Fire Pro Wrestling W

Fire Pro Wrestling W is the finest wrestling video game ever made. Some may make the case that AKI's Virtual Pro Wrestling 2 (or its North American equivalents, most notably WWF No Mercy) should hold that title, and others may vainly plead that WWE '13 or the later analog-grappling entries in the Smackdown vs. Raw series are contenders, but the games in those series are handily eclipsed by the precise gameplay and thoroughgoing customization that the Fire Pro series offers. Spike Chunsoft's Fire Pro Wrestling World (hereafter FPW) surpasses 2007's Fire Pro Wrestling Returns (hereafter FPR) in both control and creation options, and so it deserves to assume the mantle of wrestling's G.O.A.T.

The timing-based gameplay of the Fire Pro series, while tough to pick up and play, has always allowed for more meticulous match development than AKI's intuitive albeit mash-heavy weak/strong grappling system and the WWE 2K series’ ever-gimmicky approach, which annually reduces a wrestling match to a concatenation of mini-games. Pulling off a move successfully is never an accident in Fire Pro, nor does it feel like a boon born out of blunt-force button-mashing skills. This tried-and-true gameplay holds up in FPW, which proceeds even more seamlessly than in FPR. And don't let the world 'wrestling' in its title sell the game short: FPW, like its predecessors, contains solid MMA and kickboxing modes (along with respective ground-grappling and clinching systems), taking the game well beyond pro wrestling and into the sphere of virtually any kind of fight you can imagine. From boxing to street-fighting, you can do it all in style in FPW. Hell, FPW even has gravity-defying anime-styled moves inspired by Ultimate Muscle, if that suits your fancy.

Fire Pro Wrestling World boasts sharper, sleeker graphics. Note the Bam Bam Bigelow 

lookalike in the front row of the audience. Note also the bored girlfriend seated behind him.

Moreover, Fire Pro has always outpaced the aforementioned wrestling series with regard to its create-a-wrestler feature. This is truly saying something, given the admirable level of customization in the 2K and AKI games. FPW takes creation even further. Instead of just 2 or 3 layers of accessorizing per body part as per FPR, there are now as many as 9 in FPW. The permutations and combinations are practically limitless. There are far more parts available, too, including skirts and body hair, the former allowing you to make your girlish girl that much girlier, the latter making your man's man that much more masculine. Put the two together and you might just make a Scotsman. There are also dozens of new moves, including the pole-shift flowsion, Bray Wyatt's Sister Abigail and a more accurate rendering of John Cena’s Attitude Adjustment. Whatever your creative goals, in FPW you can fashion any wrestler from any era and give him or her an ultraprecise moveset, even detailing in head-bending depth the timing and frequency of move usage via the game's logic editor. Now you can make a spot-on Cena, spamming AA attempts in the late stages of his matches, something the licensed WWE games still cannot (or perhaps will not) do with much exactitude. Also, the process of searching through the thousands of moves is much more streamlined than in previous games, as FPW’s edit mode now sorts maneuvers by type. The new moves and outfit options alone make FPW worth buying, as does all the available save space afforded by the PS4. While FPR had a generous 500 slots for custom characters, the PS4's hard-drive means there really is no conceivable limit to the number of wrestlers, cage-fighters and kickboxers you can create. Moreover, the online network allows you to share creations with the most effete wrestling aficionados around the world (and then have them harshly judged thereby).

FPW also has the benefit of being licensed by the top promotion on the planet today, New Japan Pro Wrestling. Sorry WWE diehards, but New Japan has equal or greater talent, and unlike Vince McMahon's booking staff, it actually uses its roster to its fullest potential. The masters of New Japan's hard-hitting “strong style”—that is, strike-heavy wrestling with kicks and slaps that land harder and realer than in any other squared-circle worldwide—are all here. You may be tempted to dismiss names like Hiroshi Tanahashi, Kazuchika Okada and Kenny Omega, but if so, you are willfully impoverishing your wrestling fandom. These wrestlers, in their mastery of the strong style, consistently put a compelling, physically intensive product in the ring, giving NJPW a “big-fight feel” that WWE can barely muster for a WrestleMania main-event. The new "Fighting Road" mode, a single-player campaign in which wrestlers climb their way up the ranks of NJPW, offers gamers a taste of this intensity. This mode should also appeal to traditionalist video game fans, who may have been disappointed by the admirable but exceedingly niche "Match Maker" mode from FPR, which simulated working as a pro wrestling booker rather than as a pro-wrestler proper.

Even if FPW is the best wrestling game ever, it is still not perfect. Many of the minor issues of FPR and other entries in the series remain unsolved in the Day One version of FPW. There is still, for example, no fighting outside the ring in the landmine death match, a feature that was enabled in the Japan-only Dreamcast release Fire Pro Wrestling Z but conspicuously absent in FPR. Moreover, there is still no falls-count-anywhere option, which could previously be found in Fire Pro Wrestling for the Gameboy Advance. These sorts of exclusions are inconsequential, though, and will only irk hardcore wrestling pedants. Perhaps more seriously, not a lot has been added in terms of bells and whistles, at least out of the Day One box. To the contrary, some features have actually been lost. FPW has fewer background songs, rings, and venues than FPR. The venues that have returned have changed, and not always for the better. The "Dojo", for instance, is just an unpeopled hall-of-mirrors matrix of wrestling rings, quite unlike the more intimate warehouse-style workout room bearing the same name in FPR. More strikingly, there are only two federations available from the outset: the licensed NJPW, of course, as well as Spike's fictional standby SWA, the wrestlers of which are half-baked, uber-generic characters such as the Maple-leaf masked "Canadian Sensation" Allen Hawkins. This is a marked change from FPR, which featured near-identical stand-ins for wrestlers from every major Japanese promotion, as well as some American talent, too. While the "Canadian Sensation" has signature moves borrowed from famous countrymen, including the Sharpshooter and the Crippler Crossface, he's still no Blood Love, FPR's none-too-subtle Bret Hart clone. Correspondingly, FPW only offers two referees to start with: NJPW legend Red Shoes Unno and some dude by the name of "Mr. Judgement". The paucity of rings, wrestlers and refs is cosmetic, though, and can be rectified in due time by the player's creativity.

There is perhaps no cosmetic issue more enduring for the Fire Pro series than its visuals. Some will stridently lament FPW’s graphics, a perennial bugbear for the series' detractors. Sure, the characters are sprite-based and not polygonal, but in FPW, the classic models benefit from the PS4's HD, which has made them less pixelated and therefore much snazzier. The NJPW guys look particularly spiffy, capturing the essence of their real-life strong-style equivalents in a workable, cartoonish form. To those people for whom graphics remain a nagging concern, your correspondent would suggest that you just might be throwing out the baby with the bathwater here, and in the process denying yourself the best experience of wrestling available in video gaming. And honestly, are the bland, lifeless graphics from the 2K WWE series preferable? At least the Fire Pro guys are well-drawn.

Although FPW's graphical style, like its features, may be sparse, the Fire Pro series is now sleeker than ever before. This slick, streamlined Fire Pro is ready to carry the torch of video game pro wrestling well into the next decade, until we are graced with a PS6 version. With FPW, the Fire Pro series retains the title of Best Wrestling Game, primarily because it empowers you to make it the best wrestling game ever, and to keep improving it with the evolution of not only wrestling, but of the imagination itself.