Victorious Boxers Revolution review

A Wii boxing game that''s based on the anime and manga,Hajime no Ippo,was brought over here by XSEED,a publisher that would soon be somewhere on the top of my list.But should they have bothered?

The story covers the humble beginnings of Ippo Makanouchi,to the fight with Sawamura,currently shown only in the manga.The series is known for some great character development,but like most video games based on an anime or manga,they tend to not explain stuff and strictly for fans of it's source material.

The voice work isn't particularly good,some of the characters voices tend to not fit them at all or just don't sound as good as their japanese counterparts,speaking of which,there's no Japanese dub included.
The announcer during the fights is annoying,mostly because his voice tends to overlap,it's common to hear "Makanouchi..straight right...right..uppercut...ma.ma..makanoucstraight right!"
It's pretty terrible,I'll just put a video down here so you can hear it.You can turn it off thankfully.

If you watched the video,you noticed the art style,and I really like it.Unlike the PS2 games,Revolution went for a manga style of art,and despite the lack of the Wii's power,it looks good on the surface.The character models look good at first glance,but their animations are not,they tend to look a little unnatural.
The crowd is more lazyness rather than lack of power of the Wii.They are blurry,pixelated cardboard cutouts that you'd swear are lifted from a N64 wrestling game.

The Wii brought us Xenoblade,so it's an issue of lazyness here
rather than power.

The controls are also at fault,being a Wii game,of course you would expect motion controls for a boxing game.Again,being a pre-motionplus era game,it just doesn't respond right.You tend to flail around and your boxer just does his own thing.The game has Gamecube and Classic Controller support,but that kinda defeats the purpose of it being on the Wii,doesn't it?

You have special moves,like the Dempsey Roll and the Jolt Counter,but some other moves like Aoki's Frog Punch are novelty but ultimately useless,just like in the manga.One other notable thing to note about the fights is that if you hit your opponent hard enough,you get a cool little x-ray scene that denotes that you broke his jaw or ribs.You don't actually see the bones break like in the anime,but you do get that satisfying sound effect.

There's alot of characters,from Hammer Nao,to Brian Hawk but is missing some characters like Jason Ozuma.

The music is also generic,no remixed anime music or anything,just generic stuff.

It does have multiplayer and as bad as the motion controls are,me and my cousins had fun flailing around,executing the techniques we all saw in the anime.That's not really a positive towards the game itself,since me and my cousins generally always have a great time with anything really,so take that for what you will.

Overall,the negatives outweigh the positives,so it's hard to reccomend even to fans of Hajime no Ippo.In the end,I kinda like the game,but it's not anything special.