Past meets present: Big Bang Pro Wrestling

An import-friendly Neo Geo Pocket Color title finally officially made its way overseas, over two decades later.

This column is “Past meets present,” the aim of which is to look back at game franchises and games that are in the news and topical again thanks to a sequel, a remaster, a re-release, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

The Neo Geo Pocket Color has received a bit of a second life in the present, thanks to re-releases of some of its classic titles on modern platforms. Some of these games have released individually, others still are available only in collections, but a library that was either unavailable due to region-specific releases or just because it was on a handheld that vanished nearly as quickly as it appeared — the Neo Geo Pocket Color didn’t even last a full year in North America before it was discontinued — is working its way back through these wide releases.

One of these games, which is available both as a solo purchase or as part of a collection (Neo Geo Pocket Color Collection Vol. 2), is Big Bang Pro Wrestling. It was import-friendly back when it first released for the Pocket Color back in November of 2000, but had not received an official release outside of Japan until it arrived on platforms like the Switch and Windows in March of 2022. Likely due to the fact that the Japanese release came six months after the handheld’s production was discontinued in North America.

Big Bang Pro Wrestling’s gameplay will be familiar to anyone who has experienced the older Fire Pro Wrestling titles: it’s sprite-based 2D wrestling, with an emphasis on timing and grappling. If both wrestlers go for a move at the same time, they’ll instead attempt to grapple each other, and whichever of them then moves quicker and inputs a move gets to actually deliver said move. There’s striking, there’s running, there are Irish whips, turnbuckle moves, ground attacks, submissions, chair shots, and finishers, but the thing you’ll do the most of is grapple, and try to perform your more heavy-hitting moves through that grappling.

Image credit: SNK Wiki

One reason that Big Bang Pro Wrestling feels so similar to Fire Pro Wrestling is because it was developed by a studio, S-Neo Co., that had experience with Fire Pro Wrestling. Human Entertainment — where Goichi Suda used to work in the days before Grasshopper Manufacture — originally developed the Fire Pro Wrestling games, they eventually shuttered, and the license moved on to Spike Chunsoft, which still owns it. The final Fire Pro Wrestling title that Human Entertainment developed and published was Fire Pro Wrestling G on the Playstation in 1999. There was a another studio working on that title as well: S-Neo Co. They also would develop Fire Pro Wrestling Returns on the Playstation 2 in 2005, as well as The Wild Rings, an Xbox and Japanese exclusive wrestling game: S-Neo Co. has credits on six games, and four of them are wrestling titles. (The other two? An adult visual novel, and a port of 1987’s Double Dragon.) Pretty safe to say they had a niche and stuck to it.

And why shouldn’t they have? Big Bang Pro Wrestling is a great time. There are 10 wrestlers in the game — eight to start, and two unlockable — and there are no licenses to be found. Likenesses, yes, but licenses? Not a one. The wrestling takes place in a made-up promotion, the IEW. There’s a high-flier in a mask who isn’t based on anyone specific but is just general “lucha libre” style, and a shoot-style wrestler who knows Vale Tudo, but most of the characters are heavily based on specific real wrestlers. The “final boss,” as it were, is basically What If Shawn Michaels Was Tall? There’s a guy who is basically just The Undertaker, minus the hat and plus a little slouching. David’s got a lot of Vader in him. Brian might have a regular name, but he’s aping The Great One. And speaking of great, Macey’s mist attack and look brings to mind Great Kabuki.

Big Bang Pro Wrestling isn’t as full-featured as something like WWF WrestleMania 2000 or Virtual Pro Wrestling, the Japanese wrestling series that the beloved North American N64 games like Mania 2000 are based on, but it’s still got plenty going for it, especially for a portable experience. There are exhibition matches, there’s a tournament option, and the “story” mode is a run for the IEW Championship, which, once you do win by defeating every opponent once, then forces you to defend your title in a series of matches that culminates in you taking on the big boss of the promotion, Josef. Once you defeat Josef, he’s unlocked for play in the other modes. And his manager/valet, Kei, will be available eventually, too… after you log an entire month of play time in the game. A nice surprise, kind of annoying that you still have to do that in the present with the re-release, but hey, maybe I’ll just leave Big Bang Pro Wrestling running in the background sometimes.

The presentation is pretty phenomenal for a handheld of the time. Sure, the Neo Geo Pocket Color was 16-bit (like the Bandai WonderSwan) and not 8-bit like the Game Boy and Game Boy Color, but still, S-Neo used that juice to make some impressive bits. There’s the whole introductory sequence, for one which should have been the direction some wrestling promotion or another used for the lead-in for their real show:

Wrestlers also receive entrances with music and pyro and the like, and an active crowd is behind them: one without repeating sprites, even. They look like an actual crowd, in the sense that there are some similarities (and palette swaps, of course, but what is a real-life crowd full of people wearing Bullet Club shirts besides a crowd full of palette swaps, anyway?), but these are all different “people” in attendance, with their own signs and such. You didn’t even get that sort of attention to detail in the crowds of the bigger console releases of the day! Wrestler sprites aren’t massive in-ring, which makes sense considering the screen size the Neo Geo Pocket Color had, but they animate fluidly and beautifully, and whenever there’s a chance or a larger portrait or sprite full of detail, the game will deploy one of those, too.

In the IEW Champion mode, wrestlers will cut promos before matches, which adds to the feel that there’s something going on here besides you just mowing down a list of opponents. It makes it feel more real, more organic: of course David would show up looking for a rematch after you become champ, and of course he’d say that, this time, the only rule is that there are no rules. It allows for a natural escalation in narrative, and a jump in difficulty as you progress through the mode, too.

There’s also some bits that keep matches from devolving into a rote rinse/repeat format, like the fact the referee is an active part of the match instead of just a concept or a pop-in. The ref can truly get involved in ways beyond just disqualifying whichever wrestler, in a standard rules match, decides to hit another wrestler in the head with a chair three times. Observe:

(You probably don’t need me to tell you this, but yes, that’s the character who is basically Taker, look, mannerisms, all of it.) Deitz whiped Eagle right into the ref, and the ref went down. Not only that, Deitz then went for a pin, and there was no one to count it! Intrigue, and a wonderful little moment that doesn’t happen all the time, and is difficult to even force considering the ref has their own movement and programming, and does his best to not be part of the action like that.

You might have noticed the smoothness of the animation there, like when Deitz moved out of the way of Eagle, and then used a big boot to take him down. The whole game looks like this, and also takes it to another level for the finishers, as Alex will show below:

Alex’s name starts flashing red — that’s the signal that a finisher can be used. In order to deploy a finisher, you press A and B at the same time, and the wrestler in question will strike out: if they make contact, they’ll then initiate their finisher. For Alex, the computer put together a convoluted series of moves in order to make it happen in the flashiest way possible, rather than just going for it at the first opportunity. It’s wrestling, you know? You need some showmanship.

You’ll use the B button to initialize running or to Irish whip your opponent into the ropes, but most of the game is played with the A button. You press A to strike, you press A and the D-pad to strike in a different way, you press A and it could end in a grapple, which will require you to once again press A (or A and a direction) to perform a wrestling move from that grapple. Those grapples, at first, are just going to result in pretty basic moves, like a bodyslam, but the more you injure your opponent, the more painful and impressive those grapple move are going to look. You don’t have a visible life bar, but between how much your ass is getting kicked — or how much ass you are kicking — and the flashing names, you do get a feel for how close you are to victory.

Submissions see you pressing A while an opponent is downed on their back: you’ll grab a leg to lock in a Figure Four, or get behind your opponent to put them in a sleeper, or whatever submission a particular wrestler has, from there. It won’t last long at first, but the more you work that limb, neck, whatever, the longer you can keep the hold locked in, and the more likely your chances at submitting them. Pins, too, won’t just happen, even after a finisher: you need to really beat the hell out your opponent to pin them, but you’ll get there so long as you keep winning those grapples and don’t let up. To pin, you press B while your opponent is on their back — don’t worry, the game own’t let you pull a Cameron and try a pin attempt from the wrong side. If your opponent is on their stomach, you’ll either flip them with B or attack them in some way, be it a kick or a stomp or a senton or what have you, to cause additional damage.

There’s a surprising variety of matches within Big Bang Pro Wrestling, too. You have your standard rules match, which you can tweak the settings of in exhibition mode to allow for more time and so on, but it also comes standard with a no rules format and a Casket Match, where you have to get your opponent into a casket in order to win. Sure, your opponent doesn’t then die in-game like in Lucha Underground, but still. Casket Match in a 16-bit portable game! There’s also a Cash Match, which kind of hides what it really is: a [Thing] on a Pole match. Do you think Vince Russo has ever played Big Bang Pro Wrestling, and if so, do you think this is the only match type he ever chooses?

Big Bang Pro Wrestling is a good time, and clearly one of the jewels of the second volume of Neo Geo Pocket Color Collection releases. It’s simplified compared to some other sprite-based wrestlers, owing to having just the two buttons to use, but that just makes it like a more advanced version of the early Fire Pro Wrestling titles (and spin-offs of that series) that showed up on handheld platforms, rather than what Fire Pro would eventually become in Human’s later years. And it’s a credit to S-Neo’s skill here that, despite just the two buttons, gameplay still feels very fulfilling due to contextual use of the button that are there. It’ll take some practice to get into the flow and rhythm of it all, to know just when and what to press to achieve the result you were looking for, but you’ll have fun getting to that point, too. And now you can officially, inexpensively do so on your modern platform of choice, too, for all of $8 if you don’t want to splurge for the complete $40 collection it’s contained within.

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