Nintendo, especially during and after the DS and Wii eras of their history, has proved to be fiercely committed to its casual "quality of life" franchises. Many of its most notable examples include titles like Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day!, Wii Fit, Ring Fit Adventures, and most recently, the first two games of the Fitness Boxing franchise. Now, Fitness Boxing will have a better chance to reach a wider audience, as the game has been announced to be getting an anime adaptation that will follow the lives of the games' various fitness trainers.
The first Fitness Boxing game was released for the Nintendo Switch on January 4th, 2019, with its sequel, Fitness Boxing 2: Rhythm & Exercise releasing on December 4th, 2020. The game tasks players with utilizing the joycons' motion controls to match a series of boxing rhythms, an activity that provides players with an excellent workout. The games allow players to customize which boxing trainer they work out with and exercise to hit songs by notable Pop and Electronic musicians such as Katy Perry and Swedish House Mafia. Both games have enjoyed good sales and hold a mixed-to-positive score of 66/100 on the review aggregate website Metacritic.
The anime will be created by the game's Tokyo-based developer Imagineer, with Jumpei & Morita, director of the musical anime Lost Song (one of many anime series available on Netflix), having been announced as the writer and director. The series has announced its voice cast and will be airing on Japanese television at an unannounced time, with no word on whether the anime will be released in America at this time.
Fitness Boxing is far from the only video game to receive an anime adaptation as of late. One recent anime was adapted from the Bandai Namco action-RPG Scarlet Nexus, with another anime, Dragon Quest: The Adventures of Dai, acting as a spin-off of Square Enix's legendary eponymous RPG franchise. Iterations of the Persona games continue to be adapted into anime series, as do a slew of Japanese mobile games, while the ongoing Pokemon anime continues to be one of the most successful animated series in the world.
Fitness Boxing is an odd choice for an anime adaptation, but with different kinds of anime managing to find audiences as of late, it seems like the series just might be able to punch its way into the anime community's watchlists.
The Fitness Boxing series is currently in production.
Source: Imagineer