Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road hides an enormous amount of optional content behind its football drama. Two cities — Nagumohara and Odaiba — are packed with small activities, running quest chains, and location-based photo tasks that quietly feed you experience, gear, and flavor writing.
None of it is technically required, but ignoring it means missing some of the game’s best equipment and a lot of its worldbuilding. It also means overlooking how Level-5 is quietly teaching you the map layout, time-of-day system, and basic combat through side tasks long before competitive play starts to matter.
How sidequests and activities are structured
Victory Road splits its optional content into two buckets:
| Type | How it starts | How it’s tracked | What it usually asks you to do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sidequests | Talk to an NPC with an exclamation mark | Quest marker on the city map (after the day-one patch) | Escort someone, win a match, refight a team, deliver an item, follow a dialogue chain |
| Activities | Auto-added to your notebook when you enter an area | No markers; described only by a small image and title | Find a hidden cat, locate a secret Lootball, interact with a specific object, take a photograph |
Every new city area you step into preloads a list of activities in your notebook, but you are often locked out of their physical locations until later chapters, thanks to invisible walls. This is especially true in Nagumohara, where a big part of the city only really opens up properly around Chapter 3.
Sidequests, on the other hand, roll out gradually with story progress. In early builds, they were easy to miss because markers only appeared after you hovered the cursor over the right slice of the map; a patch now surfaces them directly on the city overview, which makes their structure much more obvious.
Nagumohara: the dense tutorial city
Nagumohara is where the game explains what “doing everything” actually looks like. Almost every system — photo mode, time-of-day, rematches, special training, escort logic — gets a small, self-contained quest here.
School and campus activities
South Cirrus Junior High is stacked with quick-hit interactions that double as a tour of the school interior:
| Quest or activity | Location | Design purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Hole in One | Tennis Court, outside the school | Teaches you to backtrack into side areas after tutorial matches and to return lost items to club NPCs. |
| Miss Sereno’s Lost Property | Classroom → gym storage | Forces you to find the storage room and notice environmental clues (like the plushie) when a door is locked. |
| Cursed Letter, Pot in the Home Ec Room, Moving Mount, Forbidden Library Book, Art Club’s Foul Smell, Sound of an Unmanned Piano | Faculty room, Home Ec, Science Lab, Library, Art Club, Music Room | Rapid-fire interactions that quietly walk you through all three floors and club rooms. |
| Top Secret Dangerous Treasure | First floor corridor | Shows how “follow the markers” quests work by scattering photo pickups around the school. |
Later chapters pile deeper character-led quests on top of that same space: “Coying up to Sasanami,” “In-Depth Coverage,” “My Goddess,” and “Card Solider’s First Crush” all keep you bouncing between floors and specific teachers or club members, but structurally they push the same idea: you learn where everything on campus is and how to read NPC dialogue for subtle hints instead of just chasing icons.
Street and neighborhood quest chains
Step off campus, and Nagumohara starts running serial storylines that hop between multiple districts:
- The “Why Grandma Got Lost” trilogy: a running gag that begins on South Cirrus Street, continues Downtown, and ends at School Road and the hospital. Each part mixes a quick battle with an escort to a new destination, building your familiarity with the city’s layout and exits.
- Josephine’s Elegant Stroll (Parts 1–3): a cat that behaves more like a recurring mini-boss. Each chapter asks you to talk to, fight, and then escort Josephine a little farther — from School Road to Nagumohara Station, then to Nagumohara Port, and finally all the way to the plane for Odaiba. It’s a clean way of tying together key fast-travel hubs.
- The Dark Society thread (“Lead on, Legs” and “The Dark Society Emerges”): starts as a missing-ball mystery on School Road and grows into a multi-area rumor hunt that sends you to Rural Road, Downtown, Coastal Road, and finally Nagumohara Station.
These chains are doing a specific job: they turn every small park, alley, and side exit into a place you’ve visited for a reason, which pays off later when you move through the city quickly to chase newer quests.
Cats, Secret Lootballs, and Kraken statues
Beneath the bigger quests, Nagumohara quietly layers three recurring activity templates that appear across almost every sub-area:
| Activity pattern | Examples in Nagumohara | What it teaches |
|---|---|---|
| Hidden cat photographs | Cat on South Cirrus Street, Cat in Seaside Park, Cat on School Road, Cat on Rural Road, Cat in Downtown, Cat on Coastal Road, Cat in Nagumohara Station, Cat on Nagumohara Port, Cat at Old Shipyard | How to use the camera in tight space, read depth in isometric scenes, and check under tables, inside glass doors, or behind props. |
| Secret Lootballs | Secret Lootball (SC Street), Secret Lootball (Seaside Park), Secret Lootball (School Road), Secret Lootball (Rural Road), Secret Lootball (Downtown), Secret Lootball (Coastal Road), Secret Lootball (Nagumohara Station), Secret Lootball (Nagumohara Port), Secret Lootball (Old Shipyard) | Encourages you to walk behind houses, on top of slides, and into visual dead-ends to find gear or items. |
| Kraken Hunt / Kraken Tour photos | Kraken Tour: Seaside Park, Kraken Tour (School Road), Kraken Hunt (Nagumohara Station), Kraken Hunt (Nagumohara Port) | Standardizes a “spot the statue and photograph it” loop that later returns in Odaiba with a more elaborate Kraken story. |
Individually, these are tiny: one tap, one photo, one reward. Collectively, they’re an exploration checklist that nudges you into all the corners the main plot might never touch.
Food, minigames, and equipment in Nagumohara
Nagumohara’s side stories also double as a gear pipeline. Several Downtown quests are built around the noodle shop and its ramen-eating minigame:
- Don Gorillo Bowl King and Noodle Shop Troubles both lean on replaying the ramen minigame, rewarding you with stickers and items.
- Between Bowls and Glances spins that same location into a light detective quest about a possible stalker, sending you across Nagumohara before looping back to the shop.
Other quests skew practical rather than narrative. “Unable to Attend the Reunion” (a letter delivery from Rural Road to the Downtown noodle shop), “The Elusive Prize” (lost raffle tickets), and “Town Beautification Efforts” (picking up and binning a can) are short, but they keep pushing you through the same commercial strip where you can repeatedly tap vending machines, food stands, and shop interiors for consumables.
Some late-Nagumohara content is also tuned around time-of-day: “Blacker Than Black Cat” Downtown and “Boss Cats’ Gathering” at the Old Shipyard both only appear at night, and “After-Hours Student Shenanigans” explicitly requires you to flip time before heading to Seaside Park. That’s less about difficulty and more about teaching you that certain activities simply do not exist in the wrong time block.
Odaiba: a smaller, more focused second city
Odaiba trims back the volume of content but keeps the same structure: a lodging area, a central “Main Area,” and a tight set of activities grouped by place rather than by unlock order.
Lodging Area: food, photos, and a missing rookie
The Lodging Area leans heavily on three types of tasks:
- Exploration photos: “Illuminating Odaiba” (the lighthouse), “Fishing Boat in Odaiba,” and “Nagumohara Lodging Cottage” all ask you to line up specific structures — usually with stricter framing than Nagumohara demanded.
- Quick NPC stories: “Sand Enthusiast 2” repeats the shell-collecting format from Seaside Park, while “The Missing Rookie” is a deliberately meandering conversation chain that has you talk to multiple wrong NPCs before landing on the right one.
- Food surveys: “What Do You Want to Eat?” and “New Local Gourmet Dish!” both have you canvas nearby NPCs about what (and where) to eat, then report back. One starts near the lighthouse; the other lives inside your team’s cabin with the kitchen staff during Chapter 9.
The Secret Lootball pattern returns here, too, tucked along a narrow path by the ocean on the west side of the Lodging Area.
Main Area: shops, gardens, and Odaiba’s own Kraken scare
Odaiba’s central hub hybridizes Nagumohara’s cats and Lootballs with more “city landmark” photography:
| Activity or quest | What you do | Where it is |
|---|---|---|
| Gourmet Sweets of Odaiba | Interact with a sign advertising sweets | North, in the shopping street |
| Famous Foods of Odaiba | Check a burger shop sign | Northwest corner of the Main Area |
| Sneakerhead | Talk to the sneaker shop employee | Near the shoe store in the north |
| Secret Lootball (Main Area) | Pick up a hidden Lootball | East side, in a small grove of trees |
| Lost Child in the Gardens | Talk to a worried mother, then find her daughter at the pond | South edge of the Main Area, then near the eastern pond |
| The Mecca of Football | Photograph the giant football emblem on the ground | Center of the plaza |
| Ferris Wheel of the Gardens | Take a picture of the Ferris wheel (with finicky framing) | Northwest section of the map |
| Odaiba Gardens Stations | Photograph the station building | Southern edge of the Main Area |
The football emblem photo is straightforward. The Ferris wheel is not: the trigger box for what counts as a valid shot is small, which is one of the first moments the game asks you to fiddle with composition rather than just mash the capture button.
Bigger quests layer on top of those landmarks. “Where’s That Ball?” starts at the football emblem and sends you back to the Lodging Area to retrieve a stray ball from a cabin-side cliff. “Can You Show Me Around?” strings together multiple stops across Odaiba as you play tour guide for a French journalist, while “Chasing the Bogus Reporter” escalates that idea into an inter-city chase from the emblem to Nagumohara Junior High and then to the retro café.
Odaiba also gets its own Kraken arc in “Odaiba’s Kraken Scare.” This time a frightened security guard near the station kicks off the chain; your map lights up with three supposed eyewitnesses, and the resolution plays out on the beach at night. Structurally, it’s a remix of Nagumohara’s Kraken photos, but with more dialogue and a clear time-of-day hook.
Late-game errands and “tourist” quests in Odaiba
Several Odaiba quests are deliberately low-pressure errands designed to soak in the setting rather than stress your team build:
- “May I Take Your Picture?” sends you from the southern station path to the northern shops and back again to buy a drink and take a commemorative photo with a husband and wife.
- “The Ultimate Soup” has an old man in the northern market mark three herbs on your map; collecting them pays out a custom soup event.
Both of these live in later chapters, after you already understand matches and special training. At that point, the game is using side content less as a tutorial and more as decompression between big story fixtures and Odaiba’s nationals matches.
Why these activities matter beyond completionism
Individually, almost every activity is simple — tap an object, talk to three NPCs, snap a photo, walk an old lady across town. As a full layer on top of the story, they do three concrete things:
- They gate some of the best equipment. Several strong bracelets, mantles, and other stat-boosting gear drop from quest completions, especially in Nagumohara. That matters later when you start building competitive squads and need extra control, shooting, or technique.
- They normalize rematches and special training. Quests like “Join me for Art Training,” “The Perfect Shot,” “Go Viral! Special Football Drill!,” and Odaiba’s “Sneakerhead” either ask you to refight specific teams or engage with special training booths. That’s the same loop you’ll use to grind out beans and skills for high-level play.
- They teach time, space, and camera friction gently. Night-only cat gatherings, picky Ferris wheel framing, and city-spanning escort chains gradually build the muscle memory you need to read the environment quickly when you are no longer casually wandering.
You can ignore all of this and sprint through Story Mode, but Victory Road is clearly built for players who like their football wrapped in small, strange errands about cats, ramen, and urban legends. Treating Nagumohara and Odaiba as spaces to clear, not just backdrops between matches, makes the whole game feel closer to a traditional JRPG rather than a linear sports story with cutscenes.
