Fire Pro Wrestling World is an arcade wrestling game available from retail stores and for download from the PlayStation Store for the PS4. Fire Pro Wrestling is a franchise that was created by Human Entertainment were the series originated in Japan on June 22nd 1989 with the release of Fire Pro Wrestling: Combination Tag for PC Engine, while further Japanese sequels for PC Engine in the form of Fire Pro Wrestling: 2nd Bout, Fire Pro Wrestling 3: Legend Bout and Wrestling Universe: Fire Pro Women: Dome Super Female Big Battle: All Japan Women VS J.W.P. in 1991, 1992 and 1995 respectively. However, Fire Pro Wrestling games began releasing on other platforms from 1991 in Japan were 8 Super Fire Pro Wrestling games released on the SNES between December 20th 1991 and March 29th 1996, alongside Thunder Pro Wrestling Retsuden on SEGA Mega Drive on March 22nd 1992 and Fire Pro Wrestling: 6 Men Scramble on SEGA Saturn on December 27th 1996, while Fire Pro Wrestling: Iron Slam ’96 and Fire Pro Wrestling G released on PS1 on March 15th 1996 and June 24th 1999 respectively. After the release of Fire Pro Wrestling G in 1999; the franchise was bought by Spike Chunsoft who released games on Dreamcast, Gameboy Advance, PS2, WonderSwan and Xbox 360, alongside mobile and social platforms and even a card game from 2000 onwards. Can Fire Pro Wrestling World continue to bring the popular Japanese arcade wrestling franchise to a wider audience, while producing the best of the series to date?
It is recommended that players start out in mission mode, especially if you are new to the gameplay of the Fire Pro Wrestling franchise. There are numerous missions that are gradually unlocked by completing the previous mission such as mastering your grapple timing, mastering how to attack an opposing wrestler when he is on the mat, mastering how to utilise the wrestling ring’s ropes to your advantage when performing moves and much more besides.
The wrestling roster comprises of 39 New Japan wrestlers and 30 SWA wrestlers that each have their own faction, nicknames, country or region, birth date, height or weight, multiple costumes, signature moves and finishing move, alongside two crazy referees nicknamed Mr. Judgement and Red Shoes Unno. Wrestlers compete in an NJPW or SWA ring within one of half a dozen arenas including Big Garden Arena, SCS Stadium, Arena De Universo, Spike Dome, Yurakuen Hall and Dojo.
Match types include a normal match; escaping the cage in a cage deathmatch; a barbed wire deathmatch in which the ring is surrounded by barbed wire that explodes whenever a wrestler makes contact with it; an SWA rules match is a fusion of pro wrestling and MMA rules; gruesome fighting is contained within an octagon steel cage used in MMA with a victory only obtained through submission or knock out; an S-1 rules match is a mixture of boxing and stand-up fighting as striking is the only form of offence that is allowed; and more besides. These match types are available within customised exhibition, tournament and league events, while the battle royal is essentially it’s own match type comprising of normal battle royal rules with wrestlers being eliminated one at a time until only one wrestler is left standing; first win rules sees the first wrestler to eliminate an opponent winning the event; an endless battle royal provides the chance for eliminated wrestlers to stay in the ring and attack those who eliminated them; over-rope battle royal offers the stipulation of a wrestler only being eliminated after they are thrown over the top rope of the wrestling ring; and a time focused battle royal in which two wrestlers start the match only for more wrestlers to gradually join the match with later wrestlers having an advantage. However, every match oddly ends without much fanfare; for instance the referee does not raise your wrestler’s hand in victory and there is around 15 seconds after the fight before it loads the post-fight menu.
Fighting road mode is a story driven mode that unfolds based upon the player’s match results. After a brief text based motivational guide on what it is like to attempt to reach the top of New Japan Pro Wrestling; more text asks the question on behalf of a commentator if this is the end for your wrestler after 45 minutes of wrestling. Suddenly, a flashback occurs to a wrestling coach that laughs in the face of your wrestler when he states that he wants to be IWGP champion before an audition day takes place that aims to recruit new wrestling talent; potentially including your wrestler. The player can fully customise their wrestler’s name, weight class and more besides; appearance; skills; parameters; and move set before participating in an audition match to begin your path to being a New Japan Pro Wrestling champion. However, fighting road has a lot of text and images within the story; none of it is voiced, despite it being the perfect feature to bring the franchise up to a more modern pacing for the story driven side of gameplay.
Customisation and user generated content creation is a massive part of Fire Pro Wrestling World. Players can edit a pre-existing wrestler including their name and weight class, appearance, skill, parameter, moveset and CPU logic or alternatively create a wrestler from scratch and the ability to create an entire faction or tag team. Meanwhile, a referee can be edited or created including their name, the amount of time it takes the referee to get to the canvas to begin the count, the cadence of the referee’s fall count, disqualification count and ringout count, the referee’s movement speed, numerous American and Japanese male and female voices, the appearance of the referee and more besides. Players can also create their own rings to play host to future matches and create a belt in name, weight class, participation and match type, design and the colour of the belt and faceplate design. Most impressively of all is the ability to upload your creations to share with players from around the world as you can download everyone else’s creations and they can download your creations.
Fire Pro Wrestling World’s downloadable content includes multiple expansions to the fighting road mode such as the 2017 NJPW Junior Heavyweight Championship and the Birth of the Legend. Downloadable content is contained within the European deluxe edition that is priced at £74.99 digitally or the digital season pass on the US store for $49.99.
It is disappointing to not see Fire Pro Wrestling World ported to the Vita as it was pretty much the final opportunity for the wrestling genre to arrive on Vita which is rather odd in itself as there were a few wrestling games that released on PSP, although at least remote play is a consolation. Fire Pro Wrestling World’s remote play performance replicates that of the PS4 version, while retaining the majority of the control scheme, although that is not really as important due to certain gameplay issues.
Fire Pro Wrestling World’s control scheme relies too much on the player perfecting the timing of grappling that can very quickly become frustrating as the pressing of the corresponding button a fraction of a second too early or too late will result in your wrestler being put on the canvas by their opponent with every wrestler rather oddly wanting to grapple as often as possible, regardless if grappling is one of their strengths or weaknesses. Keeping that control scheme for the Fire Pro Wrestling purists is fine, but there should have been an updated control scheme to make Fire Pro Wrestling World fun for newcomers to the franchise. The control scheme consists of pressing square, X or O to perform a small, medium or big move respectively; pressing triangle to run; pressing L1 to breathe; pressing R1 to circle your opponent; pressing R2 to perform a pinfall attempt; changing the direction of the left analogue stick or pressing up, down, left or right on the d-pad to you’re your wrestler in that given direction; pressing the share button takes you to the share feature menu; and pressing the options button to display the pause menu. Vibration occurs when an opposing wrestler performs a move on your wrestler; while there is no touch pad support that could have provided an alternative to circling your opponent or performing certain wrestling moves, alongside no light bar support that could have produced an alternative HUD to display the health status of your wrestler.
Graphically, Fire Pro Wrestling World possesses an arcade retro stylised aesthetic that is synonymous with the Fire Pro Wrestling franchise since Super Fire Pro Wrestling on the SNES in the 1990s, albeit with improved textures and resolution. However, the performance does not reach its potential due to collision detection problems when two wrestlers simultaneously perform any move on each other.
Fire Pro Wrestling World’s presentation is good in some areas such as the user interface across various menus such as the main menu, game mode selection menus, wrestler selection menus, customisation and edit mode menus, options menu and gameplay menus with support for navigation via the left analogue stick, directional pad and face buttons, while tapping the touch pad toggles a description of the menu on or off, although it does not include support for navigation via the right analogue stick. Menu backgrounds include the Fire Pro Wrestling World logo positioned in the centre, while chains move up and down in the foreground and background and particle effects from fire are spread through part of the logo. However, loading times are longer than expected, the menus stutter at times for no reason and post-match has around 15 seconds worth of standing still or pointlessly walking from side to side without any victory celebrations orchestrated by the referee as he prefers to stand still.
Voice-overs include wrestlers occasionally taunting their opponents, a referee counting during a pinfall or counting a wrestler out when outside the ring or declaring a rope break during an attempted pinfall and an announcement informing the crowd every five minutes to the current duration of the match through the arena’s tannoy system. There is no commentary, despite there being multiple commentators sitting ringside, while there are numerous coaches and wrestlers that make appearances throughout the fighting road mode in between matches; yet none of them are voiced resulting in the player reading through lots of text rather than the story being voiced and acted as would have been anticipated. Sound effects include wrestlers performing moves on each other and an enthusiastic crowd cheering on their favourites; accompanied by rock music during menus and official ring entrance music during the in-ring arrival of wrestlers. There is no DualShock 4 speaker implementation that could have produced ring entrance music for your wrestler and the crowd reaction to a big move or an unexpected kick-out from a pinfall attempt.
The trophy list includes 32 trophies with 10 bronze trophies, 18 silver trophies, 3 gold trophies and 1 platinum trophy. Easier trophies include participation in match types regardless of the match result including 10 bronze trophies for fighting your first match in an exhibition, tournament, league, battle royale, normal rules, cage, barbed wire, SWA rules, gruesome fighting and more besides and a silver trophy for fighting for your first title. Harder trophies include the 1,000 Appearances gold trophy for fighting in 1,000 matches total; the Mission Master silver trophy for completing every mission with an S rank; and the Edit Legend for creating 100 wrestlers. There is one online multiplayer trophy as the Worldwide Debut silver trophy requires the player to fight in their first online match. It is estimated that depending upon skill and a good trophy guide to provide some helpful tips that it would take between 25 to 50 hours to platinum the trophy list.
Fighting road mode has three difficulty levels including easy, normal and hard, although every match type outside of fighting road mode does not have a particular difficulty level. The difficulty curve is harder than what it should be for all the wrong reasons which is brought about by an unnecessary requirement of relying on timing a grapple to perfection or your wrestler ends up on the canvas and collision detection that is far too easy to miss an opponent when both wrestlers are performing a move and even when performing a running move. Meanwhile, mission mode is an odd tutorial as it sometimes gives more questions rather than answers due to poor localisation in how certain move descriptions are phrased, but it is possible to figure it out with trial and error, although that should not be the case.
Local and online multiplayer supports 2 to 4 players throughout every match type within a single match or various customised tournaments and the ability to compete for a title.
Providing that you can tolerate or overcome the controls and some of the rough around the edges areas; Fire Pro Wrestling World actually has a lot of replayability including numerous match types, customisable rules and a large roster of 69 wrestlers wrestling for varying titles within half a dozen arenas, while there is also the story driven fighting road mode, alongside the unpredictability of matches during local and online multiplayer for 2 to 4 players. However, it is unquestionably the wrestler, referee, team, ring and belt customisation and creation that can be uploaded for the world to experience that yields the most replay value, especially considering that you can download everyone else’s creations resulting in infinite replay value for as long as the online servers are available to upload and download user generated content.
Analysis
- Title: Fire Pro Wrestling World
- Developer: Spike Chunsoft
- Publisher: Koch Media
- System: PS4
- Format: PS4 Blu-Ray Disc/PSN Download
- Cross-Buy: No
- Cross-Play: No
- Players: 1-4 (Local Multiplayer)/2-4 (Online Multiplayer)
- Hard Drive Space Required: 2.95GB (Version 1.02 – PS4 Blu-Ray Disc/PSN Download)
