My thoughts have changed a lot on Superstar Baseball over the years. Baseball has always been one of my favorite sports, but I was actually pretty disappointed with this game when it first came out. I got it for my birthday shortly after release, and I distinctly remember feeling bad about putting that on my wishlist, since it being full price meant my folks had spent a good $50 (a significant part of my birthday funds; we weren't poor by any stretch of the term, but we lived well within our means) on a game that just... didn't appeal to me. I ended up putting a lot of time into it, and I think my father did as well, but it sure never held me the way Mario Power Tennis did insofar as Mario sports titles went.

It feels a little funny saying that now, because boy, did I have fun with this revisit.

I hate to admit it, but I think I didn't really get it as a kid because the game requires patience to master. There are optimal ways to play the game, and you're able to consistently break the AI once you know 'em, but getting there involves learning a LOT of different characters' playstyles, optimal pairings, optimal positions, etc. Grinding is baked into the road to this game's mastery in the same way it's baked into fighting games. Since I mentioned Power Tennis, that game by contrast has way less to learn - a couple playstyles, each character's power shots, court features, and that's about it.

But of course, these days it's that complexity that makes Superstar Baseball so interesting. As luck would have it, I streamed this for Designing For right around the time the modern metagame started to develop. Being coached through juuuuuuust how robust the Chemistry system was was really eye-opening. It's not just a trinary "Like/Indifferent/Dislike" system, it's on a full 100 point scale, with each of the 32 unique characters having a different score for each of the 31+ other characters. You have to put a LOT of careful consideration into how Chemistry interacts with characters' special abilities and different fielding positions, more than anything.

Another thing I don't think I appreciated enough as a kid were some of the oddball roster picks. Being a frequenter of Super Mario fansite "Lemmy's Land", I was very used to hoping for NES/SNES throwbacks in an era mostly interested in celebrating recent successes. I was very put off by the excessive Mario Sunshine padding - THREE Piantas and THREE Nokis? Of course, now I wish we saw more stuff like that in Mario spin-offs. It's lovely seeing legacy characters like Chargin' Chuck and Pauline finally get their due in Mario Golf: Super Rush, but imagine how out-there it would've been to see someone like a Jaxi or Shiverian pop up. Ah, I would've thought myself crazy for suggesting such a thing 15 years ago...

I never played Mario Super Sluggers, but I've heard that it's more arcadey compared to Superstar Baseball and far less technically complex. That's too bad. I get the feeling I would've preferred Sluggers as a kid had I played it new, but these days, it's that technical complexity I really respect and miss from Mario spin-offs. I'm not familiar enough with side games to say if this is the last really great Mario sports title (people liked Strikers Charged, right?), but surely this must've been one of the greats.

Definitely one of the best baseball games I've ever played, I would have gotten so much mileage out of some kind of Season mode like traditional baseball games have

EDIT: Played this game competitively for about a year and it made my outlook on this game much worse unfortunately lmao. I won't lower my rating though, but holy shit playing this game competitively is a nightmare. When you're remotely close in skill with your opponent every game literally just comes down to hit trajectory RNG. Will your perfect hit be a grand slam or inning ending double play? RNG will decide! Sounds competitively viable to me! Star hits like Birdo egg and Mario fireball are also pretty much entirely RNG, but you can turn star skills off, so that is less on the game and more on the competitive community making star skills part of the ruleset when they blatantly should not be. Pitching meta is also miserable, the meta is to just throw outside balls/bait outside balls into last second strikes 90% of the time and it just becomes 50/50 simulator. Playing this game competitively is fun for a bit when you're new but when you actually start improving and realize that all your games against similarly skilled opponents are being decided by luck and nothing else you will stop enjoying it very quickly.