INAZUMA ELEVEN: Victory Road

I used to fall in love with every game Level5 released. Such wonderful handcrafted games full of effort and passion. Whimsical worlds with beautiful soundtracks. Inazuma Eleven might still be my favorite franchise of all time. But it seems Level5 has now entered an era of huge delays and AI slop. And I feel like they just cant seem to get a single thing right anymore. Looking at other releases like Fantasy Life and Professor Layton, it seems they dont know what made these games great or how to even make games like these anymore. After going through development hell for 10 years they released a game where all the beloved RPG mechanics have been swapped out for gacha nonsense. The balancing is wonky. The upscaled models dont look great and the different generations of models look incoherent and just dont blend well together. The new content is quite lacking. Less than half of teams have any new moves or backstory. The bulk of the game consist mostly of insane amounts of grinding. It is quite easy, even for a casual player, to come up with improvements to the game. With the new gacha system and the ability to have thousands of variants and builds, how there is no favoriting system absolutely boggles me. I waited another 6 months after release for improvements. But each "DLC" I am more and more confused by the things that Level5 are choosing to focus on. I just dont feel like praising each small step taken, when there is no focus on fixing bigger issues. But there is a reason I waited 10 years, checking in every week. So I guess I will see you all when the next update drops to see if they finally fixed the game and managed to recapture the old inazuma magic.

Loved the game, it was great and had a lot of stuff, but some player models are still low quality and they added a fake difficulty mode that are just bloated stats that are unattainable, unless you are using very specific builds, it makes the game a pain to play and I can't recommend something like this when your fully trained teams are completely worthless. Not only the game requires a massive ammount of grind, every update the grind keeps getting worse and a good team feels impossible to reach, and now it has gotten to a point where it is completely unbearable.