Dice-K. Matsui. Ichiro. No doubt about it, the United States has been looking to Japan more and more for baseball talent and while Major League licensed baseball games have been exported to Japan, there hasn’t been any such luck for NPB (Nippon Professional Baseball) games imported into America. Hopefully that will change with the release of Professional Baseball (Yakyuu) Spirits 4, because you really don’t know what you’re missing until you play this silky smooth, truly Next-Gen game from Konami. There’s only one, small problem: damn near everything is in Japanese.
The first thing you’re probably thinking is: Konami makes a baseball game? It’s hard to believe but Konami, between Pro Evolution Soccer and Pro Spirits 4, has quite the sports franchise in Japan. Thankfully Sony took off the region coding of games so that you can play Japanese games on your US PlayStation 3, which gives casual gamers the chance to play these games that previously were only available if you had a Japanese console or special “modification” hardware.
The game itself is a joy to play. Professional Baseball Spirits 4 takes a game like MLB 2K7 over its knee and spanks it like a naughty child. It literally blows anything we have here out of the water; it’s admittedly frustrating to know that American developers either can’t or won’t create a baseball game that is in Konami’s league. (Our only remaining hope this year is The Show on the PS3.)
The gameplay has a familiar feel to it but it also feels tight and well constructed. You can bat with a cursor or via the “Zone” method, but this is one of the very few games when cursor hitting just feels right. The pitches aren’t all so fast that you can’t catch up to them using this method. You actually have some time to move your bat. You feel like you are in complete control of your at-bat.
You can hit for contact, power, or bunt. A power swing will change your "bat" to a circle and require you to be very accurate in your swing. A bunt will give you a much bigger target cursor to hit. There is an additional swing button which allows you to attempt to push the ball to the opposite field or pull the ball down the line. When you try to push an opposite field hit, the swing timing is much more difficult but the payoff in hitting to the opposite field is quite an achievement (definitely do the tutorial on this; it takes a very long time to get the timing right). You need to learn this technique though because the Japanese game is built around ball placement and speed much more than a traditional American game.
Player and pitch controls are relatively similar to stateside games. The pitching interface is unique but actually intuitive once you become familiar with it. Instead of the normal ‘press X for fastball, circle for change up’ system, the game gives you a display that looks like the bottom of a fork or a tree branch -- the pitch names are displayed on the branches (in Japanese) and if your pitcher has more than four different pitches, by pressing R1 you can access the other four. One annoyance is that it doesn't consolidate the pitches so if a pitcher has four pitches, three of them might be on the first 'page' and the fourth is on the second, even though the first page can hold five. It’s just extra busy work.
A meter displays the pitcher's ability to throw the pitch; in addition you can push up on the right stick to throw a power pitch which provides greater pitch velocity and accuracy; it comes at the price of reducing your stamina.
The elephant in the room is the language barrier. Is it possible to play a Japanese baseball game if you don’t know the language? The answer to that question is…ehh…well…it depends. If you like to know everything that is going on in the game, the answer is absolutely yes. There are a lot of details provided on screen that are not shown in a typical American baseball game – such as defensive alignments – which are very helpful if you know Japanese. That said, baseball still is baseball and the general gameplay is the same so the action is relatively easy to grasp regardless of the language barrier. There is a tutorial mode and if you find the FAQ getting the control and gameplay mechanics down is pretty easy.
