I’ve played a lot of baseball games on this console over the past few months, and I saved this one for last on purpose. Part of that is because it plays so differently to any other baseball game I’m familiar with on the console, and part of it is due to just how weird “beating” it via the main single player mode is. However, this past Golden Week was the perfect time to finally sit down and complete it. Playing on real hardware, it took me about 2.5 hours to beat the aliens in the World’s Strongest Team mode with the fielding on automatic and the AI difficulty on very easy.
In the normal game modes, this is just a pretty typical team-versus-team baseball game, but there is actually quite the story to the game’s World’s Strongest Team mode. As the opening title crawl tells us, on the far end of the universe, there were aliens who were CRAZY good at baseball. They decided to take over Earth by beating all of its best baseball teams, and nothing could stop them. South Korea, America, Cuba, one by one all of the world’s best baseball teams were soundly beaten by the aliens. Not even Japan’s teams were safe from them. The teams were all disbanded, and the players returned to their respective hometowns. Around this time, there’s the main character, you. You were an up-and-coming Japanese player with dreams of making it big, and you were shocked to hear that there wasn’t even any NPB to join anymore! Not letting that stop you, you decide to simply make your own team instead and take on these nasty aliens and send them back where they came from!
What this involves is going around Japan and assembling the best team you can. You start by picking your home prefecture, and the number of pros from that respective area will give you better players for free as the game goes on. At the start of things, all you’ve got is a bunch of company team members in their 50s. Good at baseball compared to a normal guy, but nothing compared to a pro (or alien) team. You start the year with a scouting report of pros currently known around Japan, and you then have the rest of the year to race around Japan, either on foot or by public transit, trying to beat the aliens to each pro so you can recruit them onto your team before the aliens snap them up. Getting these good players on your team is the only way you’re going to have a chance to beat the aliens at the annual new year’s humans vs. aliens match, because there’s only so much that good play will make up for the awful stats on your starting team.
However, these former pros won’t just join you out of the goodness of their hearts. In order to get them to join you, you’ll have to beat them in mini-game first! The game has around 10 mini-games that they’ll challenge you to before you can recruit them, though few of them have anything to actually do with baseball. Things like the target hitting, knocks, or home run derby are all at least somewhat related to the baseball parts, but stuff like the drawing contest is far too difficult to ever be possible, and the balloon inflating game is just Mario Party-like excuse to destroy your joystick. The snowball fight mini-game is great fun, I’ll admit, but these mini-games largely suck, and even though the years aren’t that long, I couldn’t help but feel woefully out of practice every time the match against the aliens came around.
The baseball in this is really weird too, and I am not a fan of designing your baseball this way. This relatively unique (among retro Japanese baseball games, anyhow) approach actually keyed me in to how Namco were the ones who made the old Mario baseball games I played as a kid. Those games are also kinda bad, admittedly, but I played the heck out of them back in the day XD. Regardless, there are certainly some good aspects of this. The fielding in particular is actually very intuitive since they actually use the really retro approach of having your inputs direct the whole team at once, like it’s an old 8-bit baseball game, rather than assigning you what it believes to be the closest player automatically and you needing to just respond from there. This is still an imperfect system, but it’s honestly my preferred way to field.
The biggest part I just cannot gel with is the batting, though. Rather than the Acclaim, Genki, or Konami-developed baseball games of the time, we don’t use the behind-the-batter approach where you aim at the incoming ball with a targeting reticle. Instead, the ball is always(?) effectively thrown right at the bat, and different kinds of pitches affect speed and curvature more than anything else. The trajectory of a hit ball is dependent on both where it hits the bat as well as where the batting player is holding the joystick at the time of the swing. Holding it forward will aim the ball towards the ground, and holding it back will aim the ball towards the crowd. It’s almost like you’re piloting a plane instead of hitting a ball.
While I’ll admit that some of the challenge here comes from using a hall effect replacement joystick that’s less accurate than the old optical joysticks the N64 was designed for, this was a system I always found far too finicky to actually be effective or fun. I found it very difficult to quickly get the stick in just delicate enough an alignment to hit the ball in a far line drive rather than a wicked infield pop fly, and if I held the stick in position too early, I’d always end up slowly drifting to the right or left on the spot instead of sticking where I was. Even on very easy, the challenge to even hit a decent ball so I could actually get a man on base, let alone score, felt far more down to simple luck than anything I could meaningfully control as a batter, and pitching certainly didn’t feel all that intuitive or great either. Perhaps there are people who are really used to this style of batting and pitching and it’s super intuitive for them, but I can’t stand playing baseball this way, and it’s easily the weakest part of the game for me.
The awkward and janky approach to the actual playing baseball is a real shame, since I honestly love the aesthetics of this game. The music is fun and good, sure, but the graphics are where the game really shines. The cutscenes in the story mode have your players bouncing around just as torso as they emote at one another, and the simple humanoid models always look so funny when they’re bobbling around like that. This goes extra for the aliens, who themselves look more like Metal Mario-versions of normal baseball players than any extraterrestrial you may conjure up in your head XD.
The world map and dialogue have a lot of fun aspects to them too, and that’s especially true for the “Namco” stadium which is a massive pile of Namco references even down to the stadium’s maximum capacity of 7650 people x3. That silliness goes even harder for the original Namco team they’ve made, whose player roster is such an insane list of deep cuts that even several groups of retro-loving friends couldn’t help me get to the bottom of some of them (with my personal favorite being the one named after the Italian restaurant chain Namco had owned since the 80’s).
Verdict: Not Recommended. There is so much silly character in the design to this game, from the joyously bizarre story mode to the crazy reference filled Namco stuff, that I really wish this game were actually fun to play. As I said before, perhaps there are some people out there for whom this is just the most perfect and intuitive way to play baseball ever, but I am frankly unconvinced this is a better way to do things than how Konami and Acclaim were doing things in their respective PawaPuro and All-Star series. I only paid 100 yen for this, so I hardly feel cheated or put out by picking it up in the first place, but if you’re the kind of weirdo like me who’s earnestly looking for a fun time from retro baseball games, your time is definitely better spent looking elsewhere unless you’re somehow already a huge fan of this series (in which case I can’t imagine this review was all that agreeable or helpful for you in the first place XP).
I think it's cool that you decided to play the originals, though; Don't get me wrong.