YAMATO vs. Kzy, DG King of Gate 2018 Day One (5/8/2018)

This was an A Block match in the 2018 King of Gate tournament.

On paper, an outstanding match up.

Kzy is the best underdog babyface in all of wrestling at this point, a few months removed from one of the best Dream Gate matches of the decade and the clear highlight of Dragon Gate’s mediocre year, and delivers once again. Throw him against the ideal version of YAMATO — that 2013-2016 villain at the peak of his powers — and it could be something special. That’s not where we’re at now, unfortunately. YAMATO is not in his best form, not only just because he is a deeply boring and unlikeable protagonist who continues to occupy that role despite the last two years of being unflappably average in it, but also because he has recently received quite the dramatic haircut, and a YAMATO without long hair is a genuinely bizarre thing. On top of being in a role that’s wrong for him, it feels like something like eighty or ninety percent of his natural charisma and swagger has been taken away from him.

So, accounting for these things, instead of special, once again, we will have to settle for merely borderline great.

Turns out that they are pretty good at being borderline great.

(If I had to sum up YAMATO in one sentence, this one is probably in the running?)

YAMATO may be lacking in the accoutrements, but the mechanical stuff all works out real well. He hits hard, does all the little things well he always did, and it helps a lot that he’s in there with Dragon Gate’s best babyface and doesn’t try too hard to fight it, meaning that even if he isn’t smirking up a storm and sauntering around the ring, he is not cast as the hero of this story. Said hero of this story spends most of the match showing exactly why at least one-half of this match is cast in the perfect role. His shots are even harder and tighter, he bumps like a wild man, all of his offense is not only only cool but lands in that area on a venn diagram in between exciting and genuinely likeable, and he’s so sympathetic. It is not some top ten Kzy babyface performance, but in a more casual way, the sort of performance in a fairly standard match that illustrates why I have such a high opinion of the man.

Outside of a moment where Kzy loses his head and tries knee work (one swiftly moved on from before too much damage can be done), it’s also yet another example of King of Gate bringing the best out of a lot of DG singles pairings. These two could easily have a half-hour Dream Gate match that does nothing for me, but (mostly) stripped of the time available to waste, it’s just an incredibly simple kind of a match. A veteran heavyweight bombs out a smaller newcomer to the upper reaches of the card, puts him to the test, and the match delivers the artillery in relatively short and efficient order.

This being Dragon Gate though, Kzy simply cannot be allowed to prosper, and loses to YAMATO’s Ragnarok.

Certainly a version of this that feels more like a trial run than the finished product, something clearly in need of an obvious tweak or maybe a less obvious shift, but all the same — to keep hammering the same thing home when something in 2018 Dragon Gate (aside from the clear highlight linked earlier in this piece) tends to work out — sometimes, it’s just a little too hard to overcome talent.

Yet again, an example out of this company of just what can kind of casually happen when nobody’s fighting upstream.

***

Tribe Vanguard (YAMATO/BxB Hulk/Flamita) vs. MaxiMuM (Speed Muscle/Ben-K) vs. ANTIAS (T-Hawk/Eita/El Lindaman), DG Kotoka Road to Final Day Five (2/7/2018)

Old reliable.

The magic is maybe not what it was and there are elements to this that do not entirely work up to the level that they are capable of (BxB, younger guys in Ben-K and Lindaman who have not yet figured it out, Eita adherering to a Dragon Gate Heel format that does not accentuate his better qualities), but the format is simply too strong.

Even at a boiler plate level, in a match that aims less for main event level than semi-main event level, it is too hard to get in the way of one of wrestling’s best formats, especially with all-world wrestlers like Speed Muscle, T-Hawk, YAMATO, and Flamita at the helm.

Hard to go too wrong here.

***

Masaaki Mochizuki/Susumu Yokosuka vs. YAMATO/Kzy, DG Open the New Years Gate 2018 Day Three (1/16/2018)

Textbook pro wrestling, and also so much more.

It’s not particularly fancy or novel, but there are few better ways to build up and/or set up a nice little title match (read: one that isn’t some monumental struggle months/years in the making), or even a nice big title match, than a simple tag team match. It works especially well like this when you’re just kind of springing something out of nowhere, but there are a million different ways it can work.

Case in point.

The goal of this match on paper is to get to a Masaaki Mochizuki vs. Kzy title match in February, but the real joy is in the way they get there.

Mochizuki vs. Kzy, as a title match, is easy enough to get to on paper, and they check off every box you want to get to (Kzy looks great, Kzy hangs with certified long term Dragon System top guys, Kzy gets the big win, etc.), and that you realistically need to check to make this work, given that Kzy hasn’t really spent much time on that level of the card as a singles wrestler before. The real exciting stuff comes in the variation on the theme though, how they do all of that, but do it kind of quietly, and allow the match to feel like something other than what it actually is. The picture comes into focus after the fact, and it’s both a more exciting and surprising outcome as a result.

The trick is that, for a big chunk of this match, this does not feel like a match that’s building up to a Kzy title challenge.

It’s not to say he is getting his ass kicked all the time, doing a YAMATO’s Little Buddy routine, but there isn’t a real clear focus. No bright lights on display effectively saying ’THIS IS KZY’S MATCH’ the entire time. It is sort of just a match, with YAMATO getting a little more focus. He’s the one performing the match’s big hot tag, he’s the one treated like a star, all of that. Had you just parachuted in (and didn’t know Mochizuki/YAMATO for the title happened not four months prior and also didn’t know that DG rarely runs match ups that close together), it would be real to simply view this as a match setting up another Mochizuki/YAMATO match.

That is, until suddenly in like the last fifth or sixth of the match, the match shifts completely into being this Kzy vs. Mochizuki showdown, and it is ELECTRIC. They clearly have immediate chemistry with each other. On the quasi-character level of a match, narratives being expressed through specific moves and ideas, Mochizuki’s natural grumpiness and pettiness contrasts perfectly with Kzy being really maybe the best babyface wrestler in the entire world at this point, and in terms of the mechanics of the matter, they both have real similar hitting-based styles that also blend together perfectly. It is, immediately, one of the best match ups in the company, even just seeing this little burst of it.

Kzy surprises the old man with the Kzydian Destroyer, and knocks just enough air out of him on a Hail Mary diving European Uppercut to score what feels like, in the moment, the biggest win of his career. There’s the Brave Gate victory and defenses, there are other big wins to be found, it’s not as if Kzy showed up in Dragon Gate a week before this match, but it feels like a first step onto a much higher level.

It would be a stretch to really call this a return to the Dragon Gate Magic of years past, but it is some picture perfect pro wrestling ass pro wrestling. An outstanding modern how-to guide on one of pro wrestling’s most basic and delightful concepts.

***+

 

Tribe Vanguad (YAMATO/Kzy/BxB Hulk) vs. MaxiMuM (Speed Muscle/Jason Lee), DG Final Gate 2017 (12/23/2017)

This was for Tribe Vanguard’s Open the Triangle Gate Titles.

It is an absolute blast.

Narratively speaking, there is not a whole lot here. There is history, four of the Big Six are in this match, you can pull at threads if you’d like to, if you need to have some kind of depth and meaning to enjoy a match. For the most part though, that does not matter all that much. This is not a match about that. There are big Dragon Gate epics that require months and often years of context to fully appreciate, but then there are also matches like these, in which I think you can know nothing and have zero memories of these six and/or this promotion and not only still enjoy it, but maybe enjoy it even more than a longtime fan might.

Four of Dragon Gate’s finest, along with BxB Hulk and Jason Lee, put on an absolute mother fucker of a fireworks show to end the year.

It’s not all that complex.

The impressive part is the construction and the execution of the thing, especially in a match between two different fan favorite groups like this. With nothing to really lean on besides the match ups here in the moment, they still create a really spectacular piece of business, riffing around and bouncing off of each other at remarkably high speed for seventeen or eighteen minutes.

While not ever match up is the absolute greatest, and not every wrestler in this match is the absolute best in the world, it is plotted out so well. There is no prolonged run from either weak link (BxB Hulk, Jason Lee), and they rarely ever face each other. The bulk of this comes down to Yoshino and Doi against YAMATO and Kzy, and those match ups are either proven enough that they’re arguably home to one of the best Dream Gate matches of the decade, a can’t miss fight between former partners, or a newer match up in Yoshino vs. Kzy that feels like the most exciting thing Dragon Gate’s put out into the world in months. The latter of the three options is especially exciting and, personally, is the highlight of the match, seeing the recent past and recently crowned best babyface wrestlers in the company having these runs that are not only crisp and impossibly fast, but so unbelievably interesting as well.

When the first half of this match fades into the second, or the middle third transitions into the last one, there’s a clear switch that’s flipped, but to their credit, it feels like a very gradual thing, rather than what is often the case here and elsewhere, where it’s a “okay, time to try hard!” kind of a feeling. There’s a very palpable shift to this match, but rather than that feeling, it’s much more of a mounting tension, leading to a constant five minute explosion at the end.

A thousand great nearfalls and incredibly cool and exciting things happen. It’s enough to make a more seasoned viewer of the promotion and fan of the style in me lose it just a little bit late at night at home nearly half a decade later, a machine that, while it might be a little older and not as cutting edge as it once was, still can run with the precision, speed, and force that made it so special to begin with. It’s not only thrilling in a kind of lizard brained way, but a real reaffirming thing in and of itself.

Yoshino completes his comeback in a real hard year by getting BxB down and into the Sol Naciente for the win.

Dragon Gate at its best, or at least close enough to count.

***1/4

 

Spiked Mohicans vs. YAMATO/Kzy, DG Gate of Evolution 2017 Night Three (11/8/2017)

Before leaving for the WWE, Ricochet ditches the confines of his deeply boring New Japan run to return home for a little run, ending here with a reunion with his dad CIMA against two perfect opponents.

Spiked Mohicans along with that entire first few years of Ricochet in Dragon Gate at CIMA’s side, to me, represents the artistic peak of Ricochet’s career (give or take the El Generico series in PWG), and a show of just what he could have been. Largely held by the hand and plugged into a system rather than asked to lead himself, Ricochet was not only allowed to lean entirely upon his unreal athleticism, but cast in a position he’s rarely been cast in anywhere else. He is not an especially likeable presence, and his turn as an arrogant athletic marvel from 2010 through 2012 or so is the only real time he’s worked as a character too, and that his matches haven’t insisted on carrying an extra burden with them.

This match isn’t exactly a return to those ideas. The Ricochet who shows up here is still bald and bearded and ripped 2017 Ricochet. He throws out some power moves, strikes more, and in smaller doses, is as frustrating as he’s been for a while now. It’s a farewell stop that he didn’t have to make on his way to a big money contract, it’s not the sort of thing that’s really outright maddening, but it is what it is. 2011 Ricochet isn’t walking through that door.

However, it also isn’t not a return to those ideas.

Just by virtue of so often being against Kzy, and of teaming with CIMA against a wrestler like Kzy. Having become Dragon Gate’s best babyface in the year since Akira Tozawa left and with Masato Yoshino slowing down, Kzy is the sort of wrestler who sort of naturally brings it out of people, or at least naturally casts them as antagonists, turning every match in which he gets to really cook something up into being his story. When Kzy gets worked over for the middle of the match, even if Ricochet isn’t taunting him constantly or doing overtly showy spots (in an antagonistic way anyways), he’s still working from above against one of wrestling’s most compelling underdogs, and so thinks sort of work themselves out.

Mostly though, it’s just a great fireworks show.

Four wrestlers with a ton of real sick offense put on a stellar display in front of a typically receptive Korakuen Hall crowd. The Ricochet vs. Kzy run at the end is especially great and in general, Ricochet looks better than he has in a real long time here, cut down in large part to the most sensational pieces of offense in the finishing run, and plugged into a few key spots.

The only real disappointment is the end result, with Kzy losing to the Meteora followed by Ricochet’s Shooting Star Press, but again, that is the game we are playing. With extra eyes on the proceedings and in a big spot that matters, CIMA was never going to allow himself to lose, or more importantly, to be on the losing team, and so we get what we got. Usually, it happens in matches that aren’t nearly as much fun as this was.

A lovely departure from Dragon Gate for Ricochet, showing one last time that even if he can’t be fixed entirely anymore, there is just something about this environment that brings out the most acceptable version of him that exists at any point in time.

***

Akira Tozawa/Speed Muscle vs. Shingo Takagi/YAMATO/BxB Hulk, DG Gate of Destiny 2016 (11/3/2016)

Akira Tozawa says his farewell.

Not to relitigate things for the thousandth time, it feels like to some extent, we’ve been talking about Akira Tozawa’s misuse by the company ever since he came back in 2011 after the greatest excursion of the modern era, but Dragon Gate never totally seemed to know what they had, and they eventually lost him. It’s one of the more heartbreaking departures of the era, in no small part because unlike many others, it’s not like he left to really do much of anything. Unlike others who left to go where he did, neither a prominent position on the card nor a chance to continue working at something near a high level awaited Akira Tozawa in America, and it simply seemed like a matter of pure cold math. If you’re going nowhere, why not get paid more to go nowhere, while getting to also hang out with your best friends and live in a much warmer climate? It’s beyond depressing, but Dragon Gate had the last half decade to do something, anything, with one of the most likeable and exciting wrestlers of his generation, and simply opted not to. The older I get, the more sympathetic I am towards the idea of “selling out”, and perhaps in no case is that stronger than with Akira Tozawa.

As a farewell present, Tozawa’s final Dragon Gate match winds up reuniting two of my three favorite units/teams in Dragon System history (Monster Express #1 in my heart and yours forever) in both Speed Muscle and, in what feels like a gift to me personally, New Hazard as well

To those uninitiated or at least less familiar with this era of the company (2010ish through this exact match), I don’t imagine you can love this in the same way that I do. The warning I put on the front of the 10/12/2016 elimination match holds true here, if not quite as strictly. I think you can probably enjoy this still, but if you haven’t been around, if you haven’t done your reading, if you don’t have those ten thousand hours so to speak, I don’t know that you can get the absolute most out of this.

(You certainly would not find yourself, at the end of this match, just shaking your head and laughing at Dragon Gate having YAMATO score the last win over Tozawa, once again referring to that writing on the wall of the office that directs them, before every booking decision, to ask how this benefits YAMATO.)

Mechanically speaking, this is sensational.

It’s the most effort I’ve seen put into a Dragon Gate six man in what feels like close to a decade, largely as a result of the circumstance of the thing. There’s no one big story, or really any one to speak of, having more in common with those Ring of Honor six mans than any Dragon System classics. It is just a collection of a handful of the best wrestlers in the company (and also BxB Hulk) trying as hard as possible for twenty eight minutes, given the main event slot of a pay-per-view, and all of the clearance that comes with that. It is beyond physically impressive, and a marvel of construction as many of the best matches like this are. Every combination is run through, and while certain ones have a way of really standing out (Shingo vs. Tozawa, Shingo vs. Yoshino, YAMATO vs. Yoshino, Doi vs. YAMATO), not a one of them is really lacking. Even the lesser ones get burned through fairly quickly. It’s one of the better examples ever of what this style can offer up at its best, a monument to the best of this company.

This match is not about the mechanical though.

Simply put, it is a match marking a clear end of an era for the company, and if you are not a fan of that era specifically, I don’t know that you can enjoy this match to the extent that many of the rest of us do.

The match is equal parts All Star Game and series finale.

Everything that happens is spectacular, and I feel it all so much. There’s a very special feeling to the entire thing, that one simply does not get all that often. The last time I felt it when watching and writing about a wrestling match was in Kenta Kobashi’s retirement match three and a half years prior, in which it felt as though everyone was trying to stretch it out as long as possible. Not out of any sense of grandeur or lofty ambitions for the quality of the match, but simply because once the match ended, something special would be over. This match is a celebration of a time and of a place that, as soon as the match ended, would no longer exist.

I miss it already.

The end of Dragon Gate’s Big Six era, and to their credit, they went out with a bang.

A fitting retirement match for, arguably, Dragon Gate’s heart and soul.

***1/2

 

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. YAMATO, DG King of Gate 2016 Day Two (5/11/2016)

This was an A Block match in the 2016 King of Gate.

Once again, this is one of those matches in Dragon Gate that rarely ever misses. They have one big standout hit to my memory, and it’s the one this match (and tournament) sets up, but I’ve rarely ever been let down by his pairing.

To get it out of the way, obviously, this didn’t need to happen.

YAMATO winning King of Gate 2016 is one of the most obvious tournament picks of the entire decade across all of professional wrestling, set up by a face turn against the heel champion, with a tournament determining who challenges said champion at the biggest show of the year for the company. Running the match two months before said biggest show of the year, either to try and add something to it (maybe works, but not REALLY) or more likely in an attempt to try and put the tournament more in doubt (absolutely fails), is an unforced error. For those reasons, but also for the extremely obvious one that with a gigantic match coming up, they’re obviously not going to put their best work on an early-tournament Korakuen Hall match!

That being said?

Still rocks.

A three-quarters or two-thirds strength version of this match still delivers the sort of quality heavyweight(ish) ass kicking that you watch these sorts of matches for.

YAMATO and Shingo have a whole lot of chemistry in every possible combination. Great strikes, cool holds, tremendous reactions in every possible way. YAMATO displays signs of the old Sickness but there is no better wrestler in Dragon Gate to do that on, because Shingo will make it matter, no matter what the context is. Shingo gets the thing almost everyone else here doesn’t, which is that he has to not only keep selling the limb in appropriate ways, but when still using it, show that doesn’t really have another option. This isn’t exactly Shingo/Tozawa from 2011 in that respect, but Shingo still does the work nobody else is either able or willing to do, even in a match like this when it doesn’t matter all that much.

(Given that it doesn’t matter all that much, it’s all the more impressive.)

As expected, a lot is left on the table. They avoid a lot of the big stuff, opting for something more akin to a great TV version of something instead. VerserK interferes, stops YAMATO’s half-assed boring new unit from doing the same, and Shingo guns the weakling down with the Pumping Bomber.

It’s a match with objectives that won’t work, and that will be wildly eclipsed by a later effort, but that doesn’t mean this one isn’t also pretty great. An easy one to have missed at the time, Lord knows that I did.

***

 

VerserK (Shingo Takagi/YAMADoi/Kotoka) vs. Monster Express (Masato Yoshino/T-Hawk/Akira Tozawa/Big R Shimizu), DG Glorious Gate 2016 Day Nine (3/28/2016)

More of that easy Dragon Gate magic.

Not the biggest version of this, nor the fastest, which means it definitely isn’t the best. Still, there’s an undeniable charm to it, as simply too much goes right.

Again, these matches succeed based on pairings, and this is one of the versions of the big Dragon System multi-man that puts a lot of emphasis on trying to run through as many combinations as possible rather than focusing on any one thing. We get a lot of Shingo vs. Yoshino, which again is really maybe Dragon Gate’s best pairing, a lot of T-Hawk vs. YAMATO and Doi, and then the others fill in here and there. It’s great. It’s easy and fun and crisp as hell.

The weak links of Kotoka and Big R are still present, but again, they’re so great at handling them that the chain doesn’t break. Big R is again only really allowed to do a few power spots, and is pushed by Shingo pasting the hell out of him into throwing better shots than usual. Kotoka, similarly, isn’t a killer like the others, but he’s so great as the irritant. There’s a great little character bit with that too, like Shingo abandoned Monster Express because he thought they were weak and Kotoka is weak as hell, but because he’s this tool that mean ass YAMATO and Doi throw at people, he’s this mascot Shingo can live with way more than Shachihoko BOY or whoever. It’s an interesting little window into a great character, on top of just how fun Kotoka is as an irritant. Equal parts Yoshinari Ogawa and Zaza Pachulia.

At the end, it’s that same old wonderful fireworks show. YAMATO turns on Takagi at the end, pausing before the red box miscue, before doing it on purpose to the leader of the group.

It’s a shame.

Once again, this group had so much more to offer. The trio of Takagi, Doi, and YAMATO is a heel supergroup on par with the famous CIMA/Doi/Yoshino Blood Generation core a decade earlier, among the ranks of the best heel trios in Dragon Gate history. YAMATO and Doi were, again, so great as a tag team and as every year passes, it feels especially shameful how little they got to do as a pure tag team. It also doesn’t feel right that it’s YAMATO to get to be the one to be the big Shingo opponent, given that a.) he’s the one turning on Takagi here, b.) how naturally unlikeable he is/how perfect he is in this role, & c.) how obviously this should have all led to Takagi vs. Akira Tozawa, given how the Shingo turn happened in the first place.

Still, the matches go on ruling. There’s a point where that falters eventually and, as it ages, talent stops being able to overcome everything. Until that point though, no company in the world turn lemons into lemonade like Dragon Gate does, even if they themselves are the ones who insist on buying lemons.

***

Monster Express (Masato Yoshino/Akira Tozawa/T-Hawk) vs. VerserK (YAMADoi/Kotoka), DG Memorial Gate in Wakayama (3/21/2016)

This was for MX’s Open the Triangle Gate titles.

Full disclaimer, I’ve never found or seen the full version of this show. The version that exists online is a TV edit version that is only an hour and forty minutes long. Most of that time is devoted to this match and the main event, although even this is clipped to some extent. Eighteen minutes cut down to thirteen or fourteen, and it’s done in a more obvious way than when DG used to clip footage when they aired those Infinity episodes way back when, chopping off a big chunk in between the first and middle thirds of the match. So, being entirely fair, there is nearly a third of this missing, and if someone’s seen the full version and feels differently, you know, that’s totally fair. We may have seen different matches entirely.

The match that I saw whipped a galaxy’s worth of ass though.

It is classic Dragon Gate.

A formula tag elevated by many of the best wrestlers alive being involved in it, and doing a thousand different cool things. It’s the sort of match that’s hard to REALLY write about extensively because there’s very little that goes into it besides proper organization and execution of the fireworks show, but that I feel sort of obliged to cover in some fashion because I really really did love it.

Everything you’d expect to deliver does, and given my faith in DG as a whole bell-to-bell at this point, and in five out of the six of these guys, that covers basically everything. It’s a match with high expectations, and that lives up to them at virtually every possible moment. Sometimes that’s old hits like Yoshino vs. YAMATO, sometimes it’s Kotoka stepping up and being an incredibly fun heel irritant, sometimes it’s old hits in new environments, like a Tozawa vs. YAMATO or T-Hawk vs. Doi match up that we haven’t seen a ton of, but that rules in all the ways one always imagined it could rule.

It just all works like it’s supposed to. A machine running as smoothly and as powerfully as ever.

Another example of just how great it was when Dragon Gate, at something close to its peak, powered the device all the way up past eleven, and ran the motherfucker at full strength. Untouchable.

***1/4