Story
Starting with the story, it’s clear as soon as you start your game that there’s gonna be a bigger focus on the story as there’s so much packed into the intro, going over what’s happened since the end of the first game between what’s about to go down at Raimon. Now personally I’m not someone who enjoys story in games, but I can apricate some from time to time, unfortunately this isn’t one of those times as I feel the over-the-top narrative of aliens invading the Earth and wanting to play football is really flat. Don’t get me wrong it’s not terrible by any means, it gives us creative characters both on the “alien” teams and the ones we meet during our quest however I’m just not a fan of the way the told this story as it follows this template, “beat this team but there’s suddenly a stronger one that you now need to beat” rinse, repeat. It gets tiring especially when you finally defeat Gemini Storm after playing all those games with them getting humbled each time only to do the exact same thing with Epsilon and in turn the same with Genesis, it starts to show its cracks early.

The game really pulls no punches with how the new coach handles the situation at hand, like we were all surprised when we first seen Gouenji get booted from the team. Our reactions were the same as the players hearing that for the first time. I enjoyed the arc Gouenji has during this game, as by going away from Raimon he’s not putting his sister at risk of any harm and seeing how much that kills him that he can’t step in which we the viewer also feel since he’s an integral part of Raimon and to Endou.

I found this out really late, but it turns out that depending on what version you are playing either Fubuki or Gouenji get more story and to be completely honest, didn’t notice it during the replay or during my grind on Firestorm. But if true a really cool detail that keeps the versions unique to one another.

Moving on to something a bit positive about the story is the fact we get a look into the new characters being introduced to us when we travel, which I like a lot, learning about each character and what they’re about is fun and creates depth for them so they can thrive at a later date and each location for these characters that you meet are really well structured and thought out although I’ll get to that more later on.



There’s a time during Chapter 9 where you’re attacked by the post-game teams captain Burn or Gazel, but an unlikely ally aids you, It’s Aphrodi from Zeus that steps in. This is so cool! Seeing the final boss’ captain step in and aid you in your quest against this new threat is awesome and a great call back to the first game. After the little scuffle Aphrodi offers to help boost Raimon’s ability by having a friendly against them. As a Zeus fan this is one of my favourite sections, I’ve ever played in a Inazuma game speaking with hindsight here I cannot stress enough how cool this was being able to challenge a reignited Zeus and then getting the opportunity to recruit them after that friendly, like that is one of the best things about this game for me.

Something else I really liked was the whole Dark Emperors angle they went with as the final boss, I love seeing all the hurt players (plus Shadow, Nishigaki and Sugimori) come back and have like this vendetta against Endou and Raimon. I love how the Aliea Meteorite can alter peoples’ appearances, making them wilder and more driven by power it’s such a cool thing to see all these players get reignited big fan of this.

Gameplay
The gameplay is mostly the same, but what Level 5 have done is exactly what I want from a sequel, that being not changing a whole lot but improving it slightly this time round in addition to everything that was in the first game they’ve added long shots, which as the name suggests allows you to ping one from distance super cool idea love how it works in game.
Another new feature is something called Alter Egos which is pretty much just so they can show off a player with DiD. Jokes aside this is one of the best features executed poorly. This is one of those features that lets Level 5 be creative with players and make fun players with. This is perfect for characters like Tachimukai and Endou as they get their roles swapped during the story so having them unlock Alter Ego here would’ve been really cool to see but alas the only players to get this feature were Fubuki, Kogure and a few Epsilon players. Such a shame to see this get completely wasted.

The locations in the games have been expanded tenfold, instead of being limited to just Tokyo we now have the whole of Japan to explore which is really cool. Each location has been crafted carefully there’s so much in each area you can get lost in absorbing the vibes like with me I absolutely adore going to the town in Hokkaido listening to the beautiful ost and just strolling around, it’s not a big area (only 2 squares) but it’s just so charming that I can’t help but just stand there while I was away on stream. Each area has that level of love put into them and it’s really nice seeing attention and care being put into these locations we players explore. It also helps that we see familiar faces when exploring these areas, you can challenge all the FF teams and unlock them via a taisen route from Furukabu. They’re optional too so you don’t need to pay any attention to them, and I love things like that. Optional challenges are really fun and exciting.

For the most part the AI still feels the same but they’ve done something really cool to the alien players where they perform much better, but they burn out rapid it’s like a double edged sword with them because all of their exclusive moves are super good in game with a lot of priority but as a result of this, all the players have really low TP bars which balances them out. This is one the of the features I really love because it makes Aliea players different, it separates them from normal scouts or recruits almost having that 3rd class we’ve got warrior, archer and now mage a bit of a weird analogy but I hope you get what I mean.

Sound
I didn’t cover this in the last review, so I’ll be doing a lil cover of the sound design in the game. The sounds mostly carry over from the last game which are completely fine the reason I’m mentioning this is because I would’ve loved to hear some diverse osts in during my time playing the game and it really annoyed me that I was listening to the same 3 songs repeatedly. Don’t get me wrong there is variation this time round, it’s not completely like the first game where it was just the same for everything but there’s not enough difference for me to forgive it. There’s a ton of great osts in the music library that this game features I know this because as a kid I’d use these osts all the time straight from the 3ds I was playing on. The lack of unique osts that play during battles and matches left me severely disappointed.

Overall, the game is a massive improvement to it’s predecessor adding things like better recruitment, more locations, and a whole lot of new characters is a fantastic way to expand the series and I’m really pumped for the next game down the line. My score for Inazuma Eleven 2 Blizzard and Firestorm is a 4 and a half out of 5, there’s still a few things that leave me wanting more out of this game but overall, it’s still the best Inazuma game currently.

The story is simple and effective, I especially like the story concept of having to recruit members to form the football club and having that act as the base for the game is really well done and it gives so much freedom to create your own Raimon, and the game encourages you to go out and scout new faces to build your team and this feature gets unlocked really quickly into the story I think it’s either chapter 2 or 3 but that’s really early given new Inazuma standards now and the whole theme of building up Raimon from nothing to legendary club is again simple but really effective, straight to the point stories and themes are something I really enjoy. Having that plus not having the story impact any of the matches like you're not required to have anyone on the field except Endou in which fair enough main character moment. (There is a moment where you must have Kurimatsu and Kabeyama on during the Kidokawa Seishuu match but other than that you didn't need anyone specific on.) But the main concept being you can create your own team and challenge Japan’s toughest teams is fantastic. They also balance the story and gameplay well as well, they don’t overload the player with story at the start, giving them little bits of story then gameplay works well as it keeps the player engaged. This doesn’t last the entire game though as in Chapter 6 you get a lot of story at the beginning with little gameplay in-between while to some it might be a bad thing but in my eyes it makes the most sense doing this as the story really sets up a lot of backstory regarding Teikoku and how they are linked to Raimon it only makes sense to give the amount of story shown.
Overall, the story was pretty decent, and it was a solid opener to the series, it’s not too wacky or crazy with its plot it’s nice and simple and really sets the standard going forward.
Focusing on gameplay now and it’s really unique and amazing, to describe the game to friends I would say it’s Pokémon but what if instead of battles it’s football which is fun comparison to make because on paper, sport games and role-playing games just should not mix but Level 5 added their own secret sauce to the Krabby patty secret formula, and it works wonderfully. Typically, with JRPGs you usually find that people say “Oh this is just a [Insert game title here] clone” but with Inazuma it has its own identity which really makes it stand out. There’s a few complaints I have with gameplay and the primary one being that the encounter rate is abhorrent, you encounter teams far to frequently and that really annoys me, more so when I’m trying to go through a door or move on to the next area I would get caught on like the frame of the door or a post or even an NPC and because of that 9/10 I would get an encounter. It just annoyed me slightly I’m happy there’s a end game item that prevents the whole encounters from happening. The type of battles that you can get keeps the player on their toes as they’re not just trying to score goals, but they’re trying to win possession or they’re trying to not concede or not lose possession, this on paper is a good idea but in execution along with the high encounter rate it just annoyed me more than anything else. The last thing that I had issue with was the time in that it took to get your Scout reports from Natsumi, they were far too long, given that it’s tracked by how many steps you take the most optimal thing to do is to just run around in a circle inside on of the Raimon buildings but every time I went from the club room to 1 of the buildings I would get an encounter and you already know my thoughts on that. Point is they can really drag on especially when you really want to get a player from the club you just beat and have to wait for a good while before you finally get the call, you get back to the club room and see the report only to find that the report doesn’t have your player that you hoped for, not having control over who’s on the scout report makes sense however it can cause players issue when they can’t get the player they want and have to keep rerolling the scout report and waiting that awful time, it’s not a pleasant experience and can be a mood killer.
Overall, though the gameplay really sets the bar high for future games and I hope that Level 5 can continue to improve their craft and make the next games absolute bangers. My score of Inazuma Eleven is a 4/5 with a highly recommended tag.