This was a unit dismissal elimination match.
It’s nothing new for Dragon Gate, once again turning the dial up to become a match about individual eliminations and not simply one-per-team for a match with stakes like this. For whatever other problems exist within the company at any given time, past or future, a match like this almost always delivers, and this is no exception.
There are maybe better matches of this sort throughout the company’s history.
You have your weak spots in here, of course. Big R and Kotoka are not GREAT, the match sometimes rushes and while Kzy has begun to come out of his shell, he’s not quite capable of hanging in big elbow exchanges just yet. At close to thirty minutes, it’s also somehow a match that I wish was longer, as they have to do a lot and some match ups and people naturally get short-changed. There’s not a focus here that absolutely tears the match asunder, the things they focus on in the end are all spectacular and enthralling, but I leave this match wanting more, as opposed to the absolute best versions of this, in which I’m exhausted and wholly satisfied and maybe need to use the inhaler. It’s also not a match with a remarkably strong narrative focus on any one wrestler or story specifically. As compared to something like one only five months and change prior, this one is not especially DRAMATIC as a result, at least not on the level that matches like this in this company can achieve.
What it is though is an absolute marvel of speed and a monument to precision, one of the best Dragon Gate fireworks shows in some time.
A thousand things happen in a row, virtually none of them are repetitive, and it finds a way to keep them all at a relatively high and stunning level for close to half an hour. Everyone, save early comedy elimination Kotoka, gets a chance to really shine in the back half (one could argue this is the sort of shining Kotoka is most capable of at this point, and fair enough, as it is very funny). The highlights come from the usual sources. Shingo going on his little rampages, Tozawa and Yoshino being Dragon Gate’s all-time best babyfaces at the peaks of their powers, Kzy bursts, and especially, a great underdog run from Shachihoko BOY where he finally finds some revenge for 2015 and scores an upset elimination over Takagi. Every great pairing here gets a little chance to take a little bit of the stage, and not a one of them comes up short.
The part that’s especially great is the final segment, where it comes down to YAMATO and Naruki Doi against Kzy against Masato Yoshino. As a result of the clear logic of the thing, either Kzy or Yoshino losing dooms their unit forever, but puts Dragon Gate’s two all-time greatest underdog figures in the ideal situation, having to get past both Doi and YAMATO.
It’s the ideal fireworks show.
The Yoshino match ups here are proven, and they succeed once again. Yoshino vs. YAMATO, secretly one of the great Dream Gate pairings of all time, results in maybe the most outstanding and dramatic stuff in the match. It’s the YAMATO vs. Kzy stuff that the match closes with though, and it’s one of the first occasions in which Kzy’s future as Dragon Gate’s greatest post-Big Six babyface shows its potential. His mechanics aren’t as great as they’ll become. Hell, his babyface basics aren’t as great as they’ll become just yet. He’ll get better at bumping and selling and eliciting sympathy through those routes, and he’ll become an even more energetic wrestler in the future. Here and now though, it’s already here, that unteachable likeability that makes all the best stuff like this work, just unrefined. Every kickout feels like a Godsend, and every bit of offense he throws out in the end feels like something even greater, even if it can’t last.
YAMATO and Doi gang up on Kzy, and at this point in his development, it’s too much. He survives one Galleria, but when Doi adds in a Bakatare Sliding Kick to help set up the second Galleria, that’s that. Kzy is eliminated, Monster Express survives (thank GOD), and Dia.HEARTS is finally done with (again, thank God).
I wish there was more, just like the entire match, but especially of this last run. Not just the YAMADoi vs. Kzy vs. Yoshino run they were on, but of Kzy’s final burst in particular. He’s not quite there yet, both in terms of mechanics or booking, but given that he’ll get there, that’s not the end of the world.
All things in (Kzy) time.
This isn’t the absolute best version of the match, given the obvious nature of the decision, but what it is is maybe something even more valuable to anyone reading this who hasn’t seen it, or perhaps to anyone at the time who was dipping their toes in with the increased ease of availability of footage that certain real heroes in our community provided at the time.
What we have here is, I think, the perfect Dragon Gate starter match.
HANDWERK 