Baki the Grappler is one of those manga that people post panels of (or videos of if taking from the anime) out of context to get a massive amount of likes because of how ridiculous that manga is IN context let alone outside of it. But now people who have only seen clips or pages from Keisuke Itagaki’s wacky ride can experience it firsthand with Baki Hanma: Blood Arena.
Now, a Baki the Grappler video game could have gone many many different ways, but a Mike Tyson’s Punch Out! style game probably wasn’t on people lists. Though honestly, it fits. The fights in the manga can get pretty brutal and the drag out, blow for blow style of a Punch Out! game perfectly fits the manga. Being developed by Purple Tree Studios, an indie developer from Argentina, you know this game is developed with heart and soul and an appreciation for the source material.
Of course, no Baki the Grappler adaptation would be complete without some baffling pseudo-science that sort of sounds correct if you think about it but doesn’t actually make sense if you think about it some more, so of course there are screen bending super moves and callbacks to the manga, but for the most part it looks like this is just going to be a fun adaptation of Baki the Grappler in the style of a traditional Mike Tyson’s Punch Out! and that’s perfectly fine and fun too.
Baki Hanma: Blood Arena will be releasing for Playstation 4 and Playstation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One, as well as PC through Steam. It’s always neat to see manga and anime adapted into video games, hopefully we can get a few more high quality manga IPs adapted into fun games like this for everyone to enjoy and finally add context to some of those wild clips everyone posts online.