YMMV / Rusty's Real Deal Baseball

• Audience-Alienating Premise: While it didn't cause an outcry a Minigame Game themed purely around baseball is still in of itself a hard sell on top of locking almost all of the content behind paywalls it's no surprise why it fell into obscurity.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Pappy Van Poodle only appears in the main story as a failsafe if the player pays full price for Rusty's products without using items to haggle down the price, and if the player does go through the story as intended, Pappy is only alluded to in the epilogue. In fact, he was so obscure and so scarcely documented that Googling him in English turned up zero results for nearly 6 years. However, this exact lack of coverage led to him becoming hugely popular among the game's fans after Polygon writer Nick Robinson posted a video about how unknown he was.
• Older Than They Think: Nick Robinson originally thought he was the first person to document the existence of Pappy van Poodle since he couldn't get any search results. However, a follow-up video has him investigate further to discover that the character's first English mention was on Miiverse in 2017, and eventually that his first mention in general was in a Japanese blog post six days after the game was released.
• Ugly Cute: Rusty himself. He looks like Homer Simpson if he were an Animal Crossing villager.
• The Woobie: Rusty used to be a great baseball player. Now his life is in shambles, his marriage is failing, and his business is failing because kids are more interested in video games than baseball. Thankfully he gets better as the game progresses.

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