Matsumoto Announces New DLC

Good time to finally announce XBox and Switch ports and reach a bigger audience.

It’s a Japanese game. Made by Japanese developers with puroresu in mind

There has been 1 traditional ladder matches in the entire history of the major promotions.

I agree it should be inclusive to all players and fans from all countries but this obsession with making a western focused game when it very clearly isn’t is odd.

I completely agree with both points.  Ladder matches are almost always cumbersome and tedious at best, and having one in a Japanese based wrestling game seems out of place.  I'll add that the development work to add it would be fairly intensive, meaning the chance that they break other stuff is high.  I would much prefer the team concentrate on other things that are less likely to mess with core game mechanics.

For me, this is essentially every ladder match mode in every wrestling game ever.  It can be slightly better if you're doing player vs player, but for simmers I've never seen AI that "worked" a ladder match in a satisfying way.

Yep. Ladders can only hold titles in Japan.

I read it in that ancient NWA book when I went to the library of congress with Jericho all those years ago.

If you wanted to make ladder matches work better, you could under the hood, without telling anyone, require x number of big moments before grabbing the title would even work.

The problem with ladder matches is that they are treated as a shoot, and don't have their own logic. A gimmick match isn't just a different win condition. It's theatrics centered around a theme.

If both guys are on the ladder and they do a grapple, it will always result in both guys bumping off the ladder unless the quota has been filled.
If one guy is on the ladder, depending on circumstances, he could get gassed at the top, he take a wrong step and fall off, couldn't get the object unhooked, the ladder could break, or tip onto the ropes, etc...
etc...etc...

So basically, you couldn't win a ladder match without actually having some memorable moments. Everything would still be fair to both players. You just progress a gimmick match by working the actual gimmick. Nothing would be on screen. No quicklime events. The players would be none the wiser, and would say the matches are great and competitive. You could also have an exception to where if you beat the opponent black and blue for a length of time, you could just go up and get the object, but that would be rare.

Apply this logic to any gimmick match. The thing you do to win doesn't succeed until you've hit your theatrics quota, OR you got like 90% of the offense after a time threshold.