VerserK (Shingo Takagi/T-Hawk/El Lindaman/Takashi Yoshida/Punch Tominaga) vs. Jimmyz (Jimmy Susumu/Ryo Jimmy Saito/Genki Horiguchi/Jimmy K-Ness/Jimmy Kanda), DG Dangerous Gate 2022 (9/18/2017)

This was the final of the summer and fall’s Unit Survival Race, with the losing faction having to split up, and was a no disqualification elimination match as well.

It is not a perfect match.

Certainly, it does not compare to either last year’s VerserK vs. Monster Express masterpiece, nor the Jimmyz vs. Mad Blankey match from two years prior, both of which it will always draw comparisons to.

Part of that is what Dragon Gate opts to do here, and that’s kill the Jimmyz in the favor of a total dead end group in VerserK.

It’s clear here that, unlike in the past, it was not really time for any of these groups to do. While Dragon Gate has no hot groups in 2017, there are also none that feel clearly at the end of their logical runs together, or who have members on the verge of leaving. The closest is actually VerserK itself, who will lose Takagi and T-Hawk both by the end of 2018, and yet it’s them that this match seeks to benefit. It’s too little and far too late for a group that has felt like something of an also-ran for the majority of the year, and again instead kills off a beloved group from the golden age. It’s not as bad as killing Monster Express only to replace them with the dull MaxiMuM group, as the only good DG stable post-2016, NATTY VIBEZ, will pop up in its place, but it still feels like a booking decision made to give off the illusion of a classic DG unit shift.

A decision made to give off the appearance of Doing Something, rather than actually doing something, but that’s so much of Dragon Gate at this point.

Relative to other Dragon Gate booking calls in the last half of the 2010s, it is not the end of the world. It’s not quite on the level of choosing YAMATO time and time again, cannibalizing their future for like a decade straight, or T-Hawk’s failure in Kobe World two months level either, it’s not them shooting themselves in the foot, but it falls short because of that. T-Hawk ending the Jimmyz also feels like too little and too late, following losing that second Kobe World main in three years to YAMATO two months prior, and being established as a choke artist on his way to leaving Dragon Gate over the next year and change.

Part of this match’s failure to live up to its total potential also just comes down to the no disqualification element, which once again fails to work right in Dragon Gate. It is just not meant to be, and that’s actually fine and good. You don’t go to Dragon Gate for blood and brawling. I don’t go to Big Japan or GCW or whatever else, and expect fast paced super athletic and intricately plotted out junior heavyweight wrestling. Whenever Dragon Gate does it, they never do it right, and the same is true here. The barbed wire around every weapon possible SOMEHOW never cuts a single person open despite getting a whole lot of use, and the spots always feel shoehorned into a match in way that feels very unnatural. Like this whole Unit Dismissal tournament in the first place, the no disqualification rules here feel just as shoehorned in, there simply to be there, without anyone (save Shingo Takagi, the only one to actually sell the idea that the addition of barbed wire should hurt more than a normal table or chair bump) really knowing how or caring enough to get the most out of them.

Still, the bones are here.

Outside of the weapons and the booking, speaking in terms of the pure mechanics of the thing, it is still yet another great big event Dragon Gate elimination match.

The elements are all here, and if not at full capacity, the machine still works. It’s thirty four minutes, I won’t say they got the timing as pitch perfect as the recent Korakuen Hall show’s three on three on three, but it’s thirty four minutes that still doesn’t quite feel all that long. The back half is especially exceptional, with the match really hitting another level when it removes the dead weight and gets down to Shingo and T-Hawk against Susumu, Ryo Saito, and Genki Horiguchi. It’s tremendous stuff, not only aided by Takagi being the only one to really sell the weapons right, but the big finishing run capabilities of T-Hawk and a guy like Susumu Yokosuka, when unburdened by the things that often ruin his longer singles matches. It’s pure fireworks up until T-Hawk beats him with the Night Ride, and even if this takes a little long to get to the fireworks factory, once they’re inside, there’s still very little else that compares.

While not the best Dragon Gate match of 2017, it feels like the most Dragon Gate match of the year 2017.

It is a darker place now, we do not get the happy endings we used to nor does it hit quite like it used to in every possible big moment. However, the spirit and the talent and the raw bones and framework and the pure machinery of the thing are still there, just waiting to be taken full advantage of in the future.

***1/7

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