白球の奇跡 #
Hakkyuu no Kiseki is a big single-player mode in PYS24. You’ll take the role of a high school baseball coach, baseball club manager, and other miscellaneous roles. You can simulate games, play a strategic role directing pitching and batting strategy, or even play the games yourself! In this article, we’ll talk about the main actions and activities that you need to know about to have success.
In general, for a given week/period, you need to do the following:
- Set your players’ practice assignments.
- Use any items you want to maintain the grounds or level up your players.
- Update the lineup if necessary based on recent progress.
- Choose practice and weekly activities.
- Play any games that happen during the period.
- Review the weekly progression and use the information to inform your decisions for #1.
Practice Activities #
Every week, you’ll choose specific practice or other activities from a selection of cards displayed in a horizontal row at the bottom of the dashboard. These cards will provide benefits to aspects of player development noted in the activity description, for example, 「ミート」 or 「パワー」.
Practice Assignments #
In the roster page in the smartphone, you can direct each player individually to work on a specific aspect of their game, including contact, power, throwing, and running for fielders, and top speed, stamina, and breaking pitches for pitchers. Actually, any player can practice any aspect, so if you want to turn a fielder into a pitcher, you can do that, and if you want your pitchers to be able to support the offence, you can do that, too.
Don’t forget that pitchers also have a fielding rating for their position. This affects being able to catch liners and grounders back up the middle cleanly, and the throwing rating still applies to their ability to throw to bases.
When you first start, all your players are set to “omakase” (おまかせ), which means that the player will choose their own training. In effect, you’ll lose a lot of control over the development of your team, and players don’t seem to progress as fast. So you’ll want to set every player to something targeted to get the most control and benefit.
Tournaments and Games #
There are several tournaments over the course of the year that your school might participate in. At minimum, you’ll be in the prefectural tournaments that include all the schools in your prefecture. Good performance in those tournaments will earn you an invite to the regional tournaments, the Meiji Jingu national tournament, or Koshien, your ultimate goal. For the first couple of years, you probably won’t make it to the advanced tournaments, but if you don’t, you’ll have a special, high-intensity training camp (look for 「合宿」 in the calendar) with more activities and better progression.
Additionally, especially early in your career, you’ll have the option to play some practice games (練習試合). Occasionally the club manager will offer you the chance to choose between teams, or will just bring one team’s request to you, and you can accept or decline the request. Practice games are nice because you get the benefit of the game progress in addition to the practice progress for the week. The extra game will have a greater effect on your players fatigue level, though.
Maintaining the Grounds #
When you first start, your school’s field and facilities are in very poor shape. The grounds condition affects your progression and growth in weekly activities and practice. You can improve the grounds by using items from the smartphone menu such as white or black soil (白土 or 黒土), equipment like a batting tee or weightlifting equipment, or through activities and events where the club manager will improve the grounds, or you can direct your players to clean up and improve it.
Grounds will deteriorate over time as you practice on it consecutively without taking a break, and equipment that you apply to the grounds will deteriorate and break over use, removing its benefit from the grounds score. You can maintain the equipment with a toolbox item or through a manager maintenance action.
Setting the Lineup and On-Field Strategy #
You can set your ideal starting lineup and main starting pitcher through the smartphone menu. Use the “omakase” (おまかせ) option to let the game auto-set the lineup. You can make further changes after auto-setting the lineup, for example, if you want to give some younger players some starts for a few games. You can change the lineup immediately before the game as well, so don’t worry if you forget a change you want to make.