The original article was released on December 23, 2022, and re-released on February 27th 2025 with no further edits. The original website was archived and saved with the Wayback Machine here.
LIGHTNING NEWS (NEW YORK, NY) — Inazuma Victory Road of Heroes, a game being developed by Level-5 will have more news released on 28th December, says Akihiro Hino, the Company’s CEO.
Anticipation for this news across the entire Inazuma Eleven community could be felt in the comment section of nearly every tweet made by Hino since 2018, with many users often probing for an update on the next entry into the well-liked football franchise.
Hino took to Twitter to announce the news, saying:
Information on Inazuma Eleven’s 2022 year-end schedule will be released by December 28th, so if you’re waiting, please wait a little longer!https://twitter.com/AkihiroHino/status/1606262834450403330
This statement reinforced the promise he made back in July when he updated fans on the progress of the game’s development and pledged to make another update “later this year”.
This comes after nearly four years of what gamers call development hell — industry jargon for a project or concept that remains in development for an especially long time.
initially announced as Inazuma Eleven: Ares, Level-5 intended for it to coincide with the Anime Release — which has been the case for many previous entries to the franchise.
The game was going to be released on Playstation, Nintendo Switch, iOS and Android, making it the first mainline entry to not be exclusive to Nintendo consoles.
Supposed to release alongside the FIFA 2018 World Cup, preparations for the game took longer than expected, causing development to start later than planned.
Games prior to this point were developed exclusively by Level-5, however, due to the time crunch, they enlisted the help of a third party.
However, after things fell through with the third-party developer, it was back to square 1.
Not to mention, the staff were becoming less motivated, and criticism on the internet was spreading, Which according to Hino made the situation “quite difficult”.
In an April 2020 blog post, Hino admitted that he believed there was “no choice but to discontinue development.”
However, Level-5 still had supporters for the project — thus giving Hino the motivation to keep on. They restarted development on a new game concept which would utilize the Yokai Watch game engine and would feature a brand new storyline. Level-5 also took these new creative liberties to create a game that isn’t tied to the anime franchise, as has been the case up to this point.
“…cross-media is focused on timing, but this time, I would like to concentrate on creating works without being tied to the broadcasting schedule of anime.”Akihiro Hino
On the new concept, Hino said:
“It will take more time, but we will aim for a culmination of Inazuma Eleven’s works with a high degree of freedom.�?From here, it will be a new guideline that incorporates the contents so far and new ideas.”
In September 2021, Hino announced Level-5 would put Inazuma Eleven GROH on the back burner to focus on YoKai Watch Jam: YoKai Academy Y. This was due to business reasons.
Hino later updated on the plans in April 2021, making a video presentation showing off the game and explaining some of the latest changes. This coincided with a blog-post which updated fans about some of the problems they were facing. Hino said,
“I would like to report that [Inazuma Eleven] is progressing toward completion. We are at the stage of solving the piled up problems one-by-one, like how to manage huge data volumes and how to realize a match system without a stylus.
All of us staff are looking forward to the day when the new Inazuma Eleven will be completed with the online feature, so please be patient. I’m really sorry to have kept you waiting for a long time. It will take a little bit more time, but we will make it worth it!”
In 2022, rumours surrounding the game’s development arose. These rumours detailed that this new title would be a Gacha game, similar to Inazuma Eleven SD. These gained traction from a Twitter thread that made relatively unfounded claims about the future of the game.
But… what is a Gacha game? In lamest terms, it’s a game that encourages players to spend in-game currency to get a random prize. In these games, in-game currency can be obtained through either gameplay or micro-transactions — a business model where gamers can use real-world currency to receive virtual goods.
Inazuma Eleven has played off of this concept in the past, in the form of its Gacha machines and Kizuna coins. However, this mechanic was largely a smaller portion of the game, rather than a core mechanic — as is commonly the case with other games in that genre.
So far, the only evidence that loosely supports their claim is a lone screenshot from the game’s official website (initially, the source was unidentified). That of which puts the game in the Collection and Football RPG genre.
However, Inazuma Eleven, like Pokemon and other team-building RPGs have always been about collecting characters. Therefore it’s more likely that the collection descriptor is derived from that, rather than a Gacha game concept.
To date, the only complete Inazuma Eleven Gacha game is the now-discontinued Inazuma Eleven SD. This game relied on the collection of characters through events like weekly randomized selections and through purchases made using the in-game currency, Inazuma Coin.
The announcements aforementioned earlier in this report reaffirmed the fact that this rumour was in fact false.
This post will be updated once more information is revealed.
