Friday Starter is a weekly column of news and tidbits from the world of baseball video games—past and present, domestic and foreign.
First thoughts on San Diego Studio’s latest
Following some drama with a broken down delivery vehicle and an emergency Target trip, I got my hands on MLB The Show 25 on Tuesday, the quote-unquote release day. I have only played the PlayStation 5 version to this point, though I expect to get the (gnarly-looking) Switch version eventually.
In short, I like what I’m seeing so far. Lots of little things have been done well, in ways that don’t necessarily show up on the back of the box.
Diamond Dynasty is clearly kinder this year than last, at least for now. Last year’s game ruined the progression feeling by taking out the free rewards for playing.
I like the new set of unlockable uniforms for matching certain statistical feats over your Diamond Dynasty career. These are goofy but fun outfits to unlock: a three-piece suit, a farmer outfit, a Cosmic Bowling-esque “Moonshot” uni. Much-needed personality.
The new Diamond Quest mode seems like a winner. The feature where you get a penalty after losing a game to the sweeper monster or whatever they call it is just good game design. You’re down but not out, and it’s almost more fun and interesting to strategize around a malus like “Ludicrously decreased speed on basestealing.” It includes a variety of bite-sized gameplay featuring your team, and it has some creative art assets and ideas throughout.
A fun little addition: A notification for certain statistical milestones reached by your individual cards. First steal, 50th home run, etc. Another subtle, good addition.
In Franchise Mode, I like the new cinematic when a big free agent is choosing their team. Adds a bit of drama and finality to a big offseason pursuit. It’s almost like a pack-opening animation from a gacha game, but no real money is involved, so great!
The single biggest improvement is adding real player progression choices to Road to the Show. Despite marketing the mode as “a baseball RPG,” previous titles did not give you much choice in how to improve your player’s attributes over time. You would basically pick an archetype, and then your player’s skill attributes would change either:
- Based on your performance in-game (too slow to feel rewarding, and almost zero control over what improves)
- By opening card packs and choosing certain equipment (a wallet-grabbing imposition on a single-player mode that shouldn’t be pay-to-win, and the choices were never interesting)
- By equipping certain perks (also earned from card packs usually, and the perks were not well-balanced so the choices weren’t interesting)
Now, you get a virtual currency that you can use to increase attributes to your liking. You can also choose to increase specific stats, or just dump them into general “improve my hitting please” categories if you don’t care to min-max it.
The perk trees also make for interesting choices. Using a UI sort of like a Skyrim perks tree, you get to customize the effects of the game’s special perk abilities. Another addition that lets you think about and try out different builds. Huge, huge improvement. The high school and college games that have been added are interesting color, but nowhere near as important as adding a real progression and choice system.
The soundtrack might be my favorite of the series. It’s very heavy on soul and R&B, as has been the trend since the Storylines mode was added (which required some period-appropriate tunes). Others may feel differently, but for me, keep that stuff coming.
The gameplay is the same as before, best I can tell. The new feature is Ambush Hitting, where with the right analog stick you can guess inside or outside pitch, and get a bonus or penalty if you’re right or wrong. I haven’t used this feature much.
Sweepers are a new pitch type in this year’s game. They have a different input shape when you’re using pinpoint pitching. When hitting, the sweepers feel a little easier to hit than sliders, in my opinion. They break more, which has made them more recognizable to my eye so far.
I’m a little surprised they didn’t make a custom-built “splinker” pitch for cover man Paul Skenes. He has a normal sinker in his repertoire instead. Satchel Paige got custom pitch names a couple years back, but not sure if anyone else has.
Several familiar problems are still there this year: It’s another somewhat buggy release window, with a visible seam in the middle of the Yankee Stadium infield, commentary describing the wrong play, and custom logos disappearing sometimes in Diamond Dynasty mode.
Most noticeably, the graphics are now clearly behind the industry standard. It’s been crazy seeing this happen over the past ten years or so, after The Show took over its sector on PS3 on the back of its beautiful visual presentation.
The resolution and framerate on PS5 are rock-solid. That is a big improvement over the PS4 versions of the game. But the player models and stadiums have not majorly changed in a decade. There’s a big variety in texture quality throughout the game as it’s built up over the years. And stadium ads are still stretched to wrong resolutions to fit whatever ad space they’re supposed to fit into, an eyesore that probably bothers me more than most people.
Just about every player likeness is recognizable, but the faces tend to have an odd “lumps of clay” texture. And… This is a bit unfair, because Roki Sasaki is brand-new to The Show, but…
The Show has had a full year of Yoshinobu Yamamoto. Maybe his likeness makes for a fairer comparison?
Yikes. Well, but Yamamoto is more famous in Japan than in the U.S. still. How about Shohei Ohtani? He’s clearly clearly the biggest star in both games:
The results are clear: The Show looks at least a generation behind, graphically. Prospi on PS5 doesn’t have the framerate and resolution of The Show, but that’s a subtle difference, while the gap in visuals is enormous.
I’m sympathetic to The Show here. They have to handle likenesses for 1,000+ MLB players, then minor leaguers too. Prospi only has to handle 12 pro teams, plus some farm rosters and Team Japan. And not all their player likenesses are as strong as the ones above. But, huge, huge difference.
Despite that major need for a graphical upgrade, I think this year’s release has done a lot of little things well.
First info on the Pawapuro and Prospi 2025 season updates
Both of Konami’s baseball game franchises released with “2024-2025” in their titles, so we knew at least some basic roster updates were coming, but we didn’t know any details until this week.
eBaseball Powerful Pro Yakyuu 2024-2025 releases its 2025 update on March 27th for both the PS4 and Switch versions of the game. The detailed list of changes are on the official site here (in Japanese).
The primary change is of course updating the NPB team rosters. The rosters are valid as of any transactions by January 27th of this year. That happens to be right when Trevor Bauer’s deal with the Yokohama BayStars was announced.
While there’s no official word on the Pro Yakyuu Spirits 2025 update yet, a gaggle of VTubers made an announcement. They showed off a cutesy long-hair style coming in a late April update to Pro Yakyuu Spirits. Given the way Konami updates their games (new features basically only come in new games or these big annual updates), that must be the expected timing for Prospi‘s 2025 update.
The hair looks a little silly on the default player model, and it gets played for laughs even by the VTubers. But more importantly, this seems to have confirmed we’ll get our big Prospi update in late April, with new rosters and presumably new uniforms, and who knows what else.
Jon Dowd interviewed on MLB Network
Former EA Vancouver producer and baseball video game legend Jon Dowd was interviewed on MLB Network for MVP Baseball 2005‘s 20th anniversary. This is separate to the MVP 2005 mini-documentary from MLB last week, which also interviewed Dowd.
“Jon Dowd” is famous to baseball game fans as the name of the fake Barry Bonds from MVP Baseball 2005, a strong candidate for best baseball game ever. After Bonds withdrew from the players union licensing agreement, each game had to choose how to handle his name and likeness at a time when he was the best player in the sport. In the case of MVP, they named him after a dev.
Despite MLB Network’s close partnership with Sony on MLB The Show, they let Dowd be frank about the current state of baseball video games. He talked about MVP 2005 resisting the temptation with annual sports franchises to develop paper-thin features that sound good on the back of the box (and to executives). He said MVP succeeded because they could spend their time sharpening the gameplay and fixing long-standing bugs. He even names names: “What I think you’re now in a lot of games, whether it’s The Show or Madden, I think lack of competition is hurting the industry.”
This is uncontroversial with fans, but still surprising to see MLB Network let someone say it on the network.
YouTube Viewing Guide
- Famed Pawapuro YouTuber Mossan uploaded a collection of league championship cinematics across the Pawapuro series. Especially early on, there’s good variety, and it takes some time to see these cinematics, so this was awesome to see.
- Checked Swing put up an English-language guide to the Season Mode in Pro Yakyuu Spirits 2024-2025.
- I really enjoyed recording Moero!! Pro Yakyuu 2016, a revival of the series known in North America as Bases Loaded. I used the Jaleco All-Stars, a roster of video game characters including a ninja, a frog, and several cars from City Connection.