Your Fire Pro Story

I am not exactly a veteran... The first game I played was Fire Pro Advance which I got in the bargain bin of a Toys R Us, however I absolutely hated it at the time and couldn't understand how to play it properly. I didn't have the internet then, and I ended up just selling it.

I had heard of the other games and in theory the idea of a 2D sprite wrestling game appealed to me but I remembered the GBA experience I had.

I got into New Japan around the same time Okada had his first reign. I knew of World and started to understand it more but wasn't quite sold on it. Once New Japan announced the collaboration however, I looked further into it. I became fascinated and a few months back I couldn't wait and decided to get the game on Steam and wait for the DLC (lol).

There's still a lot I don't understand about the game, I'm a little intimidated by the mods so I haven't used them, and I mostly play matches, though I have enjoyed simming.

In short, it was New Japan's collaboration that got me into Fire Pro

I first heard about Fire Pro around 1996, from reading about it on RSPW (how many of you remember Usenet???) and the like. When 6MS came out, there was a fair amount of online hype. One of the American video game magazines did a one page review of it, and praised it highly, though it erroneously said it was releasing on the Sony Playstation and not the Sega Saturn!

I didn't own a Saturn at the time, but a couple months later, bought one at Target when the system was on clearance, for about $80. Ordered 6MS the next day, along with some kind of converter/adapter thingy that plugged into the back of the system.

Happily been playing Fire Pro games ever since. I believe the only console release I've not owned since then was Fire Pro Z and the Game Boy versions.

Stumbled into SFPPXX on an emulator back in the early 00's, played the hell out of that. Afterwards, learned about FPD and picked it up for the Dreamcast; good timing since I was a UFC mark at the time and gruesome fighting seemed like like the greatest thing ever.

Stumbled on PS2 Returns years later, after the community had already been working on it for a while, downloaded a lot of save packs. Skipped the PS3 re-release since I felt the PS2 version was good enough.

Then in 2017, after watching the first season of GLOW on Netflix I remembered the fun I had with Fire Pro and decided to look up some videos for nostalgia sake. First article I see is about plans to release a new game on PC in July.

👏

It's been an interesting ride.

Somewhere around 1995 or 1996 I read about it on the old TNM website (pre-TNM7) when there were still video game reviews on there. One of the reviews was for SFPWX(P), and I had recently gotten an SNES and filing out the tabs was relatively simple so I decided to order the game and give it a shot. The game cost a ridiculous amount of money for a 14 year old kid at the time, but it was worth it long term.

I noticed that the Mod Suite looked just like TNM 7. Made me feel at home. But didn't think anyone else knew it existed. :)

First game was FPW 2 for GBA probably Christmas 02. Then I got a Dreamcast in about 2004 and messed with FPD. Modded my PS2 when Returns came out and also got copies of KOC2 and Red + Green. Eventually imported everything from Giant Gram to Toukon Retsuden.

Coming off the AKI series, which at the time I thought was the absolute pinnacle of wrestling games, I literally wouldn't play anything else. After No Mercy came out I waited and waited and waited for what I assumed would be the eventual announcement of the next installment in the series. We had four continuous years of AKI games and I had no reason not to expect more with the games being highly acclaimed and a massive fan-following at the time. So when that time of the season came around, I began nervously wringing my hands as no announcement of a new game had been made and there had not even been a hint that there wouldn't be one.

The year came and went and the AKI message boards were just frothing as no one knew what was going on. I can't remember how exactly the announcement came about that the AKI / WWE partnership had ended, only that it had ended on very petty terms on the part of the WWE, if that story is true.

So another year of No Mercy. Fortunately I had a copy that wasn't glitched and managed to stretch out my enjoyment of the game by buying an N64 Dex Drive so I could create hundreds of wrestlers in the CAW mode and mix and match them up on the memory card through my PC. At the time I used to actually do monthly PPV's and actually tape them on VHS.

I was getting desperate for something new as the N64 was really showing its age by this point and I even decided I might cave in and get a copy of Smackdown Just Bring It. I had been souring on the actual WWE for a couple years by this point and barely watched any actual shows but I wanted a more modern up to date wrestling game. I had always considered the Smackdown series to be an antithesis of what a wrestling game should be. Sure they usually looked okay and had all the bells and whistles of the WWE in the graphics and sound department, but for the life of me I could not understand how any self proclaimed wrestling fan was enjoying the gameplay, especially coming off of the more sim styled approach the AKI games had.

So following along development of the title on the official forums, the old community outreach guy for the company was Sanders Keel. Anyone remember this guy and his infamous online meltdown?
Anyway, Sander Keel was the official hype man for Smackdown Just Bring It and had told the community that they were even working with some former AKI developers on the new game and wanted to incorporate some of the AKI gameplay elements into the new installment. So I was fucking hyped for a wrestling game again. If AKI and Smackdown can meet somewhere in the middle I might be able to live with that. I even remember the old trailers they showed with chain wrestling sequences and interacting with the ropes, none of which turned out to actually be performable in the game.

So I bought Smackdown Just Bring It release day, brought it home and over the course of an hour of playing had my hype dwindle down into outrage. It was just more arcade horseshit with broken commentary and selling animations that didn't match up to what was happening to the wrestler. Stomp on a wrestlers leg and he would go into a selling animation of holding his head. WTF?

What truly killed it though was the Royal Rumble. The grueling, nail biting, hour long marathons of survival I had relished in Wrestlemania 2000 and No Mercy were relegated to campy ten minute punch fests in Just Bring It. I packed the game up, got my coat and took the game back to the store telling the guy behind the counter it should be called Smackdown Just Bring It Back.

Many of my evenings after that were spent just trawling through wrestling message boards looking for information on news for any upcoming wrestling game that didn't have Smackdown in the title. I guess I wasn't alone in the search because a thread pointed me to a Gamespot article about a Japanese wrestling game that had come out about a year or so earlier called Fire Pro Wrestling G.

I had actually heard of Fire Pro once before as my cousin had a emulated copy of Super Fire Pro Wrestling X Premium on his laptop that he used to bring over and maintain was the best wrestling game ever because it had a Create a Wrestler mode which was unheard of to me at the time. Problem was it was 2d and mostly full of wrestlers I had never even heard of, so I never really paid it much attention.

After doing a crapload of research on Fire Pro Wrestling G I was finally sold on giving the game a try, especially since there was literally nothing else on the horizon for a non Smackdown wrestling gamer.
Ended up importing it and initially was not impressed at all. Like most new players to Fire Pro, learning the play mechanics was a long and frustrating ordeal that really soured me on the game. Although I did enjoy simming WWE vs WCW feuds on it quite a bit and the matches had a very dynamic and natural back and forth flow to them. With no huds on the screen to give away potential endings I was always surprised by those last second kickouts and this is probably what kept me trying to learn the game mechanics instead of shoving it off into the back of a closet and forgetting about it, like I did with a copy of AJPW King's Soul, which I would completely forget about until King of Colosseum Red was announced.

So that started off things off with Fire Pro. Once I also got into Japanese wrestling through Fire Pro the obsession was pretty much locked in. As long as there were Fire Pro games coming out I was determined to buy whatever I needed to play them. I bought two Dreamcast's just for Fire Pro Wrestling D and I almost bought an Xbox when I heard it was getting a Fire Pro game. Fortunately the game trailer hit before pay day and when I saw it in action I said this isn't Fire Pro and didn't buy the system.

So Fire Pro and it's KOC cousin have really been the only wrestling games I have played over the last decade. Although I did buy ASPWIII, my playtime with that was shortlived. It really wasn't until 2K and WWE started their games that I gave another wrestling series a try. While I still don't consider them on equal footing as Fire Pro I do consider them buyable although maybe not on day one. I just think of what a King of Colosseum game could be with the graphics and animation of a 2K WWE game but a modernized KOC grappling engine.