How far can the human spirit truly take you?
After beating The Silver Case for the first time, I found myself itching for more Suda content. I didn’t know where to go though, I didn’t want something too long, and I didn’t want to continue to Flower Sun and Rain just yet so I was a little stuck on what I wanted to do. I then remembered his first written game, Super Fire Pro Wrestling Special, a wrestling game so infamous in its writing that Suda received numerous death threats over its ending! Now, to be upfront here, I’ve never been that huge on wrestling, especially the video games, so I was sort of hesitant jumping into this, but my curiosity on where Suda began took hold so I found myself booting it up. What I discovered was one of the most insane SNES games I think I’ve ever played.
The story of this game is where Suda takes full control, delivering a journey about an up and coming wrestler going through multiple tournaments in order to eventually become the champion of the world. From the start, it’s pretty generic, you get a trainer, you do some battles, you lose occasionally, typical sports story writing from my experience, but then it suddenly starts to take a turn. Wrestling goes from a simple way to pass the time, to an obsession, a desire, something that takes priority over everything else in your life. A question begins to be asked, “How far are you willing to go to pursue your dream and is it really worth it?” Suddenly you're an alcoholic, you’re abandoning the girl of your dreams in utter despair over not being good enough for her, you forgo grieving your master in order to keep fighting, to keep wrestling until you reach the top no matter how much it kills you. It’s a testament of the human spirit, a journey of how far you’re willing to go for your dreams, and it only gets darker and darker the farther you get. The final chapter is especially haunting, I won’t really go into what happens because it’s easily the biggest appeal of the game, but the ending is one of the more gut wrenching things I’ve ever seen a game do, and it blows my mind that this was released when it was. It was fascinating going through this story mode though, you can really see a lot of Suda’s writing quirks shine here and I could see it as a Kill The Past game if Suda had made it now. Telling a journey about trying to leave your past behind in order to focus on what you have now is pretty typical for that series, so it was incredibly riveting seeing just where that all began.
This is still a wrestling game though, and like other wrestling games, you’ll be spending most of your time in the ring duking it out. Upon first starting Fire Pro, I was rather confused on what the mechanics were. Mashing like you could in other wrestling games just wasn't working here, and I found myself getting destroyed by the first ever opponent, I was so puzzled on how to make progress. I decided to do some research and I discovered that this game focuses less on button combos and more on button timing! Depending on when you press the button during specific actions you’ll end up doing a different move. The trick to winning in this game is learning when to apply each attack in order to successfully drain your opponent’s stamina to be able to pin them down long enough to win. I could feel my skills increase the more I played and won fights, there’s an incredible growth of skill here, and for a good while I felt as if I was getting stronger with the main character, becoming a part of their journey with them! At the beginning, this is an incredibly fun loop of gauging what an opponent's pattern is, learning how to best approach them, before delivering a move that devastates them and ends the fight in record time. Unfortunately at about the halfway mark matches start to get incredibly tedious. There’s an incredibly simple strategy with future fights that lets you just spam the kick move till the opponent falls down and loses, letting you win fights in less than a minute and it makes the game turn into a repetitive slog. I felt no effort to use anything else because the game rewarded me for just cheesing it, it kinda sucked and it made me wish the AI was better in order to accommodate for it, it holds a good majority of this game back by the end. The only time this didn’t work was the tag team chapter which became more annoying more than anything as it forced you to rely on your partners ai to stop the other opponent from stopping your take down. It sucks because the beginning of the game is fun, it just becomes so tedious and boring by the end I just kept playing to see more of Suda’s writing.
All in all, Fire Pro Wrestling Special is a great wrestling game, a more unique take on the genre sure, but one I ended up enjoying immensely. It felt like a breath of fresh air from the more generic wrestling games out there, and the more deliberate, timed button presses the game focuses on really helped add a lot more skill factor to it. I just wish the campaign accommodated this better. If there was a difficulty increase by the end then I think it’d help a lot, but unfortunately most opponents are the same level of skills it sucks. It was very much worth playing to see just where Suda started though, and I’m very excited to see this writing stay strong in his other works!
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