The Blog for the Sports Gamer

Once you’re done pressing X through all of the text mentioned at the end of Section 1 of the MVP guide, you’re sent to the MVP menu. There are 7 menu items on this screen and they are as follows.

Done (Completes the player menu and will send you to the next game or next day if no game is played for that day)
Schedule (Shows your team schedule and the game results)
Mission (Tasks for your player to complete)
Personal (More on this in a moment)
League Stats and Info (League Standings and some other statistics)
Settings (More details below)
Save and Exit

The screens that you will be spending most of your time on in the MVP mode are Mission and Personal.

In the Mission screen, you will first see the missions that you are currently working on. If you want to see what other missions are available, choose the right option and you will be presented with various missions that your player can try to accomplish. From what I’ve been able to determine to this point, the missions are tasks that you have to complete within a certain amount of time. There is a great deal of text to work with on these missions, so I’ll be doing more translation work on the missions that I have seen available and will continue to add to this section as time goes on.

Under the Personal menu, there are quite a few options. The first of which is your Skill growth screen. On this screen, you can choose to “turn on” the various skills you are working on improving. I’m still working on translating this screen, but as a pitcher you can see that the first option is your pitch speed, then your stamina, then some other pitching skills, and finishing up with the pitches that you have under your command. For batters, you can spend points on Power, fielding skills, etc. You earn so many points per game that you compete in, so you want to focus on one or just a few skills at one time to see any growth out of them. The better you perform in a game, the more points you earn towards those skills that you have selected to be “on.”

After that in the Personal menu, you have access to the following items in this order…

Game by Game stats
Season by Season stats
Your player card (Pitching, Hitting, Fielding Ratings, and other info)
Change player numbers (Changing the numbers for the other players on your team)
Replace a player (Insert another player created character onto your team)

The other menu item with more than a few submenus is the settings option. Under that you will see these options.

Game Play settings (In game speed, sim speed, etc.)
Pennant Race settings (CPU trade frequency, etc.)
In-game settings (Errors = On or Off, etc.)
User settings (Camera settings, button settings, etc.) (There are a ton of options in here)

Once you’re done with the menus you can get into the gameplay. The games are played out like the games in the exhibition mode with the primary exception being that you have no coaching options, meaning that you play your position and that’s it.

One nice thing that I’ve found about being a pitcher in the MVP mode is that the catcher selects the pitch that he wants you to throw. You can choose to press the L1 button you can shake that pitch off and choose another, but I’ve found that the CPU catcher does a pretty good job of calling the game. The only thing that I wish they would have done was to have the catcher choose the location of where he would like you to pitch. It would have added that extra bit of realism that would have been nice to see included.

In the next section of the guide we will cover the Exhibition, Strike Pitch, and Homerun Challenge modes.