GAME CLEAR No. 291 -- Major League

Major League (1989, Family Computer)

Developer: Lenar
Publisher: Irem
Clear Version: Family Computer
Clear Platform: New Famicom
Clear Date: 4/1/26

---

Why should I care?
It’s odd that the film of the same name got “adapted” only in Japan on the Famicom, but it’s otherwise forgettable.

---

Mild Thing

Okay. One more 8-bit sports game. For now.

Major League is a strange little game. It is a licensed tie-in with the 1989 American film of the same name. Beyond incorporating the problematic mohawk baseball man and maybe a couple of the characters on the title screen, it is otherwise just a baseball game with made-up teams. It does not even feature the Cleveland Indians (who were the protagonists of the picture). It seems somewhat likely that Irem and Lenar had been working on a baseball game already and perhaps licensed the IP at the last minute to boost sales (somehow? I have no idea if the film was popular at all in Japan). Whatever the case, what’s here is a humdrum baseball game with effectively no relation to its namesake movie.

Based on a machine translation of the manual, the game consists of a variety of fictional teams that form the Ceramic and Major Leagues. The former is seemingly analogous to Nippon Professional Baseball (why it’s called “ceramic” I cannot even hazard a guess), and the latter is seemingly supposed to be the Major Leagues of the United States. Unlike Baseball, which I just wrote about, Major League’s teams do seem to have significant differences. Some are built for power, some for speed, some for pitching, and so on.

For the game I played, I chose the National League East champions, the Mates. This is presumably a parody of the Mets, but I choose to believe they were actually my beloved Braves, although I realize as I am writing this very sentence that the Braves were still in the National League West in 1989 and I am an IDIOT.

Anyway, I beat my opponent, which I am also just now realizing were 「イー ン デ ヤン」, a transliteration of “Indians”, which means I was wrong above. Good lord. I’m not fixing that. I’m blogging live, okay?

I beat them badly. 16-4. The umps called the game in the 8th inning, which was a funny thing to realize could happen. Most of my scoring came on the long ball, which was surprisingly easy to hit.

I mentioned in my writeup on Baseball that it was exceedingly primitive and that they made such great strides in realism and fidelity even within the Famicom’s own lifespan. That’s certainly true here. Compared to Baseball, Major League adds a bullpen, pinch hitters, much more realistic graphics and animations, and much faster pace of play and rendering. It also adds music, which takes the form of the chants that ring out from the fans of Nippon Professional Baseball fans around Japan. It’s chiptunes instead of real voices, of course, but it has the heavily percussive styling of the chants Japanese baseball fans sing in support of their players. As in real life, it’s a great vibe. I’m sure many of these improvements also existed in earlier games like Family Stadium, for example, but I haven’t played that (yet).

The defense is still dogshit. You control everyone on the field at the same time, turning routing popouts to the shallow outfield into a nightmare of determining whether the shortstop or left fielder should be trying to catch it. If your read is incorrect, you’re sending the guy who should be fielding the ball in the wrong fucking direction. You can do sliding, diving, and leaping catches in this, though, so that’s cool.

The little characters are very cute. They remind me a bit of Kunio-kun (River City Ransom) guys despite not being a Technōs game. I like ’em a lot.

Anyway, it’s baseball, okay? It’s probably not even the hundredth best baseball game ever made, but it exists, and it was on my shelf. Now I’ve at least played through the game and beaten the computer. That’s what I call backlog maintenance.