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dawho5

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  1. dawho5

    G-1 Climax

    dawho5 replied to Loss's topic in Pro Wrestling

    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.
  2. dawho5

    G-1 Climax

    dawho5 replied to Loss's topic in Pro Wrestling

    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.
  3. dawho5
    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
  4. dawho5
    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.
  5. dawho5
    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.
  6. dawho5
    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.
  7. dawho5
    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.
  8. dawho5
    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.
  9. dawho5
    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.
  10. dawho5
    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.
  11. dawho5

    G-1 Climax

    dawho5 replied to Loss's topic in Pro 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.
  12. dawho5
    I think heels generally make more interesting characters than faces.
  13. dawho5
    It would also make my head explode. Depending on your opinion of me, that may be considered a good thing.
  14. dawho5
    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.
  15. dawho5
    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.
  16. dawho5
    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.
  17. dawho5
    That there is a shock. I need to go sit down now.
  18. dawho5
    Starts out as a brawl, which is really good. These two beating the tar out of one another is a lot of fun. Then we get to the finishing sequence and Koji goes right for an anklelock, which is fine despite the lack of legwork. Hayato sells the leg as Koji kicks it out from under him. Then Koji....goes up top for a rolling senton. And follows with his falcon arrow thingy. I have started to dread Kanemoto finishing runs, because he seems to always get his shit (the moves above, moonsault which thankfully was not here, tiger suplex which was, but hayato had a brilliant kickout on it) in regardless of what has happened earlier in the match and what the finish is. Hayato gets some finishers in after a painfully obvious setup (Koji going for another boot scrape off the ropes after already doing it). Koji hits the great tiger suplex spot, but Hayato goes back on offense and eventually re-tries a ground head kick sequence, which has to mean...yep, anklelock. And this time with all kinds of extra twisting and hurtiness. That's the end, but if that was always going to be the end why did Koji go back to the non-leg stuff besides bad habit? Legwork with a few big things in between would have set up that finish so much better. It's good enough to make the bottom of my ballot, but that finishing sequence hurts it a lot.
  19. dawho5
    Champion's Carnival seemed to me like it was just a gimmicked way to set up challengers for the TC in the 90s. Also, it tended to shake up the way matches were wrestled because it was a 30 minute time limit rather than a 60 (same with RWTL, but as you mentioned it was more important). I always looked at CC as a nice break from all the excessive stuff in the late 90s and go back to a better wrestling style. As far as why it was stopped in 82, I've got no idea.
  20. dawho5
    This wasn't as good as the February match pitting Saito against Mochizuki. It had a similar weakness, Saito not selling the arm in place of Mochizuki not selling the leg. Milano's stuff is so varied, he has some strange submissions that tie Saito in a knot, a few of which are a bit too convoluted. Especially since he's really good at simple stuff like a shoulder armbreaker or the armbar variant where he tries to pull Saito's shoulder out of it's socket instead. His strikes are really weak too. I don't mind his aerial stuff, but when you put it everything he does in the match together it's hard to see what he was even trying to do besides hit a bunch of cool looking nearfalls and submissions. At the very least Mochizuki had some kind of focus to where he was striking that led to his finishers. Saito almost completely no-selling the arm was really disappointing. I want to like him as a wrestler, but stuff like that is hard for me to get around.
  21. dawho5
    I was thinking that Nakamura had some similarities to Ohtani when I watched them wrestle each other. He's bigger and more shooty, but there's something there that made me think Ohtani was wrestling a bigger version of his younger self. I don't think Nakamura is as openly emotive or works the crowd as much though. As far as Tanahashi goes, there's a lot I like about him. Yeah, his opening match stuff and strikes are really weak. And I wouldn't go so far as to put him on the level of a Flair or Misawa, but he's got a formula and it usually works with pretty much everyone and produces acceptable to good matches most of the time. The legwork grew on me when I noticed how he used it late to stay on offense after somebody got the knees up on a frog splash. Reminded me a little of the Kawada armwork that led to the opponent being unable to follow up after a jumping high kick. I do wish he'd work over the ribs a bit more in anticipation of the high fly flow though.
  22. dawho5
    I tend to put that kind of stuff away during wrestling matches as far as "could it happen?" sort of things. Execution is important, but you can't get too detail oriented on a lot of stuff or it ruins it. An example: I was watching the Hayato vs. Kenou match from December 2009 earlier. During their faux-kickboxing I noticed very clearly that Hayato has not done a lot of sparring involving anybody even halfways throwing their kicks. If he had, he'd know that reaching for those incoming kicks without making a tight fist is a good way to at the very least get jammed fingers (if not broken ones, depending on how hard they are kicking). Shin vs. finger, you do the match. So I tend to put away all "that's not how you do that" or "that's not possible" things because it's just gonna kill it for me. Another example: Nakajima likes to do this kick where he turns a roundhouse completely vertical onto the back of a guy's head or neck. I notice watching it that it barely touches the guy, which is a good thing, because if there was any steam on it at all, that's big trouble for the guy taking it. If a guy trained to kick hits you with a vertical angled roundhouse, that's gonna have all kinds of force to it. There are certainly spots that annoy me to no end, but it's not for lack of realism.
  23. dawho5
    This was really good. Nakamura comes in as the champ and has to defend against outsider (but former NJPW guy) Ohtani. They work a nice legwork sequence that ultimately means nothing. Nakamura goes to the arm as well as beating the crap out of Ohtani with knees to the body. Then they turn normal psychology on it's head and end up making Ohtani the face with Nakamura being the dickish heel. Crowd squarely in Ohtani's corner, he makes a fiery comeback that is really fun to watch. The finishing run is not overdone, but one spot in it loses me and I hate that. Ohtani wants a superplex and has to get up off the mat after being elbowed off the top 3 times to get it. big slap and some Ohtani elbows finally net him the superplex! And he pops up immediately for the pin. I get that was supposed to be a big nearfall, but sell what you had to do to get it at least for a little bit. This should show up somehwre on the lower half of my ballot, but that superplex spot really kills the match for me.
  24. dawho5
    Lots more filler than their September match. I don't think it's much longer, but it feels quite a bit longer due to the meaningless legwork and nearfalls. September match gets a vote, this does not.
  25. dawho5
    This had the same things going for it as the 2005 Kawada vs. Kojima match. Opponent with good offense kicking the shit out of Kojima with well-timed hope spots. Same major weakness in the lariat flurry at the end. And Kojima is so bad about telegraphing his comebacks.
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