The Best Baseball Game You've Never Played

To all the US-based readers out there, hopefully you and yours are coming off an absolutely choice turkey day if you celebrate that sort of thing, but “buying stuff you don’t need” is arguably even more American than Thanksgiving. So in the spirit of the beginning of the holiday season, who am I to not give you something to buy on Black Friday? Instead of that Christmas tree you might be eyeing starting today (no, I will not accept those who put Christmas lights up or buy a tree before Thanksgiving — you’re sinners on a level that goes beyond even those who start dabbling in pumpkins spice in August), can I interest you in some Japanese baseball?

Pro Yakyuu Spirits/Professional Baseball Spirits (and to a lesser extent MLB Power Pros) are two Konami franchises that have been mostly kept overseas. This means they have been reserved for baseball fans who are willing to go out of their way to experience something fresh. Outside of a stretch where Power Pros was getting some US releases starting near the end of the Nintendo Wii era (2K had some sort of publishing partnership with Konami during this period), both franchises have been games you need import in one way or another to experience. This means you have usually paid a premium to play a game that’s mostly in Japanese, which can be a hard sell for some folks.

If those things are still roadblocks for you, with Pro Yakyuu Spirits 2024 the selling point begins with look at this friggin’ game…

The Selling Points For Pro Baseball Spirits 2024

Holy.

Running on a mix of Unreal Engine and a proprietary Konami engine, Professional Baseball Spirits 2024 is a damn pretty game, and that’s before we get to how well it plays. The same hoops to jump through remain as well, but it’s a little less daunting importing things considering the PS5 is region free if you get a hard disc, and Steam and PSN are both able to be navigated if you want to go the digital route.

There is no “perfect” translation either if you can’t read a lick of Japanese so navigating all the modes can be tricky, but Google Translate does exist — including using your camera on your smartphone and just pointing it at the screen for a live translation that is decent enough most of the time — to at least get by. In addition, OS does have a thread for Pro Yakyuu Spirits 2024, and the community is very willing to help with not just translation questions but how the modes and gameplay work overall — and will even point you towards Discord communities where you can get even more assistance.

In short, while there will be detours on your path, you can absolutely overcome them and have a good time with this game while being functionally illiterate, and without knowing anything about importing games or professional baseball in Japan. To put a fun spin on it, it’s like being a 4-year-old child all over again! Here, look at a pretty picture again to distract you.

I’ll explain how to acquire the game in the next section, but I think it’s best to sell you a bit more first. There are tons of YouTube videos out there of people playing the game, and you should certainly poke around in that area to get a feel for the gameplay and graphics. There are also helpful reviews that will also give you explanations of the various modes. This review from The Famicast is a helpful one as a primer of sorts.

To compare it to MLB The Show, there are modes that scratch the same itch as Road to the Show, Diamond Dynasty, and Moments within Spirits 2024. Their franchise-mode equivalent is the biggest departure from MLB The Show, and it’s called Hakkyu no Kiseki. It’s basically a high school baseball mode, so it’s more like College Football’s dynasty mode than a normal franchise mode. The Season mode that is in the game fits as the game’s equivalent of a franchise mode, but Hakkyu is doing more interesting things than it.

The coolest aspect of the modes is that the Hakkyu no Kiseki mode can also tie into the Star Player mode — the Road to the Show equivalent. So you can take some of those high school players you’ve grown attached to, and then start a career mode with them if they’re good enough to make it into professional baseball. You can also use existing real players or make your own if you want to experience the mode that way.

How To Enrich The Experience

If you just want to get to know a little history about the NPB, there’s videos like this one showcasing the top 100 players of all-time:

You can also learn about the history of every team in the NPB:

Heck, you can even learn about the stadiums:

Folks like OS user marbury are hard at work translating the game, with both free and premium versions to scope out if you want to get the most of this year’s game. You can also use a lot of the old translations from prior versions of Spirits if you just want to learn about some of the mechanics because, like most sports games, a lot of those elements are carried over from version to version.

There are even those like Hunter Baun who will explain the Hakkyu no Kiseki mode, and you can learn about the Diamond Dynasty equivalent (Grand Prix) via a tutorial video like this one:

If you get into the game, you know some folks are already posting their sliders as well, with OS user franch1se posting their settings on the forums. All in all, if you soured on MLB The Show this year (or just love baseball games in general), you’re not going to find another baseball game out there that can possibly scratch that itch like this one.

So if you want to go the extra step, let’s now explain how to acquire this bad boy.

How To Buy Pro Baseball Spirits 2024

There are three different ways to go about getting this game, and I’ll tackle them from the easiest to the most complex.

Import The PS5 Version

The easiest way to get the game is to simply import it. The PS5 is region free, so if you buy the disc-based version, you can just pop it into your system and you’re good to go. Of course, this assumes you have a PS5 that can play physical media. If you do own that sort of PS5, then PlayAsia has always been my number one spot to use when importing sports games. It’s $65 (plus shipping if the site is not running a free shipping promotion), and you can figure out how long it will take to make it to you as well.

Create a Japanese PSN Account

Another way to get the game is by creating a Japanese PSN account. You can theoretically make an Indonesian account (and perhaps a couple other countries apply as well) if you want to try to get the game for cheaper, but since I want to guide you on known paths, I’m sticking with explaining the Japanese PSN route.

This video from WheelzJPN is probably the easiest way to follow the steps to create that Japanese PSN account:

The biggest hurdle with this one is using Japanese currency to buy the game, and so you’ll to use a Japanese PSN voucher to pull that off (since I doubt many of you have Japanese credit cards). Again, PlayAsia is the site I can vouch for if you want to buy a PSN card, and you’ll need a 10,000 yen (about $67) PSN card in order to buy Spirits.

Buying The Game On Steam

The most involved way of getting the game is via buying it on Steam. Now, going the more “complex” route does come with some perks. You could have access to PC mods if that scene takes off, and you can also play the game on your Steam Deck if you have one of those. I don’t think an MLB mod will ever be a thing because of the structure of Spirits 2024 itself, so if you’re buying it with that hope, I mostly want to dash those dreams right off rip.

That said, for those without a PS5, this route is doable, but you will need to do more than just create a new Steam account.

• First you need a VPN that can connect to Japan or Indonesia and then connect to those servers. You can shop for a VPN, and I would look at ExpressVPN, NordVPN, ProtonVPN, or Surfshark as some possible solutions. If you don’t know, a VPN is a way to fake what region you’re in right now in order to get to content you otherwise would not be able to access. You only need the VPN to make the new Steam account buy the game. You will not need the VPN afterwards in order to access the game once it’s on your PC/Steam Deck, so if you want to look for a “free trial” for a VPN, that would be a smart play.

• After you get a VPN, go to the Steam website — not the app. Make sure to use a search engine to find the Indonesian/Japanese Steam and then translate the page and create an account.

• Add the game to your cart after you do that. It should be about 375,000 Rp if you go the Indonesian route, which is like $25. So, yes, it is much cheaper to do it this way versus the Japanese (yen) route, but it’s up to you how you go about it.

• You now need a currency/way to pay for the game, much like you did for the Japanese PSN account version. Currently PlayAsia does not have any 400,000 Rp gift cards in stock and they also have no 5,000 or 3,000 yen gift cards in stock. Have no fear, go to Seagm.com and get an Indonesia Steam gift card or Japanese Steam gift card. Again, 400,000 Rp costs about $25, or you can buy five 2,000 yen cards for about $79.

• Add the Steam gift cards to your account.

• Check out and then log in on the Steam app with the account and download your game. I actually don’t think you even need to use the VPN to download the game, it should just be available on your Steam account regardless of what region you’re in after you make the purchase — you can test that out when you get to that step. In either case, after you download the game, you no longer need the VPN. You can use this account alongside your current US account (or whatever country your current account is for) so you’ll just need to bounce between the two when you want to play the game.

And that’s that. I hope this has been helpful, and even if you don’t end up buying the game, I do think you should at least watch some of those YouTube videos to see what the “competition” is up to out there. Pro Baseball Spirits is not a series that comes out every year, so this is a bit of a special event, and it’s another reason why I thought it might be helpful to share all of this.

Until next time y’all. And, as always, thanks for reading.

-Chase