Friday Starter is a weekly column of news and tidbits from the world of baseball video games—past and present, domestic and foreign.
Pawapuro in the flesh
August 26th is Pawapuro Day, a holiday to celebrate the Konami baseball series known in English as Power Pros. Why on 8/26? Because of Japanese number wordplay, where 8 can be pronounced “pa,” 2 can be pronounced “pu” and 6 can be pronounced “ro,” giving you, well, three of the four syllables in Pawapuro.
While one might have hoped for an announcement on the next game in the series, what we got instead was at least interesting: A live action TV drama series is coming out based on the games. The show starts next month on September 26th, under a title I’ll translate as Power Pro Drama: How I Found Success When I Joined the Workforce.
The story isn’t a straightforward retelling of the traditional high school Pawapuro Success Mode storyline like I would have guessed. Instead, it centers on a young adult starting a new job for the first time. He finds a mysterious game called Power Pro Businessman that gives him a special power: He can see the stats and attributes of the people around him, including himself. Several characters from the Power Pros story modes will appear, including the classic comedy sidekick Yabe.
The show is written by Kohei Tsuji, one member of the comedy duo Nippon no Shacho (President of Japan). He is a Hanshin Tigers fan who played baseball in high school and still plays on an amateur team in his spare time. His younger brother Takehiko Tsuji also happened to pitch for the Chunichi Dragons. Kohei has also streamed hours of himself playing Pawapuro and Prospi on YouTube.
Power Pro Drama will be available on demand on TVer, so it will be free to watch if you have a VPN that can connect from Japan. It remains to be seen how Pawapuro-like it will really be as an office comedy, but looking forward to it.
A Pawapuro Day animation
While we’re on the topic, enjoy this short animated gif for Pawapuro Day from Katsuton on Twitter. Katsuton makes and retweets a ton of Pawapuro fan art, so check out the account if you’re interested. Here’s one more personal favorite that I found through a Katsuton retweet, this one by Meguponta:
“How R.B.I. Baseball Works” video by Baseball Replay Journal
The channel Baseball Replay Journal has recently branched out into video essays on retro baseball games. This one covers an old fixation of mine: R.B.I. Baseball mechanics and modding. As the video covers, R.B.I. modding is unfortunately a bit of a lost art, with link rot and Windows compatibility issues ruining mod tools that used to make creating your own rosters a cinch.
The video also talks about the sometimes counter-intuitive mechanics of the NES R.B.I. games. You’ll have to watch to learn why you should always use all your pinch hitters if you’re really trying to be competitive.
Song of the Week
“Eikan Nine Draft” from Powerful Pro Yakyuu 2024-2025. For such a relatively minor event in the calendar of the high school baseball mode… hard to imagine effortlessly cranking out a tune like this one, even if it’s a bit of a short loop. And a great meme for the thumbnail by the uploader Popurun.