I was rifling through the plastic bins at the center of the storefront and I saw it staring me in the face. MLB Power Pros for the Nintendo Wii. The cover was something straight from Japan, the major league ballplayers who graced this cover had been turned into Rayman-esque monsters, but somehow they were still recognizable.
Daisuke Matsuzaka, Alex Rodriguez, and Ichiro grace the cover in their chibi-fied “glory”. Something about its aesthetic struck me, and so I had to beg my father to get it for me. The game itself is simple. It’s a pickup and play baseball game, much in the vain of RBI Baseball or MLB Slugfest. The controls are responsive and it feels fun to smack around a ball with a couple friends from time to time. But, within the game was something I would never be prepared for.
On the game’s home screen there’s an almost overwhelming amount of options, very few of which have clear meanings. Right in the middle is a button labeled Success. From the moment I booted up the game, I was drawn to that button. I want to succeed, I better press the Success button. I wasn’t prepared. The chibi-fied 3D models all became flat drawings and the game shifted from a baseball game to something quite different. A visual novel. About baseball. What.
(Humble beginnings.)
I was following the story of Chief, a young college ballplayer riddled with inferiority, but still fighting to make it into the big leagues. You, the player, are his decision maker, choosing which adventures to take. Through each option, you discover some new skill or find out something about one of your teammates, until the very end of the game, when all your skills are tested in 9 innings against the Champion Rings in a fight for the Rainbow Beach Championship. I have completed this mode more than one hundred times and each time I find a new little bit of dialogue or a new random event. Throughout this process, I’ve found some valuable life lessons to share.
Firstly, things get harder before they get easier. When the game begins, you are a no-name, talentless scrub. F’s inability all across the board. (You even have G’s in some places!) Even on your team, the last-place Tulips, you are not good enough to even appear in the line-up. This was not the way things were supposed to go. It’s discombobulating, the manner in which you realize how small you are in this world. For someone with major league dreams, to see that almost everyone around you, even your bespectacled sidekick Marvin, has more talent than you, should feel like spit on your face. There are years of training ahead of you if you want to take the team to the major league level.
“But I’m the hero,” you say to yourself, “why am I so awful?” Well, that’s the next thing I learned. Just because you’re the protagonist, doesn’t make you the hero. There are so many characters in Success Mode who hold the same aspirations as you, and with limited spots on baseball rosters, there are going to be troublesome waters ahead for sure. Each of these players sees themselves as a kind of hero of their own story. And who is to say they’re not? Even Toby, your selfish, sneering reprobate of a teammate tries to do what’s best for the team and believes that he can lead them to glory.
(This is Toby. We can hate him together.)
It’s important to remember you’re not such a goody-two-shoes yourself. Just because you are the protagonist doesn’t make you a good person. You can go about it the honest way, with hard work and dedication, but you can also decide that nothing is off-limits and visit Dr. Goodjob on the bad end of town who will inject you with the latest cocktail of steroids. You can buy an old wooden bat and find the spirit of Willy Legend and have him play for you. There’s a whole world of ways in which you can invert and subvert the typical sports story.
You can’t go at it alone. It’s not possible. No man is an island, especially when you are trying to achieve your dreams. For baseball boy over here, he needs to meet scouts and coaches and impress them, he needs his friends to help push him when he gets lazy. There’s no way that he could make his way into the majors without you, either. Without you, he is still the same college benchwarmer he started as. Pushing Chief into the majors is a slow, arduous process. You gotta make sure he passes his classes as well as trains hard. You gotta buy the right gear. You gotta impress the right people.
At the end, you’ll see whether or not it was all worth it. Did your decisions make a difference? Were you able to convince the scouts that you had the work ethic and the talent to make the majors? The things we do now will have a great impact on us for the rest of our lives and they will color our experiences from now until the day we die. So choose carefully, there’s no save game to pick back up from. And I learned most of that from picking through games in the bargain bin.