Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-4435241-20141101174542/@comment-4916528-20141203131415

Meower wrote: Machomuu wrote: Meower wrote: Mayday123 wrote: Hope there might be a new series Oh, don't worry, there will surely be a new one. Level5 can't just up and stop producing cashcow series, the problem though is that atm Youkai Watch is just that much more profitable on Japanese shores. About that...I'm not so sure. Inazuma Eleven's sales in Japan have actualy fallen quite a bit after GO. Danball Senki was actually the same case, with Galaxy and Wars being their lowest grossing games yet. I imagine that's part of the reason Hino decided to take a new direction with them and, assuming they do continue, they probably won't have yearly releases. I think the biggest issues with IE having difficult times in getting a new series are:

- Level5 seems to have underestimated foreign demand for the series. In fact, I am still wondering what took them so long with the localizations, I mean sure I know these tend to take friggin long to make, but it seems bizarre they'd take this much time, considering, at least in the area I come from, the second and third games were huge hits. It's probably because they never expected it to take off like it currently has, even if it's a niche in certain countries;

- There's a lot of problems related to the game balance. Up until IE 3 (maybe even the first GO, but I kind of disagree on that one) hissatsus determined much of the gameplay, as soon as Kenshins and other junk entered the fray, the games became inexplicably focused on those. They disrupt the flow of the game, even if they look cool and have a lot of useful stuff about them. Plus, they didn't add a convenient way to tell the power level of the attacker until Galaxy;

- The lack of wifi battles, because while it was still forgivable during the DS era, it's unexcusable nowadays. I get that the problems stem from the sheer amount of data that must be passed over the not-so-stable Nintendo servers, hopefully by the time the New3ds becomes a thing they'll have fixed this problem. Still though, a series that presents its strength in multiplayer can't afford to lose wifi matches as a feature;

- A lack of novelty. They hit the ceiling for excitement with Galaxy, given that now whatever else they're going to put in the story is going to look embarrasingly meek compared to "let's save the friggin planet". And while we're at that, a lot of people definitely disliked the retconning of Chrono Stones, so there's that;

- Somewhat more ambiguous target audience, given the title is SUPPOSEDLY aimed at male children, but there's an abundance of players outside this token audience, and the creators struggle at keeping a balance between story and characters, and different tones. 1. There's not so much foreign demand for IE as you'd hope. The fandom is slowly shrinking by now as well.

2. Keshin and Souls don't necessarily interfere with the game's balance. They add an extra challenge and they can make matches far more intense to the very last split second- trust me, I've experienced this first hand. By the time I'd almost won the match with The Lagoon, I was shaking and my hands were sweating madly just because of the tension. If it'd just been about hissatsu, I wouldn't have been nearly as impressed.

3.  a series that presents its strength in multiplayer? I've never read this anywhere, pretty sure its strength is in the enormous number of scouts, techniques, and general variability

4. They don't necessarily have to go further than that, MANY of us were hoping for a real FFI season in Galaxy instead of aliens, though I must say Galaxy's plot, hissatsu, setting and designs very well made up for that. If we just get another season loosely following Endou's generation (Football Frontier season, new season 2 plot, then FFI season), that would work just fine for most fans. And hopefully gain level5 a bunch of new ones, because most of the old fans were hoping for just the normal, good old hissatsu-based Inazuma Eleven and already stopped by the mention of Keshin, or left for a while at mention of Keshin Armed, or left to never return to the series at mention of Souls. But those also attracted new fans, and you can't always cater to both sides, so I hope the next season will focus back on IE's roots.

5. I'm pretty sure Level5 is trying to shed that simple limited audience with the introduction of more female players. Me and alot of other fans are hoping the next protagonist may be a female FW or DF, and there are chances for that, but we can't be sure. They could at least have a female protagonist take over from the male (imagine if Tenma had been female, shindou got sick, and tenma took over. like that.). And for gods sake, there's so many unused, cool scout designs that never got attention. The Grandchildren, Broth Eleven, you name it. You can talk about balance between story and characters, but there's enough animes to have broken that balance and if you ask me, Inazuma Eleven surely isn't lacking in tones of anything. We've seen joy, sadness, mourning (you can not tell me you didnt miss kageyama before they unveiled kuroiwa), love (natsumi, aki, touko, just sayin'), family bonds (fei, kinako, asurei, endou & daisuke, matatagi & bros), even alien terrorism so I really do not see the problem here.