konami if you release a full prospi/power pros game in english i will actually kiss you. i sincerely hope this and the WBSC power pros game were just testing the waters to give us exactly that

I've put quite a few hours into this game in the first week or so that it's been out, so I want to give a full review of my experience so far so that you know exactly what you can expect from this game.

First things first, this game is primarily focused on multiplayer. The amount of singleplayer content is limited, with the only options being exhibition matches against the CPU as well as a training mode. There is no singleplayer campaign mode. I only played one game against the CPU on a low difficulty, so I can't really speak to the difficulty level of the bots.

One other thing I will get out of the way is that you cannot create custom characters in this game, only customize the appearance of existing ones. This again loops back to the game being primarily focused on the multiplayer aspect, where everyone has the same access to characters and over time you learn the strengths and weaknesses of each one. Team customization, on the other hand, is very well fleshed-out in this game and deserves to be highlighted. I rarely spend more than a few minutes on customizing things in games, but I found myself in the team editor for well over an hour making the perfect uniform for my team.

The main section of this game is the World Championship mode, where tournaments are held every week, split between a normal section and a rookie section which you can only enter if your MR (match rating) is below 50. For each game you play in a tournament, you gain CP (championship points) based on if you win/lose/tie and based on the strength of your opponent. The player with the highest CP at the end of the tournament is the winner, and there are rewards for everyone who plays even a few games in the tournament.

The CP you gain also counts toward a total amount that never leaves your profile, and the more total CP you gain, you unlock new characters and other cosmetics (but mainly characters). This system allows for you to always have new players to consider adding to your team for the next tournament, but also comes with the drawback that newer players may have to face higher-level players who have unlocked stronger characters that they can't access yet.

I personally think the tutorial system is very good in this game. It does get to be a bit long, but if you go through each part of it, you will thoroughly understand the controls by the end. The game has a lot of different mechanics, so I think it was fair for them to make the tutorial so in-depth.

In terms of issues that I currently have, there are a few and I will update my review if any of these things change in the future. First, there is currently an issue (KBM only) when pitching with the double-tap controls in online games where a windows error sound plays every time on the second tap or whenever you try to make a throw on defense. This gets very annoying very quickly. Second, the controls are not customizable in game, if you want to change any of your binds, you're out of luck. Third, the default setting for contact assistance is OFF in online play, which causes a lot of new players to struggle with hitting without understanding why. If you're reading this and end up playing the game, go to World Championship > User Settings > Batting > Contact Assistance and turn it all the way up. It makes it so that you don't have to be absolutely perfect with your aim to get powerful contact, and there's no reason not to always have it at the max value for whatever tournament you're playing. I don't understand why this would not automatically go to the highest value allowed for the tournament, and I only noticed it after 30+ games and getting absolutely decimated in a couple by opponents who were making hard contact so much more consistently than me.

Overall, I would absolutely recommend this game. The skill curve is very large, and if you enjoy baseball and multiplayer games, I think you'll probably enjoy this game a lot. If you try it and don't like it, well at least it's free.

I want Konami to know the effort I went through to buy Pro Spirits 2024 - 2025 on PlayStation 5 lol. I appreciate that we are finally getting a global release, and free to play at that, but also this is a very stripped down version of the AAA sports effort that is exclusive to Asia. If eBaseball were to get all of the same gameplay modes and features as the paid version, it would absolutely be the best baseball sim.