| smbhax [sys=PS2; cat=Wrestling; reg=JPN] |
| | | The venerable 2D wrestling series comes back to give its die-hard fans a massive helping of the incredibly detailed Japanese professional (ie, semi-staged) wrestling simulation that has far outlived any other games with which it could be compared. Go Fire Pro!
In this rebirth, you get hundreds and hundreds of wrestlers based on actual big sweaty dudes, and then you can make more in the inevitable Edit mode, which this time around lets you get all that much more detailed tricking out the last detail of your favorite real or fantasy bare-chested brawler. Or so I've heard--Edit mode is too much for me; and really, with hundreds of wrestlers that they've already made for me, I'm not gonna need Edit mode for much.
This game didn't really come back for me, you see. I really like the control scheme, and the 2D-ness of it all, but I'm not into the endless editing and match-making, which is really all there is to FPR, once you get right down to it. I'm disappointed that there's no "story" type of thing this time around, as there was in Fire Pro G (see entry 81), and even in the retroactively maligned Fire Pro Z (see entry 331). Let us not even speak of D's flimsy "Victory Road." But there's not even the shadow of an attempt at that sort of thing here, and that will keep the non-puroresu-fanboy like me from really sticking with the game for very long, at least at any one time.
I mean, hey, I like to get eight big fat scaling sprite dude battling it out in a ring or cage or whatever all at once just as much as the next guy, but there's only so much of that kind of senseless violence that I can take before starting to ask existential questions, and that leads to all kinds of dangerous things.
So, you know, I'll *want* to come back to this every so often for a big rumble, and definitely so if I can get some peeps together to do it with me (up to eight with two multitaps, even!), 'cause I really do like the battle system, what with the bajillion strikes, rope drops, submissions, throws, pins, flying knees, and other fun things you can do to the other sprites. That's just good clean fun, as anyone will tell you. But meantime, on my own, I'm more likely to try getting through some of the story/career modes in G and Z. |
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| | | | I seem to have unloaded my PS Fire Pros at some point, dang. |
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| | | | 2005 in Japan, two years after Z. 2007 in NA. |
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| | | | On NA PS3 (not JP, as far as I can see) in 2013--and still there, it's where I've repurchased it for $9.99 plus tax. PS3 PS2 games can be dumped/extracted with Apollo Save Tool and converted to a chd-compressible .iso with PowerISO (or by converting/burning the Apollo iso to disc and then ripping the disc with ImgBurn). |
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| | | | The 4.4 GB ISO chd compresses to 627 MB. |
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| | | The match backgrounds are still a big weirdly kinda diagonally chunky low-res crowd texture just like flat across the ground, like in G. ^ _^ Dirty 3D shading has crept up onto the ring but not noticeably onto the wrestlers themselves.
The first random-set match music I had was awful. ; D |
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| | | You can't get the same unified-looking low-res effect setting the res down to native with this game in PCSX2 that you can get with G in DuckStation; here it just gets alternating blurry/fuzzy-chunky, like it's doing some (bad) deinterlacing when it's at that lowest resolution setting.
But, it doesn't look bad at the higher resolutions; you don't have big pixels obviously rotating sideways on arms and legs like G did. |
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| | | In PCSX2, for this game I set
Display
Bilinear Filtering = None
Rendering
Texture Filtering = Nearest
to make it more pixelly. |
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| | | | There are a couple Hulk Hogan edit heads (443 or thereabouts I think) but no Hogan character made (what I thought was close to Hogan was actually Vader), so you'd have to make one. It's a lot of tweaking and I'm never satisfied with my own efforts really 'cause I don't know what I'm doing, so I think I'll just leave my Hoganing to G, which has a Hogan-alike. |
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| | | The controls seem weird to me vs G: taunt/performance moved to left analog (was L1/L2 in G), breathe now on L1, nothing on L2/R2.
3D walk / drag / front facelock from grapple on R1 (3D walk at least is on R1 in G so that's the same). |
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| | | | The characters are much bigger onscreen than in G. |
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| | | | The wide screen patch works for gameplay: wrestlers stay their normal dimensions and you can see more of the area around the sides of the ring, etc. Menus are stretched wide. : P |
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| smbhax 20:08:44 05/13/24 [title updated] |
| | | | I'd been calling this just "Fire Pro Returns" instead of "Fire Pro Wrestling Returns." That would have been cooler but I guess there actually is that big ol other word in there eh. 'p' |
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| | | The controls are basically Fire Pro D controls--Dreamcast doesn't have L2/R2 so D had to move things around a bit.
The characters in Returns are the same size as in D--apparently they were slightly smaller in Z. |
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| | | | The game WAS called just "Fire Pro Returns" in Japan. |
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Wrestler entrances are way better than the horrible ones in D, and Returns has a ton of music tracks for them. (W/ PCSX2's default hardware-accelerated rendering, the wrestler sprites show through the live-action pre-rendered layered(?) footage; doesn't happen in Software rendering mode, but then the wrestling graphics are kind of mushy)
The menus are kind of awkward (not helped by PSCX2's widescreen "patch" (hack) stretching them wide, I suppose (display ratio of wrestlers/ring/etc is correct in actual matches)), and the music that plays during them is horrible; from listening to OSTs on YouTube, it sounded like Returns (called "Fire Pro Returns" in Japan--no "Wrestling") had a lot of tracks from D, plus additional tracks (plus all the various entrance tracks, many of which I suspect are heavily "inspired" by other music) that aren't quite as snappy as D's.
You can't set the ring graphics to Random like you can in G and D. : P
The match crowd graphics are still diagonal super-chunky, pretty much like Fire Pro G on PS1! Wrestlers are the same size on-screen as in D (I read they were smaller in Z), but there's more visual variety to them here.
Have already been seeing quite a few long moves, like you press one button and your wrestler may turn around, run to the ropes, bounce off, run back, and do a power-bomb into grapple pin on the opponent. Mayyyyybe a bit of jumping the shark at this point, like the game is a bit too much on auto-pilot for those; in previous games you'd have had to input the running and follow-up move separately, and felt cooler for pulling it off.
Feels like more move variety going on even aside from those over-elaborate ones though; like more wrestling stuff can happen now. Controls are pretty much just like the DC version--which is a bit odd because L2/R2 don't have any function. Oh /\ now picks up weapons in addition to running, I think I read.
The ring graphics have a slightly dusty gray look to them, and the sharp but weirdly overlapping-at-the-joints segmented shadows of D are gone, replaced by a very fuzzy oval blob under each wrestler.
There's a giant-size body type (this existed in some earlier Fire Pro, I think I read? Definitely not in D), like for Giant Baba, who is now at least half-a-head taller; the parts aren't natural-looking as the regular scale pieces, but not too bad.
There are over 50 more real-life wrestlers (helped by the user-made rename file to replace their default pseudonyms; no Hogan though! And fewer overall (unlicensed) western wrestlers--I suppose this is what you get when you finally get a Fire Pro that comes out in the west) in Returns than in D (counting D's 48 free DLC ones), but I miss the 100s of wacky DLC fantasy wrestlers I downloaded for D. ^ _^ I suppose the answer is I remake them in Return's edit mode 'cause now I actually could fit all 298 of those D fantasy wrestlers into the game at once--Returns has 500 edit slots--but ahh I'll just play D if I want to mess with 'em.
Finally figured out that for a tag match, you select the 1P/CP settings at the top of the match config screen, and these open a pop-up that lets you add additional wrestlers to make it like 1P·1P/CP·CP--up to four per side I think. I tried doing a 1P·CP tag partnership with the CPU but that was boring when I was tagged out, 'cause you can only get back in, and briefly, when your partner is directly threatened with a pinfall or something. (Ah, the FAQ says it's the "Tornado" setting that allows everybody to stay in.)
Lost the over-the-ropes Battle Royal (no "e"!; although in D for instance the katakana seems to translate more naturally to "royale" since the last katakana ends, like most katakana, with a vowel sound) to Baba when I accidentally mash-rolled out of the ring UNDER the ropes! ; D |
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3:48 - Akira Hokuto vs Amazing Kong
13:22 - Yuji Nagata vs Kintaro Kanemura
22:14 - Ryo Saito vs Giant Baba
32:40 - Mohammed Yone vs Badboy Hido
41:56 - Yoshitsune vs Seiya Morohashi
44:44 - Yoshihi Takayama vs Ryuji Ito
52:49 - Seiya Morohashi vs Jun Izumida
1:01:19 - Shinjiro Otani vs Hirotaka Yokoi
1:09:56 - Nobuhiko Takada vs Osamu Kido
1:13:58 - Nobutaka Araya vs Milano Collectio
1:22:18 - Alek Karelin vs Shingo Takagi
1:28:50 - wrap!
From Google and Wikipedia, I think "Milano Collectio" (per the rename file) is meant to be Akihito Sawafuji aka Milano Collection A. T.: "Sawafuji adopted the gimmick of an Italian fashion aficionado/supermodel, reflected in his ring attire."
I was thinking this would be like an upgraded Fire Pro D, but it really didn't grab me coming from that one. The colors are washed out compared to D, the music isn't as universally amazing--the menu tune is awful ; D--major new gameplay features like the "Giant" body style (Baba, Karelin) and the long scripted single-button sequences--a move where your wrestler runs to the rope, bounces off, comes back and does a ground attack, for instance, all from a single button press--feel like misfires, some of the menu screens are real eyesores, some of the move lists feel pretty so-so--and way too many give you a straight kick to the abs move with which you can really cheese the AI, causing them to collapse just a few minutes into the match, and, what was really annoying me here, there's no RANDOM select for rings--after G and D had one! (Okay you could counter by saying Fire Pro World doesn't even have RANDOM for venues, much less rings...)
I had been thinking Returns would be my go-to for playing Spike-made wrestlers, since it has more of them, but now I'm thinking D will be the one I stick with for that. |
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