The Best And Worst Of NJPW: Wrestling Hi No Kuni 2019

Previously on NJPW: Everyone wondered if Sho wants Shingo Takagi more than the tag titles, we learned Kota Ibushi wants to be NJPW 4 Life, and Suzuki ruined Liger’s 30th anniversary by being too dramatic about MMA.

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And now, the best and worst of Road to Wrestling Dontaku – Aki no Kuni SENGOKU EMAKI on April 26 in Hiroshima and Wrestling Hi no Kuni on April 29 in Kumamoto.

Best: Chaos and Ko

I’m going to kick this off talking about my two favorite matches from these shows, starting with my actual favorite, the IWGP Junior Heavyweight Tag Team Championship match between Roppongi 3K and the team of Bushi and Shingo Takagi. The big question going into this match was whether Sho would ruin things for his team by focusing too much on his goal of pinning Takagi, but that had never seemed to cause him to lose a match on this tour before, so it really wasn’t that concerning of a question for our shiny EDM boys.

The facts that both these pairs are great at tag teamwork, that there is so much aggression behind the fight for these titles, and that everyone involved has a distinct, individual personality all combine to make this an entertainingly passionate match. Sho and Takagi are especially good when they’re in the ring together, Sho trying to get that elusive win over the undefeated Dragon while proving that he can be exactly as tough as this veteran junior powerhouse in the same way, aka being extremely Manly and throwing lots of very motivated clotheslines.

Sho ultimately puts the needs of the tag team over the needs of the one (he doesn’t just go rogue and never tag out), but also doesn’t have to sacrifice much. Even when he saves Yoh from a Pumping Bomber it ultimately shows how badass he is to both Shingo and the audience. So while part of this match is in service of what will almost definitely be one of the most anticipated matches of Best of the Super Juniors, but that part isn’t elevated that above the tag titles. Yay for these not being used like the 6-man championships!

What’s interesting about this individual feud though is that, in a promo that would have felt like the post-credits scene in a Marvel movie if it had been placed at the end of the post-match comments, Takagi now seems like its more obsessed half. He’s shocked his nemesis wasn’t completely consumed by his need to pin him and thinks Sho has “awoken” something in him while Sho comes off like a level-headed, driven athlete backstage. This hasn’t produced anything dramatic at this point, but it makes the competitors feel more evenly matched and makes the already compelling feud just a little bit more interesting.

While the power guys are clear standouts in this match, it’s Yoh that pins Bushi after a Dragon Suplex – obviously not the R3K finisher, but also not Yoh’s usual singles finisher. Most recently brought back to finisher status in NJPW by Tanahashi, it joins the Dragon Screw leg whip in Yoh’s growing arsenal of Ace moves. Along with a personality that seems to sincerely fit a pure babyface type of character not everyone can pull off, picking up an old-school finisher like this points to an interesting individual future for Yoh as well as his more intense partner.

The other really good match on this show is Evil, Sanada, and Tetsuya Naito vs. Tomohiro Ishii, Kazuchika Okada, and Kota Ibushi. The crowd is extremely psyched for even the announcement something that features three out of the four most beloved guys in the company and remains psyched throughout, which makes sense because all these wrestlers kill it. It’s the most powerful type of match in the preview tag genre, both a really good tag team match in itself and one that showcases all the feuds involved, making them all look exciting. All the pairs of rivals in the match show that they have different physical dynamics too and will deliver different kinds of singles matches.

The wrestlers involved in the best parts of the April 26 show reunite at Wrestling Hi no Kuni for another ten-man tag, the first match the live audience for this event is really into. It understandably does not bang as hard as either of the matches on the previous show, but it has good energy and is overall fun to watch. The Skull End that ends Sho is one of the dumber-looking ones we’ve seen recently but maybe Sanada’s gag of putting a piece of tape with [name of city] on his shirt to try and get local babyface heat everywhere without sacrificing his cool image makes up for it. (It does not; that submission looks very dumb sometimes.)

Worst: An Under-Delivering Undercard/A Very Quiet Kumamoto

There are a bunch of matches on both Aki no Kuni SENGOKU EMAKI and Hi no Kuni that I’m not going to talk about much and fall into the category of way weaker lower card matches than NJPW’s being having recently. It doesn’t help that the audience on April 29 in Kumamoto is by far the deadest of the year (and also there’s some other audio feed audible in the background of the English commentary version a lot of the time) (either that or I temporarily went insane while watching that show) and barely reacts to anything until the last three matches. That Lee-Ospreay vs. Ishimori-Hikuleo match definitely deserved a more receptive audience and would have had one most places.

The one match out of these that makes me concerned for the angle it finally kicks off in the ring is Jeff Cobb and Ryusuke Taguchi vs. Taichi and Taka Michinoku on the 26th. Cobb only gets reactions for cool moves and while Taichi doesn’t get cheered, it’s possible the combination of his popularity with Cobb’s relative lack of it as a guest star more casual fans might not be familiar with could result in their title match not getting the ideal response. Their sequences together on the 29th remind me of my personal hopes for the match though and I think they should be able to win over even a less than hyped audience if that’s what they end up with.

Best/Worst: That Ain’t 1987 Memphis

The people hurt the worst by the lack of crowd interest in almost anything are the wrestlers stuck in the consistently least cared about feud so far, the one related to the U.S. title picture. I feel like Chase Owens’ gag of calling for a time out, asking for a handshake, then just trying the kick to gut anyway when Juice Robinson didn’t fall for it would have gone over way better in Korakuen last week!

Owens vs. Robinson III is a weird match partly because it’s not a weird match at all; it’s the most straightforward of their series. Owens finally goes back to the strategy he used to beat Juice in the first place, his own wrestling skill seasoned with a reasonable amount of heel chicanery. They keep the match pretty simple, the most over the top thing the extra effort you can see and hear Juice putting into his trademark appeals to the crowd, trying almost desperately to get this audience invested in the match. If you wondered why this feud even happened, this match would be your answer. Now Robinson gets to move on to hopefully someone higher profile.

Mikey Nicholls vs. Bad Luck Fale doesn’t come off as well as its all-American counterpart but it does have its upsides. Along with more of the running joke of Gino Gambino calling Fale “a war hero,” we get the beginning of a very logical match in which Fale targets a body part on which his opponent heavily relies for offense, here the arm of Nicholls, much like he did the back of Robinson during their title match. Unlike Juice in that match though, Nicholls’ selling is much less consistent, which makes his babyface comeback less exciting, though it does start to win over this dead audience.

I was surprised to see Fale beat him, especially with the Grenade, which I always forget is supposed to be basically the same power level as the Bad Luck Fall because it’s not the move mentioned in his default promo, but it made sense as an ending to the match. Fale was just too big and wrestled too smart and now looks strong for… I’m guessing the G1?

Best: The Real MVP

The preview tags for the Guerrillas of Destiny vs. the team of Togi Makabe and Toru Yano that has yet to be officially renamed the Most Violent Players have been hit or miss. However, the hype video, which is spot-on with its depiction of G.O.D. as Grand Theft Auto characters, made it seem like their IWGP Heavyweight Tag Team Championship match would lean into the over-the-top element that made the trios title match work.

Though the tag title match doesn’t go to comedy territory, it is heightened in a way that makes it a lot more engaging than the first time these teams wrestled, with the reunited MVP finally wrestling like the reunited MVP for more than a few moves at a time. They work together to make sure Yano has time to expose a corner right at the beginning of the match, hit a spike piledriver to the floor, and take control of G.O.D. outside of the ring in a way that reminds everyone they were doing this stuff back when people bled a lot more in this company. After the champs focus on Yano for revenge purposes, the hot tag to Makabe feels truly hot for the first time in a while.

New Japan has been on a rematch kick lately, but after this new/old energy from Makabe and Yano, I really wouldn’t mind seeing a rematch of this if it means Makabe makes good on his backstage promise they’ll take it to the next level. A functioning MVP seems like too good of a thing to only bring back for one match.

So Depressing On Every Level: The New Beginning In Osaka 2016 Called

Before I talk about Hirooki Goto vs. Jay White, by far the biggest let-down of this tour for me so far, I want to go over the last match of their build. Along with the crowd-pleasing return of Will Opsreay and exciting sequences between Lee and Ishimori, Goto continued to look really, really good.

The giant-slaying stuff with Hikuleo continued to work well and the physical story between he and White continued gradually and logically. White initially stopped Goto from hitting the GTR on Hikuleo this time around and went to hit Goto with the Blade Runner, but Goto now managed to not only escaped the move but to definitively take out White with a clothesline and then hit the GTR on Hikuleo to win the match. And continuing this logical progression, Goto looked more confident as he stared down White, who continued to call him “a f*cking joke,” et cetera.

With this, all that was left was for this clear hero and villain to wrestle one-on-one. No matter what the result would be, their time together in the ring in tag matches made it look like they could both come out of this looking good. And with Evil vs. Ishii also being talked about as possibly a de facto number one contender’s match for the IWGP Heavyweight Championship, there was no reason to really stress out about how likely this was to spell a White vs. Okada For The Third Time Since January match in our future.

Their singles match starts in a promising way but completely falls flat in the middle. While I was busy thinking about how strong Goto’s strengths can be during this build, I forgot about just how weak White’s weakness can be. Unlike the other major singles heels in the company (Taichi, ZSJ, Ishimori, Suzuki…), White’s streaks of offense can drag not just because you’re waiting for the babyface to finally break them, but because they’re just not as engaging to watch as wrestling. When White dominates a match, it can be one move – long pause – another move – long pause. It’s an uranage. Then it’s a DVDDT. Then it’s a deadlift German. Then it’s the Kiwi Crusher. It’s a series of high-impact wrestling moves happening and nothing about it makes it feel like anything other than that in itself.

And it’s not like Goto is this perfect wrestler, if there’s such a thing that exists in the real world – his big matches in which his character has choked have sometimes also felt like the performer choking, I think most memorably in his 2016 IWGP Heavyweight Championship match against Okada.

However, Goto the performer does not choke in this match. He breaks out the rare Code Red and later looks like a badass giving a ushigoroshi first to Gedo, then to White. The smart reverse GTR and the no-sell of the suplex own – and own so much harder than both of White’s escapes of almost-locked-on GTRs. He looks like the better wrestler and then he loses to a guy who did not look good at all for most of the match and then gets called a failure. We don’t get any words from Goto backstage so there’s no reaction yet from the character who had “given up on giving up,” (according to a translation of the hype video by Chris Carlton) to clearly not giving up and yet still failing.

It’s disappointing beyond a kayfabe level because if this was someone other than Goto you’d think this might trigger some sort of change for him at some point, maybe a return to heel status, but this is the dude who had that 2016 match in which he painted his body in a Buddhism-inspired way like it was the biggest bout of his life and then lost to Okada and joined Okada’s stable and was beyond nerfed for a while because this made him look like such a joke. But the dude can deliver and deserves to be something other than a Yoshi-Hashi who doesn’t know he’s a Yoshi-Hashi – it looks like that might be what he is now.

While Goto’s career seems like a bad of question marks and sadness, it looks like we know exactly what Jay White is up to next. The way he says that Okada and Sanada are fighting to be the one who gives his belt back to him makes it sound like he’ll be the next challenger for the IWGP Heavyweight Championship and if so, wow, I hope he’s facing improbable new champ Sanada because at least we’ve never seen that before.

Maybe after the main event of Wrestling Dontaku Jay White will start walking out to challenge Okada but then someone else will run out ahead of him and beat him to the ring to make their own challenge because White trips on the ring-steps in a moment of karmic vengeance for Yoshi-Hashi, except he doesn’t get hurt in real life because this is not a cruel fantasy comeuppance for the performer who I do not know personally! Then Goto comes out with, like, Ishii and Makabe and Yano and maybe Henare as Great Bash Heel II and they all point and laugh at him and then go off to shoulder tackle people into the sunset.