So brief summary first:
Hajime No Ippo is a story about named Ippo, a poor high school boy who got bullied in school until
he got saved by a boxer named Takamura. after this encounter he started boxing and worked hard at it until he became Japanese champion and then a contender for the world title. He met plenty of talented people along the way including his rival Miyata and plenty of other boxers. in the most recent arc he has retired but I'm guessing he will be back sooner or later.

anyways lets start with the review.

I really like Hajime No Ippo, I have reread the series 3 times now. yes, I have reread Hajime no Ippo 3 times, the manga with 1100+ chapters. The story of Ippo and his hard work really hits some string in my heart because
I never get tired of it. seeing him exhausted, beat up and looks like about to die every time he has a harsh training
session before his fights really inspires me and makes me feel excited like a kid. the funnier part is that no
matter how beat up he looks before a match, he always somehow ends up being more beat up after. Every match is a treat as you can see visually his growth as a reader even if you weren't a boxer yourself. You can understand how little by little he solves his weakness with training and willpower. every match you see him learn something, and every match you see results from his training. Its a well deserved power-up every time he does have one.

he relationship between Ippo, his coach and Takamura also makes me extremely fulfilled(?). Coach Kamogawa's goal is to train a world champion class boxer with the same ideals as him. it was a promise to his childhood sweetheart. And in the manga he already achieved training world champion class boxer, even beyond that as the boxer has conquered weight class over weight class. this boxer is Takamura, the monster of Japan. But no matter how much Takamura succeeds, coach Kamogawa really cant admit from the bottom of his heart that Takamura is a world champion because of him and his ideals. This is due to Takamura being a genius physically and mentally in terms of fighting. He believes that any coach with some skill could have made Takamura a world champion as he was
a bonafide monster.

this is where Ippo comes in the relationship, Ippo had 0 talent to fighting other than his physique which he built from
carrying heavy objects and helping out his mom in the fish shop. He was bullied since he was a child and never even had a brawl with anyone until much later. Basically he was similar to Kamogawa when he was young. so from the ground up, coach Kamogawa built Ippo's boxing knowledge, instinct, arm strength, strategy, everything. But the most important thing that he taught was spirit, the spirit to never give up. And once Ippo soaked all his teaching like a sponge, he became a well-oiled machine made by coach Kamogawa, a spitting image of the coach himself. With Ippo, the coach sees a world champion with his ideals, someone who he can confidently tell his dead childhood sweetheart that his ideals conquered the world. But that dream was shattered as Ippo was broken down by the rank 2 of the world, the gatekeeper to Ricardo the world featherweight champion. this was the point where he retired, after building so much damage mentally and physically, his body couldn't keep up anymore and was close to being diagnosed punch drunk. a dangerous state for all boxers. of course coach Kamogawa blames himself for this because he was the one who taught him to win like that, he was the one who taught Ippo to destroy his body by persevering with spirit even if his body wont listen.

Takamura knows how broken hearted Kamogawa was, but he has complex feelings about it. He said in his heart that he was still there to fulfill his dreams. he was still there to show the coach what its like to be at the top. he doesn't despise Ippo as all boxers careers must come to an end at some point, but he has complex feelings about the situation with coach and Ippo, jealousy and spite maybe. but one things for sure, he is destroying his body and eye to conquer even more world championships, he promised to the coach that he will conquer every weight class from middleweight to heavyweight. and he promised he will do it before he passed away. so even though his right eye is slowly getting more and more blind, even though this can lead to him dying. he uses the spirit he was taught to persevere and win world championship matches with his right almost half blind. again he doesn't despise Ippo, but seeing as he is working himself to death as one of the students of coach, seeing the other student retire because of being afraid to accumulate even more damage makes him feel betrayed. the feeling even gets worse when he saw the coach have such a sad facial expression when Ippo was knocked down at the gates of world champion.

the comedy and side characters are also amazing. Side characters are fleshed out pretty well, and they also get dropped whenever needed. other sports manga's I have read always wants to force side characters that they fleshed out a lot to stay in the series because of their popularity, but not Hajime no Ippo. the author isn't afraid to even retire THE MAIN CHARACTER from boxing !! it has been almost 50+ chapters of Ippo being retired. and popular side characters like Sendo, Mashiba, Miyata and others are being left out from entire volumes sometimes.
but they somehow still maintain their popularity. I love Mashiba and Itagaki the most of any side character in the story. Mashiba is just walking comedy at this point since I always laugh out loud whenever he is the focus. I find Itagaki cool because he is the complete opposite of Ippo. Ippo is an untalented boxer who worked harder and harder to win against those who have talent, Itagaki on the other hand is the pinnacle of talent in japan and tries to bring out more and more of his innate skill to win matches. every time he fights he taps in more and more of his potential, but this leads to him being conceited, thinking he can handle Ippo already and become the next Japanese champion immediately. but he was crushed by his rival at the Japanese belt match, humbling him once again.

I made this review the 3rd time I reread this series, I'm posting this review because I'm rereading it again ehe