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This is my PB and former WR run of Hajime no Ippo: The Fighting! (GBA), manga%. Surpassed through use of 140 glitch strategies. Original description below.
Manga% requires you to lose to Date in order to complete the last two fights (essentially this games version of 100%). I'm going to describe my strats here for the community, or for anyone who is curious as to what is going on.
For the first 4 fights, I do some down avoid manipulation to prevent them from stalling the fight out on their last knockdown. The AI will only use a down avoid if they are sufficiently hurt, so the goal here is to do enough damage to knock them down without doing so much damage that they are forced into spamming down avoids. I do this on these first fights because the AI’s defense is low enough to burst them down with combos. That and the fights are only 2 KO TKO, which doesn’t really give me enough time to use body blow/get up abuse strats.
For the remaining fights (besides Okita, we’ll get to him), I abuse body blows to force the AI into wasting their spirit on the get up ability. Since I throw only body blows and liver blows for the whole fight, they take almost entirely red damage, which means they have no way to get up from the first and second knock down unless they use get up. By the end of the fight, they’ll only have enough spirit to use maybe 1 down avoid, sometimes 0. This strategy was inspired by a guide written by Guppinas on speedrun.com, so shoutout to them. Unfortunately you do have to wait for the 9 count each time, but the 2nd and 3rd knockdown are so fast it is worth it. Plus its leagues more consistent than any other strat I tried. Note that I only throw jabs here to reliably close distance; Jabs do 0 red damage and very little yellow.
For Okita, I use something I call the 140 glitch. Discovered by error1 during the creation of their TAS, the 140 glitch abuses a developer oversight to achieve an early KO. You can read the technical details here (tasvideos.org/3... and • Hajime no Ippo - The F... ) but basically if you do between 140 and 141 red damage the AI breaks and stays down when it shouldn’t.
I use this on Okita because I found a consistent way to perform it while practicing BB abuse (at least I believe that's what's happening here; I have no other explanation for him staying down). It is technically possible on every fighter in the game, but doing so would require some serious "card counting", knowing exactly how much damage you're doing with each punch, which varies between every opponent. That or researching and memorizing a reliable sequence for every fight in the game.
-Misc strats/tips
The AI will never walk towards you unless its throwing a punch; wait and dodge it for a free combo. You can even do this to yourself against Date by throwing a hook from the corner. Ippo will walk forward defenseless, which sometimes lets Date hit you without breaking your guard. I call it guard skip, it really doesn't save much time and rarely works so use at your own risk.
That's it. My sum of best shows that the record can clearly go lower, but doing so would take some serious dice rolls and/or a change in strategy (some sort of new AI manipulation or including more of the 140 glitch?). Hopefully this was helpful to newbies and current runners alike.

[@KevTyGaming]

Holy moly, was this really 1900 attempts in the making? How much time went into this? Mad props to you, man; That's gonna be a tough one for anybody to beat.

[@TGHunter]

Damn, that's so clean. Insane Okita ko... Really dope run, i'm glad that the little guide i made inspired more runs.

[@MegamanStarforce2010]

that -37s on Okita was next level. that was awesome, great stuff!

[@raphaeentilea8556]

Awesome 😍💋 💝💖♥️❤️

[@clunt4095]

whats the current record

[@hudson2228]

Current record is 8:19 by TheTrueCorrectGuy/KevTy Gaming. Here’s the leaderboards www.speedrun.com/hajime_no_ippo_the_fighting_gba And here’s the video kzbin.info/www/bejne/l6KkoX2gl8udo9k