PCE Game 45 – Nekketsu Legend Baseballer

Nekketsu Legend Baseballer (熱血レジェンド ベースボーラー), released 6/16/1995, developed by Pack In Video

I really did not know what to expect with this title — it turns out this is a horrendously bad RPG; if it weren’t so obscure I think it would be a legendary kusoge. The opening narration is ridiculous. The game takes place on Planet Yakyuu (baseball), which was abandoned by most human colonists because of the harsh living conditions. But baseball players developed it and lived there. Then the evil Dark Baseballer spirit attacked, but 9 holy baseball players defeated it. This narration is done in apparent seriousness; I don’t think this was intended to be a gag or parody.

The main character is the son of one of the 9 holy baseball legends. As you can see the graphics are terrible even for PC Engine, and the voice acting is laughably bad. It’s rare to see really incompetent voice acting from a Japanese game but this may be the worst I’ve seen.

The guy at the bottom has joined the Dark Baseballer forces and killed the other 8 legends. The father tries to use Holy Ball Excalibur but the other guy returns it with Dark Hit Deathbringer and kills the dad. Now the dad passes on the holy symbol to his son, who has to go out and defeat the Dark Baseballer forces.

Here’s the excellent town graphics.

The battle system is a mess — when you get into a battle it goes into some kind of baseball game, but it’s basically just a skin over a regular “hold down the attack button” system.

Basically you throw a pitch, and it’s either a strike (enemy takes damage), a ball (both take damage), or a hit (you take damage). It’s very slow, apparently the fights can take 20-30 minutes in the later part of the game even though you just hold down the turbo button to win.

You assign your members to the 9 positions but it doesn’t seem to have any real effect because in the end you’re just holding the attack button down.

If you can understand Japanese this is a great video on the game. The guy who did this has a channel where he plays bad games (kusoge) and he said this was in the top 5 worst he had ever played. He also faulted the terrible voice acting (which is even worse than what I saw, later in the game), stupid story, and slow battle system — apparently it’s even worse on an actual PC Engine because the loading times are very long. He also said the system is really unbalanced and he never saw the enemies get a hit. He usually streams the games as he does it but he stopped streaming it after the first two because it was so slow and boring, and he said he watched 4 movies to pass the time during the battles (he put something on top of the controller button).

There’s also the usual problem of not being able to see what anything does in the shops or item menu. There’s also a bug where if you choose what you want to buy and then cancel out, you get the item anyway without paying money.

Obviously I did not finish this game, or even play it much — it’s hard to see how this trainwreck of a game was released in 1995 but I guess there are kusoge in every period.

8 thoughts on “PCE Game 45 – Nekketsu Legend Baseballer

    1. kurisu Post author

      It’s unlikely; this is a pretty obscure game. At least it looks like “The Closer” is a real attempt at a baseball RPG, rather than the strange garbage of this game.

      Reply
  1. Morpheus Kitami

    Has Pack-In Video ever done a game that wasn’t awful? If it wasn’t the CRPGAddict playing some awful MSX title, it was the Angry Video Game Nerd playing some awful NES game. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of them making something that was even passable.

    Reply
    1. kurisu Post author

      I think their biggest successes were the fishing RPG games (kawa no nushi tsuri and sequels), and they also made the first Harvest Moon game. They got absorbed by Victor Entertainment shortly after that.

      Reply
    2. Healy

      In addition to the games that Kurisu and Harvester mentioned, they also published Magical Pop’n, although another company developed it, so I’m not sure if you’d count it…

      Reply
  2. Carlos

    Interesting premise, for sure. I’d never heard of this game before, although I knew there were a few pce sports/rpg titles, like one that mixed racing with rpg. and another that did the same but with tennis. Both pretty mediocre games. I thing the F1/rpg game was even localized in the West if I’m not mistaken.

    Similarly, there’s also the Megadrive/Genesis game Battle Golfer Yui, or the Mario Tennis franchise.

    Reply

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