This review was commissioned by Dan Vacura over on my Ko-fi account.
I’ve never really gotten this match.
It’s one of many on the 90s joshi canon that any fan can easily find, even back in my younger days as a fan. It doesn’t have the same immediacy as the Dream Slam I Hokuto/Kandori, for example, nor does it have the punchy flash of something like Aja/Manami from later in the year. It’s a much more sprawling epic, 35 minutes in length, and with a fairly ambitious narrative running through it. In the years since I’ve last seen this, I’ve always assumed that a revisit with further knowledge and context might finally make it click for me. After all, it’s got that one big, juicy idea that’s always boosted its myth even in previous viewings.
And to its credit, it’s a really interesting narrative hook here. It’s perhaps the most famous “Can they co-exist?” tag in pro wrestling history. After spending 1993 trying to extinguish each other, Hokuto takes Kandori on as a tag team partner to kick of her (prematurely named) Final Countdown tour. The tension is palpable even from the pre-match interviews. Where Kong and Bull stand side-by-side, Hokuto and Kandori stand on either side of the backstage reporter. During the interview, Kandori even states that she feels like that she has three opponents coming into the match.
That animosity translates in-ring as well. Again, they make the most of small details. At the ring introductions, Kong and Bull stand firmly in the blue corner. Meanwhile, Hokuto stands in the opposite red corner, while Kandori chooses to stand in a neutral corner instead. In the first half of the match two, Hokuto and Kandori never really tag so much as they smack each other into the match. It is the most compelling aspect of the entire match. The strife between the two central characters is such a big stumbling block for them both. It comes to its climax too as the match finishes, never in so blatant and obvious a way as one might expect, but constantly in ways that feel much more like the heat of the moment getting the better of both women as opposed to anything so obvious as a cleanly demarcated point of forgiveness and mutual understanding. Kandori reaching to save Hokuto at multiple points, trying to drag her out of the corner away from Aja’s clutches, and then dramatically making big saves in the final stretch to open Hokuto’s path to victory all carry a certain emotional weight behind them that brings a close to their rivalry quite neatly.
The unfortunate thing is the rest of it.
And there’s a lot of the rest of it. 35 minutes of it. If you ask me, these four struggle to fill that space. That shouldn’t be a surprise either, these four especially function best in incredibly urgent, punchy matches. Dragged out for over half an hour, everything feels stretched thin and at its worst–I’ll say it–boring. There’s a surprising amount of ground work deployed here, for example, which is not something I really care to see from any of these workers here, even the more shoot-leaning Kandori. The 90s AJW stalwarts especially I’ve never really associated with interesting matwork (though Aja had some room to display ability later on in ARSION) and they disappoint on that front here too. Holds pulled from lucha get applied but without the intricacies of rhythm that make that kind of thing work in lucha.
It gets so dire at points that well-practiced monsters in both Aja and Bull can’t even really string together a compelling heat segment amidst all of this. Yokohama Arena sits firmly on their hands for much of their control, and we’re not even really blessed with the best that either woman can do as far as more direct, aggressive mauling until much deeper down the stretch. Even then, all the most impactful bits of brawling and bomb throwing feel spaced too far out to retain their energy through the runtime. In the back half too, the match leans towards the overindulgent with multiple big nearfalls until Hokuto finally gets the climactic victory.
I don’t know if I can strictly call this a bad match. The Hokuto and Kandori does still work, and there’s just enough bombs falling in the back half to bite on, but the structure holding it all together is unwieldy. The result is a match with one grand idea and very little else going for it. In practice, it’s not even the best version of that big idea executed within the very same decade. Just a few years before, three out of these four participants put in a much more compelling (and blessedly shorter) version when Bull Nakano and Aja Kong finally set their differences aside to dispatch a team of Akira Hokuto and Toshiyo Yamada. Wrestling Queendom trades the thrills and drama of that tag for bloat and excess instead.
Maybe the next time I see it, I’ll finally see the classic everyone’s been raving about for decades. For now, more of an overrated slog to me.
Rating: ***
