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Calvin

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Everything posted by Calvin

  1. Calvin
    This is for Otani’s UWA World Welterweight Championship. You can hear a coin drop while they’re working holds in the beginning. It’s not bad, but the crowd is comatose, and it takes these two a while to figure out they need to move beyond the mat-work to engage the audience better. **1/2
  2. Calvin
    This is for Double Inoue’s WWWA Tag Team Championship, and it is a Best Two Out of Three Falls match. I thought this was worked smartly to hide Toyota’s weaknesses and maximize her strengths. She was there every time this match needed a shot of adrenaline – there’s no one quite like Toyota when it comes to picking up the pace is there? – and she could lean on Hasegawa to carry the selling segments, so this was just about the perfect biome for her to have a great match. Toyota’s athleticism and superstar charisma are on full display here, and I’m able to better appreciate those qualities when she’s not actively annoying me. There’s some questionable transitions here that prevent this from reaching true greatness (at one point, Toyoto redirects the entire match to do Sabu tribute spots), and I’m unsure if blowing their load in the first fall was the wisest decision since the match seemed to cool down afterwards and never really regained the heat it had in the beginning. ***3/4
  3. Calvin
    Akiyama is a terrific face-in-peril here as the Holy Demon Army bully, batter, and abuse him. ***
  4. Calvin
    There's nothing here that couldn't have been accomplished in half the time. It got to the point where they're hitting the same beats over again with depreciating effect, and the match devolves into a repetitive mess instead of a compelling war of attrition. **3/4
  5. Calvin
    Mochizuki contra Mochizuki! Winner is the sole proprietor of the Mochizuki name. Rob Van Dam-level selling from Masaaki Mochizuki in this one with tons of sloppy interferences from M2K, and by the end they were just doing thoughtlessly performing moves on each other. For someone who just got kicked out of his own group, Masaaki wrestles this with almost no hate or urgency, and it's kind of disappointing.
  6. Calvin
    These two go a touch longer than they should've, and Hyuga's selling is erratic, but otherwise a strongly worked match with Amano targeting the knee to slow down the athletic Hyuga. ***1/4
  7. Calvin
    This ends too abruptly for it to be considered anything more than a teaser of what these two are capable of, but it's fun watching them seamlessly transition from one style to another without so much as a hiccup. **3/4
  8. Calvin
    A primer on how to destroy the structural integrity of a match by Lioness Asuka. Yoshida is tremendous here, but even she's worn down to a nub at the end and is actively participating in her bullshit brawling. **1/4
  9. Calvin
    It's always a pleasure to watch Yoshida in her environment with an opponent willing to play her game.
  10. Calvin
    It's rare to see a lengthy submission segment that ends in an actual submission. Usually it's a big shine moment for the wrestler underneath, but Hyuga surprisingly tapped. ***
  11. Calvin
    Misawa single-handedly crushes all of Sterness with elbows and flowsions and whatever. Akiyama gets a veneer of "protection" as he comes into this with an injured arm. I actually enjoyed watching him slaughter an entire faction, but the macro implications of Misawa's booking are starting to become more apparent, and it's no wonder this promotion struggled so badly to create stars. ***
  12. Calvin
    Orton's first meaningful match of his career. It's short, but he gets a ton of shine. His boilerplate whitemeat babyface act is hilarious to watch, but everyone has to start somewhere.
  13. Calvin
    There's been some pushback on the idea that these matches are thought be underrated gems, but I'd say this and the Backlash match are worth watching. Angle wrestles this with a ton of hate, and Edge has a gusher of a bladejob that helps him feel like a convincing face-in-peril for once. ***1/4
  14. Calvin
    This is paced like a thirty minute match despite only going for fifteen, and it completely lacks flow. You can always rely on these two to be hard-hitting and physical, but there isn't much else to chew on here. Nagata's not an interesting enough seller for him to be eating shit the entire match, and he kind of oversells here anyways. On the flipside, Takayama doesn't sell nearly enough. I don't mind him eating bombs like they're nothing because it's totally believable, but then to lose so abruptly to a couple of weak-looking kicks? It's jarring. I understand the dynamic that they're trying to establish with Takayama as this imposing force for Nagata to overcome. It's essentially Nagata's fight with Cro Cop reimagined, but what if we're living in an alternate universe where he doesn't get head-kick KO'd in like five seconds? I'm conceptually into it, but the execution was lacking. **1/4
  15. Calvin
    Fun showcase for the ladies on the big Dome show with Nakanishi getting the surprise pinfall over Toyota! ***
  16. Calvin
    I get the appeal of these car-crash spectacles, and back when this happened I would've LOVED this, but these matches don't hold up for me anymore. It's hard for me to look past the contrived high-spots, erratic selling, and illogical sequences like Eddie doing a Sunset Flip Powerbomb off of the ladder instead of grabbing the fucking title. **1/4
  17. Calvin
    Incredible match that kickstarts into a high gear immediately from the outset when Hidaka disrespects the shit out of Hoshikawa. From there, they wrestle each other with the type of urgency that makes your heart pound, and the momentum shifts heavily towards Hidaka's favor when Hoshikawa recklessly kicks the ringpost, damaging his leg. He loses the match not too long after as he's kick-based striker, and Hidaka opportunistically uses that to his advantage to set-up the Shawn Capture. ****1/4
  18. Calvin
    Incidental blood is simply the best blood. Sai elevates himself, and the match, to another level after he gets his nose busted by Ishikawa. Some real "you just made me bleed my own blood" type energy from this dude.
  19. Calvin
    This, um, kind of ruled? OH-Gun being somewhat flummoxed by two WWE-style caricatures and needing time to solve them made for a fun watch. Tom Howard is dynamite at taking an STO.
  20. Calvin
    Building a match around Takaiwa having nothing resembling a defense and relying on his brutish strength to get him out of vulnerable positions against a technically precise fighter was a brilliant premise. ***1/2
  21. Calvin
    Lesnar versus a game Hardy Boyz will always be a fun time. ***
  22. Calvin
    Tim White takes the hardest bump in this match, and he also blades better than Triple H, ong. A plodding hardcore match dressed up in a steel cage gimmick to blow off a hate feud that isn't actually a hate feud, but more of a "I'm killing your push for good" feud. Its amusing how they try to make the Hell out of a Cell segment feel organic, but they don't realize that those segments will always inherently feel out of place and you need someone clinically insane like Mick Foley to distract the audience with unbelievably dangerous spots. **1/4
  23. Calvin
    At least the Backlash match had some semblance of flow and escalation, but here ... this is kind of all over the place. There's no logical sense to the transitions. Angle belly-to-bellies Edge over the top rope and proceeds to ... work chinlocks? Great idea, Kurt. Edge remains an underwhelming face-in-peril, and I don't feel like beating that drum again. A large portion of this is them licking their lips and waiting for those precious final minutes to show us what makes pro-wrestling magical: ref bumps, finisher/signature spam, and stealing each other's moves! We don't even get to see the payoff of Angle getting shaved until two matches later, which is totally fucking lame. **1/4
  24. Calvin
    Austin's on the verge of taking his ball and going home, and it's reflected in the effort he puts into his matches. Hall is past his prime and isn't really good for anything besides antagonizing the locker-room, apparently. There's no chance this was ever going to be good. **
  25. Calvin
    Triple H is an all-time bad babyface. Just unbelievably, irredeemably bad. Many would argue this match got shafted by going after Hogan vs. Rock, but it was never going to be good regardless of placement with Hunter playing a traditional face-in-peril role, and he's lost so much mobility post-quad injury that it's not even interesting watching him athletically bump around anymore. Everyone knew at the time Jericho was a complete afterthought going into this feud (he's more or less the hapless third wheel in Hunter and Stephanie McMahon's feud) and the end result is never in question. **
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