You have already clicked the download link. If you need to download again, please click here to reset the link.

Hajime no Ippo the Fighting DS: Reviews

Select Author:

Game Score: 4/10

For me, Hajime no Ippo was an unexpected, but very welcome surprise. One of a few GBA games for which romhacking.net had a COMPLETE translation patch, I figured "Well it must be a pretty cool game, then." Indeed it was, and it just snowballed from there. The paltry, yet teasingly informative story mode made me want to watch the anime, which made me want to see the movie, which made me want to own every game with Ippo in it. This is one of them, and I'm sorry to say, it's a disgrace to the series.

Story (probably)10/10 - There aren't any DS translation patches on romhacking.net, so I played it straight-up kanji style. No matter, I've seen every episode of the series, so I know the story and characters well. Makunouchi Ippo was a high school student who always got bullied because he lacked the time to make friends (his time was spent helping his mother run their fishing store). He was rescued from his bullies by Mamoru Takamura, a boxer who trained at the Kamogawa Boxing Gym, and taken there for his wounds to be treated. There, it's discovered that he has a natural talent for boxing and a desire to know what it means to be truly strong, so he decides to become a professional boxer. Now, I don't know exactly how much of the story this game tells or how closely it follows it, but I assume it did a decent job since there are lots of speech bubbles all over the place, and they can't all be filled with "Do your best" and "Press the Start button to pause."

Gameplay Crap/10 - I don't know if you've played the GBA version of this game (you really should, all the cool kids are doing it), but it was pure digital awesomeness. Even with the GBA's limitations, it made a fast-paced, addicting, yet surprisingly simple and enticing boxing game. Even better, the GBA version followed nearly every detail of the anime from the voices of the characters to the placement and movements of their boxing gloves. Play the DS version for 5 minutes and you'll see why I gave it a Crap out of ten. It's not that it in and of itself is crap, it's that compared to the very high standard set by it's last-gen cousin, its sluggish and counter-intuitive fight controls mixed in with the brain-dead flailing that comprise the fights make it look like Danny Devito standing next to soon-to-be Governator Arnold in "Twins." To quote the movie: "All the crap that was left over went to you, DS version."

Sound - Ugh/10 - Unbelievably, I think the sound in the GBA version was better than this version as well. That's like the 86 in Initial D beating the crap out of the tricked-out 300+ horsepower race cars...it shouldn't be happening in reality! I compare the referee's counting in the two games as my example. In the GBA version, the ref actually appears in front of you (for some reason, a rarity in boxing games), tell you to go the "Neutral Cornaw-eh" (with the Japanese accent and everything), and starts counting with a different emphasis on each number, a special higher pitch for 9, and a definitive, quick 10. Compare that to the DS version, which features no ref, no corner animation, and sounds like someone typed the numbers 1 through 10 into one of those text-to-speech programs, then slowed it down somewhat (the only difference being Microsoft Sam doesn't have a Japanese accent).

Replay - ?/10 I haven't played the whole game through yet (I doubt that the entire game's mechanics will spontaneously mutate into something wonderful after I beat Sendo), but the game doesn't seem to have much appeal to begin with, let alone enough to tempt a player to go through it a second time. But hey, I could be wrong.

Overall 4/10 (an actual number!) - I don't like the phrase "if you're a fan of the series" because it seems overused to me, but it sort of applies in a big way to this game. The only way you'll enjoy it is if you're biased to because you liked the concepts, characters, and storyline before you even started playing. So let your view of the series guide you in downloading this one: Fan = yes, Not fan = no.