Giant Gram 2000: All-Japan Pro Wrestling 3

"Giant Gram surpasses all other wrestling games."

You can keep your Mayhems and Smackdowns and Wrestlemanias. The best wrestling videogames come from across the tranquil pond known as the Pacific Ocean. Anyone who has played the Japan-imported New Japan Pro Wrestling series for the Playstation can attest to this.

It seemed hard to believe someone could surpass the New Japan games, but leave it to Sega and All Japan to do so. Their new Dreamcast game, Giant Gram 2000, is the new standard for wrestling games.

What makes this game so special, apart from good gameplay and snappy video, are a couple touches appealing to the longtime wrestling fan.

First, the game not only features the stars of AJPW, but also some Puroresu legends.

[Note: The game was made before Misawa and his group left the company to form NOAH. It’s interesting to note that the NOAH logo appears on the game’s back, along with the AJPW one.]

So, in addition to the game having Misawa, Kobashi, Akiyama, Vader and such, it also has wrestlers like Bruiser Brody, Jumbo Tsuruta, Gene Kiniski, Bobo Brazil and the father of Japanese wrestling, Rikidozan.

Second, there is a mode on the game for Historical Matches. There, you must reenact some of the most famous matches in AJPW history. And if you finish the match with enough points, you see a short video of the match.

As with most wrestling games, there are plenty of hidden characters. If you know your puroresu, you can recognize Mutoh, Chono, Hashimoto, Hayabusa and Shinzaki.

The create-a-wrestler section is also different than most games. Instead of picking a moveset, you wrestle characters in the dojo, learning moves along the way. You decide which you keep, and as you learn them, they do more damage and can be combined to make super moves and finishers.

There are a few downsides. Like its Saturn predecesor, the game is too reliant on button combinations to hit moves. And the game runs arcade style, with a sped-up clock and downtime timer. This is easily negated by just playing with infinite time. This also lets you have lots of time to learn moves in training mode.

Of course, the biggest negative to the game is that it’s not in English. Fortunately, there are plenty of websites and message boards devoted to translating the game for us gaijin that can’t read kanji.

If you’re a true wrestling fan, find a way to get this game, because, once you figure out how to play, you’ll be addicted.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 09/17/00, Updated 09/17/00