An MLB The Show Alternative Arrives This Summer

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It has been a long time coming, but Pro Yakyu/eBaseball/Pro Spirits is finally going worldwide once more this July. For those who have been waiting for an alternative to MLB The Show, this is going to be your best bet in years — if you don’t mind the lack of an MLB license.

I last covered Konami’s popular baseball series back in 2024, and it has been in the news here and there since then. Most recently, Konami did release a free-to-play version of eBaseball: Pro Spirit that is stripped down and mostly for head-to-head online play. You can check that out for a solid representation of the gameplay the series has to offer.

We have an official OS Account that you all can sign-up for now. I implore all of you, whether you want to subscribe to a paid tier or not, to go that site and sign-up. Go there, click the “Sign In” button and then use either Discord or your OS name to log-in and connect everything together.

Also, please join the OS Discord.

Perhaps that release was also the dry run for the “official” announcement of the full game release that is coming on July 16 for Steam and PS5. Yes, Xbox owners are out of luck, and this tracks with how the game has been released in prior cycles so don’t expect a late change on that front.

The big thing that separates this release from 2024 is we’re getting some amount of English language/text translations for this version. I described how to get the most out of the 2024 version in that newsletter, and part of that was using translation guides to make the experience not so arduous.

The people who do those translations are true saints, but not everyone is going to be down to do all that translating to enjoy the game. You also had to import the game, and while it’s not very tricky to do that on Steam or PS5 (and some may want to import this version again — more on that in a moment) these were all friction points that probably impacted how many people scoped out Pro Yakyu.

This time around, it appears a lot of that won’t be a problem. This is important because certain modes like the Hakkyu No Kiseki mode (one of their franchise modes where you take over a high school team) has a lot of text in it.

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We’ll need to wait for a little more info to make sure all the text will be translated, but there will also be English language commentary for the first time from Josh Lewin. If you watch the first trailer above, you might assume this is the worst commentary of all-time, but that is just the crappy YouTube AI/translation software dubbing the commentary.

Here is how Lewin sounds in the English version of the trailer:

He sounds perfectly fine in that with his actual voice. Either way, you can also use the Japanese commentary, and from my experience, I assure you that you can get enough from them even if you don’t understand a single word (their energy is infectious).

Here is the full list of games mode that will be available:

• Exhibition Game

• Season Mode (their version of a “traditional” franchise mode)

• Star Player (Road to the Show equivalent)

• Hakkyu no Kiseki

• Spirits

• Live Championship

• Live Scenario

• Grand Prix

• Home Run Derby

• Team Edit

• Edit Share

• Other

And if you watch the aforementioned trailer, you’ll see that a WBC mode will also be available (it features Ohtani and LoanDepot Park). However, this will only be available in the Japan/Asia regions, which goes to show how wonky the WBC licensing continues to be for SDS and Konami.

This is why you may still want to import the game. Again, I talked about how to import the game in that newsletter, and I assume the same rules will apply overall (and, yes, you can play Japanese versions of games, including hard copies, on your North American PS5s).

If the full English text translations are available in all versions of the game, then it seems like it will absolutely be worth importing the game, but we’ll need to wait and see about that aspect of things for now.

What seems promising is they do show English language on the WBC screens as of now:

The other hang-up for some folks is obviously going to be the lack of an MLB license. Customization does exist in eBaseball, but I don’t think you should be hoping for a full MLB conversion or anything as it’s not that simple to do all of that. However, there is full NPB licensing, and there is likely a little MLB talent in the game due to the WBC.

As for the gameplay, we’ll need to see what improvements are there, but overall I’ve generally been in the camp where I think fielding is unquestionably better in The Show. With batting and pitching, those are closer comps and it comes more down to personal preference.

Along those same lines, the graphics in eBaseball are superior to The Show’s, and the graphics were one reason some people really took notice of the 2024 version when it came out.

All in all, this is very exciting, and we’ll have a feature-rich baseball game in our lives this summer right around when College Football 27 is also coming out. Get hyped.

Everything Else From This Week

As one door opens, another is closing (at least for now). After many years, MVP Mods officially went offline this week.

It obviously doesn’t sound like it was by choice, and we can hope things were backed up somewhere because that’s so much work that has up and vanished otherwise.

Still, MVP Mods is a testament to the sports gaming community and what it is capable of to keep something alive. So many people got to continue to experience the MVP Baseball (and MLB 2K) series for years and years because of the hard work of so many — and the tireless work of a few special folks to keep the servers up and the community together all that time.

The Show also deployed a new patch this week. A bunch of City Connect jerseys were added, some player models were updated, and for what I think might be the 100th year in a row, they fixed the game start times for the Cubs/Guardians/Astros in franchise mode (but will only be reflected in new save files).

The Forza Horizon 6 Achievements list is out ahead of the game’s release on May 19. It’s not really useful looking at these lists for most sports games, but I think it’s worth scoping them out in racing games, especially an open-world one, just to get an idea of the scope of the game to some extent. Plus, I’m just dying to play Horizon 6, so I’ll take anything right now.

The Skate team also released a new patch, and the collaboration with Nike is part of it, but the bigger deal is they added a night-time mode to the Isle. This is only part of the map, so there’s no night mode yet for San Vansterdam, but maybe that will come in the future.

The WWE 2K26 team also released a new patch along with the Season 2 launch.

Finally, in my long-term bid to get all of you to play Super Battle Golf, I want to point out that a console release has been announced for this summer. This will likely coincide with the next big content update that’s coming from Brimstone.

The sale is over (so now Battle Golf costs $8 again), but I have played a bunch of the Frozen Fairway update over the last week, and I think now is a great time to jump into things if you have been on the fence. There are now 45 holes in the game, and with the new “ice” levels in there, it feels one step closer to being the Mario Kart version of golf.

If you can get together even three other friends, it’s worth playing. You can play with up to 16 players, but the devs do recommend stopping at eight (I tend to agree as the chaos goes to another level when you get beyond that). You might lose those friends along the way as things can get heated when eight people are hitting golf balls simultaneously, but it’s a perfect party game for that very same reason.