Nekkyuu Koushien: The Endless Summer
Note: This game title is always transliterated as “Koushien” instead of “Koshien.” However, in most other contexts, the word is usually transliterated as “Koshien,” so that’s what I’ll be using here except in the game title.
A crowd of 50,000 people roars at every bit of action, big and small. Bands play, cheer squads belt out fight songs, and flags are waved in a frenzy. When the final out is made, the cameras find the faces of the defeated players and remain focused on their tears. To fans of Koshien, this scene is run of the mill, though it never stops being exciting. To those unfamiliar with the sights and sounds of Japanese high school baseball, it is incomprehensible.
Koshien is a sporting event like no other. For American readers, the best and most common comparison is to March Madness. But instead of basketball, it’s baseball, and instead of college students, it’s high schoolers.
As a non-Japanese person I don’t want to speak on the greater cultural importance of Koshien as a coming of age moment for boys across the country, or as a prominent example of traditionalism, or any of the other great points that have been made about high school baseball as an institution. I encourage you to read more from people who have lived through the experience.
But the bottom line is that Koshien is really, really important to a lot of people. Shigeo Nagashima, one of the great heroes of Japanese baseball, once said: “Koshien is a page of history. It burns somewhere inside every man’s heart.” I mentioned the tears earlier, but genuinely one of the most shocking and moving parts of watching Koshien is how much crying there is. Pitchers cry as they blow the game. Entire teams cry together and console one another upon defeat. And this is not a rare occurrence, it seemingly happens in every game!
And as a neutral fan, this is some of the best damn baseball in the world. There is drama, there is pageantry, emotion, hustle, guts, heroic performances, and high stakes. I can watch a first round Koshien game between two schools I have never heard of and be completely enthralled the entire time.
So what’s the deal with Nekkyuu Koushien? On the surface, it’s a pretty standard 8-bit baseball game. Not as good as the classics like RBI Baseball or Baseball Stars or Softball Tengoku, but it’s decent enough. But those games aren’t Koshien. There is an allure to the tournament, even in virtual form, and since I first played this game this past winter, I have had an irresistible desire to win my own championship at Koshien. Well, I got busy, but as summer rolled around, I thought it was an appropriate time to get back into it and really give it an honest effort.
Nekkyuu Koushien is pretty cool for the time in that you actually get to create your own school, picking a home prefecture and name. You are assigned a roster of players, and I believe there are over 150 different rosters in the game, which is a tremendous amount of players for the time. The structure of the game is as follows: You first play in your Prefectural Championship Game. In this first game, you can earn experience points for your players, and if you win you qualify for Koshien proper. From there, you must win five more games on hallowed ground in order to win the National Championship.
It turns out it’s not that easy. As I started playing practice games, messing around with picking different prefectures, I quickly noticed something. I was always losing. I played four, five, six games, and could not win any of them. I wasn’t really getting blown out at all; it was a sequence of close defeats. But nonetheless, my quest to conquer Koshien was repeatedly being ended before we could even qualify. At this point I looked up a Youtube video out of curiosity, and skimming through it I saw that the player in the video won their qualifying game about 7000-0, which certainly seemed to indicate that I was doing something wrong. But I didn’t want to watch the video closely and spoil any secret technique or cheese strategy for myself, so I just went back to grinding out games.
It didn’t seem to matter which prefecture I chose, my team was just not good enough. And it felt worse because quite frankly this game seems to give you less agency over what happens than in most 8-bit baseball games. While the game looks largely like a descendant of the Famista line, the gameplay feels a bit different. The two big changes are that fielding is semi-automated (except throwing) and that there are basically no strikeouts. Almost every CPU at-bat seems to end when the first pitch is put in play. Which makes pitching feel like you’re just going through the motions and praying. There’s not really any pitch sequencing or strategy to it. Combine that with not really controlling the defense and a lot of the game feels out of your hands. Which made my losing streak all the more curious.
But every losing streak must end eventually, and I finally got my first win with a school from Oita Prefecture. We had finally qualified for Koshien, and honestly? It felt pretty good just to win one game and get that far. We only won 3-2 and I earned very few experience points, and we were beaten soundly in the first round of the real tournament. But now I had a taste of victory. I didn’t have to practice for 10 hours a day every day like the real ballplayers do, but I can feel myself getting better at every aspect of the game, and improving on the margins will help. No more mistimed jumps in the field, or baserunning blunders. Feeling better about batting and pitching even though they still seem like you don’t have complete control.
This game does have a different brand of baseball that feels a bit more like high school ball, albeit not in the world’s most realistic manner. But teams are aggressive on the basepaths and are not scared of getting into rundowns and trying to sneak extra bases out of them. There are very few home runs, even with the lucky zones in the outfield shortening the fences a bit. Somewhat curiously, fly balls in this game are death. You will seldom see a fly ball touch the ground. Even a well struck ball in the gap is almost always brought in without much trouble. You will see some line drives sneak through the gaps or down the lines, but actual fly balls that get down are quite rare. No errors though, which is a pretty big omission for a high school baseball game.
Obviously the pageantry is a huge part of the Koshien experience, and this game does have a little bit of that. There are cutscenes of cheering squads, the iconic Koshien horn before the game, and a cutscene of your school singing their alma mater after a win. But I recommend putting on some of your own music in the background to enhance the experience: Try choosing from a selection of the best Koshien bands from recent years.
Eventually I settled in on a “permanent” team, and elected to always choose Kochi Prefecture. I have decided to name my school Kochi Agricultural (no such school exists) and will ride with them to the end. I learned that a good way to generate offense in this game is to go to the opposite field; both by doing the classic Famista move towards the pitch and slap it oppo maneuver and also by hitting it in on the hands and getting inside-outed. This Kochi school also has a deep lineup 1-9 so I was stringing together lots of hits down the lines. We won the Prefectural Championship 8-4 in our first year, and moved on to Koshien. With eight points to distribute, I just went for two in each category, though maybe this isn’t the optimal strategy. In the first round, we were stuffed 3-1 and I barely managed any offense until a brief 9th inning rally. Clearly the competition at Koshien is much stronger than in Kochi.
Now seems like a good time to mention that one of the most iconic scenes from Koshien each year is the defeated team members scooping up a handful of infield dirt as a souvenir; proof that they had made it to the big stage, even if only for a day. This scene is depicted in Nekkyuu Koushien as the Game Over screen when you lose. For underclassmen, there is some small hope that your school will return again the following year, though with a grueling single elimination Prefectural Tournament this is hardly guaranteed even for the traditional powerhouse schools. But hopefully, Kochi Agricultural can return soon.
Year 2: We once again won the Prefectural Final, this time 6-3. I went for 2 points in pitching and 4 in hitting, 0 in defense and speed. The first round of the main tournament was a nailbiter, going into extra innings, and apparently there are errors in this game because my 2nd baseman just cost us the game and we lost 5-4 in 10! A victory at the big dance remains elusive. The other noteworthy thing that happened on this run: we hit a homer! It was the first homer I have seen in this game, from both me and the CPU side. Investing those points into batting presumably had an impact. My goal for the next round is to really run up the score in the qualifier, and ideally get an experience spread of 3-4-1-1 at minimum.
Year 3: Well, we got the 9 runs I wanted. 10 runs, in fact. Only one small problem…we lost 11-10! My first failure to qualify in a while. However, I do think there is still progress being made. I’ve got a good feel now for pushing and pulling a lot of balls right down the lines and am able to execute pretty regularly, hence the 10 runs here. There is definitely more agency in batting than I originally gave credit for. Pitching still seems like the main skill is just knowing when to go to the bullpen.
Year 4: A dominant 10-2 qualifying win. We hit an inside the park HR in this game, on the rare deep fly in the gap that actually found some green grass. Kochi Agricultural has become the powerhouse in the region! I elected a 4-4-1-1 spread here. It all appeared to be going south in the first round once again, as well fell into a 4-0 hole in the first inning. But a long, hard fought game ensued, and our boys managed an epic bottom of the 9th comeback that saw a looming 8-5 defeat turned into a 9-8 victory! Our first ever win at Koshien and man did it feel great. So then the question becomes, is this our time? Well, no, of course not. Instead we were unceremoniously disposed of in the following round by a score of 8-3.
Year 5: This time around, something interesting happened. We got hot early, hitting line drive after line drive in the first two innings. It was 9-3 early. We chased multiple pitchers out of the game. The CPU manager seemed aware that they were not going to have enough arms to get through the game at this rate and left guys in to get shelled. We had some good luck. I batted really well. Everything culminated in us putting up an absolutely ludicrous 38 runs. Yes, thirty-eight! Just a complete beatdown as if I had the game all figured out and solved at this point. We are never going to get a better crack than this surely. Though I hope with such a ludicrous score and my improved skill the tournament will actually go pretty easily…
So what was the first game with the super team like? With my gorgeous 10-10-9-9 split? Underwhelming, really. We cruised to an uneventful 6-1 victory, but it wasn’t really what I had hoped for. Sure it was easy, but we did not start hitting towering home runs. Pitching still had no swing and miss. Our baserunners didn’t seem any faster (and actually seemed to be slower, relative to the CPU’s increased arm strength!). The only area where I really noticed a serious difference was in fielding, where we got to a ton of balls that we would not normally get to and that’s what made the game so smooth. Hopefully that continues.
Round of 16 was more like it. 11-0, there was absolutely never a doubt that we were going to win, and it was just like going through the motions. Still didn’t hit any home runs and it felt more just like I was batting well again, rather than the stats. But whether it’s the pitching rating or the fielding rating, I’m not sure, but absolutely nobody is scoring on us. Complete game shutout for my starter and it’s pretty much all routine defensive plays. I figured out that speed only seems to affect stealing, but stealing is now incredibly easy. We’re actually so fast that sometimes it seems to glitch out and the runners freeze because they got to the bag so early? So I actually got thrown out a few times as a result. But mighty Kochi Agricultural marches on to the quarterfinals for the first time ever.
The quarterfinal was a smooth 5-3 win, not as big of a margin but again a very stress free game. Not much to say here. I figured out you can just hit the advance runner button again to counter the freezing glitch, so the steals were flowing freely. The semifinal was an 8-1 romp as well. I was becoming so confident of my eventual championship that the games became almost automatic. The super team was simply too good, I thought. But before the final it did set in that this last game might be significantly more difficult than what had come before, and that the pressure was on. A loss here would be heartbreaking.
And so Kochi Agricultural took the field in the Summer Koshien final against Yakashira High School, from Tottori Prefecture. Kind of shocking that a school from Tottori is in the final. Kochi vs Tottori! Not exactly a game for the big population centers. We pounced on them early, aggressive on the basepaths as usual. And we hit an actual over the fence home run, our first of the tournament. By the time the game had reached its halfway point, my nerves had subsided and the contest had turned into a coronation. Kochi Agricultural was the best team in the country, and we had proven it conclusively. Nobody could stand in our way. Another 8-1 victory, and we were Koshien champions. What a thrill! The endless summer is finally over.
Overall, Nekkyuu Koushien is an average 8-bit baseball game on the field, which is not a very high bar honestly. But the Koshien vibes and the simple tournament structure and the large number of teams to choose from make it a really engaging game nonetheless. Despite the flaws, and there certainly are flaws, I had a really fun time chasing down the title in this game. If it had gone on any longer, I think I would have started to sour on the game, but I won the title just in time. It’s worth trying out even if you don’t commit to winning the whole thing.