I finally played Little League World Series Baseball 2022!
It’s bad!
- Fielding feels like one of those nightmares where a car’s coming at you and your dang legs just won’t move.
- Pitch location seems to be irrelevant, far as I can tell. I consistently tried to throw out of the zone, but the CPU hit everything well and hardly ever took a called ball.
- Power-ups seem meaningless. They vary by team, with the one for my team being an attribute boost for one swing or one at-bat as a pitcher. Or you can use them for speed boosts in the field or on the bases, but not big enough boosts to actually do anything.
- I have no idea how to see the pitching abilities of my players. A few times in the video above, my pitcher ran out of gas so I subbed him out, but had to cycle through several players before I found one with good pitching attributes. Maybe I was missing the button to switch to pitching attributes in the UI?
- Sliders move in reverse for lefty pitchers. Check at 16:55 in my video above.
- Not shown in the video, but there’s a sticker system for granting attribute boosts to your players in the Championship mode. Far as I can tell, nothing in the UI tells you what each sticker does until you apply it to a player. And it’s really laborious to go through each of your players and give three stickers to each one.
- Shockingly bad scoreboard graphic. Took me most of a game to understand what was what. Why are Balls separated a little but Strikes and Outs are bunched together? The spacing between the bases on the diamond graphic is noticeably off. The O for Outs and all the zeroes are too similar, so I can’t figure out what is what at a glance.
I mean, the performance and texture quality and stuff wasn’t great on Switch either, but there are bigger problems before getting to that. I kind of like the art style, and I’m always up for an arcade-style baseball game, but what a mess!
A random home run clip
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