INAZUMA ELEVEN: Victory Road Deluxe Edition

I went in expecting a serviceable niche revival and came out having lost three weekends to roster spreadsheets and hissatsu techniques. Victory Road is a football RPG in the truest sense: matches are not simulations, they are turn-adjacent tactical duels where your forward tries to bulldoze past a defender in a focus face-off, your striker fires through castle-like defensive walls to reach the keeper, and every decision on the team-building screen echoes loudly once the whistle blows. The backbone of that team-building is a six-type build system. Stack enough players running the same passive build type and your team gains a coherent identity: Breach builds turn every shot into a goalkeeper nightmare, Bond builds reward patient passing chains with amplified strike power, Tension builds reward staying aggressive as a rising stat meter compounds your momentum, and Rough Play lets your defensive tacklers wade in hard with reduced foul risk. Counter and the Freedom hybrid round out the options. What makes this genuinely interesting past hour 20 is that the Mixi-Max mechanic can flip a character's stat profile entirely - a forward Mixi-Maxed with the wrong partner suddenly plays like a defender - so the meta keeps shifting under your feet. With over 5,400 collectible players drawn from across the series' history, there is enough raw material here to obsess over formations across dozens of configurations, including eight formation templates ranging from 4-4-2 Diamond to 5-4-1 Double Volante. The story mode follows Destin Billows, a boy who actively resents football, set 25 years after the original game. He builds his team as a tactical commander rather than a star player, and that framing is smarter than it sounds. The character work is earnest and occasionally surprisingly layered for a Saturday morning anime aesthetic, with each teammate carrying genuine personal stakes rather than being decoration. It runs upward of 40 hours just through the main campaign, and the anime cutscenes produced with MAPPA give the climactic matches real visual weight. The narrative is cheesy in the best tradition of the series, but the spotlight on individual characters keeps it from feeling hollow. The pacing does drag in the early chapters, though, so prepare for a slow burn before the story clicks into gear. The honest complaints are real. The English voice acting is inconsistent: some characters land warmly while others sound like their lines were assembled from separate recording sessions with no director present, and given that nearly every line is voiced, the rough patches add up. Team management deepens meaningfully over time but the trickle of substantial upgrades is slow enough to frustrate players who do not enjoy the process for its own sake. A handful of mechanics feel bolted on rather than integrated. And for all the depth on offer, the online PvP meta rewards roster investment heavily, which means early competitive play can feel punishing before your collection matures. None of that undercuts the core appeal for the audience this game is actually chasing. If you grew up on the DS-era entries or have ever wanted a football game where special moves detonate like anime finishing moves and your formation choice genuinely changes how matches resolve, Victory Road delivers on its long-delayed promise. The build variety holds up well past the mid-game, the sheer volume of collectible players gives it long-term pull, and the cross-platform multiplayer means the online community has real scale. Filler quests exist but the majority of the side content has personality. Just start on the Japanese voice track.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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