The History of Virtual Pro Wrestling 2

Fans first saw the game at the 1999 Nintendo Space World, where it was shown about 65 percent complete. The preview build boasted Tournament, League, Ranking and Grand Meeting modes, a Belt Edit feature, the Champion Road mode that became the Royal Road Succession, an expanded creation mode, over 1,000 move combinations, and a roster promised at way over 100 fighters.

Asmik Ace held a license for All Japan Pro Wrestling only, so All Japan's wrestlers appear as themselves. Everyone else, the stars of New Japan, FMW, Michinoku Pro, Pancrase, Pride, and the shoot fighting world, appears under a generic name in altered gear, with the game's deep Edit mode handing players every tool needed to restore them. The design expects the restoration; the disguise is a doorway, not a wall.

The wrestling itself leans into puroresu. The theatrical entrances of the American games give way to a simple backstage introduction and an in-ring announcement. Venues are the real rooms of Japanese wrestling: Nippon Budokan, Korakuen Hall, Kawasaki Stadium, the Tokyo Dome. Players choose among three referees with distinct reaction times and count speeds.

VPW2 dropped the cage match and First Blood match of WrestleMania 2000 as unconventional to Japanese wrestling, restored the test-of-strength grapple and striking combination grapple from WCW/nWo Revenge, and added a running grapple. Its move library includes techniques American wrestling had banned from its rings, among them the Burning Hammer. In a first for 3D wrestling games, AKI built an entirely separate grappling system for mixed martial artists, with optional shootfighting rules built on strike combinations, judo takedowns, and submissions.

Two creation ideas appeared here and nowhere else in the series. A detailed mask editor served the luchador tradition, and a Logic setting let players script how their created wrestler behaves under computer control at each stage of a match. The Belt Creation mode could unify three real All Japan championships into the Triple Crown.

Virtual Pro Wrestling 2 released in Japan on 28 January 2000. Unlike the earlier AKI WCW games, its American sibling WrestleMania 2000 did travel the other way and received a Japanese release that September, but VPW2 itself was never localized. Western players met it through import shops and emulators, and word of mouth did the rest.

VPW2 is the fullest statement of what AKI thought wrestling was: a sport of Strong Style collisions, shoot fighting technique, and championships unified one belt at a time. Its American cousins outsold it many times over, but among wrestlers themselves, this is the one they name. This shelf's question page takes up the case in full.