Kazuchika Okada

[Jmare007]

If only we could have an "invader Okada" run in another promotion

[Boss Rock]

We got brief flashes with the Peter Pan Ibushi match and TAKA's anniversary tag. Would love to see him play King Shit in NOAH, DDT, or AJPW.

[dkookypunk43]

Yeah he sort of needs that invader role but I think he's a top tier candidate without that for me

[Tetsujin]

Okada's peak is undeniable and his best stuff is some of the best pro wrestling I've ever seen (hell, right now he has literally my #1 match, against Shibata). But since 2019 he has become this dull, repetitive, automatic pilot version of himself and it has been seriously painful to watch. Consistency is definitely not an argument for him, and he's still only 32, so I don't think his career will improve that much considering he already wrestles like a guy in his sixties. He's a bizarre case.

[kas]

From Dominion 2016 to Dominion 2018, Okada peaked higher than any other wrestler I've seen. Outside of that, his 2012 to WK 2020 run was excellent. He's able to get something good out of every wrestler he faces, and has had the best matches of Tanahashi's, Omega's, Shibata's, Marufuji's, SANADA's, Makabe's, EVIL's, Fale's, and YOSHI-HASHI's careers. Slowed down in 2020 and the first half of 2021, but has looked like he's getting back to his best during this last G1 run. Could easily see myself voting for him as number 1.

[strobogo]

On 4/27/2021 at 8:07 PM, Tetsujin said:

Okada's peak is undeniable and his best stuff is some of the best pro wrestling I've ever seen (hell, right now he has literally my #1 match, against Shibata). But since 2019 he has become this dull, repetitive, automatic pilot version of himself and it has been seriously painful to watch. Consistency is definitely not an argument for him, and he's still only 32, so I don't think his career will improve that much considering he already wrestles like a guy in his sixties. He's a bizarre case.

Okada's been on the backburner and really doing nothing of note since ending his mega reign in 2018 and it's hard to blame him for going through the motions for a while. Gedo has had nothing for him while making too late ascensions for Natio and Ibushi that flopped for different reasons, and during the pandemic, Okada was doing PPV matches with Yujiro and The Great O'Khan. Hard to get your dander up for shit like that, but he still brought it for the G1 and big matches with Ospreay/Shingo. I would say it's probably difficult for him to get up for much of anything other than a sold out Tokyo Dome main event at this point. How can he possibly stay motivated when he's broken basically every record the company has ever had by the time he's 30? And in Japan these mega names stay wrestling regularly into their 50s and 60s so we might have another 25 years of Okada doing Okada things.

[El-P]

After the last 2 (well, 3 actually) days of this year's Wrestling Kingdom, I'm like "fuuuuuuuuuuck, this guy actually may be the greatest Ace ever". His match with Ospreay was next level. It's like he just had awaken (not entirely true though, as he ruled in the G1 this year and his feud with Cobb had been great) and was determined on showing how it's done and then some. The complexity of the sequences at one point where just out of this world. And not only you had to think about them, structure them, but actually having to execute them. Of course Ospreay is THAT dance partner, but still. And the guy has developed a style, working from Tanahashi's years, which does not require you to bump on your head more and more and more, so he's got so many years in front of him still. One year ago I wasn't thinking about him as a #1 spot contender, but now and with 4 years + before the poll... Yeah, he could end up just there.

[SmartMark15]

The last truly great Okada match was against Naito in 2020 with only a surprisingly strong Cobb match last year to show for over two years of work since then. One of the most rapid and vicious declines in recent memory.

[strobogo]

Disagree. All the Okada/Shingo matches have been better than the Okada/Naito 2020 WK match and I'd say also the 2018 match.

[Childs]

I've never been an Okada fan, but I do wonder about the narrative around his "decline." Is it more a comment on the stagnant booking and waning talent pool that we've seen in pandemic-era New Japan? Is his performance really that different? The things that annoy me about him are the things that always annoyed me about him. The things he does well are the things he always did well. His case isn't much better than it was in 2019, but I don't see how it's worse. 

[El-P]

There is no decline, as showed by the two nights at WK. He had back issues at one point and took it easier for a while, and why the fuck not when you're programmed against Yujiro Takahashi and meaningless tag team matches. So yeah, booking and pandemic is pretty much all what his "decline" was all about. You put him two nights back to back at the Tokyo Dome and he's basically saving both shows (which were very underwhelming) popping out two incredible matches, most impressive of all the second being even more incredible than the first. And then he's having an amazing performance as the already legendary Ace pummeling the frustrated young hope of NOAH in a great tag match that also involved 59 years old Mutoh. Hence my first comment about Okada "waking up" and taking back what's his, maybe the spot of the greatest pro-wrestler ever. 

[DylanZero]

Okada wrestles the exact same as he always has. That Shingo match and his Ospreay matches could have easily taken place in 2015 down to the beat. And he wrestled them virtually the same. Like all of his other big matches.

[kas]

Okada understandably took it slow after the Naito match, but still showed up in big matches (Shingo matches, Ishii at the G1, Ospreay at WK 15) and was still also putting good, (if underwhelming by his standards) stuff. Since the 2nd Cobb match in 2021, he looked like he was in much better shape and moving a lot better. He had a good G1 run, giving Tama and Chase their best ever matches and putting on one of New Japan's best matches of the year with Tanahashi, and his performances at WK this year were stellar.

[Boss Rock]

Pretty much all that has been said. 2020 was just an odd year due to his back injury, feuding with Yujiro, and insisting on centering his game around the Money Clip (which is indeed a bad submission). From WK 15 onward, he's been back in business. It seems like every time he has an off-performance or does something different there's concerns that he's hurt or in decline. The same thing happened with Tanahashi all the time.

[Tetsujin]

5 hours ago, Childs said:

I've never been an Okada fan, but I do wonder about the narrative around his "decline." Is it more a comment on the stagnant booking and waning talent pool that we've seen in pandemic-era New Japan? Is his performance really that different? The things that annoy me about him are the things that always annoyed me about him. The things he does well are the things he always did well. His case isn't much better than it was in 2019, but I don't see how it's worse. 

He has definitely looked worse each year since 2018. Sometimes he just wrestle in autopilot mode and sometimes he has looked like he couldn't go anymore, just a broken guy. His big matches are basically the same since 2019 with only a couple of exceptions, and no, the Shingo and Ospreay matches this year aren't those exceptions. He has become so much boring and predictable, It is just not fun to watch him.

[Kadaveri]

6 hours ago, DylanZero said:

Okada wrestles the exact same as he always has. That Shingo match and his Ospreay matches could have easily taken place in 2015 down to the beat. And he wrestled them virtually the same. Like all of his other big matches.

I think there are some differences (he does it all a lot slower now for one) but really this aspect is probably a big reason why so many people have soured on him. He's had virtually zero evolution since becoming the top star of NJPW and watching a guy just do the exact same act every night stops being interesting after a while.

[EnviousStupid]

The pandemic is a big part of his perceived decline. He's still working the same style of match he has for nearly a decade now, but that style is so clearly reliant on a hot crowd filling the dead space with their cheers. When they're only restricted to clapping, it's hard to not notice major diminishing returns in almost every singles match he's been part of for the last 2 years.

[Reel]

I think the Marty Scurll match from All In went a long way in convincing people that he wrestles every match the same way, I'm not sure that's 100% correct, but on that card, in that spot, against that guy, there was room to try a different approach, and he decidedly didn't. 

[Boss Rock]

He had a really fun, sub-10 minute match against Yota Tsuji last year. 

[Makai Club #1]

It was a fairly big match in the United States against one of the bigger stars on the indie scene. I can see why he tried to go all out to impress people. I doubt that Okada was going to go on auto-pilot like he's wrestling Yujiro Takahashi.

[El-P]

He managed to work some of the greatest matches ever for ten years and get many many MANY guys their single best matches ever (like this year again in the G1 with Tama Tonga or Chase Owens, not exactly world beaters) and who knows how many of those "boring same matches" that actually are gonna be all-time classics he'll have under his belt in the next years. If some (some, not "a lot", the consensus of him maybe being GOAT is very real) people are bored, it's on them in term of perception, really (which is understandable to a degree, like getting bored of *anything* that you watch for too long, even if it's great).

Also, he had no reason to deviate from his approach when facing Scurll, why would he ? People at All In probably also paid to watch an *Okada* match, and he delivered a great Okada match against a guy who already was familiar with the NJPW style. Deviating from a style that has produced arguably the greatest matches ever just for the sake of it makes no sense, and even less when he's working in front of an audience who rarely get to see him work to begin with.

And his style absolutely has evolved over the years. Not huge variations, but variations nonetheless. Also, it's not like he's always imposing his style of match either, his matches with Omega were very much dominated by Omega's approach. 

[NintendoLogic]

Okada and Scurll nearly ruined All In by going 12 minutes over their allotted time. The show came dangerously close to going off the air with the main event still in progress, which would have been a disaster. So that particular situation clearly called for a different approach. People seemed to point the finger at Scurll as the primary culprit, though.

[Reel]

It was also not very good, so the 'why would he change his approach, it worked before' defense sort of goes out of the window for me. It was bad and too long. He should have tried something else, and that criticism goes for pretty much everything post-2016 for me. He just isn't that adaptable.

I will watch the Tsuji match though. 6/16, Kizuna Road? @Boss Rock

[Boss Rock]

Yeah I think that's the one.

[Tetsujin]

I don't get the "he can bore you, it's your opinion, but that's on you, objectively he's one of the GOATs" card. I know a lot of people see him as such, but it's not like alienation doesn't exist. Generations of fans and wrestlers have been educated to like the prototype king's road formula, even if it's a very monotone, souless and artificial adaptation of it, like most Okada big matches... the Scurll one being the clearest example, not because it was bad (in fact I really liked it) but because they put the whole show in danger just because they had to do the Okada formula step by step, no matter what. That's his career in a nutshell. The New Beginning 2020 match against Taichi is another great example: he just lost the title to Naito, finally, so he was free of the big match gimmick for a long time, and he had a personal, almost bloody, rivalry with Taichi... Looked like a really cool opportunity to reinvent and keep yourself fresh as a wrestler... and then they worked the typical Okada main event and he won. It's just almost always the same, and that "almost" doesn't compensate enough, for me at least.

Also, his small variations have been to worse. He had a pretty fucking cool finishing hold (I don't even remember it's name now), left it for no reason, and years later came with a stupid cobra clutch to bore the living shit out of people. He had this cool "cocky rich brat" attitude, and he became less and less character driven by time. He had one Rainmaker that was an insta kill, but now he has multiple Rainmaker versions, each one looking worse than the last, but don't worry, the only one that will get him the win is the original Rainmaker so why bother anyway!?!? He had one fantastic Tombstone as a signature spot that was basically the perfect set up for his Rainmaker, so he could build tension around wheter he will execute it or not (the struggle around tombstones are part of what makes most of the Tanahashi matches amazing, imo), but now he has a regular Tombstone, the spinning Tombstone, and apron versions of both. None of them mean anything now. Hell, the first time he did the spinning Tombstone was because Omega pushed him to surpass his fucking limits at WK 11, and it felt huge, but look at it now. It's really frustrating.