Monster Express (Akira Tozawa (c)/Masato Yoshino/Big R Shimizu/Shachihoko BOY) vs. VerserK (Shingo Takagi (c)/Naruki Doi/T-Hawk/Cyber Kong/YASSHI), DG Gate of Victory 2016 Day Seven (10/12/2016)

This was a handicap Captain’s Fall revival-style elimination Unit Dismissal match.

Usually, when I really love a match, I want to drop a link or sort of hint at where an enterprising young reader could find the match I’m writing about. Part of this is that I want you to see and like better wrestling. There’s so much good to great wrestling out there throughout history, there’s no excuse to spend your time watching bad, or worse, mediocre wrestling. I want to help you, even if you go into something without the best context and love for everything.

That is not the case here.

I do not want you to seek this out or watch this if you do not have reverence for Akira Tozawa or for the Monster Express unit, or the stories told with this unit and these men over the last three years. I am 100% gatekeeping you. Do your homework, do the reading, and then come back when you can get the absolute most out of this, because outside of retirements and departures and Takagi’s heel turn in 2015, it is perhaps the most emotionally draining match in Dragon Gate history.

With Akira Tozawa’s upcoming departure to WWE set in stone and T-Hawk’s recent betrayal of Monster Express to join VerserK, the result of this already seems obvious. Shingo leaving was one thing, but removing two members of the original three-man core means, even if they survive here, it would be a fundamentally different unit, one that maybe ought to be renamed anyways, for all the resemblance it has to such a beloved unit. The Monster Express that goes into this match is not the fearsome all-time great unit that they fielded for much of the last three years. Those odds only seem compounded by Peter Kaasa’s injury before the show (not the career ending one) meaning that Monster Express couldn’t even go into this with a full five man team. That’s not the killer it might be in a revival-style elimination match, where an elimination one side causes one eliminated man from the other team to re-enter, but it’s not great. It’s just a whole lot.

All that’s left to do is put pen to paper on the thing, you know?

The beauty of the thing though, and the beauty of both Dragon Gate and pro wrestling done right in a larger sense, is that you never really know.

Specifically, the beauty of this match is that it balances these two ideas. You always kind of know how this is going to end. In a pragmatic and realistic sense, how it maybe should end. It’s a matter of waiting for that sword of Damocles to finally fall, knowing that something bad is going to happen to this thing we all love, but also constantly teetering on the edge. When you tease time and time again that it’s going to happen, only for Our Heroes to keep pushing it back, you sort of get that feeling without even trying to.

Yes, something terrible — this specific horrible final fate — is almost definitely going to happen.

But maybe not. 

That’s the most impressive and beautiful and altogether stunning thing about this, that it pushes “but maybe not” as far as possible, and winds up turning what was a foregone conclusion at the start into one of the more emotionally devastating moments of the entire decade.

Not to recap every single elimination and comeback and thing that happens in the match, but the entire match rides on the momentum of that feeling. It does it in so many fun different ways too, and does so many different things with the format of the match. A near immediate dismissal and then redemption story for Shachihoko BOY, going back to the first cracks between Takagi and the other MX members years back. Kotoka returning for revenge on his former stablemates in VerserK. Takagi constantly almost gets cornered by his former stablemates. Yoshino the spark plug constantly bailing MX out when it’s tight, and the match largely being a battle to neutralize him at the end, taking both Doi and T-Hawk to really do it. Big R failing to stand up to Cyber Kong, but later being able to do it. And of course, the way that at the end, it just comes down to the two captains in an extended run.

We never got the Shingo vs. Tozawa title match, but we get something like three to five minutes at the end of this that’s just them, and it feels just as big. It could be argued they’re able to get reactions here, both in this setting and in Korakuen Hall instead of Kobe World, that they maybe couldn’t have had in that theoretical match. It feels as big as anything else to happen in Dragon Gate all year, the most dramatic nearfalls the company’s put out all year, and the most real heart put into something either.

This is already a great match, and then the last run of this takes it completely over the top, as Our Hero is slowly and heartbreaking gunned down by the odds against him outside and the power of Takagi inside.

In a purely structural and mechanical sense, removed from all those Dragon Gate Stories, this match is pretty marvelous too. Everyone in this you’d expect to be great in this is stellar. Yoshino, Shingo, and Tozawa once again make it incredibly clear that they are the three best wrestlers in the company, but this match doesn’t just work because they’re great. You’ve got your all world absolute killers in the line up, but this is a match that could have been diminished and/or made outright not-great as a result of the lesser talents in the match. What the match does with them is either barely allowing them to get involved at all (YASSHI), or really only letting them hit the absolute highlights and putting them ONLY in situations to succeed both as heel brick wall (Kong) or as a bowling burl hurled at it to remove it (Big R), while also limiting them compared to the others. The layout of the match is also pretty special, with a pure back and forth kind of a structure turned into the best ever version of the revival rules elimination match I’ve ever seen, swinging from different situations (3v3, 4v2, 5v1) in increasingly dramatic ways. There’s one especially great run where MX gets it to 4 on 2 in their favor, only for it to swing to 4-2 in VerserK’s favor through pure cheating, before Tozawa has to stare down and fight back from a 5-1 deficit. Ending up with Tozawa vs. Shingo anyways, Tozawa weakened from that fight earlier, it’s all just really astoundingly well done on almost every level.

This is a match that’s thought up and assembled with precision, executed as well as possible. In general, it is nearly perfect.

With one exception, and it’s 100% down to booking.

Something about the timing and the direction of the entire thing just doesn’t feel right. Not just that it feels terrible, that’s a given. Monster Express breaking up is the right move, generally, because Monster Express was Yoshino, Tozawa, and Shingo. But I mean in a more general sense, this feels like a match that is on the wrong date. This is a match where Shingo crushes the group once and for all, VerserK’s ultimate victory. It’s what you do right before the big evil force is finally stopped, which is what happened on the biggest show of the year. Ideally, with Tozawa getting revenge and dethroning Takagi in that main event, but alas.

It feels like a match that happened before Kobe World, and only airs now for some reason.

As it is here, it’s a thing that puts all that heat back on Takagi, only for Dragon Gate to not really ever do much of anything with Takagi again. As a result, one thinks about other things, like how Tozawa and Monster Express at large never ever got any revenge on Shingo for his betrayal (although Yoshino did years in the future, once he had begun to decline, it’s easy to forget their 2018 Kobe World main), the self-fulfilling prophecy the entire Tozawa thing wound up being with this now only SUPER CONVENIENTLY happening once there’s a pragmatic argument that Tozawa and MX has to lose, and how even beyond that and just thinking of how despicable it makes Shingo and how little is done with that, it’s ultimately just kind of a waste of something that works as unbelievably well as this does. There is just something about it, as a complete package, that has always felt just a little off for me.

There’s a version of this where Tozawa wins at the end, and it is with very little doubt in my mind, the 2016 Match of the Year and maybe the best match in company history. The result of a match is rarely enough to ruin something this great, but it is enough to diminish it just a little little bit.

Still, beyond that, a near masterpiece.

If it has to go like this, at least it matters. Heels win things all the time in other places, but it’s like Big Japan’s incrimental to a fault development, when something this out of the ordinary happens, you notice and remember it. It’s one of the only times in Dragon Gate history where the bad guys win this definitively, and because of that and because of who it happened to and what it meant, it is up there with the most devastating gut punches in company history.

You can’t say they didn’t make it count.

A significant significant match, both in that it ends Dragon Gate’s all-time greatest faction, but also for me as a viewer.

Personally, it’s also the middle part of a trifecta of things along with YAMATO/Shingo and Tozawa’s departure that essentially ended my time as a real hardcore fan of the company. One represented, with some real finality both in the moment and in retrospect, that Dragon Gate booking would never be 100% for me. The latter of the three firmly ending this era of the company and removing at least one of the wrestlers that one could reasonably call the heart and soul of the company. That’s not to say I ever stopped watching, but it is to say that I’ve never really cared as much since.

I have yet to ever enjoy Dragon Gate/Dragongate to the extent that I did when Monster Express was around. That’s not to say I am entirely detached from it, but it is to say that it hasn’t ever totally reached these levels, and nothing has ever hit quite the same button that Monster Express did. It was maybe the coolest stable I’ve ever seen. Especially in their original incarnation, they were this perfect unit of all the most likeable and awesome wrestlers in the promotion to the extent that if they played in another sport, we’d have something called the Monster Express Third. It’s not just that they’re gone, of course. It’s this smaller symptom of a larger problem, the era of the Big Six officially coming to a close, between Tozawa’s departure, Takagi’s more drawn out diminished role until his 2018 departure, and Yoshino never being quite the same after 2016. It’s about Dragon Gate booking largely falling off a cliff for a few years late in the decade. It’s also about this just being an overwhelmingly talented crop of guys that happened to line up with one of the company’s best prolonged runs of booking (2013-2016) ever, and the rarity of situations like that.

The end of Peak Dragon Gate is all of those things, but more than either other match that it’s connected with in my mind, I think this perfectly sort of sums it up. It’s the exact perfect representation of all that Dragon Gate can be and has to offer as a company and a style, but also the perfect avatar of just how weird and frustrating being a fan of this company was, could, and probably still can be (it will be Kzy Time some day). The company effectively summed up in one match.

If not the ten thousand megaton emotional juggernaut heavyweight champion of 2016, that’s solely because of the match in a few weeks that it leads into. It’s still a god damner, a classical style Dragon Gate epic, but one that aims straight for the heart with an unmatched force and accuracy.

Watch it when you’re ready for it, and get rendered into dust.

***1/2

VerserK (Shingo Takagi/YAMADoi/Kotoka) vs. Monster Express (Masato Yoshino/Akira Tozawa/T-Hawk/Shachihoko BOY) vs. Dia.HEARTS (Masaaki Mochizuki/Dragon Kid/Kzy/Big R Shimizu), DG Truth Gate 2016 Day Two (2/4/2016)

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.

***1/4

Amigo Tag (Masato Yoshino/Shachihoko BOY) vs. Jimmy Susumu/Jimmy Kagetora, DG Gate of Passion Day Four (4/9/2015)

This was for Amigo Tag’s Open the Twin Gate Titles.

Even relative to the few years before it, Dragon Gate footage from 2015 is incredibly hard to come by. As someone who sort of faded out of watching it (again) during the long BxB Hulk title reign that began in 2014, and didn’t totally come back until 2016, I hate it. I hate it more than the other absences because I at least know what’s missing and how I felt about it at the time. There’s none of that in 2015. It’s this thing I didn’t experience and can’t find anywhere, either legally (outside of the three or four shows from 2015 on DG’s official service) or otherwise (step it up IVP and streaming pirates), save for a few things that have remained online, either due to the star power of the names (Shingo vs. CIMA) or an exceedingly high reputation (Shingo vs. Mochi).

This is one of those matches from 2015 that has remained pretty widely available, and with really good reason.

It’s the best Twin Gate match ever.

Granted, that’s not an exceptionally high bar to clear. Twin Gate matches can get weighed down pretty easily by the same things that weigh down Dream Gate matches a lot of the times. Outside of this, the best of them are virtually all these great little dudes rock style slugfests, usually with Shingo, YAMATO, T-Hawk, Mochi, etc. involved. There are a handful of those matches that I really love all the same, but it’s not the same as calling it the best match in company history, or the bar it would have to clear if I called something the best IWGP Heavyweight Title or the best AJPW Unified World Tag Team Title match ever.

All the same, it is comfortably the best Twin Gate match ever.

It achieves that status largely through a combination of miracles, existing as God’s own Twin Gate match.

Firstly, it’s a both a big and a great Dragon Gate match in which very little context is needed.

The big story here is that Shachihoko BOY is the big underdog. It might help you to know his history. His years of working undercard tags, his failure to ever break through, even his place as the clear obvious and only weak link in Monster Express. Really though, you don’t need to know anything, because a big strength of this match is how clear they make everything from beginning to end. Shachi is undersized compared to everyone else, doesn’t get as much offense, and lacks both the aggression of his opponents and the confidence of his partner. He also comes in with tape on his lower back, marking him as injured in a way that nobody else in the match is. It’s clear very quickly into the match where everybody stands. Knowing the moves helps, but it only helps so much. The match is already great, and then a little context gives it a little push. It’s the kind of match someone can drop in on ten or twenty years later with a few sentences explaining things, and still totally get.

People very deeply into Dragon Gate on a level I can never truly understand (the real psychos) will praise the storytelling of this match as some great victory, like it wasn’t the easiest and best story to tell no matter what. Like most praise for deep Dragon Gate storytelling though, it’s kind of a load of shit. More often than not, that always just feels like a cover. There are a few long running stories that enhance certain matches and occasionally a big deal in one of the multi-mans with high stakes, but it’s not as hard of a promotion to parachute into as you might think. Things are generally pretty self evident, they’re all pretty expressive wrestlers, it’s not like how you need to start at 6/5/89 to totally appreciate 6/3/94. Context matters, only a fool would argue otherwise, but this really isn’t all that deep.

The real great matches don’t require supplemental homework to get them, and this is a really great match.

This is also a miracle because it’s a double limbwork match in Dragon Gate in which both sides of that are respected for the rest of the match and not just immediately blown off when the segment is over. Even more than that, it’s a genuinely respectful arm selling performance from SUSUMU YOKOSUKA of all people, one of the biggest offenders in Dragon System history of having matches in which none of that shit ever ever ever matters. I can count on one hand the other Susumu matches I’ve seen in which he paid this much attention to selling his arm throughout the entire matches, and I’d probably have a finger or two left over. Sometimes, we hyperbolize and stretch the meaning of words, but no, this is a genuine miracle. An act of God, with his hand on the bad shoulder of Yokosuka, if only to remind him of that fact.

Masato Yoshino has to be the one to go out and get that advantage. Shachihoko BOY simply can’t do it on his own. He can’t get much of anything on his own, and before too long, Kagetora bails out his partner before too much damage can be done. This is a particularly good way to go about it, as it means Susumu doesn’t really have to go wild with the selling, and it’s his choice to give a shit anyways even in little small ways twenty minutes later that does so much for the match. It’s also immediately a great contrast to the imbalance of the championship team. Kagetora clearly isn’t the star that Susumu is, but Susumu can trust him to go out and do it on his own. The work on Shachi’s back is genuinely mean as hell, and another aspect of this that absolves the match of needing much in the way of previous knowledge. It’s mean and dismissive and really brutal, it’s one of the better focused segments in recent Dragon Gate history. Shachi himself isn’t an incredible seller, he’s not even as good as Susumu is, but he’s functional and always seems very hurt, and it’s exactly enough. The onus is really more on Yokosuka in that department, and he does the best work of his career on that level. Shachi’s job is just to not let the match down, and he more than comes through.

Naturally, the finishing run is wild and awesome and hyperdramatic.

Yoshino’s hot tag is one of his best ever. There’s an urgency to it that stands out. Yoshino is always unbelievably fast in a way that you can only imagine someone becoming through a Faustian bargain, but he rarely feels desperate and frantic like he does here, having to do a lot of this on his own. Susumu’s arm selling continuing through this last third is where it becomes really impressive, and the Kagetora vs. Shachi nearfall runs are tremendous, but this is primarily Yoshino’s part of the match, and he kills it. Beyond all the big drama, most impressive of all from Our Hero is that in a match full of great Susumu Yokosuka lariats, Masato Yoshino is the one who delivers the single best and most fist pumpingly emphatic lariat of the match.

It comes down to Yokosuka and Shachcihoko BOY, and surprisingly, the two lesser wrestlers in the match absolutely kill it. Susumu strikes a rare perfect balance between selling the arm and still just hammering Shachi with the lariats, especially the Jumbo no Kaichis at the very end. Shachihoko BOY again doesn’t have to do a ton besides bump and die and look incredibly sympathetic, but he does it. Korakuen is with him. The world is with him. The kickouts, one of the regular Jumbo and the second of the leg trap followthrough cover, feel genuinely shocking and significant in a way that most nearfalls simply don’t.

It’s a role player or just a non-superstar having the game of his life in the most important game he can possibly play. It doesn’t always make a lot of sense and nobody can ever predict it, but sometimes this stuff can just break loose out of the universe into real life, and nobody ever wants it to end. It’s the stuff of legend. Steve Kerr snuffing out the Utah Jazz at the buzzer in ’97 and playing his part in denying a pedophile a ring.

Big Shot Shachihoko.

Fate of the universe on the line, Martians have the death beam, I want Shachihoko BOY.

All of that.

The match delivers one last miracle at the end, beyond just Shachihoko BOY surviving so much. Instead of the typical Dragon Gate thing of giving him his own big nearfall run and having some big dramatic piece of impact offense to have His Moment, they instead opt for something more surprising and more fitting with the story. Susumu just tries another, but Shachi twists around into a takedown, before diving into a cradle to just barely win.

Fittingly, a match full of small miracles ends with a finish and a result that feels like a gigantic one.

One of the best matches of the year, and in recent company history. A lot of the times, great matches can get lost, but a match like this has survived for a reason. If a mystical force in the universe ever smiled upon a Dragon Gate match, it did so in this match (and also for every Florida Brothers match).

****