Inazuma Eleven 2: Firestorm Review

Full matches are a little more involved and crop up a couple of times per chapter, with the option to play friendly games versus any team you've already faced. Here, you control a full team of 11 players and go all out to beat your rivals. At least, that's what happens later. At the beginning of the game, there are far too many matches entirely scripted; for narrative purposes, you can't win them. While the first game often required you to pull off a specific move at a specific time, the sequel simply prevents your shots, blocks, and tackles from having any effect. Once this stops happening and you can play properly, things are a little more fun, but it takes far too long to get to this point. Anyone not already familiar with how Inazuma Eleven works is going to be left confused and frustrated.

Jack's dedication to athleticism is an inspiration to his teammates.

There are a few new additions to the way the game works, but nothing which has much impact. Most notable are the block moves and long shots. Block moves let you block shots going towards goal. For example, a striker may have a shoot move that also functions as a block move. In practice, this simply means you have slightly more special moves to use in defense. Long shots allow you to take a shot at goal from anywhere on the pitch by tapping an onscreen icon and then selecting a special move marked with an L. The long shots are few and far between and add surprisingly little to the overall match flow, given how the shots are nearly always saved.

The other main addition is the inclusion of alter egos, which let you switch between a player's personas, allowing each player to play two positions at different times. For instance, a character could be playing as a striker in the first half, and then you can switch to the alter ego and place the player in defense, with a different move set, in the second half. As you can imagine, given the vast number of players on offer, this is little more than an amusing curio, having no meaningful effect on the way the game plays out. It basically exists to explain away a certain character's backstory involving dead siblings and souls and never comes close to being anything like a game changer.

Clearly, someone hasn't been following the old 'apple a day' maxim.

Inazuma Eleven 2 features female players, and you can recruit different (non-story) footballers depending on whether you own the Firestorm or Blizzard version. There's also a narrative subplot involving a budding romance between Mark and one of two girls depending on the version. Other than this, the version differences are minor. There are a huge number of incidental players to recruit (well over a thousand), but there's little collect-'em-all incentive when you can have only 100 players in your roster at once.

Other than these few minor changes, Inazuma Eleven 2 is pretty much the same game you played six months ago, only with a new story. It's the same gameplay, the same visuals, and the same frustrations. The plot is slightly more involved this time, and there's a lot more of it. For the first four or five hours in particular, the action is broken up by reams and reams of dialogue, cutscenes, scripted matches, and tutorials for a system the narrative assumes you already know.

If they don't make it as footballers, they have promising careers as guards in Metal Gear Solid games.

Inazuma Eleven 2 is unlikely to win over critics of the previous game, and it's a fairly impenetrable starting point given its assumption that you know the previous game's story. For those who loved the original and are craving more of the same, it's a worthy follow-up because it keeps every system in place, largely untouched. For those who aren't already on Team Raimon, however, there's little here to celebrate.