Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road farming routes for XP, heroes, beans and drops

Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road is built around repetition. Levels, spirits, beans, cards, and rare passives all sit behind different loops, and the game rarely explains which activities are actually efficient. The result: a lot of wasted time in the wrong modes.

This breakdown focuses on practical farming routes that have been tested to work: one offline Chronicle grind that spits out XP and spirits, online ranked setups for extreme leveling and Bond Stars, AFK card farming in story, focused bean training, and passive setups that quietly supercharge every other farm.

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How To Farm XP In Inazuma Eleven Victory Road

Starts at: 00:05

XP and spirit farming offline (Team Ogre Chronicle loop)

The most self-contained offline farm lives in Chronicle Mode against Team Ogre, at the end of the original Inazuma Eleven 1 route.

The aim of this loop is simple:

• farm large amounts of EXP for your squad
• farm player spirits, including Top Player, Legendary, and occasionally Hero spirits
• Pick up beans and miscellaneous items as a side effect

The setup looks like this:

• Enter Chronicle Mode and queue up the match versus Team Ogre.
• Use a team strong enough to beat them consistently; the featured lineup was far from perfect, but comfortably cleared the match and stayed ahead in stats for focus battles.
• Include key story players whose spirits you want (for example, Brier, Darion, Harper, or others you’re targeting). Having a player on your team noticeably increases the chance their spirit drops.
• Optionally add a “golden” player, such as Golden Bolong, if you want to funnel the big XP payout into a single character.

The method relies on repeatedly forcing focus battles against Ogre’s three strikers:

• Malice
• Lancer
• Kalios (name varies slightly in pronunciation)

Those three are important because they hit hard on offense but lack defensive moves in duels. As long as your attacker’s attack stat outmuscles their defense, you win focus battles cheaply and quickly, which is where the majority of drops come from.

A typical loop inside the match:

1. Score one early goal to take the lead. This frees you to ignore scoring for the rest of the match and focus purely on duels.
2. From kickoff or after any reset, steal the ball as quickly as possible.
3. Manually dribble into Malice, Lancer, or Kalios to force a focus battle.
4. Win the duel, take the drop, and immediately move toward the next one.
5. Avoid defenders and specific midfielders who carry dangerous defensive moves; if they engage, you slow the cycle or lose possession.

In one demonstration run, this produced around 34 focus battles in a single match, with roughly half that in the first half alone. Even on an unlucky run, the post-match tally still showed:

• ~150,000+ EXP shared across the squad
• multiple Top Player spirits (e.g., Gazelle, Sean Frost)
• a Legendary player spirit in the match reward list
• a modest trickle of beans

With better positioning and more deliberate routing between the three strikers, the number of duels (and therefore drop chances) can go higher. The bottleneck is not difficulty; it is how many focus battles you squeeze into the 90 minutes.

Two small tweaks help keep the loop stable:

• Use a strong keeper with a reliable catch (for instance, God Catch) to shut down the occasional Ogre long shot like Doom Spear. The goal is to maintain a 1–0 or 2–0 lead so you can ignore scoring.
• Trigger a special tactic that boosts dribble speed and scramble stats to navigate around unwanted defenders and reach the strikers faster.

This loop is particularly useful if you prefer to stay offline: it covers EXP, spirits for the Player Universe and Spirit Shop, and some beans, without touching Ranked or relying on other players.

XP farming online (Ranked Matches and commander mode)

Online Ranked Matches are still the single fastest way to level characters. The game’s XP system heavily rewards matches against higher-level teams, and the reward does not depend on you winning.

To access Ranked, open Competition Mode from the main menu, choose Compete Online, then select Ranked Match from the options. The XP logic is straightforward:

• Every Ranked Match pays out XP at the end, win or lose.
• The lower your team’s level compared to your opponent, the more XP you gain.
• Facing a much higher-level opponent can catapult under-leveled characters up by dozens of levels in a single game.

Ranked also pays five Bond Stars per match, again regardless of result. Bond Stars fuel the Player Universe constellations in Chronicle Mode, where you pull for spirits and chase Hero characters. That makes Ranked the central hub not just for levels, but for gacha currency as well.

“Lose on purpose” leveling strategy

The XP bonus for level difference is strong enough that intentionally fielding a weak overall team becomes a valid strategy:

• Fill almost your entire lineup with level 1 “scrub” players you never intend to use long term.
• Include one or two characters you actually want to level in the starting XI.
• Queue into Ranked. Your average team level collapses, and matchmaking pairs you with high-level opponents.

You will be crushed on the scoreboard, but your chosen characters walk away with enormous XP chunks every time. Since Bond Stars are flat per match, each loss is still fully productive.

Commander mode for semi-AFK grinding

Playing out every Ranked match manually is exhausting. Commander mode offloads most of the work to the AI:

• Once the match starts, press the button shown at the bottom-left of the HUD (on supported platforms, this is the d-pad down input) to switch to commander mode.
• Your team continues playing under AI control. You can still intervene for formations and cutscene skips if you want to shorten match length.
• At halftime, you may need to press Continue; if you ignore it, the game will eventually advance on its own after a short delay.

Combined with the low-level team trick, commander mode effectively turns Ranked into a background XP and Bond Star farm: you queue into a game, flick commander mode on, walk away, then come back to bank levels and start the next match.

For maximum throughput, equip XP-boosting gear like Promise Pendant, Bracelet of Victory, or EXP Boots on the players you care about, so every loss pays out more.

AFK card farming in story (Ry Noodles minigame)

The card-based currencies that drop in the story are deceptively powerful. They buy special moves, equipment, tactics, costumes, Kizuna Town buildings, and “new possibilities” items used in late-game systems. The most efficient way to farm them is effectively AFK.

The loop revolves around the noodles minigame in South Cirrus:

1. Travel to South Cirrus and enter Ryry Noodles.
2. Talk to the NPC running the noodles minigame to start it.
3. Once your team is over-leveled for the minigame, you can win by mashing a single button.
4. Use a turbo controller or macro to repeatedly input that button and auto-repeat the minigame indefinitely.

Over several hours, this method stacks thousands of cards, especially:

• the heart-themed card (Love)
• the dream-themed card
• the friendship-themed card

The card mix skews toward green, yellow, and pink icons, but with enough runtime you accumulate every type.

Where to spend story cards

Cards feed into multiple shops.

At later stages, after finishing the story, the “New possibilities” option appears in both Ryry Noodles and the Odavia shop, with each shop selling 10 units. Running the noodles minigame for eight or more hours is enough to buy all 20 in one go, along with substantial move and gear purchases.

Rock–paper–scissors focus battles in South Cirrus also reward cards, but each duel involves more dialogue overhead and a cooldown timer before the same opponent can be challenged again. For pure AFK throughput, the noodles minigame is significantly more efficient.

Bean farming from Story training

Beans upgrade stats permanently and are the backbone of endgame builds. The most reliable source of beans is Story Mode training, where each training location leans toward a specific bean colour.

Three practical rules emerge:

• If a training drill feels nearly impossible on the highest difficulty, drop to the third setting. Failing repeatedly on “Challenging” is a worse use of time than clearing a lower difficulty consistently.
• For Pink and Light Blue beans, it is often more efficient to run the third difficulty to reduce RNG and avoid long strings of failed attempts.
• For the Baseball Field Tr4p drill, limit the game to 60 FPS so the training completes correctly even when you miss the last ball.

While other farms give beans incidentally (such as the Ogre match), Story training is still the primary way to target specific colours when pushing key stats to max.

Farming custom passives and boosting drop rates

Beyond levels and raw stats, team passives quietly decide how efficient every other farm will be. Victory Road ties these to the “Abilain” board on each player, coordinator, and manager, including a special custom passive slot that unlocks at level 50.

Two custom passives in particular are farming staples:

• Custom passive 36 – Team common item drop rate +10% (often called “common item finder”)
• Custom passive 37 – Team rare item drop rate +5% (often called “rare item finder”)

These effects stack across your active squad, coordinators, and manager, but not bench players. With 10 players on the field plus one manager and up to four coordinators, you can have 15 copies in play:

• 15 × 5% rare rate = 75% extra chance for rare items (Top Player spirits, Legendary spirits, Hero spirits, rare crates, and other yellow/orange/hero drops)
• 15 × 10% common rate = 150% extra chance for common drops (beans, common cards, passive skill items, and so on)

Bench characters’ passives are ignored for these purposes; only the players physically on the field and your support staff count.

Where to farm rare item finder (custom passive 37)

Rare item finder drops reliably in later Chronicle matches that you then unlock in Competition Mode’s Free Match list. A proven spot is the Royal Academy free match tied to the Chronicle’s Royal Academy node:

1. In Chronicle Mode → Chronicle Competition Route, play through and clear the Royal Academy match on all three difficulties (up to around level 55).
2. Return to the main menu and enter Competition Mode → Free Match.
3. Select the Royal Academy free match corresponding to the one you just cleared in Chronicle.
4. Run this free match repeatedly; custom passive 37 appears as a drop alongside Legendary and Top Player spirits, beans, and battle coins.

Royal Academy’s team sits around level 80 in this context, so you need a fairly developed squad or heroes to auto-pilot fights. Once you can safely win by a few goals, you can even throw the match into commander mode after scoring one early goal and let the AI handle gameplay while you collect results.

Drop rates are not guaranteed. One run might yield nothing; another might give several copies of the passive plus multiple Legendaries. In one sample of about seven runs, two rare item finder copies dropped. Expect to grind roughly a dozen matches or more to reach 15 copies.

Where to farm common item finder (custom passive 36)

Common item finder ties into the Team Ogre route mentioned earlier.

• Play through the original Inazuma Eleven 1 Chronicle route up to and including the Zeus battle.
• Continue into the Ogre content beyond Zeus and clear the related Chronicle fights, including the second Ogre match.
• These completions unlock corresponding Free Matches in Competition Mode, including an Ogre match that can drop custom passive 36.

Grinding that Ogre free match pays out large numbers of common passive items, beans, and spirits. Custom passive 36 is mixed into that drop pool.

Once you have enough copies, it becomes viable to build two specialized teams:

• a common-drop team with custom passive 36 stacked across everyone, for bean and card-heavy activities
• a rare-drop team with custom passive 37 stacked, for Hero hunting, Legendary farming, and Chronicle rares

Swapping between them before entering a farm lets you sharpen the drop table without changing tactics or lineups.

Recycling manager passives while you grind

Managers and coordinators also carry unique passive sets on their Abilain boards. Those passives can be removed and reused, but only after you have actually fielded that manager in matches.

While you grind rare item finder in free matches, it makes sense to:

• Rotate different managers and coordinators into your backroom staff.
• Play enough matches with each so their Abilain passives appear and can be unequipped.
• Strip their passives into your inventory once unlocked, giving you a stockpile of management passives for future teams.

Some manager duplicates even have different passive combos: one copy might favor Bond Power, another Tension, or different positional buffs. Cycling through them while you are already running dozens of free matches costs nothing extra and pays off when you eventually build specialized squads.

Connecting all the loops

Victory Road’s grind is less painful once the loops feed into each other. Ranked Matches build levels and Bond Stars, which unlock spirits and Heroes. Team Ogre and Royal Academy free matches, powered by custom passives, stack spirits, beans, and passive items. Story training and Ryry Noodles fill in beans and story cards, which then buy moves, gear, buildings, and reroll items.

The key is to stop treating every activity as “play a match, hope for the best,” and instead decide exactly what you need today: XP, beans, cards, common drops, or rare drops. Once you choose that, there is already a loop in the game designed to print it for you.