Dammit Mandrake!
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Mar 20, 2018
Nah that would be me. @Vyse Inglebard is just my alarm clock made out of meat.
Let's heard you a bit about Inazuma Eleven.
Generally speaking it is a football/soccer JRPG made by Level-5 with an overworld that opens up as you defeat rival teams on your way to a larger championship. There is usually some secret plot underpinning the main premise that involves giant criminal organizations/corporations/aliens and you end up taking them out in the endgame or post-game. Your team is made up of 16 middle school kids and each member of your team has six moves (four pre-determined and two which can be assigned) and several stats which I will go over in a minute. You will be arranging your team of 16 into formations for larger matches against your rivals. During those matches, 11 of your players will be on the field with five in reserve; you (in the original DS games) use the touch screen to draw paths and tell players when and where to shoot. It is all pretty intuitive and works well.
I also want to emphasize early-on that this game is not exactly super realistic. Your players' special moves are like moves out of Dragon Ball Z and crazy stuff like that. You'll be traveling to alternate realities to warp around your opponents, freezing time and imbuing the ball with elemental energy to try to blow your opponent off of the field in a deadly explosion. Don't worry everyone is (usually) (mostly) okay afterwards except sometimes. It ends up being a lot of fun and very goofy.
Outside of the larger matches against your rivals, there are random encounters much like any other JRPG and for those random encounters you will use the players in slots one through four of your main roster. You can see this pictured above; the first four slots are a slightly different color to signify their special use. So you're always going to moving players in and out of your top four in order to passively train a variety of players throughout the game. Later on in the game you can play larger rival matches at-will and train up the whole team at once.
So yeah, there's your general outline. The game follows a pretty standard progression and the story is usually at least passable. It is the game's mechanics which are the real meat, so let's talk about them for a bit. Here is a typical character screen:
On the left you have a pretty standard set of stats and I think you can generally figure out what traditional skills they correspond to. For instance "guts" is obviously a stand-in for the "luck" stat. In the top right you have a character's preferred position on the pitch. Axel is a forward and a good one at that. But you don't have to run players in their preferred positions and the game actively encourages you to move players around and try new things. Axel has an element of fire associated with him. The game uses a basic element system of Fire, Wind, Ground and Grass which creates on-field advantages and disadvantages based upon matchups. If you are a much higher level than your opponent, this matters less; however, when you are evenly-matched or even +-10 levels, you want to keep track of your matchups.
You'll see FP and TP listed as well. These are Fitness Points and Technical Points, respectively. Fitness Points are spent when you want your player to dash across the pitch. Based upon their stats, dashing can be extremely useful as it lets you bypass other players without engaging in an encounter on the pitch (more on that later). Technical Points are what you spend to use moves. So if I want to use a special move, I'll have to spend 10, 30, 50 or even 70 points. With that laid out, let's talk about special moves because I sure you've seen that they are a huge part of your character's statistics screen.
This is Bobby. His preferred role is as a defender and his element is grass. You'll see that his first four moves have a slightly darker backdrop to them. Each player has four moves that have been set by the developers. You usually start with one of them unlocked and as you level up and reach certain thresholds, the remaining moves will unlock. The special moves in slots five and six are always empty and can be assigned by the player at any time so long as they've acquired a move manual to teach it. Moves are broken up into several different types which we will go over now:
- Shots: every player on the field can choose to "shoot" the ball or try a "chip shot" on goal. But if you have a special move of the Shot type, you can fire off a significantly more powerful attack on the goal. And when I say attack, I mean attack. The ball lights on fire, travels through a wormhole or even has three players kick it at the same time to smash past the keeper's defense.
- Blocks: during matches, when you encounter an oncoming opponent that has the ball you are able to use a "tackle" or a "sliding tackle" on them to try to get the ball back. BUT! If you have a special move of the Block type, you can drastically improve your odds of getting the ball back from the other player. Things like creating an afterimage or replacing the ball with a melon are all within the realm of possibility. It is worth noting though: some block moves have a higher chance of catching a foul and giving the ball right back to the other team.
- Dribbles: while each player on the field can try a "feint" or a "charge" when moving toward the opponent's goal with the ball, Dribble type moves will push things in your favor when trying to get the breakthrough that you need. Call upon the power of wind to blow your opponent out of the way or just lower your shoulder and blast on through. Much like blocks, be careful how aggressive you play because some of these moves will net you a foul instead of a goal.
- Saves: the bread and butter for any keeper is their ability to protect the goal. Any of them can try to use a "catch" or a "punch" to get the ball away from the zone; however a Save type move will stop just about anything that is coming at them. These moves are immensely important and the ebb and flow of a match depend largely on how well you protect your keeper and how many Technical Points they have in reserve. If you can drain down a keeper's TP, you can effectively remove them from the match and start opening up on their goal.
- Skills: these are special passive abilities that can give individual players stat/ability boosts or even provide your whole team with perks. Whether it is a Skill to improve your shots on goal or a rare skill that makes your entire team better at defending, these powerful moves are not to be overlooked when building your players and your teams as a whole.
Before I go on, you should probably check out a match to see it all in action. You know the basics and anything further would be advanced stuff. But for Pokemon players, that advanced stuff is going to be really important. And I am sure you've already seen the +1 and +2 and L5 junk next to a bunch of the moves in these player sheets. We'll get to that! But for now here is the heart of the game:
(note: this match is later in the first game when you can challenge teams at-will)
Just a couple more things before you rate me autistic. Let's look at the movesets for Axel and Bobby once more:
You will notice that some moves have a B or a L listed after the name. These are pretty useful additional abilities that the move is capable of.
Axel's Fire Tornado is a Shot type move; however, if an opponent takes a shot on-goal and the ball passes through Axel's region of influence, you can choose to have Axel use his Fire Tornado shot to kick the ball back from whence it came. You will see that Bobby's block attack Volcano Cut can also be used in this fashion. What this means is that players that were not a part of the initial encounter can help out if the ball is anywhere near them and they have enough TP to step in. It is really useful stuff and can royally fuck with your opponent... and your own plans if you aren't careful.
Looking over at Bobby once more, his Triple Boost shot has the L modifier which means that this shot is a long shot. You can fire this thing off from the other side of the pitch and it will not suffer the same exponential drop-off in power that normal shot type special moves suffer from. Long shot moves are pretty hard to come by so be on the look out for them. Bobby is one of those unassuming players you get at the start of the game that many people will never train up because cooler players come along. But when you look at his standard four moves, Bobby is actually really good and worth the time put into him. And then augmenting him with good stuff in the five and six slot can make him a mainstay. You've also got a basic equipment system with your footwear being the most important thing. Plus two extra accessory slots which can alter your stats more than you may expect. And keepers are able to also equip a pear of gloves.
The second to last thing I want to talk about are move levels. You've seen them by now: Killer Slide +2, Triple Dash +2 and Fireball Storm L5. Not only are you leveling up your characters and training their stats in Inazuma Eleven, their individual moves can and should also be trained up. The more you use a move, the better the move becomes. After using a move about 30 times in matches, it will level up to become that move's +1 form. A +1 move is much stronger than the base move and a +2 move is orders of magnitude stronger than the base move. Leveling up your moves is a huge part of the game and allows you to use early-game moves all the way up to the final battles. When I compare these games to Pokemon, it is this specific aspect of Inazuma Eleven that runs circles around Pokemon. If Pokemon would add this one thing to their game, it would greatly enhance the variety of moves and overall gameplay options in the series. And then you get to extremely special moves like Fireball Storm which operate on a leveling scale of one through five. Fireball Storm L5 is absurdly powerful but it also takes a significant amount of time to train that move up. And even L3 and L4 moves are nothing to laugh at. But the best part is that each time a move levels up it gets a newer, cooler animation to go with it. So you can show off more than just a higher number by having a flashier move to use against your opponents.
And speaking of opponents... from Inazuma Eleven 2 and on, there are multiple versions of each game. Just like how Pokemon had Red and Blue, Inazuma Eleven 2 has Firestorm and Blizzard. Each game has specific players to recruit and if you want a full roster you're going to have to trade with other players. You can also play matches against other human opponents and there are co-op matches where you can work together to defeat opponents. It is a fully-featured series of games.
If you are interested in Inazuma Eleven, I would suggest starting with Inazuma Eleven 1 if you can find it. It is a great game and sets you up with everything you need. If you like it, jump on up to IE2: Firestorm or Blizzard and enjoy the new features added. If you just want to play the best one right away, start with Inazuma Eleven 2. I always recommend these games to people looking for something other than Pokemon that scratches the same itch. Inazuma Eleven comes with the caveat of being a football/soccer game; but I am not the biggest fan of the sport and I ended up loving this series. And it lays out some nice ideas that our favorite monster catching franchise should probably consider.
There is a new game in development right now for Switch and PS4 called Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road. Here's a trailer for it:
Oh you may be wondering about any complaints I have about Inazuma Eleven. I have been pretty positive about it. The biggest issue I have is that most of the games start off pretty slow. I had put the first game down for a few months because I got bored. But thankfully I decided to give it another chance. The first couple hours are gonna be kind of mundane because you don't have a ton of cool moves yet; but push past that and you will be greatly rewarded. I really enjoy this series and think it should be much more popular than it is. Generally speaking the only fans of this game I ever find are from South America; my boys down there fucking love this series. Also there's an anime that this game series is based on but I never watched any of that. Maybe you'll like that too. I dunno.
I guess I'll make this its own thread, rather than an oppressively long post in the Nintendo Switch thread. If you have any questions please bug me!
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