Since we’re now beyond the MLB trade deadline and the push is officially on for teams attempting to make the postseason, it goes without saying that this post is extremely late relative to the game’s release. MLB The Show 25 came out back in March, and I’ve been playing it throughout the spring and summer. I figured this post was still worth putting together since it’s more about my thoughts around the game rather than something like a review… anyone who was going to buy this game already did months ago.
25 is the second title in the series I’ve played. I ended up getting MLB The Show 24 last year and played it a decent bit, though not nearly as much as I’ve played this year’s entry. Games like MLB The Show are interesting to me in that you can sink countless hours into the game while only playing a small percentage of it. For example, I almost exclusively play Franchise mode, where you take over a team and run it through the season. The goal of Franchise mode is to be a GM and skipper of the team, managing your players and prospects. The mode starts with the team’s schedule for the current season, and players have the option to play out the entirety of each game, play only key moments of it, or to simply simulate the entire thing. I actually don’t play it the way it’s intended at all at all, though; I automate essentially everything related to the management of the team and just play through a team’s season. Generally speaking I play every single inning of every game to see how well I can have my team perform relative to real life. It’s almost as if I exclusively played exhibition matches, with the main differences being that:
- The games I play match the actual schedule for the 2025 season.
- Things like my pitching rotation and reliever usage still matter.
I say this only to highlight that this is the way I experience the game. I’m not grinding out matches online against try-hards in Diamond Dynasty or doing QTE events in Road To The Show.
As is typically the case with sports games that release each year, MLB The Show 25 is quite similar to 24. The same gameplay mechanics all exist, with the primary difference being newly updated rosters for each team (which are subsequently also now completely out of alignment this deep into the season.) However, there have been a handful of UI tweaks that make it easier to know at a glance how to control different aspects of the game. For example, when batting, some tips in the UI made it a lot easier for me to understand the mechanics around stealing and how to steal when compared to last year.
As you can likely tell from the screenshots, the graphics look fairly awful since I’m playing on the Nintendo Switch. The models tend to be stiff and blocky while the framerate is low when compared to something like the PlayStation. This does have an appreciable impact on the gameplay since it means the ball is often more difficult to pick up and track than it would be on a system with more horsepower. In some modes, like Road To The Show and March To October, this makes fielding balls difficult. In all modes, batting is going to be more of a challenge than it could be. Since I don’t ever play online, though, I’m not nearly as concerned about this as others may be.
Speaking of batting, I’ve found that the jump between difficulties is fairly significant which can make it hard to lock in exactly where I should be playing. On the Minors difficulty, for example, I found that opposing pitchers almost exclusively threw strikes and I would have to sit back and wait even on fastballs to avoid swinging too early. Bumping to Rookie seemed to make it so that speed and pitch variation suddenly became factors. There is an option for dynamic difficulty (e.g. the difficulty will automatically bump itself up or down based on how well I’m playing), but I found that it was far too jarring in the middle of a game. Instead I tend to manually set the difficulty. If I feel like I’m beating up on my opponents a little too much, I’ll play a few Exhibition matches at the next difficulty setting up prior to jumping back to my Franchise save.
For both pitching and batting, I appreciate that there are tons of options to choose from as far as the style of control goes. As shown in the screenshot above, I use Precision mode for batting, where both placement of the bat and swing timing are in control of the player. This mode just felt natural to me, so I never even bothered trying out the other settings (there’s a handy tool in the game for rapidly trying out different play styles.)
Pitching was a bit trickier for me. Precision mode for pitching involves selecting the pitch location followed by performing a timed input pattern with the directional stick. The timing and accuracy of this input determines how close the pitch is to the selected location. I’m absolutely awful at this. I’m sure if I practiced more I could get used to it, but I wasn’t really looking to play that seriously. For a while I played with a mode where you literally just select the pitch location; the stats of the player and some RNG determined the accuracy. This was frankly super boring, so I then tried Pulse mode. In this mode you select the pitch location and time the button press to deliver it based on a pulse on the screen. While this was a bit more engaging, the ease of it meant that RNG still factors in; I would occasionally have perfect timing but my pitcher would still throw a meatball over the middle of the plate. I eventually settled on Metered pitching, where a timed presses as a slider moves along a meter determine both the power and accuracy of the pitch. I had to practice a little bit to get used to it, but not nearly as much as I would for something like Precision. This mode gives me a good mix of being playable while also in control of my own performance.
What’s interesting to me is that the timing of the meter depends on both the stats of the pitcher and factors in the game (e.g. if pitching from the stretch), which makes it so that the warmup pitches you can get when putting in a new pitcher from the bullpen actually have some use.
The game’s presentation can also be tweaked based on how cinematic you want things to be. You can crank it up so that it’s essentially like a TV broadcast, have it only show gameplay for the most streamlined experience, or somewhere in the middle. I personally like the middle offering. I like seeing some random stats are the start of each game and the TV-style replays after big moments in the game, but I don’t want a ton of fluff that makes each game take forever.
While plenty of people complain about sports games just being the same thing released year after year as a cash grab, some of the tweaks, quality of life improvements, and updated rosters (which is a bigger deal to me than it likely is for most due to the way I like to play the game), I felt like this was worth getting considering how much time I end up sinking into it.