For this week's Demo Play Thursday i played the PlayStation 4 version of Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road from Level-5.
Living in Japan, i have head of Inazuma Eleven and it used to be very popular, but there hasn't been a new anime or game for many years. i checked out the Wikipedia page and yeh, i was surprised that this game was originally set to come out in 2018! back then it was titled "Inazuma Eleven Ares" and was meant to tie into the Inazuma Eleven Ares anime series in 2018.
I doubt that the tech in Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road has much in common with Inazuma Eleven Ares. since it's first reveal it's had 3 more names and gained the PS5 as a release console. Honestly, for a PS4 game it did look really nice. many of the anime releases on PS4 have looked great. the animated cutscenes also looked high quality, but with their black borders i don't know if they're 1080p, scaled down to 1080p, or upscaled to it.
Whilst graphically Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road looks like a modern game, playing the game wasn't as impressive. i was bored playing it. Whilst i know of the Inazuma series, i've never watched nor played any of the games. what i played of Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road went against what i knew, in that Inazuma is a football/soccer series and yet our character hates it and moved to this school specifically to avoid it. after 50 minutes of the story mode, i felt like i knew more of other characters than my own.
The demo does have a second game mode, after story, called Competition Mode. But this felt unwelcoming to me, a new player, much like the story mode did. i had the choice of playing it online or against bots. i chose to play against bots but for some reason the game gave the bots more levels than me. so not only did i not know how to play it, i was up against much higher opposition.
And wow, it doesn't play like any football/soccer game i've ever played. in some respects, it's more like a strategy game. but it should've had some sort of practice mode. it tried to teach me what was happening, there were videos showing it in action, but it tried to do it in a game with a much higher opposition. so i would try to do what it said, but the opposition was so much higher levelled than me it didn't matter what i did.
So i didn't enjoy my time with Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road that much. sure it looks good and it was interesting trying out a game in a series i've heard so much about. it's just that it never felt like this game was for me. i didn't have the context for the story and i didn't know how to play it's style of football/soccer. thankfully, as it's a demo it does mean i can use this as practice for when the real game comes out. but as i didn't enjoy my time with the demo, i'm not really keen on getting the game. instead i'd rather try one of the other Inazuma games
