Ina11 2 yap after rewatch
Inazuma Eleven 2 game and its adaptation are... fascinating in some good and bad ways.
The premise is a silly football aliens idea, but the actual core is navegating the trauma the two main characters, Fubuki as protagonist and Hiroto as antagonist, have. Both are orphans, both are struggling with their identity and value as a person along with the fear of abandonment, both want to be useful because there is nothing else for them to hold onto.
Fubuki had to live with being the only survivor, now without his parents and brother at young age, even thinking his brother should have lived instead of him. Level 5 isn't really good at portraying Dissociative Personality Disorder (just see the awful cheap copy that was Ichihoshi), but the game does a nice work with Atsuya. He's the protector, the aggresive that can solve the problems, while Shirou is the easygoing that repress his feelings. They're different, buth they're also similar. Just like Atsuya, Shirou starts as a lone wolf, he's arrogant and thinks he can do all the work as long as Atsuya is with him, which makes Someoka get angry at him. But he also adapts and Atsuya learns to play together with him as forwards.
Fubuki favores Someoka even in the game, but the anime got freedom to develop their relationship deeper. Yet this is where the first problem begans. When Fubuki loses Someoka, and because he's unable to beat Osamu, both Shirou and Atsuya starts to break under the pressure. Their relationship as a system based on taking different roles doesn't work anymore. Osamu tells them what they feared the most: they're not needed anymore. They're not good enough to be needed, which means they lost the place to belong they had found in Raimon.
In the game, Atsuya is scouted by the antagonists. He "betrays" Raimon because Raimon made Shirou suffer, because he didn't feel needed (loved) there. He complains about all this, but it's also a fake betrayal to make Shirou move forward. All this is absolutely deleted in the anime, which leaves Atsuya as a more bland character that resembles the evil alter archetype. However, they take the chance to make Fubuki talk with Someoka and bond more. Someoka becomes a safe space for him, someone who is always supporting him when characters like Endou don't see he's struggling. This bonding also makes the match of Dark Emperors more painful, with Fubuki desperately trying to make Someoka remember their promise. It's a bittersweet feeling. Is this development worth losing the game timeline? I would have liked them to mix both.
What happens next is even worse. When Goenji returns, a person that can replace Fubuki, Fubuki desperately try to reach to him. In the game, while Goenji rejects Atsuya's challenge, he ends up listening to Fubuki's fears and explaining to him that Raimon does want him, that he doesn't need to be perfect, regardless of who he is. Shirou finally understands that he can rely on his team mates from now on, and Atsuya decides his role as a protector is over, deciding to let Shirou by himself and telling him he will be always watching over him from inside his heart.
All this emotional development is totally destroyed in the anime. Why? Is it because it wasn't "cool" enough? In order to force Fubuki's change during the climax match, they made Goenji be an absolutely terrible person shaming Shirou for his insecurities, then he just "fixed" him by hitting him with the ball. Fubuki's fusion was cool, but it just let him have to solve his trauma alone (men can't cry ig?) and Atsuya as something to get rid of.
Ironic enough, when it comes to Hiroto, the parts of his story that were cut deleted all the cruel lines Ulvida had for him.
Hiroto's story in game... it seems a queer allegory. Perhaps it was unintentional, however, his relationship with Endou and how he's "outed" is pretty similar to a gay man's struggles. He's part of the "aliens", the people the Raimon hates, yet he desires to connect with Endou, he likes being with him and playing with him. In the game, there is a scene where they find Midorikawa who has lost his memory after being abandoned by Aliea. Hiroto doesn't understand why Endou just let him go, since he had hurt him, he's the enemy. His words are really mean, considering he's fully aware of who Midorikawa is and what's happening at Aliea, but he's pretty much projecting, because he's expecting to be hated if Endou finds he's Gran.
Of course, the moment when Hiroto's identity is revealed eventually happens. In the anime, all the fear Hiroto had in game was just deleted and he says he's Gran himself. There is no actual conflict. In the game, Endou doesn't realize Gran is Hiroto until Ulvida tells him. For Hiroto, this is devastating. Ulvida outs him out of spite, because she's too brainwashed by Aliea and hates how Hiroto behaves, and because she is jealous of him due to the favoritism their "father" gives. Hiroto panics and runs away, forcing The Genesis to leave with him.
His feelings for Endou are a really conflicting for Hiroto. It goes against everything Aliea, Mr. Kira, stands for. Desperate because of those feelings, Hiroto tries to talk with his adoptive father, just to get denied by him. So he resigns himself to keep following Mr. Kira's orders. He can't go against his desires because he's the most important person for him, who gave him a place to belong, even if he's just borrowing Kira's real son's name and the man doesn't actually care about him.
Hiroto is one of the most tragic characters in Inazuma Eleven. He was groomed by Mr. Kira for years in order to be turned into a terrorist. All the kids in Aliea were, but Hiroto has the strongest connection, having lost his real name (which now we know it's Tatsuya), being used as a replacement for the real Hiroto, throwing his identity and feelings in a desperate way to beg for love from a parent figure. Even when he becomes an adult in GO, he cherises Mr. Kira and adopts his last name, unable to cut ties with his abuser.
Inazuma Eleven 2 is a story about child soldiers, middle school kids used by evil rich people as a weapon of war. The anime tried to whitewash Mr. Kira's evilness, he realizes he was wrong and Ulvida can't bear with getting her role in life turned into dust. But the game isn't that nice, the reason why Ulvida attacks him is because he cruelly discarded her when she lost, just like he had discarded Hiroto a few minutes before. On the other hand, there is a great change at the end of this arc. While Hiroto is taken away by the medical team in the game after protecting Kira from Ulvida, in the anime he stays in the scene and Hitomiko reach for him, showing that he finally has a true family.
When you read the game story and realize how much they cut (censored?) the main development, season 2 is nothing but disappointment. And yet, you can't hate it, because season 2 changes also brought amazing improvements.
Some of them are small, like Fudou's introduction in the hospital. Others change whole subplots. This is the case for Kazemaru's fall. In the game, he gets really powerful and Ulvida decides to injure him, so he's forced to be hospitalized. The anime decided to go a darker route, where he's too traumatized when overpowered enemies keep appearing and decide to quit due to his own inferiority complex. This connect a lot better with his main role in the Dark Emperors, since he had lost all hope to get stronger by himself.
Chaos introduction in the game are simple post game matches. Depending on the version you bought, just like pokemon, Suzuno or Nagumo will appear once during Atsuya's betrayal, just to be kicked by Aphrodi. The Raimon leaves and that's all of those three in the main story, really wasted. The anime decided to use that chance to insert them and their matches more properly. Nagumo's plan to deceive Raimon and his alliance with Suzuno where they had to teach their team members to work together was pretty nice. No wonder why they're actually popular unlike the post game characters from Ina11 3 or Chrono stone. During this arc, Tachimukai's training being shown for this match and Aphrodi's small interaction in Fubuki's plot also helped a lot what the game lacked.
At some point, Level 5 decided to sell nostalgia and brought the old characters back to an AU that happened to get called Inazuma Eleven Ares no Tenbin. And what they did... was deleting all Fubuki's and Hiroto's trauma. No one died, there was no tragic events. This could have worked if they actually tried to do something.
Shirou and Atsuya, this time with Someoka as outsider and Atsuya being a troublemaker could have get the brothers fighting, instead Shirou was reduced to be a pretty face that just existed. It was really sad.
Hiroto on the other hand... well, Tatsuya does have a conflict. The rich kid who hates the orphan, that's the plot. I don't particularly hate that Kira's son now has the same age as Tatsuya I do hate his nonsensical ugly design, but the kid that we saw suffering the whole Inazuma Eleven 2 now got eclipsed by this brat that bullied him and should have been an antagonist instead of playing in the same team.
I've been designing how I would fix Ares narrative, but this is a text about Inazuma Eleven 2, so I'll just say: justice for Tatsuya
Btw, the manga totally skipped Inazuma Eleven 2, so I refuse to read that thing.
