For the first time in decades, Baki Hanma is set to appear on video game consoles, but what the heck is Baki Hanma: Blood Arena?
Grappler Baki and its many sequels are incredibly influential within the anime and manga industries. People who aren’t fans might not have noticed, though. The series had almost exclusively played out as a manga with no international presence. Only a fraction of the story was adapted into anime, and there was little in the way of merch or spin-off content.
That’s changed in recent years, however. The popularity of 2018’s Baki anime and the Baki Hanma sequel have propelled the series to international acclaim. Still, there hasn’t been the sort of enormous cross-media push seen with series like Dragon Ball or Bleach. That’s starting to change with Baki Hanma: Blood Arena.
Baki Hanma: Blood Arena release date info and platforms
Baki Hanma: Blood Arena is slated for a Q3 2025 release. This means it will come out between July 2025 and September 2025.
The game is developed by Purple Tree SRL, the creators of Thunder Ray. Thunder Ray is a single-player fighting game in the vein of NES classic Punch-Out, albeit with modernized 2D graphics and extra mechanics. Baki Hanma: Blood Arena looks to be extremely similar to Thunder Ray from a gameplay perspective.
Rather than being a shot-for-shot remake of the source material, it seems to simply put the player in the metaphorical shoes of Baki Hanma for fights against some of the series’ most popular characters.
The trailer shows Baki as the player character fighting the likes of Doppo Orochi, Muhammad Alai Jr, Kaoru Hanayama, and Kaio Retsu. Many of these fights don’t align with the source material, as Doppo and Baki have never actually fought and Hanayama and Baki were still children in their one brawl. Aesthetically, the game seems to directly pull the designs and style of TMS Studios’ Baki anime rather than the manga.
Baki Hanma: Blood Arena is set to be released on Nintendo, Xbox, and PlayStation consoles, alongside a PC release through Steam. There are not yet any details on the game’s price.
Blood Arena is Baki’s first console game in 25 years
Baki Hanma: Blood Arena will be the first Baki video game released on consoles since 2000.
The first was Grappler Baki: Baki Saikyō Retsuden for the PlayStation 2. The fighting game never received a North American release, and was only licensed and localized internationally for the United Kingdom. The UK release actually had the Baki name scrubbed, and was entitled “Fighting Fury.”
It functionally adapted the Maximum Tournament story arc, with the game’s roster including many of its participants as playable characters.
Since then, Baki has occasionally had Japan-exclusive browser and mobile games. The most recent was Baki: King of Souls, a mobile gacha card game. Baki Hanma: Blood Arena is set to be the truest to the source material since Fighting Fury, simply on how it tasks players with winning fights with fists.
