GOTNW

Don Fuji http://www.voicesofwrestling.com/2015/12/27/dragon-gate-fantastic-gate-2015-december-20-review/ http://www.voicesofwrestling.com/2015/03/01/dragon-gate-champion-gate-in-osaka-review/ http://www.voicesofwrestling.com/2016/02/02/dragon-gate-open-the-new-year-gate-2016-january-17th-review/

I'm not sure TAJIRI would make my list without the SMASH/WNC run. That's what really makes me comfortable putting him at this level and I encourage everyone to check out his stuff from that time perios, great matches vs. Finlay, Nishimura and TAKA Michinoku but it also has stuff like him carrying Satoshi Kajiwara to the best match of his career.

Hayato's peak was tremendous. I could see including him if there was a way for me to binge watch a bunch of Michinoku Pro (and I wanted to do said thing). He seems to have fallen off recently, whether it be due to injuries or Michinokh Pro being busy pushing a Brahman as their top singles champion. His matches opposite Kanemoto and Kenou are out of this world great.

How many old man Perro brawls are out there? I honestly might like the El Hijo Del Santo match more than the Sangre Chicana match from 1986. Also enjoy him a lot in title matches, especially the Villano 3 one where 3 would go for ridiculous submissions and Perro would counter them by just throwing him on the ground.

He'll be somewhere in my bottom half. An amazing big match performer from 2009 onwards with a lot of good stuff before he found himself as a character. A bizarre example of this would be him having Naofumi Yamamoto's/YOSHI-TATSU's career match in....2005? And as mentioned he works really well against less capable opponents. Also got a very good match out of Wataru Inoue.

I will say I absolutely loved the 10 minute Pac match they had in Dragon Gate and I do not love a lot of Dragon Gate.

I loved him when I was watching my first ROH stuff and he was one of the Dragon Gate guys I could stomach watching before I threw my hands up and accepted that is a style I don't like and shouldn't waste my time on. I recently watched the pimped Mochizuki match out of curiosity and he looked absolutely terrible, not connecting with offence and just spamming moves without ever convincing me one of them could actually lead to the finish.

Love Zack, I jumped on his bandwagon while he was working undercard matches in NOAH and I'm glad he's gained such a big following, I don't think he's has enough hyped matches over a long enough period of time that were great enough for me to rank him right now but if we redo this in 5/10 years he should make my list unless something terrible happens.

You know I was ready to say Ricochet had become great at wrestling after the end of Lucha Underground's first season (even if he did occasionally do stupid shit like no selling a Crucifix Powerbomb on the apron he still got a super good match out of Hernandez where that spot is just preventing me from calling it great rather than an example used to display why I think the match sucked) but then I watched him vs Zack Sabre Jr. which I expected to be great but he dragged the match down a lot and I just gave up on him. I think he's very good, especially at what he does, but he won't sniff my list.

I'm having trouble figuring out should I take his terrible comedy matches into account and if so how much. I figure he'd still be in my top half somewhere based on the strength of his best performances.

His match vs Ryuji Yamakawa with the Barbed Wire Kickpad is one of the most fascinating things I've seen and something everyone who enjoys ultraviolence should go out of their way to see. He's also in my 2000s match of the decade (though he was probably like....the fifth best performer in it) and has some great stuff in Big Mouth Loud as well. He's under consideration.

The Masakatsu Funaki brawl is one of the best matches ever so that's half his case alone. Not sure I'll have the time for a focused revision and analysis of his career but he is a lock.

Can be fun in multi man tags where everyone else does all the work and he can just do Ric Flair spots and comedy. That's about it, he has no case for this.

Interesting how a guy who had a very revered 10/15 year run which ended only two years ago has almost no comments. Wonder if that displays his overhype or the PWO bubble. I used to kind of shit on him not for his work (I only thought he wasn't as great as some claimed) but for not putting young guys over and being so focused on getting himself and his strenght over. I know a lot more both about his career and pro wrestling now so I have mellowed down on him as well. He will place well on my list, probably somewhere in the middle.

If they wanted to work people into cheering Reigns they could've done so. Reigns was dead in the water as soon as they gave him the Shield vest, Shield entrance music and Shield entrance through the crowd. The better thing to have done would've been to have given him a clean start like they Ambrose and Rollins. The best thing would've been if they gave them to either Ambrose or Rollins creating the illusion one of them is the chosen one. Then there's the issue of how much more protected Reigns was than Ambrose and Rollins during the Shield run and also the infamous "make Roman look strong" which sounds even more stupid when you consider they had him evenly work matches against shit tier midcarders like Fandango.

Murakami has become a lock for my list and I'll rank him as highly as I rationally can. Between his singles matches vs Ishikawa, Nagata, Ohtani and various Battlarts tags he actually has a nice resume of high end matches.

I love lucha but if I get to include judo throws Kensuke Sasaki is the armdrag champion:

I was thinking more in terms of peak performances and matches but I'd absolutely take 2000-2004 Akiyama over any Taue period. If you go into Akiyama expecting him to deliver a bunch of 30 minute sines matches MOTYCs you're bound to be disappointed. Not that he couldn't do it but that's not really what he was/is about as a worker. Incidentally I think losing focus as a character is what lead to his down period, which had a plethora of very good matches and performances anyway. If someone watches the Sternness vs Burning tags and doesn't "get" Akiyama or his character it's them and I'm not sure what to even say to convince them.

Those are bizarre criticism if you like Marufuji and I say this as someone who's probably spent what would convert to weeks watching Marufuji matches. I don't even remember when did Marufuji play heel, his All Japan and New Japan runs were just him being put in big junior matches that were wrestled like big junior spotfests-I think they were well done but going as far back as his first match outside of NOAH (I think) vs. the now paralyzed dude in ZERO-1 Marufuji has wrestled the same wherever he went. Marufuji is about all-action as you can get as well while I could think of some examples of KENTA working a slower pace while still producing good results.

This is the reality era mate no need.

I'm a massive KENTA fan-he's one of the guys who got me into puro in the first place and my opinion of him never diminished even as I was discovering better workers. I'm sure something like the 40 minute Nakajima Kensuke Office match wouldn't hold up for me-god knows what ridiculous rating I gave it when I watched it-but it's something where I kind of saw the flaws even when I was watching it but the action was spectacular enough for me the ignore them. That's my main problem with a lot of junior wrestling and spotfests-if you're going to work a match like that it has to impress me. I just don't get that from Minoru Tanaka matches, Dragon Gate etc. But that kind of work isn't something I associate with KENTA a lot really. Even when he was a junior he'd be in a random tag where KUDO would try to start shit and KENTA would just slap him into oblivion and that kind of thing stuck with me a lot more than the Apron Falcon Arrow matches. I think his output is amazing and I don't see any major flaws in his work. He's a lock for my top 50 and there's a big chance he'll be in my top 30. If anything he's a guy who suffers from me being too familiar with his work, and with being busy watching so much unfamiliar wrestling and him being injured I haven't thought about him much lately so I wasn't hyping him much here.

I think a lot of someone's impression of Akiyama has to do with what they watch as he's not someone like Hashimoto or Choshu or Maeda where he comes off larger than life whatever you watch nor is he the most consistent worker ever and he has had his down periods. I also really don't see the argument that Taue is a better grumpy veteran than Akiyama (that's not a role I've ever associated with Taue) or Taue above Akiyama in general. I LOVE Taue but Akiyama smokes him in terms of range, longevity, variety.....I could see someone preferring Taue if they think 90s All Japan is the greatest wrestling ever (which I don't) but even peak for peak I'd take Akiyama easily.

Early Sternness Akiyama is easily my favourite character ever. I watched a tag match recently that was like him and Mossman vs Kobashi and Kentaro Shiga and he put on one of the greatest performances I've ever seen and turned what should've been just a throwaway tag match into a near perfect one. It's also something that was gradually lost over time and while I love Akiyama whether he's a super rookie, an upper midcarder desperately trying to break through or a grumpy veteran I really wish we got ten years of him taunting the top babyfaces and shitbeating their young boys.

The opening portion of this one was intriguing as Saito completely dominated Fuchi mostly with stomps and punchs, some were nice but overall Saito's punches and stomps didn't look good enough to have significant merit on their own nor did they look bad enough to take away from the match, the quality of this one was mostly down to how they were gonna follow up the beatdown and that's where the match really took off, Fuchi went absolutely berserk just blasting Saito with amazing punches and just beat the shit out of him and when he satisfied my bloodthirst they transition to the closing stretch which was mostly built around big nearfalls including a swell count-out tease. Also worth noting is that Fuchi hit a Dropkick that was so good I replayed it about five times. Good stuff.

Man oh man I LOVED this one. Such an amazing performance from Fuchi trying to survive against a higher ranked opponent by destroying his leg. His early control segment ruled, he was just viciously slamming Misawa's leg onto the announce table. The legwork set Fuchi up for both his future control segments giving him a good base to work on by stretching Misawa and also provided with him a way to easily and believably transition back into offence. Misawa's selling was sublime, just a perfect example of how selling doesn't have to black or white (and in most cases when such selling is used it takes away from the match more than anything), he limped and slowed down but still went for all his big stuff regardless like you would in a fight and recognized the pain both by not being able to follow up a great looking frog splash with a cover and by modifying his flip lariat (usually he would use a dashing start, here he just kind of threw himself at Fuchi). We get a few nearfalls that didn't use "big" moves but were extremely well set up and the crowd bought into them before a cool and (for All Japan) unique finish. A lot of stars.