The Show 25 has been announced, solemnly
Just when I started writing this post, San Diego Studio made its first official mention of MLB The Show 25. Almost every sentence of the post expresses excitement, but despite that the tone that comes through the screen is “Please, we’re so sorry for what we did. We can change. We can make this work.”
The main announcement is that Seasons and Sets will not return for Diamond Dynasty in The Show 25. This was a system that more or less reset your progress in Diamond Dynasty on a quarterly basis. On the one hand, it gives you a reason to keep playing the game month after month and resume the grind. On the other hand, wouldn’t it kill your motivation to put hours and hours into unlocking or paying for a card that you won’t be able to use soon anyway?
I put a ton of hours into Diamond Dynasty in The Show 23 despite having mixed feelings about it. I described then as a potato chips mode, effective but definitely empty calories. For better or worse, The Show 24 broke me of the habit. Besides the seasons concept resetting your roster, they were so much less generous with rewards for playing Diamond Dynasty content. The endorphins treadmill was totally gone for me, and I wasn’t motivated to put in real money to get the feeling back.
The post doesn’t include any other hard info about next year’s Diamond Dynasty besides the retirement of the Seasons concept. It shares a few other tidbits about other modes:
- Road To The Show: Deepen the player’s journey, before being drafted, and return control to how a player develops and grows in new and interesting ways.
- Diamond Dynasty: Alongside the retirement of Sets and Seasons, our fans can look forward to all-new elements of the Diamond Dynasty experience blended with what our fans love most about Diamond Dynasty.
- Franchise: Improved trade evaluation metrics are coming along with a new fun and engaging offseason experience.
- Gameplay: With the expansion of quick time events, defensive AI, and pathing updates, enjoy more engaging moment-to-moment gameplay.
Your results may vary, but none of that gets me too excited.
Road to the Show definitely needs some control and interesting choices to make over how your player develops over time, so that would be nice.
I feel a little better about Franchise, after I enjoyed the new draft system in 24.
“Expansion of quick time events”? Am I reading that right? These exist currently in Road to the Show or player-locked gameplay. They add a little more interactivity to the defense side of the game in those modes, but does anyone enjoy them?
Despite the Forbes headline coming from this post claiming a “major change” and a “new direction” for The Show, this is small potatoes, for me. You might wonder if The Show will try a big graphical upgrade, in response to Pro Yakyuu Spirits 2024-2025. Doesn’t sound like it. Maybe they’ll add another new mode, like they did with Storylines a couple years ago? If so, they haven’t said yet. There is obviously more to come, but for a mea culpa, this info isn’t exciting for me at least.
YouTube Viewing Guide XL
While the implosion of Twitter hasn’t helped me keep abreast of niche gaming news, there was a bumper crop of baseball gaming videos this week:
GameDay covered the This Week in Baseball Challenge mode from All-Star Baseball 2005. I have to admit I started to record footage of this mode, then gave it up after the Moises Alou / Bartman challenge took me 400 tries to complete. I had nowhere near the patience or humor of Mr. GameDay.
Not to spoil the video, but: The Triple Threat challenge reads like a baseball gaming creepypasta. Hit a triple to complete the cycle for Phil Nevin! Starting with two outs in the ninth inning. And Phil Nevin is due up third. Horrifying.
I have no idea how RndStranger pumps out so many miniature gaming documentaries per week. But his thoroughness is huge for foreign baseball video games, which otherwise hardly have any English-language sources you can go to.
This video covers Kattobi! Douji for the Famicom Disk System. It’s a card battler based on a manga, and it’s got some interesting tactical depth.
Speaking of English-language sources on Japanese baseball games, this video is a nice succinct guide to Spirits mode in the new Pro Yakyuu Spirits 2024-2025. You don’t get this in The Show: Basically a poker game that lets you quickly create new characters to fill out custom teams.
And then the uploads for my channel this week:
- Two Japanese mobile game ads featuring Shohei Ohtani: One for MLB Pro Spirit and another for Pro Yakyuu Spirit A. The latter definitely the more interesting, with some filmed dramatizations of fans celebrating Japan’s WBC win.
- Another Derby! (PC) Gameplay – Maybe not quite as interesting as a cosmic horror $1 Steam baseball game might sound.
- Jikkyou Powerful Pro Yakyuu 7 (PS2) CPU vs. CPU Gameplay – The first PlayStation 2 Pawapuro game. It’s a bit rougher than the later ones for the console, and still has the system where you peek at the catcher’s glove at the top of the screen to get a sense where the pitch is coming, which I don’t love. But still a great game.