I’m not a mega-huge fan of Ookiku Furikabutte (known in the west as Big Windup!) but it’s definitely one of the best sports anime I’ve seen so far. I liked it enough that I even bought the series after watching it for free on Funimation’s youtube channel. So despite my misgivings about anime spin-off games, i.e. they usually suck, I decided to give this DS game a shot.

For a cheap tie-in to Season 1, it’s not half bad. It’s less a sports game and more a collection of slice of life skits involving the Nishiura baseball team. Maybe it was designed to satisfy those fans who would have preferred less baseball and more team interaction, especially in the latter half of the show.

What you have here is a day by day, blow by blow look at Mihashi’s life from after the Mihoshi practice match all the way until the end of the Tousei match. He goes to school, after school he goes to practice, then he walks home with his buddies and goes to bed. Next day, the same. Next day, the same. Every once in a while they have a practice match. There’s a long interval where you have to study because the coach won’t let you play if you flunk your tests. And she really won’t – you’ll get an instant game over.

The “game” part is a collection of mini-games which raise 4 team stats: trust, strength, batting and fielding. There’s one where you polish balls, another where you pick up balls, there’s pitching and batting, skipping rope, tossing the ball back and forth and some other stuff, all of which you play with the stylus and touchscreen. Easy, fun stuff. If you want more, you can play those games from the main menu screen and they’ll still count towards your stats.

Whether you win, lose or draw practice games and the final match depends on whether your stats are high enough or not. I have to stress that this is not a baseball game, so you won’t be playing the matches yourself. They might let you “pitch” or “bat” once, but that’s about it.

There are also no penalties for losing a practice game and no rewards for winning one, but that shouldn’t surprise anyone. Also if your stats are too low going into the Tousei match, they don’t bother letting you play, you automatically lose 6-3. I learned that the hard way. If your trust with one particular character is high enough you supposedly get their end. I focused too much on raising everyone’s trust equally, so I got an “Everyone is happy, Mihashi is the ace” ending instead. That’s okay with me.

Stuff that bothered me a bit: All 7 schools you face use the exact same pitcher, who throws the exact same pitch. They should have invented 7 new pitchers instead, just for the fun of it. Speaking of which, Junta from Tousei looks horrible when he’s pitching. Another thing: not being able to skip or forward scenes on the first playthrough sucked. Thirdly there really should have been more mini-games. They get kind of boring after a while.

Still, as I said, the point of Hontou no Ace ni Nareru Kamo is to enjoy scenes and minor events that aren’t present in the anime/manga in addition to the regular anime events. Sorta of “official fanfiction”, if there’s such a thing. It’s very much a character game, just like Ookiku Furikabutte is very much a character show and the sports, while very well done, is just there as a medium of expression. So if you’re a fan of the characters and you can read simple Japanese and you really want to see, say, Tajima, Mihashi and Izumi hanging out after school or Sakaeguchi and Suyama fooling around before practice or 10 extra scenes of Abe yelling at Mihashi, this is your game. For everyone else it’s a cute collection of minigames, but not really worth going out of your way to play.