Featured image by @yuuri_cameko
This review was commissioned by Ragnar33 over on my Ko-fi account.
It’s hard to have a great match when only one wrestler involved has a pulse. Our favorite kick boy returns once again to put on another snoozer classic. I’m not going to sit here and say I’ve never enjoyed a Katsuhiko Nakajima match before. His ability to hit fairly hard, even outside of his signature kicks, has drawn my curiosity more than once in the past. But every single time I’ve tried to give the guy a fair shake, he finds himself being the more boring end of a match, clashing into someone with an equally boring formula, or just not giving much of himself to be worth checking out.
In this case, it’s the third of those options. After invoking the name of Antonio Inoki as a cheap cosplay gimmick for the last several months and stinking up the house with fellow boring formula wrestler Kento Miyahara, Katsuhiko Nakajima reaches the end of his Triple Crown Championship reign against a promising upstart in Yuma Anzai. As someone with no great familiarity with Anzai, God bless him. The kid tries so fucking hard in this match to draw blood from a stone, when he’s somehow been dealth the shittier hand between the two in spite of being the guy booked to win the title. Anzai spends 90% of the match on the backfoot, absorbing Nakajima’s kicks and having his arm worked over, and good on Anzai for working so hard to sell all that. He’s expressive and sympathetic throughout, and he really does work to put over how busted up his arm is. Towards the end, one can see him unable to put any real force behind his attempted elbow strikes.
Nakajima feels mechanical in the most boring possible way. All he’s good for is some lower body strength behind his kicks and little else. It’s like watching an AI generated wrestler created using the prompt “hard hitting Japanese wrestler.” Somebody check his hands to see if the fingers are deformed. There’s nothing behind his eyes except a pure disinterest in what’s happening, something that’s hard not to read into given how this match wraps up and what’s to follow.
The finish is literally nothing. Nakajima’s been dominating for a good ten minutes or more, only for Anzai to stun him with a jumping knee and a German suplex. Nakajima’s shoulders stay down for the contractually obligated three seconds and not a single bit more before he shuffles off soon to stink up a GLEAT show near you.
Total waste of time, a match whose finish invites you to think that nothing that happened between the bells actually mattered and that the result was a perfunctory footnote stapled on at the last minute. A poisoned coronation if there ever was one.
Rating: **
