Fitness Boxing Fist of the North Star

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Fitness Boxing Fist of the North Star is one of those games made for a very specific group of people: fans of classic Fist of the North Star anime that also enjoy a decent workout. This is an admittedly small demographic, especially in a world where most people (outside of Japan, at least) only know the franchise from memes, if at all. But hey, if someone is a fan of the Fitness Boxing series in general, they may still spare a glance to this installment, full of beefy men and graphics straight out of the 80s.

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Gameplay is pretty straightforward. Take a Joy-Con in each hand and follow along with your instructor as you jab, dodge, duck, and sway along with a tune  from Fist of the North Star. The goal is to time your movements so you hit the mark perfectly; you can practice the timing and tempo as much as you want in the basic training section, where each move from hooks to sway-backs are able to be studied. Once you have the hang of it, you can move onto the other modes. Or you can just go in blind, but I really, REALLY don’t recommend that. This game is already frustrating. Not knowing how to hit the mark will make you want to throw things at your TV.

There are a number of other modes that you can choose from, including daily workout (a randomized assortment of 3-5 exercises based on your goals), free training (choosing exercises and creating your own workout with your own soundtrack), and battle (where you can gain new instructors by beating their lackeys and eventually the character themselves in a boss battle). If you spring for the DLC you’ll also have Heart and Raoh modes, which are challenges to see how many punches you can land in a certain amount of time and how hard you can punch. These are really fun and quick, and I found they really helped me warm up and cool down.

By doing activities in these modes, you can earn coins to help you unlock songs and outfits, which is so very important because I wanted to see Kenshiro in every possible outfit. If you’re not into that sort of thing, though, that’s okay. The game will auto select songs from the ones you already have, and you can leave the instructors in whatever they first appear in. Obviously, what matters more is the workouts! Admittedly, these are pretty good and well-rounded if you choose full body as your focus (though you can choose to focus on any area you please and cycle through).

The game has you switch sides so you’re not just working with your dominant hand, which I appreciated, and it allows you to choose from three goals – get moving, stamina, and maintenance – to curate your daily workout. As you play, you’re graded on how many times you performed the actions correctly.

Here’s where the problems come in. There are many (many) times where player movements are not read properly. This results in bad or missed actions, which ultimately lower your score and may even cause you to fail a battle challenge. I noticed this issue was particularly bad with dodges and ducks, though it sometimes also appeared during hook punches. I thought maybe it was due to my punches being thrown with my left (non-dominant) hand, but I’d have the same issue on the right. Other times, though, I’d have no problems at all. It wasn’t enough to make me stop playing at first, but when I’d been getting close to the end of a workout and suddenly my score would tank, it admittedly buttered my biscuits a little. If you’re having a lot of issues with this like I was, there is an auto-grade option you can turn on for each movement that will set it to perfect each time. It helps defeat that frustration.

In addition to issues with motion reading, battle mode tended to get a little repetitive. You’re punching the same guys over and over each section with the same moves to make it to the boss so you can unlock them as an instructor, and the moves don’t change when you reach the boss. It feels like the same pattern every single time with little variation, which becomes boring after a while. I would have liked to be asked to switch sides more often or to change the pattern slightly by adding other elements, because you should be unlocking moves through your daily workout anyway. I feel like there should have been more building upon of the skills as you progressed, but it often felt static.

The other issue I ran into was the inability to structure daily workouts. The game pulls the exercises for you, which is fine, but you can’t arrange them. You can click randomize until you get what you want, but it’s a huge pain. You’ll often get multiple hard or extreme exercises right after your warm up stretch, while all the easy ones are at the end or at the beginning. It leads to you getting pretty exhausted quickly sometimes, especially if you opt for long workouts where those hard or extreme exercises may last for 15-20 minutes. It may not be a deal breaker for everyone, but I’m a picky, picky guy. I like the ability to structure the workouts more, which makes the daily workout a real chore.

The soundtrack is nothing but bangers, which is to be expected. Fist of the North Star’s anime adaptation has a killer score and a few of the songs were pulled directly from it. I liked that you were able to choose songs freely in free training, though I used “Tough Boy” for basically everything. The graphics are crusty, to put it nicely, with visuals that look like they were pulled directly from the manga; as someone who enjoys Fist of the North Star I didn’t mind this, as I fully expect a slight crust on any media from this franchise.

However, this may be a no-go for some, because it may make the game look a bit unpolished (or straight up ugly, as my mom so lovingly says about both Fist of the North Star and its artistic relative, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure).

Fitness Boxing Fist of the North Star is, as stated before, a game for a very small sect of gamers. If you like boxing and are desperate for Kenshiro to say you’re doing a good job (check) you’ll probably have fun with it, and may be able to overlook issues in motion reading and repetitiveness. If you like boxing, but not Fist of the North Star, then you’ll probably struggle with justifying this purchase because of its lack of legwork integration, general visual crust, and poor motion reading. The real question here is are you getting your money’s worth, and unfortunately, that’s not the case here, even with the extra challenges and fashion of the DLC.