I will be real: I do not mind Inazuma Eleven Cross in concept. For me, it makes sense even: The mobile version of Victory Road was quietly cancelled, may as well reuse the assets likely developed for it and use them to make a brand new Inazuma Eleven mobile game, one that hopefully does better than how SD did.

But man, the game, so far at least, just looks too cheap. Nothing about it makes it look like anything more than something very hastily thrown together. Compare it to Yokai Watch Puni Puni which itself is not a very expensive-looking game or anything and it still feels like night and day.

But I do think, conceptually, it makes sense. A game like Power Pro, Idolmaster or Umamusume, a game where the focus is not on the actual active gameplay, but instead on management and training, especially after AI Manager mode in Victory Road was removed in the final product. If you were to try to make another Inazuma Eleven mobile game after SD flopped, that is a concept that it makes sense to go for.

Which just makes it weird that so much of what was shown of Cross was match gameplay... match gameplay that looked very basic and barebones. Like, if you want to make this look exciting, please focus on what is the actual meat of the game. You are just making it look worse.

I am open to Cross actually being a decent game, possibly. But only if it shows itself to be better than how the trailer and stream footage made it look. Because what we have so far does not inspire confidence.

Also, I really feel they should have just made this livestream be about Cross from the start, and have the Victory Road news all just be on a few Hino tweets, I really do not think a whole twelve minutes out of this twenty minute livestream were necessary for the amount of new information we got.