Pawapuro 14 Ketteiban On Sale 12/20

Official site is FINALLY up.

http://www.konami.jp/gs/game/pawa/14_wii_ket/index.html

Same crap. Same old garbage from Konami. They have nothing new on there that makes me expect anything better from them. They've been pushing this BS about making the game easier on beginners and easy to understand for the past couple years. Are they marketing the game towards infants now? Babies don't have money!

Just look at the sales figure thread I posted a short while ago. Pawapuro 99 is ridiculously difficult when compared to the recent games. It sold twice as much as the games Konami is releasing now. Get a clue! That whole sales mentality of ditching the hardcore fans for new extra "special" gamers who don't even understand the rules of baseball...not exactly working as well as you guys expected, right? If they don't even understand the rules, what makes you think they're going to be repeat customers for a baseball video game? Even the newbie Americans who played Pawapuro for the first time this year were gushing about how easy it was to just pick up and get into. How difficult do you think your game is? Contact, power, swing, throw to bases. That's it! Give me a break. 2K Sports with their swing sticks and intricate base stealing are complex. This is Famicom baseball.

Every single time I read new stuff from Pawapuro Productions, it just makes me even more pissed off. This is why patching their old games with decent built in AI and physics is the only way to go. I guarantee you that if they don't fix this series, fans will do it themselves.

Bad news, guys. Someone watched a promo video for the game at a local game store. He says the pitch speed is back to being as slow as Pawapuro 13. This hasn't been confirmed yet, but it wouldn't surprise me. That's the way it's been lately. One step forward, 100 steps back.

You have to wonder if Konami stating they "listened to fans" means that they listened to idiots who couldn't even hit with the super slow pitching. That's what practice mode is for, kids. Just don't be shocked when online matches are completely impossible for you in future games because you get crushed by decent players.

Honestly, how difficult is it for them to give us various pitch speeds like in PYS4? This stuff is the difference between 100,000 people buying or ignoring the game. Just put in those extra lines of code to give us multiple pitch speeds already. It's not like you spend hours upon hours on the graphics. I honestly have no idea what these guys do with their time. Do they have brainstorming sessions to figure out how to ruin the series? I just don't get it.

Anyway, the general consensus on 2ch is that the series is done. There was a little ray of hope for a lot of the guys, but this news basically shows who Konami are catering to now. I think people are already going off to Pawapoke, PYS, old school titles, or just stop playing yakyu games altogether. Most people believe that Pawapuro now is a full on game for children and PYS is the franchise they're aiming at adults.

In the past, Pawapuro used to be a game that both children and adults could play, since the presentation was childish but the gameplay was sim. Pawapoke 10 makes it a point to say in it's promo video that both children and adults can play the game. Since Pawapoke's dev team has a lot more guys from the glory days of Pawapuro, I'm guessing they're taking that old mentality to the portable platform.

Pawapuro's constant marketing in recent years of catering to beginners, AKA kids who just learned how to walk, shows they are targeting young children who enjoy the childish presentation but don't know any better to complain about physics, AI, etc. Why did they do this? I have no idea. It's obviously led to a huge drop in sales. My guess is that the quality of staff that they have right now is too poor to continue on producing the quality titles that Akada's team released, so they had to change their approach.

With Pro Yakyu Spirits' constant upgrading of AI and increasingly deep gameplay, it's obvious the game is targeted towards older players. Mixing of pitches, defensive shifts, and unforgiving pitch timing make the series appeal to more hardcore gamers. The only problem is that the realistic graphics make creating players difficult. The pennant mode is also not nearly as refined as Pawapuro, which has been adding onto their pennant mode for many years.

So my advice to everyone who hates Pawapuro 13 and 14 is to not look forward to Pawapuro titles anymore. Don't even consider it the same game that's been released before, because it's not being made for us anymore. I'd consider Pro Yakyu Spirits 5 to be the only game to look forward to next year. Hopefully they're more familiar with the PS3 now and can make a perfectly smooth 60 frames per second game. There's potential with Powerful Major League, but they'll need to tweak AI and add full edit for the Japanese release.

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/28777.html

Video is up on GameTrailers before anywhere else on the internet. GameSpot released the Pawapuro 14 trailer before anyone else earlier this year. Some people involved with Konami's internet marketing need to be fired, in my opinion. This is the kind of stuff that effects sales. I guess the entire shape of Japanese business is changing now that the slackers of my generation are given jobs and responsibility.

Not much new stuff to be found in the video. New forms for Matsunaka(now that he sucks...thanks), G.G. Sato, Takeshi Yamasaki, and Naruse. They also show off the new gimmick uniforms some of the teams used this year. They gave Ramirez A meet and A power. Darvish has a two seam fastball. They pimp the new Success Mode that tries to capitalize on the whole Olympic qualifiers thing that just went down. You basically pick a bunch of NPB players and manage them through the Olympics.

They still haven't gotten rid of those garbage 3D sprites in My Life Mode. They could be tolerated on PS1 or N64, but this is PS2 and Wii hardware. Give us a break with the crappy 3D sprites. The presence of those things has the power to turn a quality game selling mode into some BS mode(like home run derby) just taking up space on the disc. The old anime style scenes they used just made My Life seem way more high quality. In addition to the old solid gameplay, Pennant, and the better Success modes, they really gave you your money's worth.

I think the inclusion of the different My Life scenarios really ruined it. The great thing about My Life in 11 and 12 was the fact that you had control over what your life would become. You could either be an all A player, constantly injured ace, shut down closer, defensive sub, pinch hitter, etc. The new My Life scenarios are just like already determined story modes. They're totally linear and give you no freedom. The amount of freedom you got in previous versions is what made it so great. I don't want to play as some fictional 38 year old outfielder who gets to make pinch hitting decisions. Nor do I want to play as some fictional star player who has to win a pennant for some team. Who the hell thought those up? The only interesting one is the retirement scenario, and that's pointless when it's a completely different scenario from the main My Life. What's so difficult about making that the final year of a normal My Life player's career? I guess that'd make too much sense.

There are conflicting reports coming out of 2ch right now from people who have claimed to play the game or seen it in action. I'm not going to share those reports until they can be confirmed. As much as Famitsu reviews can be bought out, I think an unchanged review score will mean more of the same crap and like all 9s will mean a return to the gameplay we all know and love. I'm predicting a score of 9888, since that is the courtesy score. Maybe all 8.

Hey Bigman, I was just on the website looking for new details......That's crazy that the video is on gametrailers of all places before their own websites.

If it is true about the ball speed that is just plain unacceptable

Not even gonna think about trying it, unless I see good reviews....which I am mostly sure there wont be any.

I rather play 11K and gets struck out over and over against my own 160km/h gyroballer pitcher with lv 5 splitter and lv 3 h-slider.

Man was he hard to hit....=_=

It's interesting to see the lack of interest in new Pawapuro titles being reflected on 2ch. Nobody is really looking forward to it other than the fanboys who buy any Pawapuro that comes out. The number of posts per day is definitely down. I also recently got a NicoNico account and a ton of the videos are Success Mode videos for the old titles. They're totally ignoring 12, 13, and 14. Even some of the compilation videos for the opening anime intros ignore 13 and 14. Gotta love it!

One of the review sites I go to actually rated Pawapuro 14 an F out of 36 total reviews. PawaMajor 2 and PYS4 got C grades. What was surprising is that most of the reviews were angry and from people who said they were going to stop buying the game. I'm used to that from English sites but not Japanese ones. Guess they're like us and got tired of getting their hopes up.

Rumor has it that Famitsu didn't even review Pawapuro 14 Ketteiban this week. They sometimes do this with weaker titles that companies depend on for sales. For example, they did this with Blue Dragon for the Xbox 360. What I don't get about that is, Ketteiban doesn't ever sell nearly as much as the July version. They're lucky to get 100,000 sales any year. Take this with a grain of salt for now.

Another person has apparently played the game at a local game store demo kiosk, so I'm going to go ahead and post his impressions. This also syncs up with other impressions people have given prior to this. I rarely get fake play reports on 2ch, so I'm going to go ahead and trust this.

-Playing with the digipad feels way more like Pawapuro 11 now. This is good news for me, since I exclusively use digital control. The past couple Pawapuros have been impossible with digital.

-Swinging at first pitches seems to have been eliminated if you throw on the edges of the strike zone. If you throw it down the middle, it'll still be swung on early.

-Break on curve balls have changed a little.

-Pitch speed is a little slower than Pawapuro 13 Ketteiban.

-You can get strike outs normally by throwing with good pitch locations.

Honestly, I'll believe this all when I at least see video. I'm not too excited about the slow pitch speed.