is a baseball

Baseball

Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each. The aim is to score runs by hitting a thrown ball with a bat and touching a series of four bases arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot diamond...

 game for the Nintendo DS

Nintendo DS

The is a portable game console produced by Nintendo, first released on November 21, 2004. A distinctive feature of the system is the presence of two separate LCD screens, the lower of which is a touchscreen, encompassed within a clamshell design, similar to the Game Boy Advance SP...

. It is part of the Power Pro Kun Pocket series

Power Pro Kun Pocket series

Power Pro Kun Pocket series , sometimes simply called Pawapoke or Power Pocket, is a sub-series of the Jikkyō Powerful Pro Yakyū series baseball game developed by Konami. The series is released only on the Nintendo's hand held platform...

(The spinoff of the Jikkyō Powerful Pro Yakyū series) of games published by Konami

Konami

is a Japanese leading developer and publisher of numerous popular and strong-selling toys, trading cards, anime, tokusatsu, slot machines, arcade cabinets and video games...

, and is the second Power Pro game released for the Nintendo DS. The two main modes are "Success Mode", a single-player story mode, and "Pennant Mode", where the player takes control of a Japanese pro-baseball team, or an original team, with the goal of winning the Japan Series

Japan Series

, or is the annual championship series in Nippon Professional Baseball, the top baseball league in Japan. It is a seven-game series between the winning clubs of the league's two circuits, the Central League and the Pacific League....

.

Success Mode

In Success Mode, the player takes the role of a character in a story and develops the character's baseball skill in a manner similar to a role-playing game. In each story, the main character's name and position

Baseball positions

There are 9 fielding positions in baseball. Each position conventionally has an associated number which is used to score putouts...

 is chosen before the game begins. After completing each story, the player accrues points which can be used to unlock minigame

Minigame

A minigame is a short video game often contained within another video game. A minigame is always smaller or more simplistic than the game in which it is contained. Minigames are sometimes also offered separately for free to promote the main game...

s or other Success Mode stories. Also, the main characters can be saved to be used in other modes.

Sasurai no Nice Guy

The first story, titled , follows a vagabond who joins a struggling local baseball team, the "Victories". The team is sponsored by a small shōtengai

Shotengai

A shōtengai is a style of Japanese commercial district running along a certain street. Shōtengai often connect to the nearest train station. Most suburbs and towns of Japan have shōtengai of varying size, and larger shōtengai may take the form of covered arcades that are blocked off to traffic...

, the , which finds itself in competition a large supermarket chain. The hero is joined by a number of other characters who compete in local games to raise publicity for the shōtengai.

Space Captain

In the second story, , the player takes the role of a captain charged with collecting "Space Vaccine". In order to purchase the necessary amount, the player must fly from planet to planet, trading goods. Money can also be used to buy parts to upgrade the hero's ship and "Baseball Robot". This mode also has an element of action RPG, as the hero periodically battles other ships or people.

Shōshin Temple

In , a play on the word for , the hero is a high school baseball player who has been invited by a teammate to a summer training camp at a local temple. The hero mistakes "Shōshin Temple" with due to the similar kanji

Kanji

Kanji are the adopted logographic Chinese characters hanzi that are used in the modern Japanese writing system along with hiragana , katakana , Indo Arabic numerals, and the occasional use of the Latin alphabet...

, and is forced into a rigorous 40-day-long Shaolin-style training session.

This is the first multi-player success mode that can be shared through game sharing function of the DS, players without the game cannot save players created in this mode.

Pennant Mode

In Pennant Mode, instead of following a story with a strict goal, the player competes as a team in a Japanese pro season. The player can use either a regular team from the 2006 season or his own created from a combination of characters from the Success Mode and real-life players in Japan.

Characters saved from Success Mode can be used once in the My Pennant Mode which inserts the character into a Japanese pro team. The player plays out a season from the perspective of the character.