Punch Out as a series has been around for over 40 years, being older than other well-established franchises like Zelda, Metroid, and Fire Emblem. It’s a simple series all about boxing, but your opponents run the gambit from generic foreign fighters, to magic teleporters, to slagging cheating Irishmen, to 80s cultural icons like Mike Tyson and Donkey Kong. Rules and regulations are also a bit more flexible here than your average boxing tournament, and thank god because otherwise it wouldn’t be as much fun.
The franchise has always relied on simple controls and a large amount of challenge to keep players hooked. You can punch, dodge, and block… and not much else. And yet you have to take on the world, against increasingly hard yet still charming opponents one at a time. It’s no wonder that there’s a good number of gamers who compare this series to Dark Souls. Even Masahiro Sakurai alluded as such when he talked about the essence of action games on his YouTube channel.
As of now, the Punch Out series has six mainline games (including the Doc Louis one) and one spinoff, that being 1985’s Arm Wrestling. And believe it or not, but the vast majority of the series is available right now on Switch! You got the two arcade originals via Arcade Archives, and the NES and SNES games with a base Switch Online membership. Other than that though, Punch Out on Switch has mainly been relegated to cameos in other games, like Super Smash Bros Ultimate, WarioWare Move It, and Luigi’s Mansion 3. Punch Out even got a bit of a spotlight in the Super Mario Movie, which prominently features the Punch Out Pizzeria as a key location in Brooklyn.
Personally speaking, I adored the Wii game even though I only played it for the first time last year. And going back and trying out the NES and SNES games was a pleasant surprise. But I’m pretty sure Nintendo lowkey thought ARMS was gonna take off as their next premiere first party boxing game, which it didn’t. As for the future of the franchise, I’m not sure what else can be done that the Wii game didn’t already refine to near-perfection, aside from new boxers to take on. The series’s identity is also entrenched in cultural stereotypes, much like Street Fighter, but I personally never found any of them offensive or derisive. Maybe they could finally add Princess Peach as an opponent like they originally planned to but scrapped for obvious reasons.
But what about you all? What do you think could be done with a brand new Punch Out game? Did you ever play the 80s and 90s ones, and how do you feel about Little Mac’s inclusion in Smash Bros?
by Asad_Farooqui