The Fielder's Choice

It is very hard for me to not recommend this game, but I have to. I had a lot of fun on my first playthrough. I read every line of text, every option, and picked based on how I wanted my character to go. It is a good game the first time through, as long as you don't mind there being options for everything (personally, I love that you can customize your character so much). Now, onto why I cannot recommend this title. It is a very short title, as you can see I have ~3 hours in this game, I have completed the game around 3 times. For a text-only game, I sort of expect there to be a bit of a read, but in the end, the game is content light. If that were the only issue, I'd still have recommended the title, but my biggest grievance is the fact that almost all the choices have no effect on your character in the long or short-term. You always hit the same points at the same time, regardless of how you made or trained your character. I got excited after my first run to try and go through with a different path, but nothing really changed. Unfortunately, I draw the line here, if the game is short AND lacking in branches AND is entirely based on text, where did the effort into developing the game go? The story isn't THAT good, and relies on a lot of baseball story cliches, so it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. The time I realized the game wasn't that good can be seen below. *warning: spoilers ahead* SPOILERS: After your first season, you have the option to fight for a higher salary or to go to Japan. First time I chose to fight for my salary. Second time, I went to Japan, had an interpreter as my character was not Japanese. The story in Japan was really cool, so I was hoping if I made my character from Japan originally, I'd get some cool stuff, such as not needing the interpreter and perhaps the coaches in Japan treating me better. Guess what? All you get is a paragraph or two on how you are bad at Japanese, and then you just have the same EXACT interpreter and reactions for the rest of the Japan arc... WHAT? You could not spare the time to have different text for the 10 slides that are in Japan on the contingency that you are Japanese? Super disappointing.

A choose your own adventure book with a queer slant to it.

Do you like baseball AND reading? Boy, The Fielder's Choice is probably up your alley. It follows the standard Choice of Games formula of stat-based narrative games (think of it as a text-based rpg, so you'll probably be disappointed if you were expecting butterfly effect endings up the wazoo) so if you're new to their work, you have to set your expectations accordingly. It's not as good as their other stuff (Choice of Robots still the GOAT), but you'll probably enjoy it if you're way into baseball. I have like a mild interest at best and I still had fun. If you're new to Choice of Games then I probably wouldn't start with this; go for Choice of Robots or Choice of the Deathless and see if you like the formula.

This is an interactive story purely for baseball fans. If you're not a major league fan (heh) of America's pastime, you probably won't even understand it. You play as a pitcher newly debuting in the major leagues; you can choose between being a prodigy (easy difficulty) or merely typical (hard difficulty). While there are choices that determine the direction of your career, you'll be spending most of your time on the mound, choosing which pitch from your repertoire is appropriate for the situation. It's a nice simulation, though it's finished pretty quickly. You can play as a male, female, or nonbinary character; this makes no difference. Any gender can date any of the game's romanceable characters, but you shouldn't expect a romance story. The only important relationship in this game is between you and your throwing arm.

Soft recommend, way too short for my liking. You never really get to know the characters around you and the aspect of building your character's throwing repertoire felt lacking. There are so few chances to determine your character traits that I only realised it was possible at the end of the game. Each season flies by and its hard to differentiate one from the other. Opportunities are missed in terms of creating rivalries within your team or with other teams' players. However, it's still a fun story and worth playing if you like baseball.

I have played a couple of text-based choose your own adventure style games in the last week or so, and unfortunately this game suffered by comparison. I ended up frustrated by how few chances there were to improve my stats in-game. You only get a couple of chances to decide which of the physical aspects of your game to work on, which was hugely disappointing to me, as I thought this would be a much larger aspect of the game. Additionally, other in-game stats are frustratingly static. For example, if you make a minor error and earn a slightly below average clubhouse reputation, you end up carrying it through the game despite what I felt were multiple opportunities to readjust. Even stranger, the stats are often completely irrelevant to the story and only become relevant in seemingly random situations. (Even with a 41% clubhouse reputation, the story described fun interactions with my teammates that would suggest my reputation was just fine, but suddenly the reputation would become a factor when deciding how to celebrate a teammate's home run.) The most frustrating thing was that very few of my choices actually changed the plot of the game. I played through twice and ended up in the same situations despite making different character choices. Even when I decided to make a different choice and stay with the team instead of letting my character get traded, I encountered many of the same situations but with teammates' names changed! Or, I would encounter the same situation - i.e. important at-bat of a playoff game - and this time I would strike out the batter, but the next page would explain that we lost the game anyway and didn't make the playoffs. I love baseball and I was very excited to play this, but ultimately it was frustrating and disappointing.

Fun game! Immersive and scracthes a baseball itch.

just a fun text adventure

not real,what inglourious basterds is to WW2-this is to basseball.

I can't give The Fielder's Choice a glowing recommendation, but overall I had a pretty good time with the game. This is an entirely text-based interactive story about your life as a pitcher, and I suppose you mostly have to ask yourself if you sound like the target audience for that sort of experience. The story itself is somewhat shorter than I expected and once you play through the game a time or two it becomes repetitive, even while making mostly new choices about your baseball career, but I enjoyed figuring out how to modify my abilities to unlock each of the achievements.