Video Game / Punch Club

Punch Club is a boxing tycoon management game with multiple branching story lines. The game was released on 8 Jan, 2016, developed by Lazy Bear Games, and published by tinyBuild. A sequel, Punch Club 2: Fast Forward was released on July 20, 2023.

Your father was brutally murdered before your eyes. Now you must train hard, eat chicken, and punch dudes in the face to discover who ended your father's life.

Tropes:

• 11th-Hour Superpower: In Punch Club 2, getting into Upper City not only allows you to use any unlockable combat skill in the game without any tonus costs but also allows you to freely redistribute your stats.
• The Aggressive Drug Dealer: The Professor, who offers you "Potions" that massively boost your stats for a few days but become way more expensive after the first use. If you go long enough without buying The Professor slashes his prices because you are his only customer. This can be exploited by using a potion to boost your stat high enough to buy one of the skills that keeps the stat above a minimum, letting you keep most of the benefits when the potion expires.
• Ancient Order of Protectors: It turns out that your father and his three best friends are merely the modern guardians of the medallion, which has been protected for millennia.
• Artistic License – Medicine: Somehow, acupuncture is capable of immediately treating broken bones and concussions.
  • The sequel's version has an ancient shaman play a musical pipe to help treat a neurologically overloaded brain from the player using the extreme neurotraining program in Silver's Gym. Additionally, the shaman also makes green tea to lower the toxic side effects of drinking the stat potions.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Watching VHS tapes in the sequel will provide you with a wide array of improvements but only a few of them will remain useful by the end of the game, with most of them either being rendered obsolete by newer things such as equipment or having such insignificant improvements that they are barely worth taking in the first place.
• Beastly Bloodsports: In the pro fighter route, your last training opponent before fighting Ivangief is a bear.
• Big Fancy House: If you become a pro fighter, you move in with your promoter, who lives in one. It's got a home gym better than your old one and the cook serves fancy food.
  • In the sequel, you can get a luxurious apartment while being employed by the police force.
• Bland-Name Product: Your primary training grounds for most of the game will likely be Silver's Gym. There are also posters on various walls for the movies "Stoney" and "Sportsport."
• Boring, but Practical:
  • In Punch Club 2 Double Inhale and Qi Concentration are this, being unimpressive attack skills that recover extra stamina instead of doing any real attacks, but they allow you to avoid a lot of trouble that stems from lack of stamina, keeping the character far longer in the ring.
  • Making a Jack of All Trades build in the sequel will put the strongest skills of each Path out of your reach but you'll have a selection of skills that can tackle almost every enemy in the game with some ease by countering their fighting styles, as well as well-rounded stats that make you a Lightning Bruiser.
  • Also in the sequel, zero-tonus attacks. Early, basic moves that lack the power or special abilities of more advanced techniques. But, since you're not spending tonus, your fighting doesn't slow down your training, thus allowing you to push your stats higher, faster. And if you've got a wall of high stats, you don't need the more advanced techniques.
  • Fighting below your level in the pro league. You're pretty much guaranteed to win (and you've probably already fought your chosen adversary before and know how to), but at the cost of gaining fewer GPPs. But you can get a decent amount of GPP through hacking anyway, and fighting below your level earns money quicker than anything else, allowing you to spend more time and money on training.
• Butt-Monkey: Silver in the sequel becomes one eventually after finishing the Silver League, as his sidequests start involving embarrassing things such as walking around the city with his fitness tracker to make him look athletic, and clamors for the player character's friendship to little avail. He also tries to pretend that Gold (who looks like the Shredder) is a different person. He eventually becomes one of the enemies you have to fight in Upper City.
• Casualty in the Ring: In the pro fighter route, Roy takes your place in the international tournament and then Ivangief kills him in the ring.
  • In the second game's final fighting league, an ordinary fighter gets incapacitated by The Food Poisoning Incident when the player is matched with him.
• Chekhov's Gunman: In Punch Club 2 some characters turn out to have far bigger roles in the plot than previously assumed such as K, who is more than just a Blade Runner reference and shares the same name as sci-fi novelist Philip K. Dick.
• Les Collaborateurs:
  • Silver has capitalized on the Good Corporation's rule. Their logo is flashing on his gym along with exhortations to "Be strong! Be good!", and he provides access to high-tech neurotraining equipment to hyper-accelerate his clients' path to strength...for a price.
  • The criminal gangs (The Mafiya, the Yakuza and Bobo's gang) are all working for the Good Corporation as well.
• Critical Existence Failure: Until you get down to 0 HP, you're still just as fearsome as you were when you started a fight.
  • Averted for the final boss in the sequel, whose moveset starts including useless skills as it takes damage.
• Cutting Off the Branches: The sequel assumes that the player made the following choices in the first game: The Hero took the Pro Fighter route; entered a relationship with Adrian; and completed the Dark Fist content.
• Demoted to Extra: The Punch Club is mentioned in 2, but only that, and only if you run the gym.
• Denser and Wackier: The core game doesn't take itself too seriously, but its plot is still generally in the boxing and martial arts genres, and most of the supernatural elements (like the medallion) fit into the latter (aside from Time Travel). The Dark Fist plotline is a superhero plot that goes into full-on parody. The sequel takes a lot of further steps by setting it in a Cyberpunk setting.
• Disappeared Dad: By the events of the second game, the main hero has disappeared without explanation after the events of the first game's final battle. Adrian becomes pregnant with his son and raises him until she deteriorates from an unspecified health issue. For all she knew, the hero abandoned them.
• The Dog Was the Mastermind:
  • The Dark Fist quest line, in which you become a superhero, ends with the revelation that the evil Mastermind is your cat Fluffy, making this a near-literal example. After becoming empowered by your father's medallion, and resentful of the player for never feeding him properly, he set up a world-conquering scheme, even faking his own death when you started interfering. You stop him by telling him off, rubbing his nose in his weapon of mass destruction, telling him not to try taking over the world, and then taking him home.
  • By the time the sequel happens, Fluffy is revealed as the Big Bad of the story, responsible for kidnapping the hero, implanting chips into everyone including Adrian, starting a nuclear holocaust and creating a dystopian city over the course of twenty years. Fluffy also gets the same treatment after being defeated by the Hero's son.
• Do Well, But Not Perfect: You need to get your ass kicked a couple of times in both the Rookie League and the Ultimate Fighting League if you want to unlock important powerups. For the Rookie League, a couple of losses will let you take magic...er, SCIENCE! potions. The Ultimate Fighting League is where you can get injured in a fight, which gets you sent to the acupuncturist.
• Dump Stat: In the game, you have three special skill trees to work with, with each one of them having its own dump stats.
  • Way of the Bear requires high Strength and is all about hard hitting strikes while sacrificing Agility, meaning you'll whiff a lot of attacks which suck up energy.
  • Way of the Tiger requires high Agility and is all about hitting people hard and often and dodging blows, though you'll sacrifice Stamina in your fights.
  • Way of the Turtle requires high Stamina and is all about being a tank, making people wear themselves out trying to take you down, though you'll also have to sacrifice Strength.
• Early Game Hell: The time and money management is hardest in the beginning, when you have no stats to speak of and barely any money, and have to balance work, training, eating and sleeping, dealing with severe money sinks and stat decay. As you advance, you get more tools for making money and keeping your stats and meters up, allowing you to focus on kicking ass. The fights do get harder, but you'll be harder too unless you're playing Hardcore Mode. For the sequel, the stat decay has been excised, but special movesets consume Tonus, which can only be restored by working out.
• Experience Booster: Training with Roy increase your training effectiveness.
  • Installing Silver's Neurotraining program will increase the effectiveness of neurotraining at the cost of regular physical training, and the opposite can be true for the Workout Booster.
• Experience Penalty: Staying on one exercise for too long eventually reduces the gains you get from it.
  • Relying on extreme neurotraining will overload your brain, which decreases the amount of experience points you gain from using them while in that condition. Curing the overload via a shaman or letting time pass will let things go back to normal.
• Expy: Damn near every NPC you meet, from the Indian convenience store clerk to an old retired fighter named Mick and a love interest named Adrian, to sewer-dwelling mutant reptiles.
• Extremity Extremist: Choosing the Way of the Tiger pushes you toward a kick-based fighting style, while Way of the Bear focuses on punches.
• The Faceless: Frank, who introduces you to the very basics of the game, only appears as a voice on the other end of a phone call.
• Failure Is the Only Option: In the sequel, the protagonist catches his mother having an affair with the local shopkeeper Apu and confronts him about it in his own store. This results in his younger brother Jai stepping in to defend his older sibling who proves to be tougher than most of the fighters in the game, regenerating ridiculous amounts of health and energy between rounds on top of having stats that are practically guaranteed to far exceed your own even in the late game, and will flatten you quite handily; luckily the story still progresses even if you lose. Slightly downplayed as some stubborn players have found ways to beat Jai and the devs later added in secret dialogue for such a situation.
• Forced Level-Grinding: This game requires lots of grinding to get strong enough to take down the next opponent.
• Fragile Speedster: The Way of the Tiger can be played this way, specializing in Agility and Strength over Stamina.
• Gainax Ending:
  • After hard training and fighting your way to the top (either professionally or illegally), you head to a secret island for the Man in Black's tournament. The result of this tournament has no effect on anything but two lines of dialogue, and then you confront the Man in Black, who reveals that he is your father. Yep your father's killer is your father; he traveled back in time, killed his past self, and stole the medallion so he could destroy it. This is because, in the original timeline, splitting the medallion in half so both his sons could use its power led to one piece becoming cursed, driving one of you insane (he doesn't tell you which), and then the insane one killed the other one and became a crime lord who somehow turned the city into an apocalyptic wasteland. Nothing else is explained, no one reacts, asks questions or says anything else. You merely get to walk around for a few more seconds before the credits roll.
  • The sequel carries on with this tradition. The hero's son defeats Fluffy and attempts to free his father, but doing so triggers a self-destruct countdown. A group of aliens resembling E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial arrived in Earth's orbit to gather Earth's champion for an intergalactic tournament only to beam everyone aboard their ship after learning what has transpired.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • If you take the Pro Fighter route, you break your leg before the tournament with Ivangief, and there's no option to fight on the broken leg or go have the acupuncturist fix it.
  • As a pro fighter, your promoter says you'll be charged for the house's food, but you're not. Presumably, he's just deducting it from your merch sales.
  • In the second game, the player character cannot pay for Adrian's hospital bill unless he permanently joins the police force or becomes a gym teacher, even if he has enough money beforehand from working multiple jobs.
• Generation Xerox: In the first Punch Club game, the player character wants to avenge his father's murder and goes through a series of fights to solve the mystery. By the time the sequel comes along, the player controls the character's SON, who wants to investigate his father's disappearance and goes through a series of fights to solve the mystery.
• Glass Cannon: One of the final talents learned from the Way of the Bear disables all your block, dodge, and counter skills, in exchange for a massive boost in power.
• Hello, [Insert Name Here]: You choose the name of the first game's protagonist at the start of a run.
• Inevitable Tournament:
  • The rookie league, underground ultimate fighting, the bar parking lot brawls, the pro league, this game has quite a few.
  • The sequel also has a twisted version of this, where becoming a champion allows the victor to reach the upper city limits.
• Instant Home Delivery: Anything you buy from Apu goes immediately into your fridge at home.
• Jack of All Trades: Your initial skill selection gives equal focus to all stats, before you reach the advanced "Way" trees and have to pick one to specialize in.
• Joke Item: The "LoL KeK" software in the sequel is a pretty literal example as it gives out a joke every morning. The jokes are typically so bad that they raise the protagonist's rage meter.
• Killed Offscreen: In the gangster path, Roy's gone by the time you're released from prison, with Adrian just saying that his love for underground fighting went too far.
  • In the second game, Mick suffers this fate during the twenty year gap between games and is forced to become a digital hologram. Additionally, La Résistance operative Juliet suffers the same fate during the second act.
• Level Scaling: Hard difficulty adds this to your opponents for the first game.
• Lightning Bruiser: The Way of the Turtle requires high Stamina to soak up damage (and to unlock in the first place), but Strength and Agility have to be balanced as well. A badly-trained fighter is nothing but a Stone Wall with weak strikes or Powerful, but Inaccurate ones, and that doesn't win fights. A well-trained Turtle is a solid meat shield plus a nastier slugger than the average fighter following the Way of the Bear, with hard-ass strikes that hit consistently even against a fighter focused on dodging like someone in the Way of the Tiger. Not only that, the Turtle controls the energy battle, letting the enemy tire out while you keep your breath by blocking and sometimes retaliating, and then knocking him down repeatedly. The problem is that, since you have to keep all the stats high, training time becomes a grindfest later on.
• Limited Wardrobe:
  • You only wear a yellow T-shirt with an indistinct pattern and red gym shorts. Unless you shuck your shirt while at the gym or at home. In some cutscenes, though, you have other clothes.
  • In the sequel, you carry a similar tradition, with your character (the first's son) wearing a blue-green t-shirt with the Roman Numeral II on it.
• Luke, I Am Your Father:
  • In the original game, Red Eye is actually your dad, but from a different timeline than your dead dad.
  • In the events of the sequel, the leader of La Résistance turns out to be the hero's brother (in this case, the player character's uncle), revealing himself to the player towards the end of the game.
• MacGuffin: Getting back your father's medallion drives most of the plot, even before you learn of its power.
• Magikarp Power: Endurance, and its specialization, the Way of the Turtle. You'll have a fairly boring early game, with drawn out fights, but once you reach the end of its perk tree? You'll have abilities that allow you to cut off energy regeneration for both you and your opponents, except you will have abilities that reduce energy cost, cost nothing, or straight up allow you to steal that of your opponents. Strength based opponents will melt through their energy bars quickly, whereas agility ones will find themselves unable to get through your guard. This means that, once the opponent's stamina is drained, a Turtle build will just knock them down over and over again until they don't get back up.
• Mighty Glacier: The Way of the Bear, the Strength-focused path on the protagonist's skill tree, is all about this: forget agility, just hit hard and be ready to take it just as hard.
• Might Makes Right: The Good Corporation defines "good" as "strong." A Good Person is someone who wins fights and earns Good Person Points. Arguments are settled by fighting, and the one who wins is clearly right. Mick tries to avert this, favoring a moral system where the strong use their strength to protect the weak; he calls this Old School Respect. Unfortunately, if you want to champion Old School Respect, you've got to do it by the Good Corporation's rules.
• Mind-Control Device: Played for Laughs with the holochips in the sequel, which the cops barely make any attempt to sugarcoat when they implant the protagonist with one near the beginning of the game. It's Played for Drama afterwards as it really is used for sinister mind control from time to time, including Adrian's illness and her disdain towards the hero in the game, and the holographic people created out of their memory banks are loyal to the Corporations regardless of their previous affiliations.
• Mugging the Monster: If your stats are below a certain threshold and you walk between areas with at least $150 in your pockets, you have a chance to encounter a mugger. You can choose to fight and, if you're strong enough, flatten him.
• Nobody Poops: You can chow down on all the steak, pizza, coffee, and energy drinks you want, because you never need a bathroom.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: In addition to various fictional characters, a few celebrity fighters were mixed in, some which include Bruce Lee as Mighty Bruce, Don "The Dragon" Wilson as "Dragon Ray", and Hulk Hogan as Kulk Kogan. Additionally, characters resembling certain figures show up as an NPC, including Don King as Din Kong the boxing promoter, Steven Seagal as a former sailor turned pizza chef named Casey, and Marlon Brando as a mafia leader named Don.
• Non-Action Big Bad: The Man in Black; rather than fighting you himself, he sets up a tournament with his own champion.
• No Stat Atrophy: Averted. At the end of each day, you lose some points from each stat, but there are perks in the skill tree that prevent stats from dropping below certain levels. This later applies to the sequel after numerous complaints about the mechanic.
• One Nation Under Copyright: The City is governed by the Good Corporation.
• One Stat to Rule Them All: In the original version of the game, Agility was this, as consistently hitting your opponent was more important than hitting them harder but less often, and Way of the Tiger ignored Strength entirely by doing damage based on Agility instead. Given that Agility also influenced your ability to dodge attacks entirely (and therefore negate damage), making a build with anything other than Agility was essentially taking the much more difficult road. Later updates to the game balanced things out a bit more by making Strength more consistently useful, but Stamina is now the dump stat, better in a secondary role (to increase HP and Endurance) instead of a primary role (focusing on letting opponents wear themselves down by punching you in the face).
• Peace & Love Incorporated: The Good Corporation! Surely they couldn't be up to anything nefarious. However, it quickly becomes apparent that they're only "good" because they've redefined morality to suit their own ends.
• Percussive Maintenance: You help "fix" the engine of Roy's truck by bashing it with a sledgehammer.
• Power-Up Food: After losing two rookie league matches, Silver sends you to the Professor for a more artificial means of strengthening yourself. Professor sells "potions" that boost one of your stats by two for a couple of days.
• Rags to Riches: Zig-zagged. By the time the player gets to the endgame, the hero could be moderately rich either as a gangster or as a star fighter.
• Riches to Rags: Played straight in the sequel. During the twenty-year time gap, Adrian becomes pregnant with the hero's son, and is forced to raise him alone. By the time the sequel starts, they are living back in the hero's old house.
• Self-Deprecation: One short plotline in Punch Club 2 involves a man in a cardboard suit with no movement animations whatsoever, which eventually results in nearby characters taking jabs at the developers themselves.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: The Man in Black/your alternate-timeline father's motivation for killing his past self and stealing the medallion.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: The ending reveals that the Man in Black, who killed your father, also is your father. The quest to avenge your father and recover the medallion was ultimately pointless.
• Shout-Out: The game is filled with references to other media, such as the protagonist's friend suffering a fatal wound from Ivangief, or the local pizza place making special deliveries to Mutant Ninja Alligators and their Raccoon Master.
  • The sequel is so packed with references that it's hard to not go for more than an area or two without seeing any.
    • Every classic movie on a tape is an Expy of a real movie.
    • There are numerous references to Fallout including a Brotherhood of Steel graffiti and a power armor helmet in the Sewers. One flashback shows the protagonist's uncle walking into the desert like the Vault Dweller.
    • Bobo's appearance is similar to Baron Harkonnen's and one of the items he sells is "Slime Melange".
    • Bender can be seen in the protagonist's garage in a box.
• Sibling Rivalry: The protagonist has a brother, but in the pro fighter path, rather than working together to solve your father's murder, he wants to do it all himself and prove he's the rightful inheritor of the medallion.
• Spoiler Cover: Fluffy the Cat is seen piloting a cybernetic mech on promotional materials for the sequel, revealing his status as The Big Bad.
• Stat Meters: Along with Experience Meters for Strength, Agility, and Stamina, and the health and energy meters in fights, you have meters representing your life (which affects your health in fights), food (which goes down with any activity), motivation (which affects the effectiveness of training), and energy (sleep or consume certain foods to regain it).
• Story Branching: There are two ways to gain access to the Man in Black's tournament: by becoming a professional fighter, or by allying with the local Don and winning the gang wars. The path taken also changes the final opponent in said tournament, as it's Sub-273 for the latter and your brother for the former, though the ending is the same.
  • The sequel has the player join either the police force or running Mick's gym while fighting through the tournament.
• Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: Zig-Zagged.
  • The main martial art paths in Punch Club 2 have different strengths and weaknesses that make them stronger against other Paths but each Path has two specializations that are useful against specific Paths.
  • In Punch Club 2 the final boss is this, being an ultimate fighting robot with three different phases, each being dedicated to one Path, requiring you to exploit a weakness of that Path using a variety of skills from different Paths.
    • The first phase has it emulate the Path of the Angry Tortoise, boasting an enormous energy pool and nearly-impassable blocks. You can bypass it by using modifiers that ignore some of the block's damage reduction, dealing damage directly to its comparatively less impressive health pool. Alternately, a Counter-Attack-heavy style won't give it a chance to block.
    • The second phase has it emulate the Path of the Lazy Bear, ending up with a massive health pool and hard-hitting attacks, but it makes no effort at defense whatsoever other than reflecting some damage back. With enough dodging as well as increased damage against targets that don't defend themselves you can shred its health down.
    • The third phase has it emulate the Path of the Dancing Monkey, with nearly-unblockable and nearly-undodgeable attacks as well as being almost impossible to hit and having an immense amount of initiative. Each of its dodges shaves away a considerable amount of initiative, allowing a stamina-heavy fighter to constantly use low-energy attacks to the point the robot can barely act until it exhausts itself.
• Timed Mission: Three achievements require you to reach the ending in under three hundred, two hundred, or one hundred in-game days. This is later dropped in the sequel.
• Title Drop: "Punch Club" is what your father called his incarnation of the Ancient Order of Protectors.
• To Be Continued: Stated at the very end of the credits, after the Gainax Ending. The sequel also carried this tradition.
• Training Montage: You can make your own at almost any time.
• Trapped by Gambling Debts: Silver had to hand over the magical amulet to the Don to cover his gambling losses.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable: It's possible to lock yourself into a situation where you have no money, energy or food, and you've already used up Mick's free meals, so you can't sleep or get a job to feed yourself. If you do this before you unlock the bar, you can't dumpster dive for a free burger, so restarting is your only option. This is patched in the second game by Clippy overtly cheating if you get yourself into a situation with no money and no food.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: By the end of the sequel, no resolution is ever given about the rest of the cast of characters. Is Adrian dead or alive after being kidnapped? Did Red Eye get erased from existence when Fluffy kidnapped The Hero at the end of the first game? Did K die during his last stand?
• You Killed My Father: The game opens with the protagonist's father being shot and killed by the mysterious man in black so he can takes your father's enchanted medallion.

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