Nekketsu Legend Baseballer

[termis]

So on to my next review of a J-RPGs that vast majority of western TG16/PCE players probably haven't played -> Nekketsu Legend Baseballer.

I was quite intrigued about this title - a traditional RPG using baseball in the storyline as well as using it for its fighting system.  It basically involves a wacky storyline involving a motley crue cast of characters fighting against monsters and going after the evil "Dark Baseballer".  It's a strange, but interesting mix that the developers were trying to tackle, and though I can see how it might've worked, in the end, most will see it as a sloppy, quick, patch-up job once the novelty wears out.

Here's how "fighting" works.  When you're on defense, throw a strike, and that'll take off enemy HP, throw a ball, and your team members take a hit.  When you get them out, it takes off additional points.  If they get a hit or score a run, you take the damage.  When on offense, it's the other way around.  And instead of magic, you can throw curveballs, change-ups, "magical throws", use special hitting tactics, etc.  It sounds interesting, but it quickly gets to be a chore when fighting takes _FOREVER_.  No, seriously.  I mean, some single peon fights can take upto 20 minutes.  Thankfully, you don't get to fight all that often, but when you do, every fight takes at least a few minutes.

Other than the unique fighting system/environment/storyline, it's pretty standard fare.  Walk around town, find and recruit party members, fight mid-level bosses, etc, etc.  The voice acting in visual scenes are incredibly terrible, but I guess that probably won't matter to the majority of you here since it's in Japanese.  It's a good laugh hearing how bad it is though.

I've only played one other Pack-in-Video game prior to this (KO Seiki: Beast Sanjuushi) - and that was okay, so I had wondered why Pack-in-Video has a pretty bad rep amongst some PCE players.  This game showed me why -- there are many glaring bugs and some things left out that show how rushed/lazy the developers were.  This game still should've been in beta testing stages.  Some of the things I found questionable in the game were:

1.  A lot of sprite bugs.  Characters flash in and out of screen / they float around screen, etc.
2.  There's no way to equip/take off items on your characters UNTIL you get into a fight.
3.  There's easy way of knowing how the items you equipped affected your character status.  You just have to memorize/write down what they were, equip an item, then go to the status screen, and see how it affected the stats.  And remember how you can't equip until you get into a fight?  Well, you can't see how it affected your character until AFTER the whole fight.  When each fight session takes a long-ass time, and then you have 9 characters in total, this becomes downright annoying.
4.  Whenever you find an item, you have no idea what you got until you check your inventory screen after walking upto the "treasure box" (a gym bag).  What if you have tons of shit in your inventory?  Well... have a good time trying to figure out what you procured.
5.  You can sell usable items, but you can't do anything about your equippable items.  They just pile on and take up room in your inventory.

Now, how playable is this for those who don't read Japanese?  I'd say it's not too difficult to figure out the fighting system if you know how the game of baseball works, but you'll probably need some help figuring out where to go  (There are times when you need to warp back to other towns and so forth to advance the storyline).  For those who'd like to tackle it, here's a Japanese faq page that should help you figure out where you need to go if you use babelfish - http://www.jimpower.org/baseballer/

In sum, I will give credit for the game's original theme, and it's not the most horrible game out there, but overall, it's a rather disappointing experience. 




My other PCE/TG16 game reviews (including other random and/or obscure J-RPGs):
Ane-san
Babel
Blood Gear
Cosmic Fantasy 1
Dragon Slayer: Legend of Heroes
Dragon Slayer: Legend of Heroes II
Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari
KO Seiki: Beast Sanjuushi
Kuusoukagaku Sekai: Gulliver Boy
Tengai Makyou: Itouryoudan & Iga Ninden Gaiou

[Keranu]

Holy crap, that sounds even cooler than I thought! I must play this game! Thanks for the great review (it's like the only source of info out there)!

[shubibiman]

Thanks for reviewing such games that we normal players wouldn't even want to put in our duos (even though most of us would certainly buy it, just as a geekish effort to complete our collections).
Thanks, really

[Turbo D]

I would like to play games like that, Its just that its not that fun when you can't understand the language. The game that I really wish I could understand is zero champ4. That game is really cool.

[Keranu]

Zero 4 Champ is awesome.

[m1savage]

I would like to play games like that, Its just that its not that fun when you can't understand the language. The game that I really wish I could understand is zero champ4. That game is really cool.

Zero 4 Champ is awesome.

Having both Zero 4 Champ games translated would be awesome.

Back to the topic at hand. Nice review on Nekketsu Legend Baseball. Another cool idea that didn't quite turn out as well as it could have but at least they tried something a little different. Appropriate that I read this today while watching the little league world series.

[termis]

Holy crap, that sounds even cooler than I thought! I must play this game! Thanks for the great review (it's like the only source of info out there)!

No, thank YOU - I wouldn't have known about this game had you not mentioned something about a baseball RPG in one of your posts way back.   

[Keranu]

Aww, you're welcome, but no thanks should be brought to me as I wouldn't have known about it if it wasn't for another user. I can't remember who it was... m1savage maybe?