The Hater’s Take on MLB The Show 24

Early impressions on the new The Show

For a full decade now, The Show has been the one and only big baseball video game released in English every year. And, for almost as long, I have been a hater. Remember, you’re not a hater if you just ignore something. That’s why I buy The Show at full price every year and play it for dozens of hours. And I named The Show 23 the 2023 Baseball Game of the Year (but the Russian election had just as many viable candidates).

So how am I a hater? When The Show earned its monopoly on baseball gaming, I learned to read Japanese to cast off those shackles. For a long time all I could do was stumble my way through menus and play exhibition games. But I could breathe again. Gameplay was accessible and fun but challenging. When I struck out, I knew what I did wrong. When I hit a home run, I knew what I did right.

And Konami and Namco’s games had style. They had grace. Every player in Prospi had a good face.

I’m starting to worry even the Japanese language can’t save me. Namco hasn’t made a baseball game in four years. Konami used to have two series, and now seems to barely have one, as we still don’t have a release date for Powerful Pro Yakyuu 2024-2025.

But anyway, the point is that I’m here to vent about all the lingering, monopoly-aided weirdness and suckness about the wildly popular MLB The Show. I have positive things I could definitely say, but this is not the time for that.

The Big New Stuff

I count two big marquee features this year: The continuation of last year’s Storylines Mode, with new Negro League players like Josh Gibson and Toni Stone, along with a second Storylines Mode about Derek Jeter and his era of Yankees. And then the other big obvious feature is the new option to create a female player in Road to the Show, which comes with its own “new narrative experience.”

The Show is definitely riding the coattails of FIFA/EAFC, the NHL games, and NBA 2K by adding female players, but that’s not an easy task in a country and sport that doesn’t have a major women’s league. I think the female player models look right, which isn’t a trivial thing. But this “new narrative experience…” Well, I’m only 40 minutes in, but so far:

• The new Road to the Show is very similar to the old ones. You get dialogue trees that are full of meaningless choices. You’re not deciding what you say, or even how you say it, but which of these three semantically identical phrases would you prefer: “Go for it!” or “You’ve got this!” or “I’m rooting for you!”
• Fingers crossed that an actual narrative breaks out at some point. So far, I guess the story would be that your high school teammate and friend is drafted in the same class as you. You text her regularly and she frequently expresses some anxiety and lack of self-confidence about her role as a woman playing a man’s game. It’s got the narrative style of an HR training video.
• The other returning factor is FMVs of MLB Network talking heads vaguely discussing your player’s accomplishments. In the real story of a real baseball player’s life, where would an MLB Network panel discussion rank in the most important parts of their story? Maybe the nine millionth most important part of the story to show, and it’s almost all the story content there is. These videos only communicate that The Show put some effort into production value, and that The Show is friends with the network and the league.

The Storylines Mode has much better video content, with a visual style and a little bit of something to say. But I’m not above complaining that this marquee mode is almost empty of gameplay ideas. Watch a video, get a hit with your player. Watch another video, get a home run with your player. Watch another video, strike out two players.

Incorporating Negro League history (and the history of famous teams from the past like the ’90s-’00s Yankees) is a fantastic idea, and enough on its own to make Storylines Mode a winner. But where is the “play” element? I know it would have to be filled out with fictional players (like Storylines Mode is already) but couldn’t we have a league mode set in the Negro Leagues? Couldn’t we play full games? Why couldn’t there be a Negro League All-Stars team in Exhibition mode at least?

The players are iconic, and the parks and uniforms look great. So let me play more than one at-bat in a time in this world.

The Likenesses

I can’t blame The Show for botching a likeness on all the game’s minor leaguers, or a bench outfielder, but there are some awfully famous players with generic-looking faces. I’ve uploaded a small gallery below with a few examples:

Masataka Yoshida is another good example to look at, just because we can compare him against a Konami game. Here he is in The Show, after apparently being stung in the face by a swarm of bees:

Here is Yoshida in what is unfortunately the best near-peer realistic baseball game out there, Konami’s Switch Prospi game from three years ago:

The game resolution and detail of the model is lower (and there’s no attempt to copy the positioning of the facial marks in Konami’s game), and the face is less expressive in motion. But the proportions are right and the face is recognizable. I get no uncanny valley ick with this Yoshida.

You’ll have to know soccer players for this video to mean much, but this is what the competition looks like, in EAFC 24 and Konami’s eFootball 2024. The likenesses in those games look like they’re from a different console generation than The Show. If EA or Konami ever really give it a go to compete with The Show, they will blow Sony out of the water in this area if nowhere else.

The Parks

In almost every case, the parks in The Show look fantastic. But they’re all peppered with eyesores in the fake advertisements in the game, which are handled in the worst way possible. I’ve griped about this recently and it hasn’t changed at all since, so click here if you want to commiserate.

The UI

San Diego Studio definitely put some effort into making the UI slicker, centered around a hot-pink-and-black aesthetic that’s part #girlboss and part Bret Hart.

I think the art part of the UI change is an improvement. There are better transitions between screens, and having a unique aesthetic to differentiate between years of what is otherwise a similar game… This is a good thing.

But on the main menu, form conquered function and salted the fields. Take a look and tell me at a glance which of these buttons takes me to the March to October mode:

The names and abbreviations of each mode are on-screen, but half cut off and written in dark grey on light gray. The icons aren’t self-explanatory, so we need those mode names. It’s awkward enough that I really think they might have to patch the main menu.

Obviously this doesn’t exactly break the experience. I can move through each icon to find what I’m looking for. But especially as someone who frequently has to use menus in a language I’m not fluent in, I’m sensitive to unclear menu design elements like this.

The Roster

You can probably chalk this one up in the “nothing you can do about it” department, but yet again the big exciting import players aren’t in the game at launch. If you start playing Franchise Mode now, your save isn’t going to include Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Shota Imanaga, or Jung-Hoo Lee.

Especially when Yamamoto and Lee were in last year’s game as WBC cards in Diamond Dynasty, it’s a little funny. The players always get added quickly in an update after they play in a real MLB game, but you wish there were a better way to handle it. Each player is in Out of the Park Baseball 25 already, though without a likeness. There must be some MLBPA rule that causes this, but it’s still a shame.

The Game Design

I’m no competitive multiplayer fiend in The Show, and I don’t follow the meta or anything like that. So I am not the best person to ask on minute gameplay changes. But here are a few notes on game design/balance changes:

• Sinkers have a new, more complicated motion in Pinpoint pitching mode. I’m guessing sinkers were seen as too easy to throw and maybe overpowered in the game. But despite the motion being more complicated, I’m still able to throw it perfectly very frequently. I use Pinpoint, and I think it’s an improvement over earlier pitching methods, but pitching remains very, very easy in The Show single-player. I pitch on Hall of Fame difficulty and still bring no-hitters into the 7th inning more often than not.
• A common complaint about The Show is the Perfect/Perfect out, when the game admits that you did everything perfect but still got unlucky. My first two Perfect/Perfect swings both resulted in outs. This is while playing with the “Competitive” settings, where skill is supposed to reign supreme. So, yes, this is still a frustrating fact of life in the game.
• Showdowns have been a mode in Diamond Dynasty for a long time. But the decisions you make in that mode are just not well designed. For one, showdowns now rarely include pitching/defense. So even though the draft implies you should spread out picks between each position, you don’t really have to. Just play everyone out of position, or pinch hit/pinch run at first opportunity with whoever you want to hit as.
• Second point on Showdowns: The perks don’t lead to interesting decisions. You’re either aiming for exit velocity boosts in the ones that stay active forever like Hero Time, or you’re using Bunt Cheese and fast players.

The Glitches

Nothing is a major game-breaker, but there are multiple glitches I faced constantly in The Show 23 that are still there in 24:

• Your team’s custom logos sometimes fail to load or revert to a generic logo on entering a game in Diamond Dynasty. Not a big deal, but ugly, and no clear pattern to when the logo shows up and when it doesn’t.
• Uploading or downloading to the Roster/Logo Vault will very often result in an error saying “An unhandled server exception occurred.” This never stopped happening for me in 23, so it’s not just caused by busy servers at game launch.

Hopefully I got all that off my chest and I can go back to being lightly positive about this game for the rest of the year. Then likely call it Baseball Game of the Year again after Konami decides it makes them more money to make Android games so they cancel the new Pawapuro. So it goes in the 2024 gaming industry.

Oh, almost forgot: They brought one of the licensed songs back from last year, “Fly the Coop” by Big K.R.I.T featuring Girl Talk. I spent a hundred hours listening to it last year, so I had to turn it off in the soundtrack settings right away in this one. Really strange.

New Encyclopedia Pages

Dove a little bit into the semi-tumultuous recent history of OOTP games for some new and updated pages on the encyclopedia part of this site. And made some pages for the newest The Show of course, along with The Bigs 2.

• The Bigs 2
• MLB The Show 24
• Out of the Park Baseball 24
• Out of the Park Baseball 23
• Out of the Park Baseball 22

YouTube Viewing Guide

• Out of the Park Baseball 25 (PC) Gameplay – A quick tour through the
• The Bigs 2 (PSP) Gameplay – I got a new upscaler that handles footage pulled straight from my PSP a ton better than the old one. So I played the PSP version of The Bigs 2 this week and had a lot of fun. Only five innings, but it was a good back-and-forth battle.
• MLB (PSP) CPU vs. CPU Gameplay – The UI is a little too minimal for CPU vs. CPU games in this, since I couldn’t tell who was hitting or pitching most of the time. And the game didn’t perform amazingly. But it looks nice for PSP, I have to admit.