I loved the first 40 hours or so, was on the fence for the next 60, and hated the remaining 300+ hours.

The first thing I did was the story, as recommended by Level-5. I loved it. There were a few moments where I had complaints, but overall the story was good and I really enjoyed this part of the game.

The next 60 hours were spent in Chronicle Mode, which was honestly meh. Remembering moments from the anime was great, but the presentation of the story was mediocre for the most part. Not to mention that, in order to progress, you have to beat each stage twice, which completely kills the mood and artificially inflates playtime for no real reason. It felt like watching an ad in the middle of a show. They did add Advance Win later on, which helped, but it’s still annoying.

The remaining ~300 hours were spent mostly on PvP, and this is where the experience became miserable. This is where I really started noticing all the flaws I had ignored earlier because I loved the story mode so much.

First, building a decent team for ranked requires way too much grinding. You need maxed-out equipment, hissatsus, passives, and beans—and configuring all of this takes several hours per character. Multiply that by 15 characters (11 players, 1 manager, 3 coordinators), and you get the idea.

On top of that, rerolling for passives is incredibly tedious. I have around 440 hours on Steam, but only about 395 hours in-game. Where did the rest go? Rerolling. And if you want to be serious about ranked, you don’t really have a choice.

I also don’t understand why there’s a Gacha system in what is essentially a single-player game. Bond Stars are a currency you can only earn through online battles, and they’re required to pull Hero-rarity players at about a 0.5% chance. Because of this, people often AFK in ranked or spam lobby matches purely to farm Bond Stars. Since I really wanted a Hero, I did lobby matches myself—and the entire time I was thinking, what am I even doing? I was literally doing nothing and wasting time just to farm currency. It wasn’t fun at all.

Ranked is also infested with cheaters, and Level-5 doesn’t seem to take meaningful action against them.

The game has lot of bugs and also seriously lacks QoL features. For example, there’s no proper filter menu for coordinators or managers, so you’re forced to guess which one is which. When rerolling passives, why isn’t there an option to summon all spirits at once? Summoning 50–60 spirits one at a time and reloading saves over and over is dumb.

Overall, if you stick with the game for the first 70–100 hours, you’ll probably love it. If you’re playing casually, you will like it. Beyond that—good luck.


EDIT: To the person who said it’s “easy” to get Bond Stars for Chronicle Mode—
as of the Galaxy Update, there are 114 matches across all routes, which means you can earn 570 Bond Stars by fully completing Chronicle Mode.

That isn’t even enough to obtain a single Fabled player with average luck, considering you need 9 specific heroes (yes 9, including the lv50 requirement Hero) for an exchange. If your luck is bad, you can easily burn 200–300 Bond Stars without getting even one hero—and targeting a specific hero pushes that cost even higher.

It seriously hurts giving this game a negative rating with 140 hours of playtime, but it is what it is.

Story Mode? a slop fest, personally the worst of the franchise. It sucks, and I feel zero challenge on it. It also gets hours to get into the actual football so that's just great!

Re-Story? why is the ng+ experience so bad? I quit halfway because it is even more boring than base story...

Chronicle Mode? A sloppy grind fest. I could go into it with 50 levels less than the CPU and still sweep because the AI is actually stupid.

Competition / Online?
The second you get to the golden league, quit it. I got into nine consecutive matches against a 5* (final league in-game) player in a row, always with a fabled except one time, and they all abused the same tech that allows you to straight up IGNORE the player's GK and score for free. I went back down to silver and won 7-0 over there because I'm on that gray area where I can't have fun no matter what league I'm at.

edit 1 - As of today, I went on 16 matches on Golden League. 15 of them were against people two leagues / tiers above me, with nearly all of them using a fabled unit.

I WAS PUT AGAINST THE SAME PERSON TWICE IN A ROW. TWICE. IN A ROW.

The Grinding?
Monotonous. Spent several days setting up overnight macros to get the stuff for my online team, all a waste.

It will always hurt to see my game with the (soon to be) most playtime be such an insult to the franchise for me. I am only going through due to sunk cost fallacy and because, outside of the basics, they nailed everything. And it hurts.

I got this game solely and purely due to nostalgia from having played every game (except the ones that didn't go global like galaxy) and I honestly partly regret it.

Do not get this. If the offline experience stays sloppy and boring, there is no point and purpose to continue once this game dies down in hype, and only the best and even sweatier players remain.

I will probably 100% the game since I do this with most games I review, but I'm 95% sure my thoughts won't change.

Having a blast with this game

Fantastic game for Inazuma eleven fans, If you don't rush it the game time is very high!
I'm at ~20h and I'm at the half of the main story mode

Inazuma Eleven is back and honestly this game is amazing the animations are beautiful, the character builds are awesome, team building, passives handling, tactics, i guarantee unless you will not have the same team as someone else in this game i mean the game has thousands upon thousands of characters and more being added as the days go by i am normally not a fan of sports games or anime but the show and the games I've played which have been 2 so far(Go Galaxy Big Bang and Victory Road) have spoken to me and peaked my interest these series/series of games are amazing truly a recommended experience in my opinion

Just rolled my ankle trying to do heavenly thunder at the neighborhood park

10/10 game I'm going to try it again

MY LIFE HAS BEEN CHANGED

I'd like to start this off by saying I like the franchise, and that the characters and the story are a nice addition, albeit weaker in some parts narratively despite leaning more mature than previous entries released years ago.

The reason why I won't recommend this game is due to one reason: the frustrating design of the gameplay loop, that feels too grinding and taxing on the player, making it feel unwelcome to both returning and new players that want to build the team they desire from a +5,400 roster of playable characters. In an attempt to make efforts feel rewarding, they ended up making the progression unnecessarily time-consuming.

Doesn't respect time and you need to play hundreds of hours just to get the characters you want. That's why people are making cheats to get what they want easily. Too much grinding and people have jobs you know. We don't have time since this game is usually played by adults! CRAZY!

Used AI in development and it isn't tagged as such.