Power Pro-kun Pocket 6

It's kind of an obvious thing to consider, but if you have an event that occurs 50% of the time in a playthrough, players that complete a game once will have an experience that might not be what the developers imagined when setting that encounter rate.

At the climax of Aya's route in Power Pro-kun Pocket 6, she tearfully breaks up with you, announcing that she's pursuing an arranged marriage to save her family's finances.

And if you don't happen to roll the 'your coworkers discuss that Aya's wedding is happening This Weekend' random event ever... I guess that's where the story ends for you! That feels bad!

Separately, you run into Suzune, the sheltered daughter of a rich family, in the early stages of a playthrough. You can choose to brush her off, be kind to her, or be clumsily physical (which earns you a beating from her bodyguards). Only the later option guarantees that you'll see her ever again! Kindness was fortunate enough to work for me the first time, which is why I ended up really confused when I couldn't find the on-ramp on a second lap.

And Suzune showed the other frustrating limitation of simulation games - she became my girlfriend, but I didn't see any of her ending because I didn't push her affection stat high enough (something that, without repeated-playthrough cheat items, you have no real way of checking)... which itself was a result of me thinking 'well I mean nothing really happens when we go on dates so I should probably focus on training for the Big Baseball'. How am I supposed to know I'm missing stuff if you don't tell me and the process of pursuing it is tediously repetitive with no signposting!

Power Pro-kun Pocket 6 is a 2003 portable spinoff of Konami's Power Pros baseball series - it's the first one (either console or portable) that I've tried, primarily because of my curiosity about its Success mode.

Success mode is a character-raising sim where you Raise Stats, Talk To People, and Do Baseball, and in contrast to the relatively grounded and baseball-focused console games, the Pocket games apparently have interestingly wild stories for a bunch of guys with cartoony Lego proportions.

Pocket 6 starts with an interesting hook about being a time traveler from the future, returning to save a local struggling factory that will be crucial for producing batteries in the future. Aside from being deep in debt to its creditors, the factory is the target of a similar-era time returnee out to do a Terminator 2 and prevent it from flourishing.

This quickly sort of stagnates into a gameplay loop where you solve one credit crisis after the next by challenging people to baseball. Need two weeks to repay loans? Baseball. Need three months instead? Baseball. City hall won't approve your factory permit? Baseball.

It's not a bad loop, but rather than building momentum towards a triumphant resolution, the game sort of just ends in an optional underground baseball tournament which has nothing to do with the core plot and your guy shrugs like 'well I hope I saved the future', the end.

Simulation games are always a very 'you get what you put in' genre but also I'd appreciate getting any lead at all! I did two playthroughs and I don't know if I'm unlucky, just bad at accruing stats, or getting language barriered... from guides it seems like a lot of core plot is just straight-up random events, and I succeeded at all the baseball, so...

One of the most memorable things about Pocket 6 is that you kind of HAVE to succeed at baseball. I lost the first game I ever played and the game immediately hit me with a haunting game over screen followed by a spirit telling me 'by the way it's okay to save scum so that doesn't happen... but only a limited number of times'. What a way to make an impression! (In a earnestly positive, 'oh that's for sickos and I'm going to tell everyone about this forever' way.)

The Success mode is not particularly long but I wouldn't call it short (maybe like 2-3 hours?), and apparently this happens for every baseball game until endgame... so I hope you're better at fielding in the infield than I am!

I honestly struggled so hard with the fielding in this game that it makes me want to go back to Baseball Stars and Mario Baseball and find out if I've lost my baseball touch. In particular, the infield is zoomed in and hits are very fast, making it difficult to figure out what fielder I was controlling in time to make easy plays.

Ironically, this made late game a little easier, because at that point, everyone is powerful enough that they tend to pop-fly to the outfield. On that note, I'm not sure if I'm just really used to arcade baseball, but homeruns were staggeringly rare for me. I only gave up 2 in two full playthroughs, and never got a single one myself, despite my second playthrough being a maximalist 'hey you don't need to build speed or defense if you put everything into power and sit behind the plate' run.

Despite the struggles I had with Pocket 6's Success mode, the simultaneous beauty of simulation games shone through on said second playthrough - despite it being my throwaway 'make the number big' funny run, the pachinko ball of fate ended up bouncing right into Aya's pocket, and her route has extremely memorable design decisions.

It opens up with the classic sin of having her be a nondescript bespectaled OL at work, but a cool sporty beauty once you get her number (a tale as old as Haruhi's anime, 20 years this year) - though I am happy with its Lawful Neutral choice of rewarding 'you're cute either way' over a yes/no evaluation of glasses.

But once you start dating Aya, you realize how underprepared years of 'welcome to Date Spot, would you like Flirty Option, Serious Option, or Joke Option' have left you (though I'd note that such openly affection-modulating answers have a strong purpose in Tokimeki Memorial where you need to get everyone's hearts in just the right spot).

Aya's dates give you an incredible amount of choice with no repetition - each of the 5 date spots has at least one branch, which itself changes and builds on itself every time you go.

And each date often hits you with the Entire Width Of The Fucking UI when it comes to choices. Out for a leisurely drive with Aya and she said she's in the mood for some pop punk? You better buckle up and tell me whether you should put on Metallic, Bon Jovi, Aerosmiss, Inkin Park, Nevaessence, Avringe Laril, Clean Day, or Samson 41! Next time she'll want some German symphonic metal and you better know which one of these 8 bands matches.

Aside from being a great barometer of the staff's extremely obvious interests (on a related note, I've been re-reading Haibara's Teenage New Game+, which itself does not know idol groups to save its life but will namedrop bands like ONE OK ROCK at a pin drop), it goes a great way towards forcing you to really consider Aya's tastes and what she's expressed in previous dates.

It feels really good to look at a movie lineup including Terminated, The Matricks Reloaded, Charlie's Angel, The Pokemon Movie, and Red Draco and think 'last time when we went to the movies, I found out Aya likes action, but she's not really a sci-fi fan... and she likes anime but she's not really childish...'! That's the magic of simulation games where your brain gets to fill in a lot!

Also, every so often your character gets the 'lovesick' debuff. The only two times this has healed naturally for my duded has been 1) when he got dumped and 2) when the ~deyansu otaku dragged you to Animate to buy some limited-edition Mobile Suit Gunder SEED DVDs. That's emergent gameplay!

In the end, I found myself wishing that instead of Power Pro-kun Pocket 6, I had a copy of Tokimeki Memorial and Baseball Stars (NES, where I can actually hit a homer with A-rank power instead of being a pop-out machine)... but I'm glad that I found some memorable moments despite getting extremely lost from whatever the golden path was supposed to be here.

And well... I did accidentally put two 2000s Konami sim games on my bingo this year...

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