Giant Gram 2000: all Japan pro Wrestling 3
■ platform: dreamcast ■ Developer: WOW entertainment ■ Year: 2000
It’s not easy being a wrestling fan. The constant questioning of your intelligence (‘You do know it’s not real, right?’) is one thing, but the struggle to find good stuff to watch is more troublesome. Sure, you’ll get great matches in WWE and even the smaller American companies, but you’re missing out on a lot if you don’t look at Japan, and that’s always been true. While New Japan Pro Wrestling has been dominant in recent times, All Japan Pro Wrestling was once a force to be reckoned with – and so were quite a few of its games.
Giant Gram 2000 is the last and best entry in Sega’s All Japan Pro Wrestling series, and like its predecessors it was originally an arcade game. As a result, the game is relatively fast-paced and has a control system that is easy to grasp. Being based on Japanese wrestling, it’s somewhat heavy on striking, too. What’s great about Giant Gram 2000 is the fact that as well as featuring a responsive, enjoyable fighting system, the moves look like they hurt. When someone lands a particularly damaging move, the screen’s colour palette will go negative with a great big clanging sound to signify injury – it’s a great touch.
Arcade mode is the primary play option, in which you battle through a series of single or tag team matches on the way to a grand championship showdown in a huge venue. It’s well presented, with all of the traditional pageantry including entrance music and streamer-throwing fans, but it wouldn’t be enough on its own. Thankfully, the home game has some cool extras over the arcade release. The now-mandatory Create A Wrestler mode is in there, although the options are certainly a bit limited when compared to other games of the time. More fleshed out is the History mode, in which you’re required to recreate 24 classic bouts in order to unlock video clips of the actual matches.
There’s a large roster on offer, with 31 initial wrestlers and 14 more to unlock. As this is based on a Japanese promotion, the wrestlers featured are primarily Japanese stars such as Giant Baba, Kenta Kobashi, Mitsuharu Misawa and Jun Akiyama. However, there are some names in there that Western fans will recognise instantly – Vader is arguably the most well known to modern fans, but the likes of Johnny Ace (better known as John Laurinaitis), Mike Barton (the WWE’S Bart Gunn), Stan Hansen and Dr Death Steve Williams all feature. The game also contains some legendary figures, including Rikidozan, Jumbo Tsuruta, Bruiser Brody and Bruno Sammartino. Even Wolf Hawkfield of Virtua Fighter shows up for a scrap, as Sega was sponsoring a wrestler to don the gimmick at the time.
Dreamcast-owning wrestling fans outside of Japan at the time had to put up with the likes of ECW Hardcore Revolution and WWF Royal Rumble, and frankly you’d feel like a total jabroni if you’d bought those knowing that something as excellent as Giant Gram 2000 was out there instead. It’s cheap, it’s mostly import-friendly (and guides are out there for the tricky bits), and it’s a damned fine professional wrestling game.