What are the Hajime no Ippo video games?

Victorious Boxers: Ippo's Road to Glory launched the line on PlayStation 2 in Japan in 2000 and reached the West in 2001, a serious boxing simulation for its era, with a first person and over the shoulder camera culture, weight classes, and a story mode climbing Ippo's own career ladder. Reviewers treated it as a boxing game first and a license second, which is the highest compliment this genre gives.

The PlayStation 2 sequels expanded the roster across the manga's whole cast: Victorious Boxers 2: Fighting Spirit reached the West in 2006, while later Japanese entries, including the All Stars and Revolution lines and the Wii's Victorious Boxers Revolution, which used motion controls for jabs, hooks and the Dempsey Roll, stayed home. The Wii game did reach the West, where its control scheme divided players exactly as motion boxing always does.

Handheld and side entries fill the tail: a Game Boy Advance game, The Fighting, in Japan, PSP's Hajime no Ippo Portable: Victorious Spirits, and a long tail of Japanese mobile and browser games, including pachinko and social titles, which document the license's domestic depth and are mostly lost to Western documentation.

The games' collector interest is their documentation value: Japanese boxes carry Morikawa art, the rosters freeze the manga's cast at each release year, and the Western Victorious Boxers releases are inexpensive, genuinely good boxing games that most Western Ippo fans do not know exist. Strategy guides were published in Japan for the major PlayStation 2 entries, walking players through career mode opponents the way the manga's corner advice walks Ippo through his.

Read against the anime and tankobon pages of this shelf, the games complete the media triangle of Ippo's biggest years, roughly 2000 to 2009, when the series was a full multi format franchise in Japan while remaining nearly invisible in English.