➤ A kick towards the future 🎮

A few months ago we played and reviewed Inazuma Eleven 3: Lightning Bolt, underlining how the Level-5 series had begun to tire a bit and needed a good boost in technical and content terms to keep up with the times. Today, with Inazuma Eleven 3: Ogre Attack !, we can only reiterate our perplexities in the face of the absurd policy with which the three versions of Inazuma Eleven 3 (precisely Lightning Lightning, Explosive Fire and Ogre Attack!) were proposed in Europe. The three titles are relatively mirror versions that were released in Japan within a few months on the Nintendo DS. In Europe, the three games have been transplanted directly to Nintendo 3DS - with the only addition of a disappointing stereoscopic effect - three years after the original release and at a time when the cartoon's success has run out. If we consider, then, that Ogre on the attack! is inspired by a feature film still unreleased by us, you will understand that we are facing one of the worst omelettes in the long and sad history of the worst omelettes.

Ogre on the attack! is the victim of the absurd distribution of the three versions of Inazuma Eleven 3

The future is here

Despite the football theme, Inazuma Eleven 3 always remains a Japanese RPG that follows in its own way a tradition of exploration, long narrative sequences and random battles. The story is basically the one already told in Lightning Flash and Explosive Fire, with some changes especially in the initial and final stages of the adventure.

In fact, the game begins by showing us a distant future in which Canon Evans, great-grandson of the historical protagonist Mark Evans, discovers the plans of the Ogre team intending to return to the past to prevent Mark and Inazuma Japan from winning the very difficult international football tournament called Football Frontier. . While Lightning Bolt and Explosive Fire focused respectively on the characters of Paolo Bianchi and Hector Helio, Ogre on the attack! dedicates numerous story sequences to defining the character of Canon and the enemies from the future. There is no more room for "supernatural" squads than the other two versions (however recruitable) and even the Spanish sung introduction and some other fully voiced cartoon cinematics have been changed to match the new story. Apart from that, the development is practically identical, despite some discrepancies in relation to the animated version of the franchise: Ogre on the attack! it is in fact inspired by the film Saikyō gundan Ogre shūrai still unreleased in Spain, which however is set during the first narrative arc of the anime. In short, for fans of the series, this is an excellent opportunity to learn about characters and events that they may never see on television screens in our language. It should always be borne in mind that Inazuma Eleven is a rather bizarre series, in which football is considered almost a religion rather than a sport: the impression, in certain moments, is that the series takes itself a little too seriously and that Level-5 fails to sustain the narrative without falling too far into childish. A very positive note, however, deserves the lyrics and the dubbing in excellent Spanish.

The 3D effect

As with Lightning Bolt and Explosive Fire, Ogre is also on the attack! proposes a very light stereoscopic effect that benefits in a very limited way to the general visual rendering and that can be easily deactivated without missing anything.

The past as well

Already on the occasion of the review of Lightning Lightning and Explosive Fire we had denoted a certain tiredness in terms of gameplay: Inazuma Eleven is a series that, unfortunately, from episode to episode, has proposed very few changes and news, ending up curling up in a compendium mechanics that are always appreciable but by now very little surprising. This third episode, for example, gives players only a very few new mechanics that allow them to combine the efforts of the players on the field to break through the opponent's defense and control the game more. For those who do not know how Inazuma Eleven works, it is easy to say: it is a jRPG that projects the mechanics of Japanese role-playing games in an urban and everyday context, and therefore the exploration of more or less vast environments in which it is possible to interact. with non-player characters, making purchases, opening "chests" and so on. There is no shortage of casual fights, but the battles in Inazuma Eleven are soccer matches in which the player's "party" collides with an opposing team.

Our players are controlled with the stylus on the lower screen, tracing their movements and touching the other characters on the field to pass the ball or "engage" a fight in which the best of the players involved will win. For this reason, it is necessary to manage the team in a strategic way, selecting its members based on their peculiar abilities and managing the equipment to upgrade them if necessary. There is also no shortage of special techniques that the characters show off in short as spectacular non-interactive sequences with an all-Japanese flavor. It is a pity that, at this point, the spectacularity no longer has the effect it once did, especially considering that this Ogre is also attacking! is nothing more than a three-year-old title for the Nintendo DS distributed in Europe only for Nintendo 3DS. Technically it is therefore a fairly antiquated product, definitely out of place in the library of the new Nintendo laptop. Fans of the franchise will also overlook its visual paucity, but how many of them who have already purchased at least one of the two previous versions will want to return to the field this time too?

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Judging Inazuma Eleven 3: Ogre Attack! it was a really tough undertaking, mostly because it was released at a really unhappy time. In summary: it is an "old" game that comes out, on the "wrong" console, months after the two mirrored and practically identical versions which in turn already suffered from the same identity problems. In the end we decided to give the same rating as Lightning Bolt and Explosive Fire, but keep in mind that if you have already played either of them you must be a die-hard fan of Inazuma Eleven to embark on this new parallel storyline. If not, perhaps it would be better to wait for the sequel developed specifically for Nintendo 3DS, if in Europe it sees the light before the next generation handset.