Here is a preview screen shot. Note the new Ferris wheel at the Tohoku Rakuten Eagles' home park.
For this page, my current interest is mainly in the 2017 Nippon Pro Baseball season available there for the 2018 Windows PC game.
I found support files for the 2017 season at Strat-O-Shack. However, I like my Stratting to be as immersive as possible and I decided to make my own improvements.
A week of hard work later, I am ready to share it with the community.
Japan 2017 Updated (149.6 MB)
Here is a preview screen shot. Note the new Ferris wheel at the Tohoku Rakuten Eagles' home park.
It was a lot of hard work, but I feel it was worth my time in the end. :-) Hit me at moc.hcirtxet@hcir (actual address is right to left) with any comments.
Unlike the Major Leagues, Strat put every single player who played in 2017 in the Japanese teams. The Major Leagues comes with a separate Non-Carded roster which has pitchers with 24 or less innings pitched, and batters with 50 or less at-bats. Strat usually excludes most of those cards because the sample size was too small for accurate game cards.
Thus, for more realistic games, I suggest you disable the As Played feature for the 2017 Japanese league. In addition, use the Sort Players home menu function to find and delete all pitchers with 24 or less innings pitched and 50 or less at-bats. You can list the players by IP and at-bats, click on one end of the spectrum, and shift-click on the other end to highlight all the players you plan to delete. In the end, all 12 teams will have at least 28 players, just like the real Japanese teams (25 in uniform, 3 travels with the team and can replace teammate player between games without the 10-day waiting rule, and the rest are in their minor leagues). Don't forget that the 40/25 roster rule does not apply to the Japanese league, in case you usually use that rule for your Major Leagues replays.
Unfortunately, a handful of players got traded in the middle of the season and have separate stats and cards for both teams. Strat did not combine the stats into one card for the benefit of those not using the As-Played feature. I have listed those traded players in the read-me file (since I fixed their photos anyway) and given my own suggestions for what to do if you are like me and want greater in-game card accuracy rather than strictly accurate in-season rosters.
Finally, not in the read-me file, but it seems the 2017 Japanese league is treated by the game as one league with two divisions, Central and Pacific. For more realism (since NPB has separate leagues, similar to how AL and NL were separated until 1999), you may want to create those leagues in the League-->Update League-->Subleague Info menu function. That way you will be able to sort the leagues and player league leaders separately like they do in real life in Japan. Use Central League (CL) for #1 and Pacific League (PL) for #2. You won't need to change anything else.
Go back to my Strat-O-Matic Baseball page.