Masato Yoshino vs. CIMA, DG Gate of Destiny 2010 (11/23/2010)

This was for Yoshino’s Open the Dream Gate Title.

One of my favorite things in wrestling all year was the rise of Masato Yoshino.

Following ending the then-record setting run of Naruki Doi, a young YAMATO went on an insane defense spree to try and establish himself and do his own thing as a new champion and would-be Ace. However, after losing a tag team match to him in the late spring or early summer, YAMATO insisted on picking a fight with Masato Yoshino, who had otherwise not really been thought of in the real upper echelon of the company or in the usual mix for Dream Gate guys at that point in time. At Kobe World, Yoshino would upset YAMATO for the title, hold it for a shockingly long time, and become an established main event wrestler in the process.

It’s real heroic superhero babyface stuff, rising into a role because they were initially challenged and it was thrust upon them, and one of the more novel ways a promotion elevated someone new into a top position on the card all decade.

Dragon Gate being Dragon Gate and, more accurately, the Dream Gate being the Dream Gate, it didn’t always translate to the ring. It often wasn’t something worth covering because the matches themselves tended to be flawed in the way that the Dream Gate matches often tend to be. Too long, full of limb work that never matters and is clearly just a way to game the system, not super well assembled otherwise, etc.

This match is the exception.

Of course, this is not to say it’s perfect.

Masato Yoshino is not the Dream Gate fixing wrestler he would become in a few years, or even another two months, and CIMA has always been at his best in tag team matches. It is still too long, not assembled in the tightest possible way, and in a larger venue like this, it lacks the energy that in a smaller room, would have provided a level of heat and noise that could cover up for a great many things.

However, it gets the mix more correct than any other Dream Gate match in a long time up to this point.

CIMA’s arm selling in transition is genuinely pretty good. He’s holding it for a while, always shaking it out for a solid five minutes, and seems to alter a lot of what he does to avoid using it until an appropriate amount of time has passed. It’s not the greatest in the world, but it’s what I ask for from all matches like this, at least a show that some of this mattered at all and that I haven’t wasted my time. The match is still too long and clearly runs out of steam by the end, not assembled to really peak at the exact end, but the body of the match is also filled with really cool ideas in terms of CIMA utilizing some different offense than usual, as well as a few real inventive sequences.

As is often the case with Dragon Gate matches that work, so much of the heavy lifting is also done by some terrific character and narrative work.

The basic idea is that, as part of everything lining up for the following year’s big Blood Warriors vs. Junction III war that more or less splits the roster in two in what I consider the start of the company’s peak period (2011-16), CIMA is slipping further and further to the dark side.

With Naruki Doi having already turned on Yoshino recently, CIMA doesn’t need to be there just yet, but the signs are all there. Visually, CIMA has the great sense to communicate this before they’re even in the ring together, going back to his younger look of facepaint around the eye and frosted tips in his hair. The effect is something akin to season three of THE WIRE where a losing Mayor Royce shaves off his goatee to try and look younger like when he first rose to power. While you can never totally ascribe intent, if it’s something that was supposed to evoke that feeling — a once dominant figure no longer quite being that as the hair apparents nip at his heels — then it’s one of the great small little bits of character work in company history. Something small and mostly innocuous, but a clear signifier to anyone who knows their history.

During the match, CIMA seems just as lost and behind the times.

He can push past the arm work to try and work on the neck, but whenever he allows Yoshino distance or tries to get overly showy with something, he loses the advantage. CIMA gets a little madder and more desperate as the match goes on, but in small ways, like unloading a shockingly nasty punch to the back of the neck, or the faces he makes when nothing works at the end. CIMA unloads nearly the entire arsenal, finding himself repeating tricks at the end, allowing Yoshino to come back because he emptied out the arsenal too early to try and keep up, and while it goes a little far for my tastes, I appreciate the intent a whole lot. Generally speaking, the thing they try to communicate — that for the first time in a big title match, even when briefly in control, CIMA feels very much like someone being controlled rather than the one controlling how the match — is something that they get across real well, and that I find pretty interesting.

Like is often the case, it’s all this other stuff that does the heavy lifting, while the move-for-move physical work is exactly good or great enough to not undermine the non-mechanical work, allowing it all to work as a cohesive package.

Yoshino taps CIMA out with the Sol Naciente Kai.

Wildly imperfect and for sure not the best that they can do, but if you’re a fan of the DG Mix or maybe just less harsh on these things than I am, I think a whole lot of you would enjoy this.

***+

 

Masaaki Mochizuki vs. Kzy, DG Kotoka Road to Final Day Five (2/7/2018)

This was for Mochizuki’s Open the Dream Gate Title.

A few months ago, some time in November or December 2022 (writing this on 2/17/2023), I stumbled upon the movie GO (1999). For whatever reason, be it a good time watching it half drunk, the cast including a bunch of people I like a lot (Olyphant, Sarah Polley, Katie Holmes, William Fichtner), it is a movie I have seen like four times in the last three or four months. I say all of that to say that hyperfixations are weird.

Most of the time, we do not choose the things we love.

For whatever reason, some time around 2015 or 2016, Kzy just grabbed onto me as one of my absolute favorite wrestlers in the world, and years later, it was incredibly cool to see him finally challenge for the Dream Gate. Even half a decade removed from this, now sort of armed with the knowledge that Kzy has become the next Akira Tozawa, really maybe the best wrestler in the entire company, but doomed to be a sort of People’s Champion who never wins the big one, I don’t care.

Kzy is my favorite wrestler in the promotion, and it is cool as hell to see him finally get a chance like this.

It is especially cool to see it go as well as this did, and by that, I mean that it is one of the very finest Dragon Gate singles matches — only topped by a few of this with far more history at their disposal than this, and one other aberration — of the entire decade.

The match is maybe not the number one best version of what it could be, this pure underdog title challenge, but I don’t care. Kzy’s control segment coming after Mochizuki’s feels just a little backwards. In fact, you could cut Kzy’s control segment entirely out of this and lose nothing, as it’s still a pure underdog kind of a match. Even when he’s briefly in control though, he never really feels in control. I am a Detroit Pistons fan (cannot imagine why I am drawn to the grittier underdog, such as the Bad Boy Natural Vibes), and so I know what it looks like when a less talented and/or less experienced side of a contest briefly takes control of the thing before the all-times wake up, and I guess that’s why I don’t care all that much in the end.

At its core, the meat of this thing is just too great.

Kzy is too likeable, Mochizuki is just a little too mean and domineering, and they build something together that is simply just too sturdy, too effective, and too satisfying to properly be denied.

Mochizuki does his best impression of a far better wrestler and Ace, and spends the match instead going after Kzy’s body. It is mean and nasty, less holds than stunningly brutal kicks and shots to the body, and arguably, that is even more effective. The bullying route rather than the stately prestige champion one. If the match’s goal is to legitimize Kzy — and half a decade later, it sure feels like it is — then this feels like the easiest way to do so. Not only give him a load of sympathy, but have him fight through it and beat ass anyways.

The match develops in the best way a big Dragon Gate epic ever can.

Kzy briefly targets the neck, and perfectly matches Mochizuki’s approach of attacking just the right part of the body to give this match a little depth and not feel like anyone is wasting time before they really flip the switch. When they do flip it in the back half, it’s out of this world great. A million really good nearfalls, and a few great ones. If they never quite get to that point of allowing me to believe in that oh so powerful well, maybe in regards to Kzy’s chances, they at least allow him the next best thing, which is not only to really push a pillar of the promotion/system in Mochizuki by surviving all of his biggest offense, but also by really pushing him to a point beyond that while delivering all of the offensive hits himself.

Mochizuki does not win by knockout or through any true impactful pinfall, but instead, Dragon Gate does the right thing for once and elevates Kzy through defeat in the way they haven’t done for anyone in a Dream Gate match maybe all decade. Kzy survives it all, counters it all, and fights evenly, right up until Mochizuki just barely rolls through the Tornado Clutch into a crucifix pin to win.

It’s the ideal, more or less. A Dream Gate match that is under twenty five minutes, without anything that feels like clear and obvious filler, that tells a clear and concise story, and that on top of that, genuinely accomplishes something. It is imperfect, I do not believe it is the best Dream Gate match of the decade, I don’t think it quite touches either the YAMATO/Yoshino or Yoshino/T-Hawk matches from late 2013, but it is a mother fucker nonetheless. It feels rude to one of my favorite wrestlers to say it has some great task before it, it does not feel like a real challenge to say the match’s goal is to ’make’ Kzy, he is such a naturally likeable wrestler that it feels like is is hardly any goal at all, like it is my goal as a bartender to sell (1) beer (people are going to want it regardless of anything I personally do), but they do such a stellar job of making the obvious that much more so.

Near perfect for what it is.

On top of being Mochizuki’s career match (and probably also Kzy’s, but this is about delivering the hot take, Kzy isn’t half of an alarmingly overrated Dream Gate match), it’s the last Dream Gate title match on this level for years and years (and counting). It sounds like an insult, but truly, I probably only need one hand to count the number of Dream Gate matches as great as this, and I might just have a few spare ones anyways.

***1/2

BxB Hulk Vs. MAD BLANKEY (Naruki Doi/Cyber Kong/Kzy/Mondai Ryu), DG Scandal Gate 2014 (8/5/2014)

This was a commissioned review from Kale. You can be like them and pay me to write about anything you would like also, be it a match, a series of matches, a show, or whatever. The going price is $5/match (or if you want a TV show or movie, $5 per half hour), obviously make sure I haven’t covered it before (and ideally come with a link). If that sounds like a thing you’d like to do, head on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon and do that. If you have an idea more complex than just listing matches and multiplying a number by five, feel free to hit the DMs and we can work something out. 

This was for Hulk’s Open the Dream Gate Title.

Unlike many other unreviewed matches from 2014 and 2015, where there is (or was, certain accounts on certain sites are being Very Kind), this was never a hard match to get a hold of. The reason I had never written about it up until this point — and why in the present moment, it took nearly a day of looking at the review page and putting it off again, only to be trapped inside for days at a time by a blizzard to finally get to work here — is because it was simply not a match I ever wanted to write about.

Not to say it is bad.

The match is totally okay.

Doi is the only real great wrestler in this match, as Kzy hasn’t totally come into himself yet (that’ll come within the next year and a half), it’s not overly long or anything, but it is just a sort of very ordinary thing. You know when a DG main event turns it on, and from the first five or so minutes with the classic kind of meandering version of the K-Hall Brawl, with nothing of any real note and very little intensity or energy on display, that this is not going to be a match of much interest. It’s pure booking, and the problem is that the booking isn’t exactly all that inspiring either, as a heroic babyface fights the odds until he can’t anymore. Like the match itself, there’s nothing all that wrong with it, it’s just that it has little to offer besides being average and average is not all that impressive in a company like 2010-2016 Dragon Gate with a ceiling as high as the one they look up at.

The major problem mostly is that it is done in the service of BxB Hulk as the match’s  beleaguered babyface hero.

In this role, he does not have it.

BxB Hulk was Dream Gate Champion for ten or eleven months, and it is the least interested I was in Dragon Gate in the years in between like 2006 and 2017. Given what he’s gone on to do since and given the way everyone else I’ve ever talked about this promotion with also talks about it, I don’t think is is one of my spicier DG takes either. He was a dud as champion, simply not having the stuff to deliver in the ways I want my title matches to deliver, on top of having the Dragon Gate Brain Sickness as bad as anyone ever. Not a likeable babyface at this point really (good underdog in the mid to late 2000s when positioned more to his strengths though!), bad at striking, worse at selling, not really offering up anything in the way of cool moves or innovation or a sensational snap on his offense, and really offering up very little despite being the champion of a promotion with maybe more enjoyable acts per capita than any other in the country, if not all of wrestling, at this point.

I used to be a pretty big BxB Hulk fan way back when (will die to protect New Hazard), but whatever magic there was is gone, and matches based around making him sympathetic, wanting to see him overcome things, etc., are flawed in their very conception.

These things are not usually possible, and this is not a cast capable of pulling off a miracle.

Abstract of the talent involved though, I respect the idea of the thing a whole lot.

New champion against insurmountable odds, succeeding just enough for it to be impressive but without the booking entering unbelievable superman babyface territory, losing to bullshit but given a second chance on a bigger show in a one on one title match, leading to a match that I liked a lot more than this, as it is the best part of this match (runs in which Doi can lead BxB by the hand), expanded out to a full match.

It’s good, fine enough, and every thought I have about it instinctively ends with ”enough”, which is to say, it is less good or interesting on its own than it is directly NOT these things, or else my initial reaction would simply be to call it interesting or remarkable or good (or great), or some other phrase of actual praise. It’s a little basic and routine, a slight difference in that it is 1 on 4, but largely the same thing once the bell rings from a company capable of more than a thing like this, even during its lesser moments, and I don’t hate it. It’s just that ”I don’t hate it” isn’t the sort of feeling that sticks around for more than a minute after the match ends.

A decent piece of bullshit on paper, albeit from one of my least favorite times in Dragon Gate in the 2010s. There are many stellar examples of Dragon Gate Magic, but this isn’t one of them, and maybe shows off the exact limits of that magic to begin with.

Shingo Takagi vs. YAMATO, DG Kobe World Pro Wrestling Festival 2016 (7/24/2016)

This was for Takagi’s Open the Dream Gate Title.

Right off the bat, so it doesn’t become the entire thing, the booking here sucks. It is, outside of like the 2015 Royal Rumble, maybe my least favorite booking decision anywhere in wrestling all decade.

It’s classic bullshit Dragon Gate booking. Looking at the sign pinned to the whiteboard in a writer’s room, and in Dragon Gate’s case, the sign always asks how any story benefits YAMATO. In a story that, originally, had absolutely nothing to do with YAMATO at all — a years long story about Takagi being betrayed, growing dissatisfied with Monster Express’ lack of toughness, and then turning on them and going on the rampage it felt like he had been overdue for half a decade for — the beneficiary of a great Dragon Gate story, once again, winds up being YAMATO.

YAMATO is not without his virtues. He is a good wrestler and really exceptional as a heel. Go read the things I wrote about him from 2013 through 2015 as a heel. Dragon Gate had especially struck gold with the YAMADoi team, the sort of perfect heel team that you can build a division around for like half a decade. I think he sucks shit as a babyface. He’s not likeable, he’s not all that energetic, there is nothing about him innately or through his performances in the role that inspires anything within me watching him. He feels like a fraud when the story asks him to be that sort of a figure, and the most genuine character in the world when cast as the antagonist. Some people are just like that, he’s one, and so it’s quite unfortunate that he’s back in the role he’s far worse at. This is less about YAMATO as a wrestler and more about YAMATO returning to this role. Not only returning to this role, but being in THIS spot and getting to do THIS thing in a role that he is, objectively, not as good in.

The real shame of this is also not that Shingo Takagi lost the title, but that he lost it here and to YAMATO. I don’t know many people who aren’t just wholly in the tank for the company who would disagree with that. Even if, for whatever reason, they like YAMATO as a babyface, I think most sane people would agree that the ending of this reign belonged to one man, and that was Akira Tozawa.

Shingo turned heel eleven months prior as a reaction to a perceived lack of toughness within Monster Express, resulting in this all-time emotional moment with Tozawa finally standing up to him. It was so obvious, the sort of perfect booking you imagine wrestling companies plan years in advance to try and create, so much so that one would naturally assume it was always the plan, leading to what could have been the best moment in Dragon Gate history, Tozawa not only finally winning the big one, but standing up to big brother and stopping a yearlong bully rampage in the process. You never want to get too into the fantasy booking your traitorous mind comes up with, but when virtually everyone came up with some variation of the same thing, I don’t think it’s just an individual issue, my brain plotting ways to make me enjoy wrestling less for stupid reasons, as it often does. Even Dragon Gate could not fuck this up, one would naturally think. It was too perfect.

Perhaps that was the problem.

Ultimately, I was a god damned moron, an absolute rube, for forgetting Dragon Gate’s one overriding guideline, and if you were like me, you also deserved to sit with me at the back of the class, sitting in a corner, facing a corner, and wearing the dunce cap while the rest of the class throws coins at us.

It is the end of something, the end of the last five or six years of Dragon Gate being one of the best and most interesting promotions in the world, really from the time the YAMATO/Yoshino Kobe World 2010 build began up through this, and the decline that begins after this. Not immediately, but years later, I think we can collectively point to this show as the high point of a wave, or at least the last high point before it crested and dropped.

That’s not just because of this decision, of course. YAMATO is a bad babyface and the next year plus of him as the babyface Ace and champion would prove that, but it has as much to do with Shingo never really getting to go on another run like this or being used to his abilities again until he left two years later, it has as much to do with Yoshino starting to finally rack up the injuries he’d avoided for fifteen years, and especially with Akira Tozawa leaving, rightfully realizing that if he’s not going to go anywhere and just spin his wheels forever, he could at least be paid way more, have to work far less hard, and get to hang out with his friends in Florida. (That last bit may have also motivated this decision, but it was one earned through years and years of misusing Tozawa following his red-hot return in 2011. even then, he wouldn’t leave for another three months, and they still should have at least done the match at some point either before now or with the time left. Shingo got a few week title run in 2013, zero excuse not to do the same for Tozawa also, if we’re going into hypotheticals, which duh, we are.)

We’ll get an epilogue for that era — the formal end of the Big Six — later in the year, but this feels like the conclusion.

This match has always felt like the end of something more than just Takagi’s reign, and it’s always occupied a strange space in my head because of that. A conclusion of things both micro and macro, all of which I have some obviously very mixed feelings about. It’s a period at the end of a sentence, which is itself the end of a story of the last half-decade plus. Dragon Gate’s ultimate choice one way or the other, and one with repercussions that were felt for years to come.

I wanted to get that all out of the way first, and that’s because this match is still just so exceptional.

Genuinely a really really really great match, one of the best Dragon Gate singles matches ever, the best Dream Gate match in years, and the best Kobe World main event ever by a margin that is almost comical. It’s not to say every single Kobe World main is bad or anything, there have been great ones before this and will be great ones after this, but none of them exist on the level that this does.

It’s a special match.

Largely, that praise goes to Shingo Takagi.

The man’s had a long and great enough career that I don’t know that you can point to any one big performance and go “that one, that’s the best Shingo Takagi performance ever”. I have a shortlist, I think. The Kobe World matches in 2010 and 2011, the Yoshino title match last year and its post-match, but this is up there.

YAMATO’s good here too. Again, we have to be fair. He falls short in a lot of ways, not being a likeable guy or a good babyface — and certainly, had a greater protagonist been opposite Takagi in this match, the superlatives I heaped upon this could have been even greater — but he delivers in every other way. Great offense, good striking, and certainly intense, if not being able to really translate that into likeability. My issues with YAMATO here are the sorts of things he can’t really change, and it almost seems unfair, but they’re there and they’re a part of like this just like they’re a part of everything he does while in a role that, despite his many talents, he is not quite suited for. It’s a casting problem, but in a miscast role, YAMATO still does as great of a job as he could.

Shingo Takagi makes this match though.

If you want to say YAMATO establishes the baseline of this thing as good to great at minimum, it’s Takagi who puts it on his back and takes it beyond that. It’s one of the best performances in company history, accomplishing so much in one match. He’s not only once again one of the best heels in company history, managing to be both domineering and withholding all at once, saving the big offense for late in the match and paring his own stuff down in the control segment to emphasize how mean-spirited he is as a character. Beyond that, he also once again delivers one of the great selling performances in Dragon Gate history, and by the end, delivers this all-around performance that’s so captivating that he winds up being the more dynamic and sympathetic figure in a match meant to accomplish the opposite.

Given how offensive I find this match in an ideological sense, Takagi’s performance here winds up being one of the more admirable performances in Dragon Gate history as a result.

The only real issue with it — and this is not an insignificant one — is that it is still a Dream Gate length match at thirty five minutes.

Even then, that does not lead to disaster in the way that it would in the hands of lesser wrestlers. With more time to fill, it just means there are sections the match can do without, never anything blatantly insulting or entirely useless. Things are expanded upon longer than they need to be, but they are all things the match treats as important. That’s where this match really succeeds, because it’s through the performance of Shingo Takagi that such a thing is really achieved.

YAMATO fill space early on by going after Takagi’s arm, and once again in Kobe World, it’s Takagi’s response to that that elevates a match.

Simply put, Takagi never forgets it. YAMATO goes back to it here and there, it’s the fulcrum upon which his eventual comeback turns, and it helps him out late in the match when he’s able to largely remove it from Shingo’s offense in the closing moments to really open him up, but lesser wrestlers would take to the inactivity on it through the middle of this match as a green light to forget it and move on. Simple and careful transition selling might even result in this still being a great match. Takagi goes further than that though, always rolling the arm out or struggling with little lifts (and later with larger ones), and once again doing the thing where he tries to use the other, only to not have anywhere near the same effectiveness. It’s not only the attention to detail, but the process which Takagi goes through in matches like this that makes his version of them so much better than almost everyone else’s.

It’s a tact that Takagi has shown before, famously in the 2011 Kobe World midcard match against Akira Tozawa, but also in a few matches against Akira Tozawa. Even still, I don’t know that he’s ever used it more dramatically or effectively than he does here. He goes to try and use the left for his big pieces of offense at the end, only now with a greater desperation than before. In the past, and even earlier on, Takagi had used the left with a kind of workmanlike stoicism, an attempt that didn’t work, before returning to what did, even if it hurt him. When Takagi goes it here, there’s a panic to it. The ability to use the right is removed, and instead of this being a sensible thing to test out like before, there’s a feeling when Shingo goes to the left at the end that this is just all that he has left.

There’s enough personality to it and Takagi’s back half performance as he gets broken down and suffers under the weight of the bad luck that privileged ass YAMATO never experiences that, even in a match designed to coronate someone as Dragon Gate’s top babyface, it’s once again Takagi who comes off as the far more interesting and compelling option. He’s not quite sympathetic, he’s still an absolute menace in control in the middle of this thing, but there’s a humanity to him that the other side of this match is totally lacking.

Cruelly, Dragon Gate’s most offensive booking decision comes all the same after YAMATO’s second or third Galleria, but only comes at the end of one of the greatest singles matches in company history. One of the more confusing feelings in recent memory, one of the best matches of the year making a bad call go down a little smoother, but a bad call and DG’s institutional controls still kind of tempering something this great. It’s the ultimate Dragon Gate thing, a match this great coming with such a “yeah, but what if…” to it, and then that some regret still being paired with a match of this magnitude.

That’s Dragon Gate.

I can never love it to the extent that my heart wants to and I can never quite hate it to the extent that my brain always seems to argue that I ought to either.

We will always be in conflict.

As a match, it’s the most fitting possible end for Dragon Gate’s peak, both illustrating how great it could be, and then why it ultimately ended. It’s not a story with a happy ending, but what a phenomenal story it was. 

***1/2

Shingo Takagi vs. Ryo Jimmy Saito, DG Memorial Gate in Wakayama (3/21/2016)

This was for Takagi’s Open the Dream Gate Title.

Once again, there’s a disclaimer that ought to come here. I’m going off the surviving TV edit of this show, and so while this is a twenty four or twenty five minute match, we have something like seventeen minutes of the thing. Like the match preceding it on this show, that’s a little under a third missing, and so who knows? There might be something bad. Botching, bad no-selling, some kind of listless action. It also might be really great. However, as one can only go to work with the tools which they posses, I can only write about the match that I saw.

As for that match?

Everybody’s got their favorites.

Sometimes, there’s a reason for that that you find easy to articulate. Someone does something you value extraordinarily well, you think someone should be even more beloved because the strike especially well or do one move you think is just unbelievably cool. Sometimes, they don’t make all that much sense. You can say someone does something well or point out all the positive attributes that they have, but it’s more than that, you know? Sometimes, a wrestler just hits you in the right place, has something about them that causes you to nod, snap your fingers, point and go, “yes, that’s the one.”

Ryo Saito has always been one of my favorites, and never once have I entirely understood why. Sometimes, it doesn’t have to make sense when you just feel it.

It didn’t happen initially.

I’m not sure when it did.

At some point in the early to mid 2010s, as more and more new wrestlers began to come into the company and as his generation peers like Susumu and Dragon Kid and the like still had big chances and these moments of victory, Ryo Saito becoming just kind of the backbone of the Jimmyz and not having those moments nearly as much really made it click into place. I always liked him, and nothing turns like to love quite like a sense of underappreciation from a larger world, especially when it always seemed to come as a result of Saito not being all that exciting and bombastic, which in Dragon Gate terms, means that he was just a normal ass sensible wrestler who rarely made the mistakes others did. You don’t like Ryo Saito enough, and so I will like him twice as much, things of that nature. It’s silly, but the weird choices we make often are. Grounded in sense only to a certain extent, and then into the realm of the fantastical.

Like Ryo Saito, this is a match that excels because of the more basic elements.

Takagi destroys Saito until he doesn’t, and then Our Hero goes on a big god damned miracle run. He’s still Ryo Saito, and doesn’t quite get the respect of a Susumu or Mochizuki in similar Shingo vs. Old Man matches, but he makes it work moreso than anyone outside of Don Fujii, because of what he brings to it. Some sense of reality, rather than throwing it all out the window to do a thousand things, creating a real struggle instead of a barrage of Things. Feelings over fireworks. Always showing the damage of a hurt back, moving worse, hindered in real ways. The match never gets as big, as wild, or as stupid as the more celebrated Shingo defenses from these reigns, and it’s something I appreciate a whole lot.

There’s only so much Saito can do against Shingo on a normal day, let alone when he’s hurt like he is. He tries, he can’t, and eventually, Shingo mows him down with an especially nasty Pumping Bomber for the win.

Outside of the match where he won it, and the one where he’ll lose it, this is my favorite Takagi Dream Gate title match of his 2015-16 run(s). It doesn’t always make sense, but the great thing about wrestling is that sometimes, that has absolutely nothing to do with it.

***

Shingo Takagi vs. Jimmy Susumu, DG Truth Gate 2016 Day Eight (2/14/2016)

This was for Takagi’s Open the Dream Gate Title.

I won’t tell you this is a bad match.

Hell, it’s a GREAT match.

They’re both offensive dynamos who have real deep bags, and they spend much of the match teasing and delivering and escalating in perfect ways. Takagi is one of the best in the world at this sort of a dumb bombfest epic, and Susumu fits in pretty alright with that. Takagi does suffer from DG Brain Sickness during this title run and works over Susumu’s arm to fill some space, but this is an occasion in which his selling is exactly good enough to not destroy what they did prior and everything in the match that follows.

Bell to bell, we’re looking at a ***ish level match here, and I can’t take away from the effort or the output of Shingo nor Susumu here.

Really though, it is the booking.

It’s unfortunate that Dragon Gate felt the need to interrupt what would have been an otherwise perfect eleven month Takagi heel title reign, robbing Peter to pay Paul by diminishing the feeling of the one who eventually dethrones him in the service of a cheap thrill here. However, that’s the sort of thing I could have lived with and loved had this gone to someone more interesting and who hasn’t already had more than their share of moments in the sun. Names like Akira Tozawa, Akira Tozawa, Akira Tozawa, Akira Tozawa, or Akira Tozawa come to mind, to name a few.

Instead, it’s Susumu again, who next to YAMATO has a place in my head as the ultimate avatar for all of Dragon Gate’s many sicknesses, creating a perfect moment of explanation for every ailment Dragon Gate has suffered, does suffer from, and will continue to suffer from in the future.

Would I have like this more if it was a Don Fujii or Ryo Saito or a weirder and less annoying and present veteran? Yeah, probably. It wouldn’t have made it a good decision though. It could have been done with someone in Shingo’s generation, or even weirder, another even younger wrestler, and I would have been head over heels for it, but none of that is what Dragon Gate opted to do. Undercutting the “kill the past” element of Shingo’s reign up to this point that had made it so interesting, even if he does regain it in a month or so, simply for a short thrill because Dragon Gate fans weren’t comfortable with a heel winning all the time and unable to invest long-term. Dragon Gate once again chooses easy comfort over the harder and more correct thing, and while it’s not the all-time worst example of this or something that really hurts in any sense (this is a 2017 story), it is another great example of this sort of behavior. Shingo Takagi isn’t quite eaten whole in the sense that Dragon Gate LOVES to eat its young, but he and his big heel run leaves with a chunk taken out of it for no clear reason.

As a company, they’re not quite as skilled at it as Pro Wrestling NOAH or the WWE, but few promotions seem as fond of both cutting off their nose and spiting their face as Dragon Gate sometimes, let alone moments like these, where they find themselves able to do both at the same time.

Shun Skywalker vs. Kzy, DG Kobe Pro Wrestling Festival Day One (7/31/2021)

This was for Skywalker’s Open the Dream Gate Title.

In which the People’s Champion of Dragon Gate plays the house one more time, and goes after wunderkind Shun Skywalker. It’s not the greatest story ever told, but Kzy’s journey as compared to Shun’s more effortless one still provides a lot of juice here. It’s a contrast made all the more clear in the introductions and in the pre-match photo, with Kzy backed by his normal and laid back Natural Vibes group, whereas the champion is flanked by MASQUERADE, aka Shun Skywalker’s Home For Gifted Perverts.

As a match, it’s sadly not quite as interesting as that story, as Dragon Gate hadn’t yet stumbled upon the great story of Shun actually just being a psychopath who had led all these promising kids astray.

Instead, it’s kind of just a collection of moves.

Fortunately, Shun Skywalker and Kzy have a whole lot of cool moves to do in between the two of them. Kzy is also one of the better elbow guys in Dragon Gate and pressures Shun Skywalker to throw good ones with a little more regularity than usual. It lacks in areas like consistency and properly tying all of this stuff together, but it’s a match that at all points, had some cool stuff going on, and I do, in fact, have to hand it to them.

What helps also is that one of said moves in a row also happens to be among the craziest things in wrestling all year.

In the end, it’s a rare Dream Gate match to actually suffer from a lack of ambition.

That isn’t to say the match isn’t big and boisterous and a lot of fun as a result, but at no point here does it every really feel like the One Good Thing might be happening. At no point here would one have the impulse to look at the clock in preparation for Kzy Time, so to speak. It never feels possible. That’s not to say this is a squash either, but that it’s not really a match concerned with drama, so much as doing a lot of cool stuff.

Fortunately for them, it’s hard to say they came up even a little short.

Unfortunately, this is about where my interest in Dragon Gate in 2021 ended in real time.

The next night, YAMATO would end Skywalker’s seven or eight month reign as Dream Gate Champion, putting this all down as yet another story that ended in a dull way when someone asked Dragon Gate’s guiding question, “how does this benefit YAMATO?”. The match itself was pretty good and I don’t doubt that there were still good to great matches in the company, which I’ll be watching in this process and maybe writing about in some cases. In real time though, it’s the exact specific sort of result that time and time again, has made me throw my hands up, say fuck this, and tune back out again. It’s a cycle we’re in, me and Dragon Gate, and it’s one we’ve been in for over a decade now.

It’s a hard thing not to be disheartened about.

Rooting against Kzy in the first place feels suspect, but rooting for YAMATO feels like going to a casino and rooting for the house.

Seeing as I don’t quite have that sickness of the soul, all I can take solace in here is that Dragon Gate’s annual window of being fun to watch closed with a better match than it usually does.

***

Shingo Takagi vs. Masaaki Mochizuki, DG Gate of Destiny 2015 (11/1/2015)

This was for Takagi’s Open the Dream Gate Title.

I know the story. Mochizuki stands up for the old fucks. They whip their dicks out and measure them for twenty five minutes.

It’s not especially interesting.

I’ve never gotten it, the superlative praise that this match has received from the day that it’s happened. Somehow it crossed over past Dragon Gate freaks and perverts and became one of those matches that more casual fans of Japanese wrestling “had” to see. It has a lot in common with the similarly flawed Minoru Suzuki vs. Takashi Sugiura match in this sense, although that match does far far far more right than this does. I thought for years that maybe it was like that match, and I was just a little harder on this one, because I used to be a real god damned selling fascist, and there was still some stuff about this that I remember liking a lot. So, you know, open mind and everything.

I still don’t get it.

In fact, I like the match even less now, and I am absolutely judging anyone holding this match up as even the best match ON THIS SHOW, let alone of the year or anything further than that.

And I like Dragon Gate. I like Dragon Gate a whole lot. I absolutely love Shingo Takagi especially, but with a match like this, I completely understand anyone who doesn’t.

Because this shit is god damned exhausting.

That’s not just about the selling, although that is pretty silly. Mochizuki works Takagi’s right arm a little early on, and Shingo responds by going to Mochizuki’s left knee. Neither is really sold much at all. Takagi bothers going through the motions to at least pretend, and Mochizuki does not. This doesn’t ruin the match on its own, at least not in the way it usually can. Both segments are fairly short lived, so much so that neither has any real bearing on the match itself. They’re dumb little segments without much of a point, and the only real effect is to make one wonder why they bothered in the first place. That’s the sort of question that opens the entire thing up, and a match like this really can’t afford that.

The match itself is especially mindless.

For a match that attempts to eschew everything but the most exciting parts of a match, it’s all rather dull.

A handful of real rough fighting spirit exchanges, tons of stuff just traded in a row, and really very little thought for any kind of a flow. It’s bombs hurled out from start to finish and while many of them do kick ass and there’s some stuff I like, the match itself is not something I enjoy at all. It feels like a video game match, and I mean that in the rudest way. A hundred things in a row, without a lot of rhyme or reason to them, while never making as much out of anything as they could.

It’s a match that I kind of hate, but that looks a whole lot like the kind of match I would love.

All the trappings of a dumb meathead match are there, from two wrestlers well suited to have a dumb meathead kind of a match. Big strikes, a focus on doing the biggest stuff, a lot of energy, shouting, etc., but that soul is absent. It feels like something simply not understood, sharing more in common with Michael Elgin style would-be dudes rock epics than those matches themselves.

“Dumb meathead wrestling” is supposed to be a shorthand for a style of wrestling that is great in spite of some perceived simplicity. It’s a compliment in the turn of phrase of an insult. Matches that are charmingly simple and forward progressing. All powerful moves and big strikes and all of that. Trading cool shit, because dudes rock. Strong BJ and Yoshihito Sasaki and occasionally some DDT guys and the NEVER Title picture. The joke is that, more often than not, these matches have more thought put into them than a lot of more complex seeming wrestling elsewhere on a card or in the company. That doesn’t always mean care paid to a backstory, so much as it means just assembling these matches in a careful way so that everything feels as big and titanic as the wrestlers involved. It is a struggle, at all times. We want to see more wrestlers be dumb, if those matches are just dumb meathead matches.

So while a match like this may have many of the same trademarks on the surface, and while it may aspire to be one of those matches, please do not be confused.

This is not dumb meathead wrestling.

This is just stupid wrestling.

Shingo Takagi vs. Don Fujii, DG Gate of Victory Day Two (10/4/2015)

This was for Takagi’s Open the Dream Gate Title.

Since the all-decade angle six weeks earlier, Takagi’s engaged in a war on Dragon Gate’s legends and the obscene deference it still shows to them instead of the current generation and those coming up. It’s just on the border of being a little too on the nose (as it is one thousand percent correct and leads to Problems in a few years), but Takagi is exactly enough of a contemptuous prick to get away with it. Doubly so now that he’s given all the former MAD BLANKEY members a home in one of DG’s least inspired heel groups yet, VerserK.

The match itself is everything you would expect, for better and worse.

Firstly, it absolutely rocks. It’s fun to see another Dream Gate match in a row with no real bullshit to it. It’s straightforward fighting between two of the company’s more straightforward fighters. Lariats and chops and big throws and head drops. A piledriver through a table and a chokeslam off the apron to a pile of chairs are the highlights, but there’s no moment of this where the action is outright lacking. The construction isn’t perfect, but all the material is, if that makes sense.

However, it is still a Dream Gate match.

Shingo vs. Fujii is an incredible match that at fifteen minutes, may have been one of the best matches of the year. However, matches can’t be great unless they’re at least twenty five minutes, so this has to go at least that far. There’s fat on it that doesn’t need to be on it, a belaboring of the point that muddies the waters by way of repetition, and in general, it’s just too nice to the old Big Don. I love him too, I get it. He’s as charming a wrestler as Dragon Gate has ever hosted, unquestionably the #1 pipe layer of the entire outfit. But it’s been years since he mattered like this, and the match loses a lot of believability by the end, along with most of its charm. It’s a lot more interesting to see an old guy doing his best in spite of everything than it is to see them go largely even by the end, but Dragon Gate is Dragon Gate, and it’s almost always gonna be like this.

However, it is a bit of a hilarious own goal at the end to have a match built on Shingo accusing the company of catering too much to the old guard go on ten minutes too long because they can’t help but be deferential to the old guard. I can’t totally hate something that nails its themes so succinctly and proves someone right in the end, even if the company trips backwards with pants arounds its ankles into doing it.

In the end, it’s a great match that could have been a much greater and far more timeless one. However, a great Dream Gate match is still a gift horse, no matter how many we’ve somehow had in a row in 2015 now (3). We got what we got, it’s a happy little free prize where we wouldn’t usually get one, and there’s no need to look it in the mouth.

***

Masato Yoshino vs. Shingo Takagi, DG Dangerous Gate 2015 (8/16/2015)

This was for Yoshino’s Open the Dream Gate title.

The match maybe goes on too long. It maybe gets a little repetitive. However, given the strengths of the story, the match as a whole, and the individual performances, it’s the sort of weakness that holds the match from being even greater, instead of ruining all the good that they’ve done. What they do is something real special in this company and for this title especially.

If not at the very top of the list with your Yoshino/YAMATOs, Yoshino/T-Hawks, and Mochizuki/Kzys, it’s one of the better Dream Gate matches of the decade. As always, that means a potent mix of some incredibly cool shit with a great story, and no major mistakes that impede the success of either.

The story does at lot of heavy lifting for them before the bell even rings.

When Monster Express formed in 2013, it was a super group. Shingo Takagi, Masato Yoshino, and Akira Tozawa. Ricochet and Uhaa Nation followed. Specifically, it formed out of the ashes of what was supposed to be Shingo Takagi’s big Dream Gate run, only for it to be ruined in a month by YAMATO at Dangerous Gate 2013. In the time since, Monster Express has seen Masato Yoshino do what Shingo couldn’t, repeatedly. It’s also seen the departure of Ricochet and Uhaa Nation, with their strength and skill replaced only by Yoshino’s little buddy Shachihoko BOY. Shingo Takagi has spent most of the year getting madder and madder about Monster Express, sent over the edge by being the odd man out a few times too many, and then the upset success of Amigo Tag in the spring. He’s bullied Shachihoko BOY for everything possible, and when Yoshino responded to T-Hawk’s performance at Kobe World and the split of the Millennials by inviting him to join them, Shingo finally also tore into Yoshino, leaving poor Akira Tozawa stuck in the middle when Yoshino retaliated to try and fix Shingo’s rotten attitude through violence, since placating him for months hasn’t worked. It’s a wonderful story that they’ve taken the time to tell here, with what was more of an equal partnership in 2013 having slowly shifted into Masato Yoshino being the clear leader due to winning the Dream Gate twice in that time, while Shingo hasn’t done so well. It’s a slow building heel turn, but one that also feels like the natural way the character would respond when success stopped coming as easily and he was surrounded by wrestlers who don’t wrestle like he likes, save for little buddy Tozawa.

The match itself does a tremendous job, both of allowing all of this to play out over half an hour, but also at just being a simple and great main event title match.

A major problem in Dream Gate matches can be time killed or things that don’t matter, and there’s relatively little of that here. Shingo jumps Yoshino at the start. Yoshino works the arm as soon as he can. Takagi’s selling is not GREAT, but seeing as he is who he is and they’re in the company that they’re in, it’s completely acceptable. Part of is that he really does try. He flexes the arm funny after certain moves, holds it a certain way, and never seems to forget that his arm is supposed to be operating at something beneath 100%. The other part of it is that the story totally accounts for this relative weakness in his game and they build a match that doesn’t require more than that.

In general, the story of the match is Shingo’s increasing aggression compared to Yoshino. He has a habit of catching Yoshino’s fancier stuff early on, and forcing Yoshino into more of a striking battle as a result. He’s more immediately willing to do horrible things to Yoshino than Yoshino is to him, such as a Tombstone Piledriver on the apron within the first third of the match, and REALLY going after the neck. Yoshino is aggressive, but it all seems in the service of the win and proving a point, whereas Takagi’s attacks all feel much meaner. Takagi always has something ready and it’s always gross and extra sharp, like he’s actually spent the entirety of his Monster Express run simply scouting Masato Yoshino.

It’s the difference between someone who’s been ready for this and who knows something is over compared with someone who still believes there’s something left to save.

Shingo picks apart Masato Yoshino for most of the match, deconstructing him in slow motion. Yoshino isn’t as ready for Shingo as Shingo was for him and he’s not as mean spirited either. He goes with the usual, and the usual doesn’t work. Definitionally, Dragon Gate can never do Vader vs. Sting, but this is the closest they’ve ever come. If not to the concrete realities of that match up, then certainly to the feeling. Shock and awe at the brute force and the hostility with which it’s applied, followed by pockets of hope, each being shut down more and more brutally. Like that first Sting/Vader match, there’s a little luck involved too, as Shingo falls down in the Sol Naciente just barely by the ropes, and allows him the escape. There was one chance, and as unfair as it was that it didn’t work, it’s now not only a door closed, but one padlocked shut.

The match reverts to what it was at the start, with Yoshino having no choice but to just try and hang. He has the one god damner of a Lariat that’s been able to stun lesser men in key moments, but here it happens once the arsenal has already been exhausted. With nowhere else to go but repetition, Shingo eventually catches him again like he has been all match. Yoshino dies on his feet, having enough to survive the Pumping Bomber that Shingo’s started to use more and more as a finish, before Takagi finally regains the title with the Last Falconry.

As a bell to bell piece of work, it’s exceptional. A bombastic show that satisfies the dumb monkey part of the brain that shrieks in delight at loud noises and bright lights, with all the emotional staying power of all the best wrestling booking.

Where this goes a step further is after the match, as Shingo Takagi attacks Shachihoko BOY when he tries to tend to an unconscious Yoshino, before shit talking a storm. Akira Tozawa finally stands up for himself, once by stopping the assault, and later by denying Takagi when he tries to break up Monster Express for good by splitting it in two, with Tozawa coming with him. Tozawa especially puts a lot into it, bordering on tears with what seems like a doomed plea to stop what he’s doing. There’s no subtitles, I have no idea what they’re saying, but Tozawa’s acting alone puts it over the top and becomes just a little bit heartbreaking.

It’s a perfect set up for the Shingo Dream Gate match that we never get. There’s time to bemoan that later. Dragon Gate’s sort of like WWE in this regard though. They love to eat their young, and so you should never really expect anything. You should never assume anything will last outside of the immediate moment. You’ll go insane otherwise, and God knows that I have. It’s all about individual moments, which is fine here because they don’t make too many better ones than this.

Top to bottom, including post-match, it’s one of the best pieces of pro wrestling of the year, and in the history of the company.

***1/2