PSP · ULJS-00125 · English fan translation · v1.0.1

Hajime no Ippo
Victorious Spirits

Play the whole PSP game in English: the story mode that follows the manga from Ippo's first steps at Kamogawa Gym, every menu, every boxer, and the arenas themselves. It ships as a small patch you apply to your own copy of the Japanese game.

35Story chapters

3,491Lines of text

83Redrawn graphics

818 KBPatch size

Download Get the latest release on GitHub: the .xdelta patch, README.txt and TESTING.txt. The patch contains no game data. You need your own copy of the original Japanese UMD/ISO.

The card What's translated

Story Mode1,968 scenes

All 35 chapters of dialogue and narration. Speaker names, page breaks and text boxes are laid out to fit the game's three-line window, with no lines cut off or running past the box.

Menus & helpEvery screen

Main menu, Exhibition, Practice, Replay, Data Book, Options and save/load messages, including the scrolling help line at the bottom of each screen.

In-game text1,011 strings

Boxer names and character versions ("Takamura (World Title Challenge)"), special moves, venues, rules, results, money, items, trophies and trunks.

Boxer roster~140 real pros

The licensed roster of real Japanese boxers from 2006, with their gyms and fighting-style notes: Hozumi Hasegawa, Daisuke Naito, Nobuo Nashiro, Eagle Kyowa and the rest.

Graphics39 labels

Screen titles, the Save/Load screen, main menu buttons, Exhibition setting labels and ranking headers, redrawn in the original colors with the same outline and glow.

Arenas44 textures

Ringside scoreboards (RED CORNER / ROUND / TIME / BLUE CORNER), tournament banners like Dynamite Glove, Champion Carnival and the Rookie King finals, and the fans' cheering banners.

In the corner Translation notes

Names follow the official English

Characters, techniques and places use the spellings fans know from the English manga and anime: Ippo Makunouchi, Mamoru Takamura, Volg Zangief, Jimmy Sisphar, the Dempsey Roll.

Dialects read as personality

Sendo's Osaka swagger, Take's Kyushu warmth and Volg's careful, polite Japanese come through in word choice and rhythm, not phonetic spelling.

"Wh-what?! Makunouchi's withdrawing?! That's the dumbest thing I ever heard!" (Sendo)

Boxing terms are real boxing terms

Infighter, outboxer, boxer-puncher, knockdowns, the final bell, OPBF. Weight classes and "Rookie King" match the series' English usage.

Fitted to the screen

Long names were shortened only where a box is narrow, such as the venue cards ("Osaka Pref. Gym", "Korakuen Final") and trophy names.

Under the hood For ROM hackers

Story scenes are rebuilt with a larger text capacity (a small code patch), so English never overflows the game's scene buffer.
Executable strings that outgrew their slots are moved to a new area of memory and every pointer to them is updated. Nothing else in the program moves.
Menu widgets that show values at runtime get more room, padded invisibly, so names and help lines display in full.
Graphics are edited in the game's own texture format with the original palette, so every pixel outside the redrawn text is unchanged.
The game's internal file table is updated for every changed file, and each build is checked file by file against the original.

Patching About two minutes

Download Delta Patcher and the .xdelta file from the release.
Make a copy of your Japanese ISO. Delta Patcher changes the file you pick, so patch the copy and keep the original safe.
Open Delta Patcher. Next to Original file, click the folder icon and choose the copy. Next to XDelta patch, choose the .xdelta file.
Click Apply patch and wait a few seconds for the success message. The copy is now the English game; rename it if you like.
Play it in PPSSPP, or on a PSP with custom firmware. If Delta Patcher reports an error, your ISO is a different dump: its SHA-1 must match the one below.

Original ISO SHA-1 6DF763C67265B65CABE00AD7CC396AA5109CB03D

Patched ISO SHA-1 (v1.0.1) 0E2D7B259E3C796BCF784CDFFC226717B211FE1A

Known limits Small print

41 lesser-known roster boxers have no public record of how their names are read. They use the most likely reading; corrections are welcome.
The tiny sponsor print under the arena banners, the title logo, one promotional picture and the kanji drawn into the Game Over artwork stay in Japanese.
Wireless (ad hoc) play hasn't been tested.

Found something? Reports

Open an issue on the GitHub page with a screenshot and say where you were: the mode, story chapter or menu screen. Bad lines, cut-off text, leftover Japanese and wrong names all get fixed in the next update. A checklist for testers comes with the patch (TESTING.txt).