The Man in Blak

Nick Wayne can do the moves -- the avalanche reverse rana into a springboard cutter (for 2 (sigh)) is basically out of Sammy Guevara's playbook -- but, like Sammy, the problem is getting those moves to mean anything at all in the structure of a match beyond the quick dopamine hit of a nearfall. To be frank, I don't see a lot of daylight between Nick Wayne and what a lot of the AEW roster is doing in tag matches every week on TV.

I actually think this is a great final because they do have a reasonable build for either guy winning with some variations on how to play it out. Sure, it’s easier for Punk to shade heel (if needed) in the match and be more physically assertive to build hope spots with Starks, but I actually don’t expect an outright heel turn from either guy. If anything, I expect Punk and Starks to do their best 1994 Bret/Waltman homage for a face vs. face dynamic, maybe even with an inversion on the false three-count finish from that match to give whoever loses something in defeat.

This one doesn't really work for me, mainly because the Undertaker is so washed at this point that they almost work a comedy match to make up for it. The cat-and-mouse opening is good -- Punk's slap in the corner is pitch-perfect -- but the action meanders a lot early and then descends into tired shot-trading late, with an especially egregious Tombstone right on the heels of a GTS. Punk actually getting to pull off Old School was a cute moment, but the real high watermark is the elbow drop to the outside and what follows. Unlike the Rock at Elimination Chamber, Undertaker actually does the full countout tease and just barely crawls in at 9.5. Once he's in, he traps Punk into a Hell's Gate attempt, but he can't really clinch it; Punk eventually wears him down from that into an Anaconda Vice for a pinfall attempt...and an absolutely hilarious zombie sit-up with both guys being bug-eyed in the middle of the hold. I expect a bit of silliness with Undertaker matches and that sit-up was just what the doctor ordered. Punk nailing Taker with the urn for a nearfall (complete with the tongue-out RIP troll cover) would have been an incredibly ballsy way to end the streak, but alas. Outside of the funny spots, none of this really coheres into anything. Maybe there could have been a good match hiding between these two if they had actually played it straight with The Streak on the line, but there was no way that was happening here with all of the Paul Bearer storyline stuff leading up to it. **1/2

There are only two positive moments here. The first one is the very beginning, where Rock and Punk take some time to have an extended feel out into the first collar-and-elbow; unlike the first match, Rock isn't coming in hurt, so they contrast the immediate brawling that kicks off the first match with a much more tentative and strategic opening. The second positive beat is the clever callback to the failed table spot from the Rumble match: Punk hits a Rock Bottom on the table and it doesn't break, giving Punk a perfect moment to fly back into the ring and play for a countout (and a title win, thanks to the screwy stipulations). Unfortunately, the Rock doesn't really milk the count-out on Punk's Rock Bottom and even blows the initial sell by looking up to say something to the ring crew or the announcers right in front of the camera. Punk isn't innocent here either, as he mugs for the crowd after an early shoulder tackle and phones in an alarming portion of the match with an Orton-esque diet of chinlocks. The whole thing is just a total disaster; multiple referees are harmed in this production. Big ups to the 2nd ref, tough, who somehow rolls his ankle under Punk in the ring, hobbles outside of the ring and then proceeds to sell it like he had lost his whole damn foot in an industrial accident. Moments later, the Rock wins after a second Rock Bottom and the crowd is mostly apathetic. DUD

This is both better than you might expect it to be and worse than it should have been, given the creative that was foisted onto this match. Rock almost torpedoes the entire face/heel dynamic of the match before they even get into the ring with a comically overwrought "inspirational babyface" pre-match promo, complete with a straight-faced invocation of Dusty's "my hand is touchin' your hand" promo. My god, Dwayne, just say you're The People's Champ and you're here to throw Punk's skinny white ass into a volcano or something. I'm happy that your mom survived cancer too but deploying that here alongside a testimonial of how you had seven dollars in your pocket after being unable to make the NFL (????) demonstrates you (or Gewirtz) didn't understand the assignment. Anyway. The big angle hovering over this match like a bad fart is that the Shield beat the crap out of Rock leading up to this match so, if they get involved here in any way, then Vince will strip Punk of the title. Rock and Punk generally work pretty well together here, with Punk targeting those damaged ribs and generally offering solid counters to Rock's brawling with kicks and submissions. Even though the crowd leans more for Punk in the beginning, Punk does his best with a multi-faceted heel performance to try and bring things back on track: there's a little bit of trolling (with the Spanish announce table teases), a little bit of old-school heat (with Heyman getting physically involved), and some good, old-fashioned disrespect (casually walking over Rock's injured ribs). A lot has been made of Rock's limited stamina during this run, but he keeps a decent pace with Punk here and sells well throughout, including a beautiful wobbly-leg collapse after a Punk roundhouse kick. There is a weird moment where Punk counters a sharpshooter into what looks like a failed or botched small package before recovering into an Anaconda Vice, but the positioning and eventual counter on the Vice is so perfect that it actually ends up coming off like a nice bit of struggle. And, naturally, the eventual Rock Bottom table spot foreshadowed by all those teases earlier gets sabotaged by the table collapsing underneath the weight of both guys, but they run it back on the floor and it works just as well. Eventually, the Rock gets enough of an opening to set up for the People's Elbow...and the lights go out. The Shield comes down under the cover of darkness to lay out the Rock and, when the lights come up, Punk recovers enough to roll the KO'd Rock into the ring for the pin. The production lingers on Punk's victory just long enough to almost bait you into thinking that they'll actually let the schmozz play out for a potential Raw resolution tomorrow night...and then Vince comes out. In the only smart beat of this entire debacle, Rock does the classic babyface play of not letting Vince take the easy way out by simply stripping Punk and, instead, asks for the match to be restarted, even though he's a complete wreck outside the ring. Unfortunately, things completely fall apart for the second "half." Punk immediately jumps on Rock after the bell, hits the Savage elbow drop, but Rock simply blows it off and pushes off a GTS attempt into a spinebuster and a People's Elbow for the win. The extra time that they used to sell the false finish could have been used to do a more gradual build into Rock's comeback but, even with the time they had, Punk missing the elbow and struggling into some other move to counter into the spinebuster would have been a smoother transition. Since the Elimination Chamber rematch is an overbooked bomb, this ends up being our only good look at what a "real" match between Rock and Punk would have looked like and what we have in the first half is actually pretty good! it's just hard to enjoy it as a whole, given all of the counter-productive booking that surrounds it. ***

Nah, he had those kicks back then - there’s a whole sequence in the triple threat on the first ROH card where Bryan and Low Ki keep one-upping each other by lighting Daniels up with kicks until Daniels ducks/collapses and they both kick each other’s feet for a wipeout.

This one didn’t hold up as well for me on rewatch, though I’d still probably place it in 4-4.25 star territory if I had to give it snowflakes. This is a great performance for Punk: his execution is tight and, other than blowing off a near-KO shot to the head to springboard into a clothesline for a nearfall, he does a great job of selling and slowing down to register the long-term damage to the ribs. For Danielson, he’s very good, but he gives some ammo to his critics along the way. He shrugs off the early kneework to lift Punk into a Romero special (which goes nowhere), he basically no-sells a step-up knee from Punk to transition into the LeBell lock, and he still doesn’t really register any sort of long-term damage throughout other than BREATHING INTENSELY. They’re all little things but, as someone coming into this rewatch specifically with an eye on Danielson as one of the all-time greats for GWE, I find that these little things stick out more, especially when they’re trapped in an otherwise great match. It does not help matters that Bryan comes off like a total doofus here arguing that Punk tapped after the bell, though I don’t know if that’s his fault or something to lay at the feet of WWE creative; as it is, it sort of sours an otherwise awesome flash pin finish. Beyond all that, though, this is still a damn good title match with lots of little nuances by both guys.

It took me a second to parse what was actually going on with that spot because I'm so conditioned to read trip attempts as a transitional non-move but, once I picked it up, it was kinda awesome? Overall, I think the match revealed that Juice is still better suited for tags (where he seems to be absolutely thriving with Jay White), so I'm really looking forward to that FTR match next week.

I ended up unlocking Brodie and Big Show on my second RTE run-through on Easy -- since I was more familiar with the game at that point, I was basically hit the ground running and won the World Championship right upfront. If you can stay undefeated from there, I hit the Dark Order branch shortly after that (with Brodie) and then I eventually hit the "challenge" branch where you end up having to win gauntlet matches against three guys; Big Show was the first one out in a "monster" gauntlet and, IIRC, that's how I ended up unlocking him. For Owen, I read somewhere that it takes something like 100 exhibition matches to unlock him, which is ridiculous. I already had the store completely bought out by the time I finished up my review playtime, but I wasn't going to spend another twenty hours grinding out exhibitions just for that.

Eh, I still see No Mercy as a closer point of comparison, due to the momentum system. You're not wrong that WM X8/XIX is basically No Mercy sped up so, in terms of sheer speed, Fight Forever has a cadence that's closer to those games. But the key difference is that X8/XIX ditches the momentum system for a Street Fighter-esque "super" meter - IIRC, you don't lose meter when you get hit in X8/XIX and you can actually build up meter with strikes. As such, I always felt more inclined to just brawl into a finisher in X8/XIX; with the AKI games, in contrast, you could still lean on strikes as your bread-and-butter offense, but you absolutely had to mix them up with grapples to keep your opponent off-balance and minimize the odds for counters. I do think that Day of Reckoning 2 gets overlooked in the pantheon of wrestling games, though. I would have really liked to have seen Fight Forever carry over its resthold/submission choice system for holds, since submissions are noticeably underpowered (just as they were in No Mercy). And there were really cool options for CAW in DoR2 as well, especially for entrance crafting.

Yeah, TK mentioned that at the Forbidden Door media scrum - the recent changing of rights for Europe's catalog didn't really have any impact on their ability to use the song and, in fact, its usage in the Okada match was effectively the culmination of months of work.

There's a temptation to point to Jungle Boy as the new Brian Pillman Jr., but I don't think the situation is quite that dire. I think Jungle Boy is still totally fine as a tag wrestler and, given how thoroughly they've hollowed out the tag division to try and make the Trios division happen, the Jurassic Express could have been a great anchor for undercard tags if they had kept them around. Somewhere along the line, though -- probably after his big "breakout" match with Dax -- they saw something bigger in him as a single and I just don't see that at all, regardless of whether he's a face or a heel. (Though he clearly needs some time and practice to find his voice as a heel, if they're actually going to run with this.) He doesn't have the physical presence and he doesn't seem to have a real gameplan for extended singles matches.

I filed my review the night before embargo, so we're going through the editing phase of it - at this point, I doubt it will get published alongside the launch of the game. Ultimately, my take was that AEW Fight Forever was a great first step. It's thin on content (especially when it comes to appearance options for CAW), but the core of the game is a surprisingly faithful recreation of the classic No Mercy engine and I think that alone makes it worth checking out. Other than the fatal four-way matches -- which are absolute disasters, thanks to the AI -- I generally dug what I played out of Road to Elite as well. They do need to clean up how CAW progression builds up over multiple Road to Elite playthroughs, though, because it seemed to "half-reset" whenever I would take a second playthrough with a character. All the stats and traits would be reset, but I would keep the unlocked signature/finisher moves that I would have assigned to the app, even though I would no longer have the additional signature/finisher slot stats.

It's pure fantasy booking, of course, but I would have liked to have seen Shingo as a match-up for MJF this year, especially since Tanahashi was already a sacrificial lamb for the AEW World Title at the last Forbidden Door. As it stands, Shingo is still one of the best hands in the company, so I'm hoping for a solid G-1 run as well.

Not sure at this point if we'll be able to make the 28th for the review, but I'm working on it. ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

I wasn't as high on the 10-man tag, but I do hope that they spin off Takeshita and Ishii into something because their interactions were *great* in that match.

Yeah, it’s not necessarily a bad thing - the finish made logical sense for the match. It’s kind of refreshing, actually. I do think it’s curious that Omega/Ospreay got as much time as they did vs. what was allotted for Danielson/Okada, though.

I feel like we’re going to hear some stories about that finish.

Forbidden Door is just cursed for Adam Cole, isn’t it? https://twitter.com/TonyKhan/status/1673065490367889410?t=mRgDFPcA8viC01MH2OlBHA&s=33

It’s actually been a couple of years since I did a review at GC - I requested the AEW Fight Forever opportunity back when it was announced (which feels like ten years ago now). But yeah, GC has had this approach to disclosures and accessibility for a long time and that’s one of the main reasons that I’ve been happy to contribute there.

You eventually run out of dream matches, though. And that sort of feels like 2023 AEW in a nutshell. It's sort of counter-intuitive, but the build for Forbidden Door isn't really about the PPV - it's about the stories coming into the PPV that they can continue or spin off to drive later shows and matches. For seemingly every show other than Forbidden Door and All In at Wembley, they're struggling to draw people to the house and keep viewers intrigued through an entire episode of TV. This has been something that AEW has sort of struggled with from the beginning, but it's especially painful now: they need a way to build some momentum coming off of a PPV, rather than blowing everything off and then flatlining the next week. AEW PPVs, admittedly, have been good or even great standalone shows as a result of this approach, but they need more than that right now.

I am not the AMA guy on Reddit - I am just a freelance dude that occasionally writes reviews for gamecritics.com.

I actually think the turning point for the Lucha Bros was getting Alex into the act doing the "Penta Says" gimmick, but I don't remember if that was before, during or after the Bucks feud, so sure. If nothing else, I would say that the cage match with the Bucks was arguably the best match that both teams have had in AEW, so it certainly didn't hurt.

I still think it's telling that the biggest (only?) breakout tag team in AEW -- The Acclaimed -- ended up getting over on their own without any sort of interaction with the Bucks. The Lucha Bros match is definitely the peak of the Bucks' heel run with the titles, but I would argue that Fenix and Penta were already over before they started that program. That said, the House of Black match is definitely a feather in their cap, it's just a pity that it was for the Trios division, which seems to be going nowhere (and is actively taking away from the standard tags).

Review is embargoed until the 28th, so I can't talk ratings or even too much review content until then - I'm not sure if I'll cross the finish line with my review by that embargo date but, once my writeup has been posted, I'll link it here.