Power Pro-kun Pocket 2 is a 2000 Baseball simulator + dating sim + Minesweeper developed by Diamond Head and published by Konami for the Game Boy Color. It introduced the "Inner Success", a story mode with alternative gameplay that's generally unrelated to Baseball but still awards a custom character upon completion.
The game and its prequel received a compilation remake in the engine of 6 for the Game Boy Advance in 2004 and that compilation was remade for the Nintendo Switch in 2021 as Power Pro-kun Pocket R. This second remake has a new gameplay mode called Cyberval. Tropes for that can be found on the page for the original game.
Outer Success Mode: Drill Moles Edition
"Hero 2" is an up-and-coming pro ballplayer who's been drafted to the small time Drill Moles/Moguraz team, which turns out to be knee-deep in debts and on the verge of dissolution. Can he bring in more hot-blooded players and make the Moles the best in Japan?Inner Success Mode: War Edition
Hero 2 finds himself drafted as a soldier to transport supplies between Japan's forces at World War II... wait, what?This game features the following tropes:
- Adaptation Expansion: While the main Pawapuro games run on Negative Continuity, the Pocket games begin to expand the setting from Pawapuro 5 into a story that spans over 30 years.
- All Just a Dream: A secret ending reveals War Edition is a dream Hero 2 had at the end of Drill Moles Edition.
- Anti-Frustration Features: Unlike in 1&2, the R remake has both Drill Moles and War unlocked from the get-go.
- Bittersweet Ending: Hero 2 succeeds as a pro ballplayer, but the ending in which the Drill Moles are bought by the Propeller organization is canon.
- Bland-Name Product: It is a big deal of the original version and its story mode that you can take on the official Japanese baseball teams, but the R remake has been confirmed by Famitsu to use the generic teams from Pawapoke Dash in their place. Even then, the flags of those fictional teams have been removed too for some reason.
- Catapult Nightmare: One random event in War Edition has Hero 2 jolt awake in fear after dreaming of Norika in the same room as him. Or rather, in the same bed as him, if the background is any indication.
- Continuing is Painful: If you get a Game Over you'll be forced to start over from the beginning. You can reset, but the game punishes that with stat losses and will eventually just erase your save file.
- Cutting Off the Branches: The game canonizes two of the bad epilogues from the first game, so Hero 1 was forced to marry Norika the stalker and Kameda nearly died and got turned into a cyborg. Then it turns out Hero 1 actually died off-screen in an accident.
- Darker and Edgier: Despite the cartoony art style, War Edition has a tragi-comic portrayal of the horrors of war.
- Fan Remake: The beetle-hunting minigame has an online remake
by fans. - Formula-Breaking Episode: War Edition is about surviving a battlefield in the days of WWII and has nothing to do with Baseball except for the protagonist playing a match at the very end, in a cutscene. The player can still build his stats via a Tilesweeper minigame and convert him to the Baseball simulator mode upon clearing the story.
- Game Within a Game: When you beat the first scenario a few times, a second one comes out of nowhere with Minesweeper gameplay. Later installments in the series further developed those "Inner" scenarios into JRPG adventures completely detached from the Outer scenarios.
- Guide Dang It!: The Inner Success doesn't unlock until you beat the main game several times.
- Hello, [Insert Name Here]: You start out by giving Hero 2 a name and a role on the team he's about to join.
- Level Goal: This game's take on Minesweeper is an early example of having to lead a character towards the other side of each mine field.
- Luck-Based Mission: Many aspects of both story modes are luck-based. Some players actually praise how that befits the hopelessness of warfare in War Edition.
- Marry Them All: This is the only game in the series with a Harem ending, including Norika too. In the original version it requires exchanging data between two copies of the game to raise multiple Relationship Values at once, so the remakes make it doable without such gimmicks.
- Multiple Endings: There are several possible outcomes for the story.
- Never Say "Die": The R remake let the series' notorious all ages rating get bumped to 12 years-old and up to avoid censoring the story, but the "Stag Beetle Murder" minigame still had to be renamed to "Stag Beetle Hell".
- New Game Plus: The game has a system that allows you to "reincarnate" your custom characters into another Pawapoke 2 cartridge. They will lose most of their stats but retain some other attributes, and as such this is the only way to obtain the Harem ending in the main story and the true ending of War Edition.
- Playable Epilogue: The game goes on for a few weeks after the final tournament match. No other game in the series does this.
- Poison Mushroom: During the Minesweeper minigame you can collect items that give your money, effects and skills. However, many of them will have negative effects and there's no way to tell which is which.
- Press Start to Game Over: It is possible to get killed in under a minute in War Edition.
- Stalker with a Crush: Hero 1 is dead, so Norika reprises her role from the first game and seeks to take Hero 2 as a Replacement Goldfish. Worse, she's high on the insurance money from her husband's death and wants to get Hero 2 killed and Make It Look Like an Accident. Even in Power Pro-kun Pocket 3, it cannot be said for sure if Hero 1 really fell off that cliff by accident...
- Status Effects:
- Like in the first game, the "lovesick" status can cause Hero 2 to get in a traffic accident after a date and suffer severe damage. In this case, he crashes his car into a utility pole.
- The dreaded "Mania" status first appears here. There's a hidden value that determines how much Hero 2 is addicted to nerdy stuff. If it reaches past a certain point, he becomes an otaku and will spend a week of each month to visit the toy store. And you can't heal this! When this event is achieved in most of the games it is in, you get an ominous cutscene like it is a game over and an ending epilogue that shows the protagonist as a miserable shut-in. All this even though in Japan the term "mania" isn't supposed to have the bad meaning "otaku" has...
- Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome: Hero 1 fell off a cliff offscreen during the events of this game.
- Surprise Car Crash: On top of randomly wasting turns, the Lovesickness status adds a chance of Hero 2 getting so distracted he crashes his car after a date.
- This Is a Work of Fiction: Both Success stories begins with this disclaimer, likely because one uses real life teams and the other is set during World War II. This was dropped in 3 and 4, but returned for good in 5.
- Tilesweeper: There is a minigame of this sort in the War Edition. You have to reach the end while avoiding mines and potentially collecting items along the way.
- Unexpected Gameplay Change:
- You are required to clear 4 different minigames to increase the Relationship Values between you and your team.
- War Edition features a Minesweeper mode which was later featured in Pawapoke 3 and 8.
- Unintentionally Unwinnable: In the beetle-hunting minigame, it is possible to get completely trapped between beetle corpses. If this happens, the game skips all player turns until the remaining beetles break through the walls.
- Updated Re-release: 1&2 for the GBA compiles the first two games on the engine for 6. The R remake for the Switch uses the GBA version's cutscenes as a base, features 3D graphics with the specific Pawapoke art style on the characters for the baseball gameplay — with unique models for everyone, for the first time in the spinoff series — and also features a new game mode about tank battles.
- We Can Rebuild Him: Kameda has been revived by the Propeller Team as the Hyper Kameda cyborg.
