This is a tough one to review because the gameplay was really good this year but the addition of time-limited programs to Diamond Dynasty and glut of moments and conquest missions really started to bog down the mode. Plus, this was the first year of the new Ballplayer mode which replaced the widely revered Road to the Show mode that had been in place since '06. Ballplayer had a lot of issues out of the gate as it now required players to be online when playing the mode, loadouts couldn't be changed between games when playing through a series, and missions would frequently stop tracking for no reason.

If you kept it simple this year and just played baseball, you probably had a good time.

I have a relationship with sports games where I either play them for hundreds of hours or I barely play them at all/skip them until the next year's release. I bounced off this after two weeks and thought, "well, I'm glad that was on Gamepass."

BUT THEN, I randomly tried the 'Diamond Dynasty' mode and I started to like an "Ultimate Team" mode for the first time ever. You can build a really fun team and play with them in all sorts of challenges both online and offline, all without feeling like you need to spend real money on card packs.

BUT THEN, in order to get some tokens and complete missions for that mode, I tried 'March to October' and that is the best single-player mode in a sports game ever. The season is condensed down to the most important moments (enter the game and make a save, hide the spider tack from the umps, etc.) and some computer assisted trades and call-ups to consider (The Dodgers want to gift me Dustin May for some random prospects AGAIN?) make the season fly by in a few hours yet still feel totally satisfying. In The Show franchises past, I've always made it a few months into the schedule before eventually simulating more games and sort of spinning out when it comes to the small decisions of everyday baseball.

After a few runs at the World Series, I'm going to mark this as completed for the year, though I have no intentions to stop playing anytime soon.

PRO: The best "ultimate team" mode in any sports game PERIOD. You can get tons of cards for free, all of them useable and plenty of the cards can be "end-game" for your team.

CON: They made Road to the Show (single-player career mode where you create-a-ballplayer and take him to the Big Leagues) almost unplayable by doing a bogus integration with online. I played MLB20 all year last year, only career mode. This year, because it was unplayable, I hopped into Ultimate Team and love it!

(Note: I think it was intentional to ruin the single player experience and force players to go into the Ultimate Team mode. Fortunately, playing ultimate team offline and no-money-spent is entirely viable!)

Besides everything said above this a sports game. It's not gonna do anything you don't expect out of it. I don't really know what I would need out of a sports game to rate it five stars, but to be quite honest, this is head-and-shoulders above the other sports games.

FIRST OVERALL FAVORITE GAME OF 2021

703 hours played - and that's the least amount of hours I've played The Show since MLB The Show 16. Yet I accomplished more with less friction and more efficiently than in any previous year of Diamond Dynasty. Where so many Ultimate Team modes are finding more and more ways to antagonize their players and goad wallets out of pockets, Sony's San Diego Studios have zagged and searched furiously for ways to give the players what they want. Yes, of course, there is the grind of all grinds at the core of MLB The Show, but at the periphery is none of the bullshit, none of the gambling mechanics (packs, sure, but trust me when I say no reasonable person spends a cent on this game's packs and it's designed for that to be the case) and none of the obfuscation.

San Diego Studios has built an incredible baseball sim purely on presentation and gameplay, then built this mode designed entirely around taking advantage of players' nostalgia and desire to watch meters go up while card collections swell in size...only to focus exclusively on how to make those goals more achievable and constant for players. What they're doing should be one of the biggest stories in modern gaming, bucking every trend in its field and garnering unheard of positive sentiment as a result. This has been going on for years now, and has played no small part in how much time I've been willing to give this franchise - 900 hours into both 17 and 18, 800 into both 19 and 20 - year in and year out.

It is the perfect podcast game, it is the perfect barely pay attention and read the news game. You can treat it as a clicker if you want to or an insanely competitive, the best players in the world succeed three out of ten tries online competitive experience if you want to. MLB The Show 21 is the rare game that wants to cater to everyone and for whom reaching everyone is their one and only design goal. I haven't played less and less of this game over the years because I don't want to play it as much as I'm used to or am exhausted by a formula that's only seen slight alterations over the past five years. No, I'm playing the game less because San Diego Studios has made their game more and more accessible, easier for players to set long-term goals for themselves, achieve those goals and then accept that's the end of that year's grind.

Baseball is a beautiful game, and over the past five years The Show has reminded me of that. After several years listing it somewhere in the middle of my lists on this website out of deference to the annual sameness of it all, in a year in which I couldn't decide between two truly exceptional throwback titles, it's finally time to give San Diego Studios and their exceptional sports sim its due as the one game as a service that truly wants nothing more than to satisfy its fanbase no matter the cost to its overall value on an accountant's spreadsheet somewhere. Thanks for everything, SDS. Here's hoping you keep it up into the next generation and beyond.