXP curve helps late adopters catch up more realistically, especially because daily and weekly objectives now shower more useful rewards.

However the metagame is still quite narrow. Certain special moves and formation combos dominate, and facing the same few archetypes repeatedly can be tiring. Level-5 has begun nudging the numbers and has signaled ongoing balance passes, but if you are looking for a perfectly tuned competitive platform, Victory Road is not there yet.

Cross-platform parity is a mixed story. Visuals scale well, and higher-end machines enjoy sharper textures and faster loads. On Switch and mobile, you are dealing with muddy foliage, occasional frame dips during heavy special move sequences and long initial boot times. None of this ruins the experience, but it reinforces the sense that Victory Road is creaking under the weight of its own ambition on weaker hardware.

Long Development vs Final Product

Given the saga behind Victory Road, it is impossible not to judge the game in the shadow of its development. Years of delays, engine changes and public promises built an expectation of something close to a definitive Inazuma Eleven experience.

What we actually have is a strong, sometimes excellent football RPG that still feels oddly insecure about its own identity. The long development shows in both polish and seams. You can feel the care in the animation work, the fanservice-laden roster and the breadth of online options. You can also feel the rewrites and re-scopes in the meandering mid-story, the bloated progression systems and the occasional technical hitch.

Reaching 500k sales is a deserved win for Level-5 and proof that the audience for this formula still exists. The question is whether Victory Road does enough to justify the wait. I think it does, but only just. The foundations are good, the patch support is clearly responsive, and there is a genuinely compelling loop here once you push through the early confusion and menu wrangling.

Yet it is hard not to imagine a tighter, more confident version that shipped a couple of years earlier with a leaner progression model and more focused story. Victory Road often feels like a game designed to be a service platform first and a classic single-player RPG second.

Verdict

Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road is a dense, occasionally dazzling return for a beloved series that has forgotten how to get out of its own way. When the story focuses on its core cast and the matches flow, it captures that electric, over-the-top football magic that made Inazuma special in the first place. The post-patch progression is far kinder to newcomers, and online play has real legs if you are willing to engage with the meta.

At the same time, bloated systems, lingering grind, uneven pacing and technical rough spots keep it from true greatness. Fans who have waited years will find plenty to love and likely forgive the missteps. Everyone else will find a very good football RPG that demands more patience than it should.

Score: 8/10