Konami’s new Shohei Ohtani tie-in baseball game under fire for game-breaking bugs 

Konami’s Powerful Pro Baseball 2024-2025 was released on July 18, however they did not hit the homerun they were hoping for. The game has quickly come under fire on Japanese social media for containing various rudimentary bugs, as reported by Japanese news site SmartFlash.  

Konami’s Power Pro series of baseball games celebrated its 30^th anniversary this year. To celebrate, Konami appointed Los Angeles Dodgers’ player Shohei Ohtani as ambassador of the series. It’s hard to overestimate how popular Ohtani is in Japan right now – he has topped polls of Japanese people’s favorite athlete for 3 years in a row.  

The highly successful and popular player was also featured in advertising for Powerful Pro Baseball 2024-2025, the newest game in Konami’s long-running baseball series, and people who pre-ordered could even get a special Shohei Ohtani slipcase. Ohtani also appears in the game (pictured at the top of this article), along with other famous Japanese baseball players like Ichiro, Sadaharu Oh, Shigeo Nagashima and many more. Overall, this collaboration and the advertising built up a lot of hype for the title.   

However, upon release, Japanese players immediately took to X and other social media platforms to vent their disappointment at a number of bugs that they had come across. A common bug causes all the numerical values to hit the maximum, and it seems this is easy to trigger. One social media user shared a long list of player combinations that can result in values suddenly maxing out. It seems that this bug is potentially game-breaking as it can affect prices, causing simple items to cost prohibitively expensive amounts of the in-game currency (PP). Another player reported that they were suddenly no longer able to change their starting lineup. 

“Seriously, don’t buy it until it gets cheaper. I wonder if they spent all their money on Shohei Ohtani.” said one disgruntled player quoted in the SmartFlash article. Others were baffled that such easy-to-trigger bugs were not picked up in official QA tests. 

Despite the bugs, some players have been posting on X about enjoying the game’s cute and funny chibi characters and cutscenes. Other users decided to buy Powerful Pro Baseball 2024-2025 precisely because they wished to see how buggy it was for themselves and wanted the challenge of trying to debug the game. “Maybe this is a message from Konami that they want to work together with users to make a good game,” another person gave a slightly backhanded comment.

Konami already released updates for the game on launch day to address some literal game-stopping bugs (numerous issues in different game modes where players would be unable to proceed beyond a certain point), as well as add some new baseballers. However, from user feedback it sounds like there are still many bugs that have yet to be addressed. It seems Konami is currently working to fix more issues and patch the game.  

Powerful Pros Baseball 2024-2025 has been released on PS4 and Nintendo Switch. It is currently only available in Japanese.