dawho5

After watching a few DBS Jr. matches, he seems to need a Honma or Tanahashi around to put on his better matches. He's a passable power wrestler, but unless he's got somebody playing a good victim he's average at best. Shibata's tendency to sprint from corner to corner until he hits his corner dropkick is really annoying. The counters all seem the same from whoever he wrestles and it's at least one, sometimes two teases with no real change to the setup. Not a fan of Nakamura's mannerisms, and he seems to have lost some of the offense I liked with the gimmick change from the mid to late 2000s.

I've seen a few times where Kyohei Wada Wada will refuse to count until the wrestler's shoulders are down. I always think it's a good thing due to him actually seeing what he's supposed to be seeing as the referee in the match.

If you're looking for Japanese guys who do that, Marufuji's early years have some good examples of that kind of bumping. He's doing flips off of lariats and flying around like a madman for bigger guys. Also, I always loved how Daisuke Ikeda would kick the shit out of Otsuka or Ishikawa only to take every suplex they ever did on his head and neck just to give something back to the de-facto faces. Ikeda was always a really good heel.

On rewatch this actually climbed a bit on my ballot. It helped that I had watched the 2002 match the day before. They play off of the fact that they had just beat each other up last time and both take a strategy of wearing the other guy down with holds and basic wrestling rather than subject themselves to the same beating they got last time. Then things escalate and they get right back to it. And they do a nice callback to the match from 2 years earlier with a NLB nearfall complete with late Takayama kickout. Great, great match done in a smart, efficient way.

Watched the 14 G1 Honma vs. Shibata and it's a better match with a better finish. Honma is really getting a lot of support in the two matches I've seen. And yes, that finisher from the other match I watched was the Matt Morgan goofy suplex variation. Looked like Honma just forgot to let go of Shibata's head.

Did I find the wrong match?

Wouldn't know to be honest.

Shibata/Honma was all kinds of fun, right until the finishing move. Number one, why is Shibata using a suplex lift into a spinebuster as a finisher? His style is about as basic as you get in modern wrestling and he's using something that overwrought as a finisher? Secondly, it looks like he spike DDTs himself in the process of doing it. Don't know whose fault that was, but it doesn't look right. Shibata/Nagata was 40% filler (at least). It may have been more, but I'm not watching it again to figure it out.

Honestly, the majority of the matches I liked in watching a lot of Japanese matches were the ones under 25 minutes. If you ask me, 15-25 is about the perfect main event time range. Once matches start going over 25 it seems like there's either a lot of filler or an overlong finish involving way too many kickouts of big moves. Or worse, both.

Yeah, was wondering how many in the conversation would have even watched the match. I tend to not comment on things I haven't seen and was wondering if that may have been the case, Bill.

Good: Ogawa vs. Hashimoto, Misawa vs. Akiyama in February Bad: All Japan becoming NOAH, a lot of the wrestling in Japan copying all the annoying parts of All Japan style without taking the good parts or just doing a bad job of it

I think the appeal of Ogawa is in the way he approaches things. In a lot of 2000s puroresu you have a ton of "FIGHTING SPIRIT" Kobashi wannabes running around just hitting each other over and over again. And late 90s All Japan was definitely an odd place for him to really break through given the style differences, but I think that's his hook. When you watch an Ogawa match, you're getting something you're not going to see from anyone else. A well-played heel who is both chickenshit and willing to take on guys way bigger than him in a really believable manner. It's not like KENTA, with all his sprinting around and no-selling or Marufuji with his completely unbelievable offense. I love his cocksure persona to go with it as well. Don't know if you've watched it yet, Loss, but there is a Vader RWTL match against the Untouchables that has Vader suplexing Ogawa all the way across the ring. Tough little bastard to boot.

I remember from my AJPW watching that this, the later 1997 Kobashi vs. Misawa and Kobashi vs. Kawada from 98 were the real great matches of the late 1990s All Japan period. You know, after Misawa became so invincible that they had to start going way over the top. And on rewatch, this holds up beautifully. I'm trying to think of anything I'd have wanted them to do differently to make this better and I really can't other than things that show up in every big AJPW match from the last half of the 90s that you just aren't going to get rid of. This is easily one of the top 10 heavyweight matches I have ever seen and it's probably number 1 for the decade.

On rewatch, I get why people are not huge fans of this on a certain level. There's a certain point where you do wish they'd take it easy on punching each other right in the jaw and it becomes a tad difficult to watch. However, there was a story in the early match of Ishikawa picking apart Ikeda's left arm and Ikeda doing the same to Ishikawa's right. And there are less uber-stiff punches to the face than you remember. The leg sequence was really good. I still rate this high because I see how they did most of what they did as far as keeping it safe, but god damn is it on the side of brutal.

I had this ranked pretty high going into rewatch, but some things came up. They do the Misawa vs. Kawada sprint variation, which is fine by me. The finishing run is pretty much the blueprint for every 2000s NOAH/AJPW/NJPW big finishing run, which is to say overdone and too many nearfalls. I understand it given Misawa's invincibility in AJPW, but it still works against the match. Kawada's sell of the rolling elbow and the back elbow were all kinds of incredible. Despite it's flaws, it's still great and I think it's better than the 2005 match by a ways. Misawa vs. Kawada by the numbers is still better than 99% of 2000s wrestling. I hate saying this, but this is one of the few truly great Kawada matches in the 2000s. It seems like he takes it a little easier on people he knows can't hang with him and the matches just don't work as well (see: Kojima). It really drives home the idea that Kobashi, Misawa, Taue and Akiyama were really something special to have in one place for so long.

So this match has everything you want from pro wrestling in spades. Stiff striking, check. Impactful suplex-style (albeit MMA style) takedowns, check. HATE, check. Atmosphere? I don't think any other match in this set matches this for atmosphere. Everything is done exactly the way it ought to be done. The fact that this is just a buildup match to a big Ogawa vs. Hash rematch is so crazy given how incredible it is. How to rate it in comparison to the more standard wrestling matches is a bit of a conundrum.

On rewatch I really love how this match plays out. Takayama plays smart and keeps things slow and not too strike-oriented to wear Misawa down. The crowd likes it, but it's not anything great until Misawa flips the switch. Huge strike exchange followed by Misawa attacking the leg briefly. Takayama decides he's not letting Misawa back in so easily and hits him with the big offense. And Takayama's big offense is all incredibly simple stuff done really well, love it. Misawa finally gets back in it by attacking the arm in desperation just to slow Takayama down. Not many nearfalls for a NOAH main, but Misawa makes an almost last-moment kickout on a German that really cranks the crowd up. Takayama's kickout right before the finish is one of those invisible, oh-it's-over kickouts that makes a match. I had this at 15 going into rewatches, but 14-5 are gonna have to hold up big for this not to jump up huge.

I never had a problem with his charisma. My problem is with a very clear sense of the workers working together on spots rather than struggling over them. In lucha libre that stuff comes across way better than American or Japanese wrestling.

Styles vs. Suzuki was great. Suzuki was so absolutely incredible. His submissions all look so evil. I wish Styles would do less of the posing. The lack of a ton of nearfalls was really refreshing.

I think heels generally make more interesting characters than faces.

It would also make my head explode. Depending on your opinion of me, that may be considered a good thing.

When I watch Malenko's matwork, I see a huge difference from when I was younger. Back then, I loved Dean for how superbly smooth everything he did on the mat was. It just flowed. Now, I see that and I wonder where the sense of struggle is. Flair had a great smoothness, but when he did things it was never in a way that took away from the idea that there was an athletic contest going on in the ring. Malenko's smoothness on the mat is almost a detriment to a lot of things because it removes any idea that there is a struggle going on in the ring most of the time.

You do outgrow that obsessive starting and stopping of games/books eventually. Or at least I did. It took me until 35 or 36, but I finally got to the point where what I do is dominated by two things and nothing else really ever gets done in my "me" time. I try to find energy when I'm not working or in class to work on the martial arts, but that got hard. Not that I don't anymore, but it's not everyday like it used to be. Wrestling gets the lion's share of my time, be it watching or making KoC2 edits and trying to balance them. I believe I am on my 5th complete restructuring of one major aspect of all the juniors I've made. The more wrestling I watch, the more I see things that I like or dislike and edit accordingly. Oddly enough, this ends up being my music time when I'm not testing them out. TEW is something I'd like to make the time for, but my next project is definitely not going to allow that for a while. I do agree that having a project to work on really helps keep the focus going on wrestling. That way when I take maybe a week with a lot less wrestling time, I have something to go back to that keeps me from getting too far away.

As to soup23's point, I'd have to agree. After a certain point the moonsault was just a nearfall in big matches. As was Misawa's frog splash (way earlier). So to pretend like them getting caught going up top for those was somehow better than Flair getting caught going up top is really off to me. Admittedly, Flair did that more often, but at the same time heavyweights going up top in America usually had a lot more impact to it at the time he was doing it. If whatever they were doing hit, it was going to be something really momentous in a match. And given Flair's predilection towards taking a lot of offense in a match, it stands to reason that he might try something big to get back in it. As well as the fact that he varied successful/unsuccessful flips according to situation. I will admit that at a certain point it became too overdone, but that came more towards his second WWE run for me rather than his first.

That there is a shock. I need to go sit down now.