Arisa Nakajima vs Pinky Mayuka
Short-ish opening match that had lots of dropkicks and some stretch holds. Shocking, I know! Pinky Mayuka is greenish and doesn’t throw very impressive dropkicks. Not a big surprise she quickly vanished out of the wrestling landscape. Nakajima is vicious and finishes her pretty fast. This very much a match to see and forget quickly.
KAZUKI vs. Hiroyo Muto
Joshi is always associated with super athletic car crash prints, but then you get two stocky workers like this. Muto wasn’t doing comedy at this point and instead worked more like a big bruiser with big chops and KAZUKI was trying to outmaneuver her. There are some fun odd spots, such as a moment where they both kept reversing Russian Leg Sweep attempts. Muto hit a really big cracking shoot headbutt at one point and KAZUKIS rolling takeover into a cool submission for the finish was pretty nice. That’s more than enough to get a match on my good side even though mostly everything else they did wasn’t much to write home about.
Toshie Uematsu vs. Tojuki Leon
This was more like what you associate with joshi. Car crash style match with a ton of no selling and blown spots. Disappointing since both these two are capable of having great matches with neat moments. There were some neat moments but overall the match never really got anything going due to the constant no selling and sloppy execution halting things. I‘ll admit the recovery of Leons blown dive attempt was remarkable and there were 2-3 nifty moments, especially Uematsus pin attempts and a cool reversal into a back stretch from Leon. But overall this was a mess.
Kaori Yoneyama vs. Command Bolshoi
This was kind of Bolshoi tour de force doing her thing with the cool submissions and neat 619 variations and hard shotais. Yoneyama is someone who can be quite great but also annoying, she was still finding herself at this point and kind of sloppy at times, I was also annoyed by her blatantly no-selling a dropkick to the face. This was solid but felt like it went longer than it needed to.
Ran Yu Yu vs. Tsubasa Kuragaki
Ran Yu Yu no longer had her super high end offense at this point, but damn she was still good. Her timing was still great, and she knew how to make something as basic as an elbow smash look killer. This was just a super cool veteran match up – they took things nice and slow which was a breath of fresh air after the hectic Bolshoi/Yoneyama match. Rans hit all these cool stiff kicks and knee drops to Kuragakis mid section. Kuragakis style mix of power and flying offense is cool as always, and it builds to a really neat end run full of cool lariats, elbows and neat counters from Yu Yu. The timing on everything was incredible. Really really cool stuff, both these two have good enough offense that they could just take turns hitting all their moves and it would be fine but they went out of their way to deliver a more thoughtful match.
Keito vs. Kayoko Haruyama
KEITO is one of those hidden badass wrestlers. Kickpadded and butch as hell, she’s a great 21st century Toshiyo Yamada. This was quite the badass little war, just two tanks punting the hell out of each other. Keito was demolishing Haruyama with her kicks who fired back with awesome stiff lariats and cool spin kicks of her own. Match was pretty smart outside of the hard hitting too, I liked how Keito sold that she was loopy by a random sleeper attempt from Haruyama, so the followup Dragon Sleeper felt more intense. Keito is lower on the totem pole so early on Haruyama was outgunning her, before Keito was able to kick her in the face and then she just started trying to kick her head off. I also loved her crazy submission hold. Really fun intense stuff that doesn’t go long.
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