The current options for translating Pawapuro Success Modes

Quick background: Konami has a long-running series of mostly Japan-only baseball games, called either Jikkyou Powerful Pro Yakyuu or eBaseball Powerful Pro Yakyuu (Pawapuro for short). Three of these games have come out in North America under the name Power Pros. Since the third game all the way back in 1996, these games have included Success Mode, a life sim/visual novel mode with original characters and a story that varies (to a greater or lesser extent) from game to game.

Sound interesting? Well, bad news: As of publication date, there are no translation mods or hacks for games in the Powerful Pro Yakyuu series. Fan translations for Japan-only games are pretty common now and cover all sorts of games, and this series has a pretty big western fan base, but, I mean, go ahead and check after me. If you see a translation for a Pawapuro game anywhere, email me at 30dash30dotclub@gmail.com right away. I’ll want to know about it.

But there are options out there if you want to see what these creative life sim/RPG/visual novel/dating sim baseball games are all about.

Official Translations

If you’re seeking this stuff out you probably already know this, but two of these games came to North America with real, official, English-language Success Modes: MLB Power Pros and MLB Power Pros 2008. Both games came out on PS2 and Wii. They’re more expensive today than most old baseball games but we’re talking, like $15 instead of $5. If you haven’t already played these games, why not start there?

Here’s a random Let’s Play if you’re curious (not mine (I should probably do a longplay (I wish I could find some commentary-free footage of this cool mode))

Real-Time Camera Translation

With recent innovations in the translation app space, you can, with pretty minimal effort, Google Translate a whole game so long as it’s all written out a page at a time in visual novel style, like Success Mode.

So long as you have a smartphone and access to free apps, Google Translate and DeepL both have camera translation modes that work well in real-ish-time. Just point your camera at the text on screen.

Google Translate sort of assumes you’re pointing at some single piece of static text, so it won’t update right away when you click to the next line of dialogue. You have to use it kind of like Time Crisis: When you’re ready for the next text and need to reload, point your camera away from the screen quickly and then back. Then it’ll oblige and translate whatever is now on-screen.

In my experience, Google Translate works a little faster (besides the Time Crisis reload factor mentioned above) and its kanji recognition is much better than DeepL’s. However, DeepL produces the better translations when it recognizes all the characters correctly, with a better sense for context within a sentence.

Google Translate on the left and DeepL on the right, translating *Jikkyou Powerful Pro Yakyuu NEXT* for Wii. DeepL recognizes the meaning of this sentence much more successfully and chooses the right “meet.”

Google Translate on the left, DeepL on the right, translating *Jikkyou Powerful Pro Yakyuu 5* for N64. With this relatively low-res N64 font, Google does a better job at recognizing the characters and gets a pretty accurate translation. DeepL gets the first kanji wrong and then surprisingly sees the kanji for “color” in place of the “de” hiragana, though it was smart enough to ignore this nonsensically-placed color kanji in its translation.

While this is an amazing piece of technology, it’s not quite as effortless as it might sound at first. There are a ton of pages of dialogue, and having to point your phone at each one can get a little exhausting. I’ve never done it, but using a tripod to keep my phone pointed at the right place could make this much easier. I could just cover the lens for a second to “reload” Google Translate.

And be aware that machine translation is always going to struggle with Japanese names, especially fictional ones since they tend to have creative readings. Baseball terminology isn’t exactly its strong suit either.

One important resource to have is this sheet of translations for all the game’s special abilities from tweav at the Power Pros Discord.

PawaJank Translation

I made a daisy-chained workflow using a few different pieces of software for live translation which I call PawaJank Translation. Check it out here.

Translated Let’s Plays

I’m writing this post now because of a very cool new foray in the Let’s Play/longplay world. Kang Gang on YouTube produced this 2 and a half hour masterpiece, a full run of the 2022 primary Success Mode with all dialogue translated on-screen.

It’s one small step for man (that took dozens of hours to complete I’m sure), one giant leap for English Pawapuro. If you’re looking to get into Success Mode, watch this full video just to get a sense of the shape of everything and the choices involved. Then you can dive in on your own game (even if it’s not 2022) and have a better idea what you’re doing.

For something similar but shorter, Thabeast721 has playthroughs of the story modes in Jikkyou Powerful Pro Yakyuu 4–6, the main N64 games on his YouTube. He took the translation app approach, but with the edited versions of his playthroughs you can get a summary of what’s going on without having to wait on that. If you want the full playthroughs, they’re here.

Summary

So we can all hope that someone will hack and translate at least one of the older Success Modes in the near future (I’ve looked into it a little, seems hard!). But for now, Google Translate is a great tool, especially after you’ve seen a playthrough or two to get a sense for things. And it’s a short mode built for replayability, so diving in and brute-forcing your way into learning it isn’t as hard as it seems.