Hajime Rising Willpower Guide: Earn It by Winning Ranked

Willpower in Hajime Rising is the one stat you cannot raise at the gym. The game’s own description says it plainly: earned by winning ranked fights, not trained, and it uses no stat points. No machine, no trainer, and no piece of gear moves it — the only documented input is a win in the ranked queue inside the Tokyo Dome, as of November 2026.

What Willpower is and what it is not

Willpower is a character stat that sits outside the game’s entire training economy. Almost every other number on your boxer climbs because you spend something on it: time on gym equipment, stat points from progression, or both. Willpower ignores all of those channels. You do not train it, you never allocate points into it, and no gear raises it.

The in-game text is unusually direct about this, and community guides keep repeating it because players keep looking for a shortcut that is not there. If you open the gym hunting for a Willpower station, you will not find one. If you are banking stat points for a later dump into Willpower, they will sit there forever.

That makes Willpower closer to a trophy case than a muscle: it is a record of what you have done in the ring, not something you can front-load before you ever queue.

The only way to earn Willpower: win ranked fights

The single path to higher Willpower is winning ranked matches. Win a ranked fight and the stat goes up; that is the entire mechanic. Available sources describe no other way to earn it, and they do not document whether a loss subtracts anything — only that wins are what count.

Because the ranked queue lives in the Tokyo Dome complex, Willpower effectively mirrors your competitive record. Players who want the stat higher have exactly one lever, and it is the same lever every time: walk into the dome, queue, and win. There is no gym routine to optimize and no gear to farm first, which is why the stat doubles as proof that the wins actually happened.

Getting into ranked in the first place

Since Willpower begins and ends with ranked wins, the practical question is how to queue. Ranked is not offered at the gym — it lives in the Tokyo Dome, a walk-in complex sitting past the noodle shop and hospital scenery outside the gym. Step through its entrance and you can start playing ranked immediately, with no level or stat requirement mentioned in available sources.

We map the full route, landmark by landmark, in the guide to queueing ranked. Once the walk is familiar, the loop is short: queue inside the dome, win, and watch Willpower climb.

Willpower, Courage, and Bloodthirst

Community walkthroughs note that the same interface lists two other entries — Courage and Bloodthirst — alongside Willpower (unverified). What either of those does, and whether they follow Willpower’s earn-only rule, is not documented in the sources behind this article. Treat the trio as related on screen but unexplained for now, and do not spend currency or points chasing Courage or Bloodthirst on Willpower’s behalf.

Common Willpower mistakes to avoid

• Grinding the gym for Willpower. No piece of gym equipment raises this stat. Hours on the machines move your trainable stats and nothing else, so a Willpower session at the gym is always a wasted one.
• Hoarding stat points. Willpower uses no stat points, so there is nothing to allocate into it later. Spend points on the stats and skill-tree nodes that actually accept them — the skill tree guide covers where those points go.
• Waiting for the right gear. No gear trains Willpower either, so there is no equipment checklist to complete before the stat starts growing.
• Queuing ranked without fundamentals. Since Willpower only moves on wins, queueing with shaky basics just feeds losses. The beginner guide is the fastest refresher before you commit.