Watch your step, for you’ve just entered theGraveyard. Inside, we’ll be digging up games that have long been without a pulse. You’ll see both good and bad souls unearthed every month as we search through the more… forgotten…parts of history.
Since 1989, the Fire Pro Wrestling series has stood atop the 2D wrestling landscape and pioneered elements that have gone onto become standard – while also raising the bar in ways that haven’t been matched outside of it. Having become aware of the series due to magazines in the ’90s covering the Saturn and PS1 entries, I adored the GBA games, but always wanted a full-fledged console release with nicer graphics to enjoy and that’s where Fire Pro Returns entered the fray. This offered up over 300 wrestlers to enjoy, with a mix of 2005-era and before stars across pro wrestling and MMA thanks to its Gruesome Fighting cage.
The Fire Pro series was the first game of any kind to feature an MMA mode in it – pre-dating UFC games by several years thanks to 6-Man Scramble on the Saturn and it’s pretty much always had its finger on the pulse of the industry dating back to having deathmatches in games long before any other series. Even in 2024, only AEW Fight Forever comes close to what Fire Pro has offered with its mix of both barb wire deathmatches, but also light tubes and the ability to throw people around from the ring to the floor normally or onto exploding barb wire boards on the outside.
Returns brought back series favorites like the battle royal in every possible version, from a timed Rumble style to a single-elimination over the top rope method to my personal favorite - an elimination match with eight people in the ring at once. This mode, combined with the ability to hit strikes mid-move to opponents led to moments like Davey Boy Smith having someone up for a delayed suplex, only to be knocked out (or CRITICALed in Fire Pro) by a roaring elbow from Mitsuharu Misawa. Being able to have so much freedom in a match means that the possibilities for fun are pretty much endless in a match like this.
you’re able to use this style of match to set up title feuds due to the order of elimination or have mini dream matches that could never take place in real life due to company politics, or folks wrestling in different eras. Players can have intergender matches, resulting in things like Awesome Kong, Aja Kong, or Bull Nakano using their considerable size in their prime to go toe-to-toe with men - which is something we see more of now than in their respective primes over the past 30 years. Fire Pro Returns is one of the greatest celebrations of pro wrestling history ever put into video game form and having its roster go back to the days of Lou Thesz and Karl Gotch and into the mid-’00s with AJ Styles shows just how much the development team cared about it.
The robust creation suite allows for incredible creations to this day - with a three layer system for attire that allows for modern-day changes and things like makeshift sleeve tattoos and intricate gear designs all within the confines of the symmetrical art pieces used so everything looks correct to the eye from any angle - including when you have someone facing or having their back to the camera for something like a rotating move. I had a blast making both Ronda Rousey the MMA fighter back in her MMA prime and having her demolish guys like Fedor and Mirko Cro Cop before making another version of her for pro wrestling.
The inclusion of the gruesome MMA cage enabled really stiff slams and it’s remarkable how well the dev team got across how much harder the mat was on the arena floor versus a wrestling ring mat by having slams do so much more damage - to the point where a ground and pound counter Rampage powerbomb could knock someone out. This made it fun to do things like having a slam-heavy MMA fighter like Rampage Jackson face someone who was more striking-based like Cro Cop and see how much more damage a slam could do on that surface. Surprisingly, the same kind of effect wasn’t put into place with a regular ring where you could in theory have different ring surfaces to work with - like a modern-day ring with a bit more give or the old boxing rings used throughout the ’80s and the hard WWF rings of the ’90s. It would have been a nice touch and something that really hasn’t been done in many wrestling games over the years.
Having pro wrestling and MMA in a single game with highly-customizable movesets means that this 2005 release was able to not only lead to a perfect 2012 Brock Lesnar with a hybrid MMA and wrestling moveset, but remains current in 2024 with men like Miniru Suzuki still employing a similar style and the entire Bloodsport sub-genre being replicated as well. That more modern-day incarnation of a blend of shoot-style striking and grappling is very much rooted in the Japanese UWFI style with worked shoots being featured to offer a more realistic-version of pro wrestling, which was influenced by the original Tiger Mask’s Shooto group and led to companies like Dream Stage noticing the style, putting a lot of money and glitz behind it and having shoot fights mix into a few worked fights in the formative PRIDE days - which kicked off a huge boom period for MMA in Japan when the industry was floundering in the US due to political forces cutting down on PPV coverage and where live events could be held.
Graveyard: Road Trip
The Choro-Q series hit the US with an underrated gem in the form of Road Trip on the PS2.
The regular cage match was added into this game and enabled things like face smashes into the cage, dives off the cage onto a standing opponent and the ability to just use the cage as a weapon and not a means to end the match to have outside the cage brawling. That made team-based cage matches especially fun since you have the challenge of trying to win and having things like the ability to make the match single elimination or elimination for each member and then combining things like a cage dive into the mix to add to the excitement. The inability to have cage dives onto downed opponents was a bit odd as that was the original way to dive onto people off a cage - made famous at first with Jimmy Snuka and Bob Backlund before being immortalized with Snuka diving onto Don Muraco in Madison Square Garden.
Visually, Returns basically keeps the Fire Pro D look from the Dreamcast alive with a bit more detail and all of its DLC moves intact. Yup, even back in the DC days, there were downloadable moves you could get via the VMU and online servers and that’s another area where the series set a standard to then be surpassed. Returns' look has held up remarkably well - especially when playing either via the PS3 and an HDMI hookup or via component cable on the PS2 itself. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t yet have PS4 or PS5 playback and moving saves over from the PS2 and modern-day devices can be tricky - but a bit easier if you have a PS2-to-PS3 memory card adapter to work with. Character animations are pretty rock-solid across the board and with all entries, landing a perfect strike not only sounds great, but looks impressive as well.
Musically, it does fall short and that’s one area the series has always faltered in a bit. The sound-alike wrestler themes are good and the overall sound design is impressive. When you have things like the ring exploding or folks getting torn up by light tubes or barbed wire, the sound effects work really nicely. The exploding ring is especially impressive with the mix of the sound itself and the visual of all the bombs surrounding the ring blowing up at once - leaving players either weakened or KOed completely.
Overall, Fire Pro Returns is one of the finest pro wrestling games ever made and as a bonus, it’s also an incredibly-satisfying MMA game as well. Even with Fire Pro Wrestling World being on the market, I would actually put Returns above it. Having a few more limitations within the creation suite made it easier to figure out solutions to coloring problems and allowed me to create characters and outfits I never thought I could in another game and its gameplay has held up remarkably over the course of nearly two decades. It’s a shame the game isn’t on modern-day hardware, but it’s a riot to play on the PS2 and it’s easy enough to play on the PS3 and get downloadable saves from the PS2 days now to get even more out of it than what’s in the base game.
