In the first weeks, I really enjoyed the game. But the longer I played, especially after finishing the story, the more I started noticing some huge problems.
And now I finally understand what caused the massive delays in development.

The biggest issue is the game design, and I’ve divided my criticisms into three categories that could genuinely kill the game:

• Grind
• Lack of features
• Lack of direction

1. Grind

Let’s start with all the currencies you need to farm:

• Beans
• Cards
• Bond Stars
• Five different types of shop currencies (Each of those five is subdivided into 6–7 more)

My question is simply: why?
Why does a single game need this many different currencies?

And the way you earn them? Long, repetitive, and not fun at all.

Beans

Beans are the most important resource because you need them to make your players usable and to upgrade their rarity. But if you want enough to matter, you must return to the story and farm the training missions on the highest difficulty. And does your performance matter?

No, it doesn’t.
You can get anywhere from 20 to 50 beans regardless of how well you actually play.
Why design a system that ignores player skill? It goes against the most basic logic in game design.

And you might think: “At least I can swap beans between players, right?”
Wrong.
If you put beans on a legendary player, you’re punished they cannot be changed or moved.
Why punish someone for upgrading a character? It’s yet another example of bad design.

Cards

To get cards, you have to go back to the story and play rock-paper-scissors in a football game. The drops are completely random (at least the rare ones are). Once more, this system feels like it was created with no logical thought behind it.

Bond Stars

Originally, you could only get Bond Stars online. Now you can earn them in Chronicle Mode, which sounds like a fix, but they made the single-player Bond Stars limited.
Once players farm everything, they will be forced back into multiplayer to AFK again.
Why make them limited?
Why simply postpone a problem instead of fixing it?

Other currencies

Most of the remaining currencies also drop through random, repetitive, and boring methods.

2. Lack of Features

Am I the only one shocked at how few features this game has?

They added 150 teams, but what can you actually do with them?
Nothing. You can only play against them or recruit their characters.

They introduced the BB Stadium, but it only has 12 teams, and you can’t even properly set up an AI vs AI match because the player AI in “Commander Mode” is terrible. How is that even possible? Using the same AI the CPU already has shouldn’t be difficult. Instead, the mode feels like a downgraded version of what it should have been.

Level Synchronization

This feature somehow wasn’t even in the game at release — a great choice for a game that claims to be competitive. And even now, it’s still bad. The level sync only brings higher-level players down to level 50; it doesn’t bring lower-level players up.
Even in custom matches with friends, you can’t choose what level the teams should be.

These missing features make the game more boring and shallow. They also hurt content creators. After finishing the story, what content can they reasonably produce?

• PvP? That gets old.
• Chronicle Mode? It forces you to play the same team twice for progress, and it has no real difficulty.

It’s not fun to watch, and it’s not fun to record.

Something that was very popular in Inazuma Eleven Strikers: drafts is also impossible here, because there is no truly customizable match mode. No level settings, no real team-building freedom. And you can’t mod the game either, because everything is tied to online systems and would be flagged as cheating.

Games without content creators tend to struggle, and this game is doing nothing to encourage them.

3. Lack of Direction

Even though Level-5 recently made changes based on community feedback and some of those changes were objectively necessary they still show no clear direction.
It feels like they have no idea what kind of game they want this to be.

Right now, they are trying to make it:

• a gacha game
• a competitive game
• a grind-heavy RPG

ALL at the same time.

These things do not work well together. And their constant flipping on what features to include (like the trainer and manager passives) doesn’t give me much confidence in their long-term plans.

And this is all.

These were my thoughts mixed with a bit of a rant from a long-time fan of the series. I really do want the best for this game and this franchise, but unfortunately, Level-5 decisions so far don’t inspire much confidence to me.