And nowadays, with 2K’s WWE games series - developed by Yuke’s for nearly 20 years now - more stale than ever, people may well turn to Fire Pro Wrestling World as an alternative - it may be 2D, but it's fresher than a series that frankly has never toppled the 14 year old Here Comes the Pain.įire Pro Wrestling World doesn’t make any wild changes to the formula - the game doesn’t need to.
When Acclaim had the licenses in the ‘90s, some people turned to Super Fire Pro Wrestling X Premium and found something a great deal better than Super Wrestlemania. Secondly, it’s an alternative to the poor quality wrestling games that have been released in the West over the years, where short of a few Smackdowns and AKI’s N64 titles consoles have largely experienced poor and stagnant wrestling games. Firstly, it’s a game that very much caters towards fans of Puroresu, with a wide range of wrestlers from the Japanese scene and beyond - whether you were into the top heavyweights, speedy juniors or violent deathmatch wrestlers, Fire Pro pretty much had you covered from the SNES onwards. Outside of Japan, the appeal of Fire Pro for people in the West has often been based around two things. It’s hard to explain but once you play the game for a bit, you’ll learn when that is. Throughout all of this, the games have retained the same style of play - a wrestling game based around timing as opposed to hammering buttons, where the grapplers come together and you try to hit your move right at that specific moment just after they lock up. Throughout all this time, the series has certainly had its moments - there’s been special women’s only editions of the game, a couple of editions that left Japan ( FPR and a couple of very good GBA games), and one game - Super Fire Pro Wrestling Special - with a storyline written by a certain Goichi Suda (this is about as weird as you’d expect).
The last proper game, 2005’s Fire Pro Returns for the PS2, featured 327 wrestlers and 500 slots for edits. It rose in popularity on the SNES as wrestling hit a boom period in Japan, before Human went bankrupt in 2000 and the series transferred to Spike, whose first major release in the series was the much loved Fire Pro Wrestling D on the Dreamcast in 2001. The first Fire Pro, Fire Pro Wrestling Combination Tag, was released in 1989 by Human Entertainment, and featured just 16 wrestlers. And after 12 long years (the avatar based Xbox 360 game doesn’t count) out of the game, Fire Pro is back courtesy of Spike Chunsoft, with Fire Pro Wrestling World now out on Steam’s Early Access, with a PS4 version also planned.
In fact, there might be only one - Fire Pro Wrestling. There’s probably even less that both got their start from a long-defunct company, and have still, through all these years, retained both the same gameplay and the same 2D graphics. There aren’t many series around these days that got their start on the PC Engine.
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