Power Pro-kun Pocket 6 is a 2003 Baseball simulator + dating sim developed by Diamond Head and published by Konami for the Game Boy Advance.
The game's Baseball simulator engine has been polished in comparison to previous GBA entries and both of its Success modes are standard dating sims. The second one, in fact, is the one of the few Inner scenarios that's connected to the main timeline and is considered canon. This installment also introduced the "Power Point" currency you can use to unlock content and items for New Game Plus.
This game's engine was later used for a Video Game Remake of the first and second installments.
Success Mode: The Man From The Future - Factory Baseball Club Edition
A time traveller comes from the future on a mission to find the time criminal whose alterations to the timeline have caused the important Wagiri tech factory to become bankrupt. After getting hired, "Hero 6" must investigate his co-workers and help them win in Baseball matches against other corporations...Another Success Mode: Mysterious Happiness Island Edition
...However, the Wagiri Bubbles team loses a match against the Great Empire Killers and is bankrupted. Hero 6 fails to even confront the time criminal. The plot goes Off the Rails as Hero 6 is sent to the Blood Butterfly Army's camp as a slave to Work Off the Debt. And it's no "army boot camp" matter — they're flat out nazi-esque arms traffickers who are performing human experiments regarding the eponymous "happiness herbs" drugs. Can Hero 6 work there for 100 days without getting freaking executed? Will he stir a rebellion or will he instead join their ranks?This game features the following tropes:
- Alas, Poor Villain:
- Upon defeat, Mecha Kameda goes on a rant about how he was created by the Propeller Team as a knockoff of Kameda Mitsuo to capture him but was abandoned before he could do it and became aflicted with an identity crisis and a desire to take revenge on mankind.
- In either good ending of Happiness Island, Hero 6 will visit Helga in prison before she is executed. If he befriended Helga enough, he'll show symphathy for her and afterwards you get to see a firing squad about to shoot her in the epilogue.
- Armies Are Evil: The Blood Butterfly army runs a slavery camp where they drug people without consent for the development of a Psycho Serum. They execute anyone who doesn't perform to their standards, and by the end of the story it is mentioned over a hundred people from inmates to the natives have been killed on the island.
- Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: The BB Army's drug experiments creates a frog-centipede kaiju called Toshio-kun. If the monster does break free, Hero 6 pilots Gundar Robo to kill it, and then takes the opportunity to stomp the army flat afterwards.
- The Bad Guy Wins: The canon ending of Factory Baseball has the Wagiri factory going bankrupt after a loss to the Great Empire Killers, but Hero 6 eventually makes a comeback in the Happiness Island scenario.
- Bag of Spilling: Happiness Island is an Immediate Sequel to Factory Baseball. Hero 6 still starts with low stats and you can't bring a previous custom character into it.
- Bestiality Is Depraved: In Happiness Island the protagonist can choose to slack off at a building that lets the inmates sleep or "relieve themselves" to recover health. The more costly variant of this is... renting... a goat named Masako. If you do this around 10 times, he gets too attached and remains with her in a bad ending called "Let's do it again". Whenever you pay for the goat, the game goes out of its way to portray Hero 6 with a grin as it happens before both characters blush heavily buuuut otherwise what's going on is only implied, as this labor camp story full of murder was rated for all ages after all!
- Big Bad: Happiness Island has Helga, the director of the BB Army. Makonde is her main enforcer and Mecha Kameda is the one running the show behind the two.
- Big Creepy-Crawlies: The shmup minigame sees Hero 6 fending off an infestation of giant cockroaches.
- Bloodless Carnage: Slighty subverted. In scenes involving people getting shot dead, most of them display a pop-up of a gun being fired while some display a pop-up with a splash of blood.
- Broken Ace: Saya Wagiri presents as a model highschooler and dutiful daughter but is really very bitter over how her father's neglect towards his family led to her mother supposedly running away with another man. She hates his factory and baseball, and is secretly a naughty girl who plays dating games with her friends. If the protagonist romances Saya only to abandon her in the end, she snaps and gives up on everything, with her bad ending all but explicitly stating she becomes a prostitute to cope with trauma.
- Canon Discontinuity: Nearly the entire second year of Factory Baseball never happened because the protagonist canonically loses to the Great Empire Killers.
- Cartoon Creature: Horuhisu is a multi-colored crayon blob thing with wide blank white eyes and a vacant perpetual smile that lives in a Bigger on the Inside locker at Wagiri. None of his co-workers other than the protagonist seem to notice or care, and he's a harmless good guy despite his scary appearance.
- Companion Cube:
- Like in the previous game, in Factory Baseball there is a parody of the Tokimeki Memorial series in the form of a small Saori-chan doll that the protagonist can play with to relieve stress. It has the negative effect of raising the Mania stat, which eventually causes a bad ending.
- The Happiness Island scenario also has a Saori-chan doll that actually resembles Shiori Fujisaki with its pink long hair and sailor uniform. It is life-sized, has a prominently detailed open mouth and... well... it's a sex doll. The context around it leaves no doubt of that. You can repeatedly "use" it to restore stamina and there's no bad ending directly associated with it, but don't forget the Dog meter and the story's goals.
- Egawa, the captain of the inmates' team in Happiness Island, rents the Saori-chan No. 2 doll a lot and beats it up as if it was the cabaret girl on which he embezzled his bank's funds on.
- Continuing is Painful: If you fail the story you'll need to start over from the beginning. You can reset the GBA, but the game punishes this with stat losses and will just erase the save file if you do it over three times.
- Company Cross References: The game contains references to other Konami franchises.
- The Saori-chan dolls from "Mekimeki R" are a reference to Shiori Fujisaki from Tokimeki Memorial. The one featured in the Happiness Island scenario that is all but outright stated to be a sex doll of course happens to look like her the most out of them all.
- The post-credits Clear screen for Factory Baseball shows the protagonist's futuristic gun is a mini Vic Viper that fires ripple lasers.
- The battle between Gundar Robo and the frog-beetle-centipede kaiju Toshio is framed like a Goemon Impact stage from the Ganbare Goemon series.
- Darker and Edgier: Happiness Island is a Nazisploitation story of sorts, with the protagonist trapped in a military labor camp under threat of human experimentation and firing squad execution. The only scenarios in the series darker than this tend to deal with closer-to-home subjects.
- Death Is Cheap: In one scene where Hero 6 is discussing books with Helga, she remarks that she dislikes stories where death is not definitive. Ironically, there are cases of resurrections in the Pawapoke games since 2 with Kameda but Helga herself is Killed Off for Real.
- Denser and Wackier: The second scenario is set in the main continuity instead of being a fantasy story like in the previous two games, and yet it happens on a drug plantation, lets you screw a goat and ends with either a fight against either an expy of Yasunori Kato from Teito Monogatari or a kaiju.
- Eagle Land: The US Super Heroes team which is the final Baseball opponent in both stories. Their xenophobic cowboy hat-clad manager keeps bragging about his home country and all the players are named after American characters and cultural concepts.
- Earn Your Bad Ending:
- In Happiness Island, you have to go out of your way to serve the Blood Butterfly Army for the Dog gauge to fill all the way to 100. If it happens, Hero 6 gets promoted as the new coach for the army's team and promptly goes drunk with power over the island's inmates.
- Also in the Inner Success, getting the ending where Hero 6 remains on the island with Masako the goat requires you to deliberately get "refreshed" by her around ten times. Other than being a waste of turns you could be using to gain money or experience, there's no reason to rent the goat that much when you can just use the Saori-chan doll instead to recover 80 stamina points.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: After failing his quest and getting sent to a deadly labor camp, Hero 6 manages to dismantle the Blood Butterfly Army and rebuilds the Wagiri Factory.
- Eaten Alive: Happens to Hero 6 if he fails to kill Toshio-kun, who's a giant frog-scorpion. This trope reoccurs often enough in other game over scenes across the series that one could call it a favorite of the developers.
- Evil Knockoff: The BB Army is secretly run by Mecha Kameda, who was created by the Propeller Team to hunt the traitorous Kameda but instead grew obssessed with surpassing him in every way. Ironically, the two never even meet.
- Explosive Stupidity: Happiness Island involves a villager named Bao trying to fight back against the BB Army with a Type 99 No.25 250 kg bomb from the Japanese Navy that was hidden in the island, but with no idea of how to handle it. The protagonist can help Bao out or convince him to not use the bomb. Not getting involved or opposing Bao can result in the guy being killed in an explosion or being captured and brutally executed by Helga.
- Final Boss: Factory Baseball has no unusual final boss after the Baseball tournament, but Happiness Island has two you can choose from.
- For Doom the Bell Tolls: Becoming a "Mania" is portrayed as the protagonist becoming a dirty and fat gacha addict as a sinister bell plays in the background.
- Formerly Fat: Nozomi from Pawapoke 4 returns as a love interest in Factory Baseball, and as an adult she has slimmed down in appearance.
- Friendly Enemy: Hero 6 can befriend Helga and learn her motivations regarding the human experiments performed by the BB Army. With high enough Relationship Values, he feels bitter about her being put on death row at the end and comes to visit before she is executed.
- G-Rated Drug: The Blood Butterfly army harvests the Happiness Herbs and tricks their Baseball team into becoming doping test subjects until the research can be used for creating super soldiers. It has wildly varying effects to begin with and make people chronically addicted, but from here on it's possible to obtain doses of it as an usable item with random effects. It also plays a positive role in Pawapoke 13 as part of the rehabilitation treatment for its protagonist.
- G-Rated Sex: At the Blood Butterfly camp, the inmates can pay to rest at special "refreshment rooms", so to say. One features a popular life-size doll of an expy of Shiori from Konami's own Tokimeki Memorial and the other contains Masako, a goat. The game's not exactly subtle about what might be going on when you choose to "heal" in those spots but doesn't depict it in detail either.
- Gag Nose: In Pennant mode, your reputation is represented by a meter depicting a tengu's nose growing until it reaches outer space. Sadly, it caps out there.
- Game Within a Game: Subverted in this installment. While there is a second scenario available, it doesn't change the game's genre.
- Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: The giant frog-scorpion Toshio-kun can be awakened at the end of Happiness Island Edition. Hero 6 drives Gundar Robo to kill it and then stomps the BB Army flat in the confusion.
- Guide Dang It!: There is an ending where Hero 6 arrests the time criminal, but it requires the correct choice to be made at a certain event.
- Happy Ending Override: Hitoshi Kuragari, the down-on-his-luck family man who first appeared in the second game as a Drill Moles player and seemed to at least be in good terms with his daughter in the fifth, got sent to the Blood Butterfly labor camp for debts he accumulated while trying to pay for her university education. He looks emanciated due to the after effects of the Happiness herbs but can regain some pride and help the other inmates dismantle the BB Army. ...but years later in 11, turns out Hitoshi becomes homeless and much more unhealthy after leaving the island. His final appearance can end with him either still homeless or dead depending of the player's actions.
- Hello, [Insert Name Here]: You start out by giving the protagonist a name and role as usual.
- The Hero: Hero 6, the first main Power Pro-kun who gets a unique outfit (Hero 5B also had an unique costume in the previous game). Like Hero 1, he stars in a second story but it is in the same game.
- Humongous Mecha: There's a Gundar Robo hidden away in the Blood Butterfly camp, which can be used by Hero 6 to kill Toshio-kun.
- Karmic Death: After Mecha Kameda is destroyed, Helga shoulders all the blame for the BB Army's actions and is executed by a firing squad. Considering the horrible things she endorses at the island for a supposed greater good and how she can potentially murder the protagonist at various points without remorse, it's not exactly undeserved. Interestingly, it is if you had befriended her that the game lets you see her about to get shot.
- Karma Meter: The Dog meter in Happiness Island measures the protagonist's loyalty to the Nazi-esque Blood Butterfly Army. Raising it sometimes requires you to snitch on your co-workers or to oppress the local villagers, including turning a blind eye to a soldier having his way with a female villager at night when nobody else is looking. Doing good deeds raises the Friendship meter, which is required for one of the good endings, but often at the cost of the Dog meter and the protagonist's well-being. Generally, you'll want the Dog gauge between 20 and 30 so then you can train the protagonist without worrying about getting executed if it empties or turning into a evil coach if it fills out.
- Indentured Servitude: People who are neck-deep in debts are sent to the Blood Butterfly camp to work on their factories, mines and happiness grass fields. And that's the least of their problems...
- It's a Wonderful Failure:
- If you lose a Baseball match in Factory Baseball, the protagonist is sent off into servitude at the Blood Butterfly Army's labor camp. This one is actually canon.
- If you return to the future at the end of Factory Baseball without arresting the time criminal, the protagonist regrets leaving his friends behind and finds everything he did was in vain. Oh, and even if you do catch the criminal this also counts as a Game Over! Every love interest has a bad epilogue for this outcome, all while the miserable game over theme plays.
- Slack off on the job at the BB camp? They shoot you dead. Becoming their employee of the month is no good, either, and one possible epilogue shows Helga and Makonde getting away with everything while the island becomes filled with graves.
- In Factory Baseball Hero 6 can become a "maniac" addicted to purchasing nerd merch and in Happiness Island he can get addicted to... caring for a goat? In both cases you get to see him looking miserable after you clear the game.
- The game over screen for Pennant mode shows the protagonist alone in an alley, drunk and lying in a pool of his own tears. It's the harshest-looking one among the series' Pennant game overs.
- Last-Second Ending Choice:
- If you fail to find the time criminal in Team Factory, you can accuse certain characters of being him. Then there's a choice of returning to the future or not (if you accused anyone you're locked to the first option). If you do return, you find everything was pointless and your custom character is lost.
- At the end of Happiness Island, you can choose between a neutral ending or one of two final bosses depending of how the story turned out.
- Left Hanging: Turns out the time criminal had good reasons for bankrupting the Wagiri factory, but we only learn his motivations 5 installments later (on hidden content, at that).
- Love Interest: Factory Baseball has a handful of troubled women to flirt and get a good ending with as usual, but Happiness Island... It lets you befriend the She-devil of the BB just to show her being executed. It gives you a goat. A goat. It lets you rescue a slave girl just for the protagonist to not be interested in romancing her, with her epilogue scene implying she might do something stupid in her loneliness and die after she was already saved from drowning once!
- Luck-Based Mission: The events that let you catch the time criminal or fight Toshio-kun might not appear in a given playthough.
- Made a Slave: Hero 6 becomes one for the BB Army. Another notable character found at Happiness Island is "Yusaku" from the previous game.
- Masturbation Means Sexual Frustration: At the Refreshment Rooms in Happiness Island, just sleeping recovers too little health and drains too many points from the Dog Meter. This makes masturbation an important game mechanic. You can pay to read a "magazine", watch a "video" or play with a life-size Saori-chan doll to recover much more health at a low Dog Meter cost. On a 2022 interview about the series
, one developer mentioned he had to refrain from having this illustrated in-game with a box of tissues being used. Instead, there's a serene shot of a flower field outside... - Merging the Branches: In Happiness Island, you either destroy Mecha Kameda and avoid encountering Toshio-kun or you kill Toshio-kun and Mecha Kameda escapes. Later games establish that somehow both of them were defeated by Hero 6.
- Mood Dissonance: Happiness Island has a lighthearted soundtrack to go with the series' cartoony art style and is not without humorous moments, but there's also themes of arms trafficking, forced doping experimentation and people getting executed before Hero 6's eyes.
- Multiple Endings: There are two main endings for Factory Baseball and three for Happiness Island. And then a bunch of possible epilogues as usual.
- New Game Plus:
- Starting from here, Power Points can be exchanged for certain items and a secret love interest (you can pick up to 3 things) in your next playthrough of Factory Baseball.
- Pennant mode now lets you increase your character's stats and abilities, if only a little because the prices get inflated in this mode.
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Nintendo Hard:- Fail either story and your save file will be erased unless you reset the GBA to resume with a penalty. The baseball matches can be very difficult, particularly the final one against the US Superheroes which starts you at a point disavantage against a pitcher with very high stats.
- You only get one life to clear the vertical shmup minigame. During Factory Baseball, you must at least get a certain amount of points to clear its sidequest.
- Non-Standard Character Design:
- Horuhisu was designed by a six year-old Corocoro reader and is portrayed faithfully to their design as a cartoonish creature drawn out of crayon.
- Unlike all the other characters, the Saori-chan dolls are portrayed in a standard art style with a nose and mouth on their faces.
- Parental Bonus: The game is rated for all ages, but outside of the ball game it has plenty of violence and sexual innuendo that is often portrayed in a sneaky, non-visual way. Adults should more easily figure out why watching a nondescript video, playing with a life-size doll which has a "sophisticated" open mouth and raising a goat would restore the protagonist's health in the context of an army's all-male slave camp.
- Poison Mushroom: The Happiness herbs are available as an usable item from this game on. They have a variety of both good and bad random effects.
- Politically Incorrect Villain: The president of the US Superheroes team is a stereotypical American executive who really wants to bomb those "yellow monkeys" of the Wagiri factory into orbit.
- Potty Emergency: One minigame has Hero 6 running like hell to get to a toilet in a rural area. You have to jump over a ton of animal crap on the way which slows you down for the rest of the play if tripped over, and to clear its sidequest properly, you must make it through squeaky-clean.
- Psycho Serum: The Blood Butterfly army performs illegal experimentation of the strenght-enhancing Happiness Herbs, which has wildly different and random effects from person to person and causes severe chemical dependency.
- Relationship Values:
- In Factory Baseball all love interests have those, as usual.
- In Happiness Island, you must keep the Dog Meter above zero to avoid execution and below 100 to not become an anime nazi. The friendship meter with your co-workers must also be raised over 60 points, or else the rebellion fails at the end of the story and everyone will be executed by Helga. The villainess herself has a relationship value, but it only determines whether Hero 6 feels sorry for her when she is executed by a firing squad in either of the good endings.
- Relax-o-Vision: In Happiness Island, picking the sex-related options at the refreshment rooms shows a pop-up of a grassy field outside the building while Hero 6 makes a suspiciously naughty face. This doesn't actually censor anything, and in fact serves to make the meaning of the video, the doll and the goat even clearer to any adults playing the game.
- Rescue Romance: In Happiness Island, the protagonist can save an indigenous woman named Inmin from being whipped by a soldier, at the expense of being beaten up before the guy leaves. He befriends Inmin and later even saves her from drowning with CPR when she has an accident at the beach. Problem is, the story doesn't actually let the player pursue a romance with Inmin and instead she's left alone wistfully looking into the ocean, wondering how long it'd take to swim to Japan...
- Serious Business: The fates of corporations are decided on the outcome of Baseball matches. And those who go bankrupt are sent off to concentration camps.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Hero 6's goal is to restore the timeline by preventing the collapse of the Wagiri factory, which develops batteries to prevent an energy crisis in the future. Only in 11 it is revealed that the time criminal was also trying to prevent a bad future — one in which the lack of an energy crisis leads to overpopulation and a dystopic civilization.
- Sexy Discretion Shot: Like in previous games, a love motel background appears after dates with female character to imply the protagonist just had sex with them. This of course includes Saya, his boss' underage daughter...
- Shout-Out:
- At one point, Yamada tries convincing the protagonist to buy "Gundar Robo SEED" stuff with him.
- Both story modes feature a "Saori Fujisaka" doll from "Mekimeki R". Of course, the one that's all but explicity stated to be a sex doll is the one that actually resembles Shiori Fujisaki.
- One of the two final bosses in Happiness Island plays like a typical Tennis Boss fight from The Legend of Zelda. The other one mimicks the Goemon Impact fights from the Ganbare Goemon series.
- Sound-Coded for Your Convenience: In Happiness Island, lowering the loyalty gauge for the evil Blood Butterfly Army makes a Good Bleeping Noise and raising it makes a Bad Buzzing Noise. The problem is that both extremes of the gauge result in a game over, so it will start flashing at values lower than 11 to remind the player to raise it.
- Stars Are Souls: If Hero 6 returns to the future at the end of Factory Baseball, we get a shot of his colleagues stargazing while his face appears in the sky, complete with a shooting star.
- Status Effects: Beware of the "Mania" status from getting addicted to the toys and media your glassy friend tries to share with you. It is permanent, causes the protagonist to waste turns buying nerdy merch and results in a bad ending.
- Stranger Behind the Mask: None of the suspects is the faceless time criminal, and his identity is never revealed even when confronted and arrested.
- Surprisingly Creepy Moment: Chances are nothing you read on this page were what you expected from the cute cover with an All Ages rating mark from CERO, but it's all real and it's just game 6 out of 14.
- There are quite a few ways to be killed in the Happiness Island scenario, like being shot down by Makonde for slacking on the job, by Helga for defying her, being overdosed with Happiness Herbs upon failing the main goal of the story or even getting Eaten Alive by a giant frog. Cue the depressing Game Over scene of Oda leaving a makeshift grave for the protagonist.
- Your "reward" for befriending Helga is getting to see her being prepared to be executed by a firing squad for her crimes.
- One of the various pop-up graphics for setting the mood on the dialogue interface is a splash of blood that is used in a few violent scenes. It's actually the only installment where they managed to sneak that in, as all the rest simply use a pop-up with a skull instead (though certain skull pop-up variants in Pawapoke games are evocative of blood).
- Timed Mission: In Happiness Island, you get 100 turns for doing various tasks on the island. You must save at least 1000 in cash for the neutral ending, or Helga will send the protagonist to be killed as a subject of human experimentation regardless of whether you win or lose the final baseball match. With that done, you must have at least 60 Friendship points to pursue the first good ending where you fight Mecha Kameda, or else all the inmates get killed while trying to rebel against the soldiers.
- Trapped in the Past: Time travel is only possible into the past, so time patrollers like Hero 6 must go into suspended animation to "return" into their own era.
- Unexpected Gameplay Change:
- Averted for the Inner Success story, which is a standard dating sim instead of a turn-based RPG.
- There are only two minigames in this installment other than the regular fortune minigame. One is a kind of racing game and the other is a vertical shmup.
- The final bosses in Happiness Island. One is a top-down action game like Zelda. Another is a first-person giant mech battle based on the Goemon Impact battles from Ganbare Goemon 2 and 3.
- Utopia Justifies the Means: Helga believes to the bitter end that the results of the Happiness Herbs experiments would validate all the deaths they caused in the process. Ironically, the protagonist of 13 does receive those drugs as treatment to recover from his career-damaging injuries.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential:
- Clearing a love interest's quest line in Factory Baseball just to abandon them and return to the future nets the most miserable bad endings the storywriters could think of.
- For Happiness Island in general, you are rewarded for being a scumbag to some extent because the Dog gauge is essentially your baseball training fuel and letting it run out will get you executed. You can do some rather bad things to keep it around middle values and still manage the Friendship gauge well enough to unlock the Mecha Kameda final boss path.
- One set of events in Happiness Island involves one of the natives acquiring an explosive to fight against the BB Army, but it is possible to foil his plans so then Helga repeatedly shoots him to death.
- Villain: Exit, Stage Left: If you choose the Happiness Island ending where you battle Toshio-kun, Mecha Kameda escapes in the confusion.
- What If?: Happiness Island is what happens if the protagonist fails to keep the Wakura Factory afloat during the second year of Factory Baseball, but the sequels actually made it the canon outcome.
- You Have Failed Me: In Happiness Island Edition you have to manage the "Dog Meter". If you fail to serve the Blood Butterfly army properly and it drops to zero they'll execute you in cold blood. You don't want the meter to fill all the way, either, as that will trigger the ending where you turn into their madly loyal soldier.
