Inazuma is an RPG with a twist. Instead of unleashing mythical creatures who battle to the death or dealing dazzling attacks with gigantic swords, you play little games of football. It's a lot of fun, and there's more to it than you might initially expect.
Inazuma Eleven
is the name of a legendary football side who once represented Raimon High School over 40 years ago. Since that day, Raimon's football side has been in steady decline whilst all of its other sports teams have prospered. At the start of the game the football club house is falling apart through years of neglect, and it can't even scrabble together enough players for a full team. It's up to you to turnaround the fortunes of the soon-to-be closed club.
You play as plucky schoolboy Mark Evans, who really, really loves the beautiful game. And so he should, coming from a long line of revered players -- his grandfather was one of the fulcrums of the fabled Inazuma Eleven. Sadly, he died several years ago, leaving Mark his bumper 'Book of Football Skills' and a desire to play.
Over the course of the game you collect players, play matches, and attempt to win the Football Frontiers International, wherein you test your skills against nearby schools.
Beneath the sporty veneer, it plays as a standard RPG, with random battles present in the form of 4-a-side kick-abouts. Wandering around the school's ever-expanding premises, you'll be challenged by other sports teams. If asked out by bulkier opposition – say, the Rugby Club or the Sumo Team – you simply have to win back possession. If the more lithe and nimble tennis team take you, you'll just have to score first. While the accumulation of points and levelling plays out how you'd expect, the 'battles' themselves benefit from the football aspect. You control the movements of your players using the stylus, arcing their runs with a skilfully-scribbled line or tapping their backs for a brief speed-boost. It's all about anticipation, moving defenders out of the way, opening up space. And in that sense, it's not a bad little football game either. Occasionally play can go awry, with the ball pinging about randomly, and it's never really clear why some challenges result in fouls whilst other, equally violent clashes do not.
Any time two players come together for a tackle or a goal-scoring opportunity, gameplay switches to turn based-combat, and you'll have to decide what to do based on the individual clash of stats. Providing you have enough energy, you'll be able to unleash insanely over-the-top attacks - for instance, summoning a Chinese Dragon to complement your already-fierce strike. Ultimately, the relative stats of the players facing-off will determine the outcome, and decide whether you come away with the ball or a turf-imprinted face.
The characters are wonderfully designed, and the fact that you can expand your squad to 100 players keeps things fresh. The centre-piece 11-aside opponents are imaginatively themed, too. The second team you play, Occult High, field a gruesome team of monster-influenced players, with a vampiric centre-forward, a werewolf winger and a Jason Vorhees-alike goalkeeper, who stops shots with a machete. But even regular opponents have been sketched out with care, from bewigged goalkeepers who look like Johann Sebastian Back to small boys with mutton-chops worthy of a Victorian butcher.
The voice acting, for some, will be unbearably chipper, and some might prematurely dismiss the game as be targeted solely at a younger audience. But keep playing and you'll soon find hidden depth. There's a melancholic note to Inazuma 11, and it deals with the problems of high school in a surprisingly sensitive way. You'll encounter bullying, the loss of loved ones, parents who don't listen, insecurity, and the awkwardness between girls and boys. Aside from the high-school drama, there's also an element of mystery in the form of shadowy figures who have a strange interest in the fate of Raimon's fledgling football team.
My major gripe is that while you're free to roam and play how you want for the majority of the game, during the end-of-chapter encounters there's sometimes a series of pre-scripted events that you're expected to work out. You can't just trounce the opposition. There's a narrative that needs to be served. You might have a striker who feels insecure next to your star player Axel Blaze, and therefore has to score the winning goal. So even if you have a one-on-one with Blaze, and you unload your most powerful shot, the game won't let you score. It has to conform to the scripting.
That's both an advantage and a disadvantage. On the one hand, it provides a dramatic narrative to each fixure, adding depth to each player on your team, highlighting their insecurities and personalities. But sometimes it can be a grind to work out what to do. Matches are relatively brief, and it can be sometimes be a frantic rush to complete each event.