MLB The Show 25 Review – Still The MVP

Juan Soto hopped on the subway and swapped one New York borough for another to become the highest-paid player in baseball. The Japanese phenom, Roki Sasaki, reunited with the growing list of his compatriots in Dodgers blue, making the World Series champions an even more formidable outfit. Corbin Burnes headed to the Arizona desert, the Cubs swung a trade for Kyle Tucker, and the Red Sox beefed up their rotation by acquiring ace Garrett Crotchet. It was an offseason of typical upheaval that even saw the Oakland Athletics leave their 57-year-old home for a temporary stay in Sacramento. But as the weather warms and spring training draws to a close, the return of the MLB season is just a few days away, which can only mean it’s also time for the newest iteration of MLB The Show. While last year’s game was one of minor iterations, MLB The Show 25 takes a few steps in the right direction by introducing a few long overdue changes to modes like Road to the Show and Franchise.

Road to the Show (RTTS) has grown stale over the past couple of years, with little to no improvements and an irritating connection to the card-collecting mode, Diamond Dynasty. This isn’t the case in The Show 25, as it severs that link and completely overhauls the opening few hours of your career with the addition of amateur baseball. Now, you begin your journey to the Major Leagues as a fresh-faced high school student. By playing well in the three available games, potentially winning a high school championship, and showcasing your talents at the MLB combine, you’ll garner interest from both MLB teams and the eight different college programs included in the game, such as Vanderbilt, LSU, UCLA, and Texas. You can opt to sign with an MLB team straight out of high school as an 18-year-old–like previous years’ games–or head to college for four years to further improve your attributes and, ideally, increase your draft stock.

Each college has a rating from one to five stars in “exposure,” which impacts your draft status and rating among scouts, and “skill development,” which determines how many upgrade tokens you’ll earn to improve your ballplayer. Once you’ve chosen a college that fits your needs, the game fast-forwards to your senior year as you prepare to compete in the College Baseball World Series in Omaha, Nebraska. Depending on the outcome of each game, you can potentially play in all four on the way to winning the national championship, which will significantly boost your standing in the draft if you also play well enough. After signing for an MLB team, you can expect to be fast-tracked through the minor leagues, as opposed to spending more time in AA and AAA if you decided to skip college, so there are some impactful choices to consider.

The amateur-baseball experience may be relatively brief in the context of the rest of your career, but it’s a welcome and much-needed addition that shakes up the stale RTTS formula. The attention to detail is excellent, from each faithfully recreated college uniform to the distinctive ping of the ball colliding with an aluminum bat, and the overhauled progression system makes for a more tailored experience as well. Previously, attribute increases were tied directly to performance. Hit a hard liner into an outfield gap, and your power would increase; strike out a batter, and your K’s per nine innings would improve. This made sense on paper, but as a position player, you would always end up as the same archetypal middle-of-the-order power bat. In The Show 25, progression is based on earning tokens, allowing you to invest upgrades into any attribute. With more control over the type of player you want to be, it’s now possible to, say, ignore power completely and pump all of your upgrades into contact, creating an Ichiro-esque leadoff hitter.

When you’re on the diamond, The Show 25 still plays the same stellar brand of baseball the series is known for, albeit with a few new tweaks. Most of these apply when you’re controlling a single player rather than the whole team, such as a swim move that lets you attempt to avoid the tag when running the bases, ala cover co-star Elly De La Cruz. The prompt only appears occasionally, so it never feels like a crutch that makes base stealing too easy. Instead, it’s a rare and exciting play that adds another element of authenticity to the game. The rest of the new additions mainly occur on defense, with additional quick-time events for fielding hard-hit balls in the infield, a slowed down cutoff minigame for corner infielders, and more defensive actions for catchers, from blocking balls in the dirt to directing infielders on where the ball should go. All of this makes fielding much more engaging when controlling a single player in either RTTS or Franchise.

Defense has also been tweaked when in control of a full team, with infielders now having a few different initial reactions that impact how quickly they get to the ball, if at all. This ensures that Gold Glove-caliber players stand out much more, while poor defenders are precisely that. It’s an important distinction to consider when building a team in Franchise or Diamond Dynasty, adding considerable value to elite defenders. The plethora of new animations is especially evident this year, too, making fielding much more fluid and varied.

While hitting has remained much the same, there’s a new Ambush Hitting mechanic that allows you to “cheat” on inside or outside pitches. By focusing on the inside half of the plate, for instance, the PCI slightly expands on that side while shrinking on the outside. In theory, this allows you to sit on certain pitches, introducing an element of real-world strategy to each at-bat. In practice, however, I never really noticed a significant advantage to correctly guessing the right half of the plate, so remaining neutral still seems like the best option. Ambush hitting is a nice idea, but it just feels superfluous in its current state.

Franchise mode is also similar to last year’s game, with the exception of a much-needed overhaul to free agency. You now have to prioritize a small selection of three targets, increasing their interest in signing for your team as the days pass and forcing you to put much more thought into roster construction. Do you target a marquee free agent like Vladimir Guerrero or try to round out the team with cheaper pieces? If you do decide to pursue a star player, will you use up the other two spots to accumulate interest from backup options or focus on filling other holes on the roster? There are tough choices to make as The Show 25 manages to both streamline the free agency process and give you more to consider. There are still some notable omissions regarding contracts, such as the inability to back-end deals, but these changes are still a positive step in the right direction.

Storylines also returns this year with a third season of The Negro Leagues. Only three players are featured at launch, but more are due to arrive as part of a free update in April. It feels a tad light, but the three included maintain the mode’s excellent presentation, combining real-world footage with bespoke illustrations and Bob Kendrick’s captivating narration and storytelling. Season three focuses on James “Cool Papa” Bell, a prototypical leadoff hitter who was so fast even Jesse Owens refused to race him; Wilber “Bullet Joe” Rogan, a diminutive two-way superstar who dominated at the plate and on the mound; and Norman “Turkey” Stearnes, a speedy home run hitter with a cannon for an arm and prodigious power than even struck fear into the legendary Satchel Paige. Listening to Bob Kendrick regale you with stories about these players’ lives and careers is both educating and inspiring. The basic gameplay challenges are fairly stale at this point, but each vignette is excellent and worth the price of admission alone.

The only notable absence is the lack of another individual player storyline like the Derek Jeter one from last year. With its branching paths and Diamond Dynasty-centered rewards, this seemed like the blueprint for the future of Storylines, so it’s disappointing that there isn’t anything similar in The Show 25. There’s no shortage of incredible baseball stories from throughout history to pull from, whether the focus is on a single player or an entire team. It’s an odd omission, especially when Diamond Dynasty adds a number of new legendary players like Ted Williams, Roger Clemens, and Manny Ramirez. The story of Boston’s 2004 World Series win seems like an obvious slam dunk–even if it would need to avoid Curt Schilling–so it’s surprising that there’s nothing of the sort.

Aside from adding new legends, Diamond Dynasty has also ditched the Sets and Seasons model that’s defined the mode for the past couple of games. Rather than cards only being usable for a specific time period, you can now use every player throughout the length of the game’s lifespan. This makes grinding for top-tier cards much more palatable, with players earned in the game’s first month potentially becoming cornerstones of your team.

Diamond Dynasty also introduces a new single-player mode called Diamond Quest, which is essentially a roguelike-inspired board game with baseball. You roll a die at the beginning of each turn, and every tile you land on contains a gameplay challenge, some type of reward, or nothing at all. These challenges are varied, sometimes tasking you with, say, getting an extra-base hit in two innings or scoring a particular amount of runs before recording 15 outs. For the most part, they tend to be quick, with the end goal of reaching the Stadium (or Stadiums) and winning a three-inning game with your squad. Emerge victorious, and you get to keep all of the rewards you accumulated up to that point, along with the chance of a high-level card dropping. It’s a ton of fun, and the random nature of the tiles ensures that it’s infinitely replayable, especially when there are new cards to earn at the end of each run.

MLB The Show 25 plays a typically excellent game of baseball. Ambush Hitting is lackluster, but tweaks to fielding make for a more well-rounded game. Meanwhile, Road to the Show finally gets the shot in the arm it’s been crying out for with the inclusion of amateur games and a reworked progression system; free agency is more engaging in Franchise, and Diamond Dynasty smartly shifts away from the restrictive Sets and Seasons model while also introducing an enjoyable new single-player mode. Whether its additions are incremental or more significant, MLB The Show 25 makes enough positive changes to justify another year out on the diamond.