As it turns out, Success Mode works pretty well. To put things in prospective, the first time I played a baseball game with a player editor (Earl Weaver Baseball: a true classic), I boosted the abilities of my favorite players. "Lou Gehrig was much faster than that. Let's give him 10 speed." Next, I created a new player with perfect stats. Then I made up a team with perfect players. While this can be fun for a while, there's no reason to care about a team of identical supermen. After that, I went through the most recent Bill James Baseball Abstract and created as many real players as I could. This was more fun, but tedious.
By setting up player creation as a Role-Playing Game, Success Mode solves both the hyper-powered and who-cares problems in one shot. You follow the same story each time you play as a Powerful University freshman who wants to make it to the big leagues. Each turn, you have to decide what to focus on for the following week: practice (there are numerous sub-choices), hitting the books, working a student job, going on a date, or just resting. Depending on what you chose, you may get experience points of several flavors (Strength, Mentality, Breaking Ball, and so on), which can be used to buy attributes and abilities such as hitting power, pitch types and Aggressive Runner.
For most of the game, you don't play any baseball at all. At the end of the first year, if you've impressed the coach, you will start the final game of the season for the Powerful Tulips. Your results are determined partially by how you control your player and partially by the abilities you've earned so far in the game. In turn, the results give you more experience points to buy abilities that will help you do better next year. Doing well in games is also how you impress the Major League scout that hangs around the university. And impressing the scout is the key to getting a minor league contract. Players that succeed in Success mode will then be playable in other modes of the game, including Season Mode.
Throughout the game, random scripted events occur that alter your character's stats. And you are confronted with a variety of choices that force you into difficult decisions. So it isn't really possible to create a perfect player without resorting to tedious save game exploits and even then you'll need to make some compromises. It's not an exaggeration to say that everything you do in Success Mode translates in to the final product somehow. For instance, if you routinely strike out or get extra-base hits an area of the strike zone, that area will be a cold or hot zone for the created player. After going on a date with a girl, you might end up with the Barehand Catch or Choke Artist ability. With so many unique attributes, it's hard not to become attached to your Success Mode creations.
This is as good a time as any to gripe about one missing feature: roster updates. When I play the Dodgers, Juan Pierre is awesome and Matt Kemp is so so. Of course I can buy the 2008 edition, but that will still be a year out of date by the time opening day rolls around. Andruw Jones will still be an everyday player. Konami could fix this by distributing (even for a small price) the roster updates directly. Even better, however, would be to allow users to make and distribute roster updates online. MVP Baseball hasn't seen an official update since 2005, but there is a thriving community updating the rosters. Not only would that be more cost-effective for Konami, it likely would result in higher quality rosters. The series has sold well enough to make a 2009 update possible, so we will have a solution to the problem soon.
Surprisingly, Success Mode comes very close to being a complete game all by itself. It's perhaps a bit short and could use more in game action, but other than that I'd be happy with the depth of this one mode. The true payoff, however comes from signing your Success Mode players in Season Mode and following the next 10 years of their career.
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