YMMV / Live Powerful Pro Baseball

• Americans Hate Tingle: Power Pros is one of the leading baseball simulator franchises in Japan, but went all but completely unlocalized thanks to licensing issues or visual novels not being any popular in America for many years. The only two games that got brought over had to make do as spinoffs of the official Major League Baseball series. Americans detest Power Pros' arcade-oriented gameplay and how characters and real-life players are depicted as cartoony nondescript puppets, and the idea of an involved story mode or RPG scenario for building characters in a sports game is downright alien to them. This is always demonstrated by the few American previews and reviews the series got from journalists on release. The "inconsequential" Pawapuro 4, for example, got rated 6.8 by Gamespot in 1997 with no mention of its story mode. In its home country, it was rated 33/40 (8.2) by Famitsu. Likewise, even after Konami's status became a lot more controversial thanks to the reveal of their mistreatment towards their own employees to draconian levels, Power Pros mainline games were still released and welcomed warmly in Japan, constantly rated highly by Famitsu and topping purchase charts for considerable times for each games.
• Awesome Music: Pretty much has the best original soundtracks in any Baseball game series.
• Continuity Lockout: WBSC eBASEBALL: Power Pros was left with the bizarre situation of introducing a myriad of characters from a series Konami practically never released on any Western countries when it doesn't even have a story mode.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: Fans tend to rank each game by how good their stories are, rather than for the quality of the Baseball simulator. The Pocket games were eventually marketed as "Baseball Variety" games instead of sports games for this reason.
• Fan Nickname: Japanese wikis for the Pawapoke series call the unnamed protagonists "Hero/Protagonist X" for convenience. The first one is called "Hero 1-3" because he's the protagonist in those two games. On the other hand, they also seem to lump all the Inner Success protagonists together.
• Fandom Rivalry: Although it lacks the scenario modes the series is famous for, WBSC eBASEBALL: Power Pros was well-received by Western fans of the old MLB spinoffs and got more players into the franchise after such a long absence since said spinoffs. It was also met with the utter ire, revulsion and repulsion from Western fans of every other abandoned Konami franchise.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: A grand total of two entries (second and third) of the MLB Power Pros spinoffs got brought over, and those do have a small following with a fan wiki and forums.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "CERO A", or "ERO". For whenever the series take a turn that's not so "rated E for Everyone".
  • The Powerful High's school song, which plays at the beginning of every match and cannot be skipped. On Nico Nico, you can't skip past it using the player, either.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The "game clear" and "custom character recorded" fanfarres from the Pawapoke games, given how difficult it can be to clear any given scenario.
  • Whenever a batter in Pawapoke Dash hits a potential home run, you hear the crunchiest bat hit sound outside of Super Smash Bros.. Actually confirming the home run in the roulette or at least clearing three bases also produces a nice jingle.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Several bad endings in Pawapoke 3 involve the protagonist's death. One is his so-called friend Kameda locking him to die inside a small container. Which the game over screen shows in all its claustrophobic glory.
  • The worst ending of Pawapoke 7's Koshien Hero Edition — to the point of infamy since it is among the first things that show up if you look up pictures of the game. In it, the so-called Pocket Heroes beat up your team to half-death and imprison them all into the form of a creepy and crappy crayon drawing. To add insult to injury, the drawing looks like a parody of the typical congratulations screen you'd get for winning a tournament or clearing any Success mode.
• Older than You Think: Pawapoke is often seen as one of Konami's older franchises that somehow avoided the Pachislot treatment Konami has become infamous for. However, they have actually made a Pawapoke Pachislot long before their controversy, and also discontinued it before.
• Player Punch: The game over and bad epilogue scenes portray varying levels of death and desolation for the protagonist and the rest of the cast, certainly making players want to start over and set things right. It's not nice to occasionally find likeable characters suffering from Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome, either.
• Scrappy Mechanic: In Pawapoke 4, you need to clear the game three times if you want to play the Inner Success mode. In 5 you don't need to. Clear the mind swap story once and it is yours. But then Pawapoke 6 took a step back and added a in-game shop that locked away both the Inner Success and the minigames. To earn enough points as soon as possible to unlock those things, you must sacrifice a successful playthrough. This means you lose both a custom character and the right to see the epilogues for his story (and to unlock them in the gallery if they're new). This nonsense lasted until 10, which actually has both Successes available from the beginning and unlocks minigames when they're found in the main story. From then on, points are only used to unlock teams for Free Play and to change certain details of your custom characters.
• Self-Fanservice: It's common for fans to draw the series' female characters with human proportions while leaving the protagonists as the cartoonish nondescript puppets they are. The Glasses Clan dudes don't get any embellishment from fans either.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop:
  • Some games in the Pawapoke series have no mandatory goals to be met at the end of each year other than not losing tournament matches. At the same time, they're the ones with some kind of mystery you must solve to keep from getting a bad and disappointing ending.
  • The last few Pawapokes have the Inner Success mode unlocked from the beginning and give you two free powerful characters. 13 and 14 even let you create one character after another in a scratch card minigame.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: Pawapoke 8 features a protagonist who knows nothing about Baseball, so you start with very low stats. Studying Baseball is another system you have to juggle along with the others. Minigames are mandatory to progress, with the Contra run-and-gun in particular causing a Game Over if failed. Furthermore, if you fail to solve the story's goal you can get a Game Over even after you win the tournament. Unlike in 6, you won't even get points from finishing that way.
• That One Level: Several minigames in the Pawapoke series count. They can be either optional and allow you to retry them on the next week or appear at fixed points of the story and give you a single try. Minigames that involve shoot 'em ups or clearing a few dozen simple math questions under a tight time limit can be some of the most troublesome. Sometimes they're all on an above-average difficulty, but in certain installments each following minigame will be harder than the last. In Pawapoke 7, for example, leaving the math questions and especially the competitive puzzle for last will make their associated sidequest pretty much unwinnable. To add injury to insult, you get a ton of penalties every time you fail a minigame. Sometimes it can even kill the protagonist.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: The Pawapoke series was notorious for getting away with a For All Ages rating in Japan regardless of its subject matter. The nazi-knockoff slave camp in 6 with the soldiers performing drug experimentation on people and executing anyone they felt was worthless was the darkest the series ever got, but since it looks cutesy and is mostly portrayed in text, who cares?

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