Quoted By:
Kazuchika Okada is like if some advanced AI developed a perfect wrestler simulation that you could test different opponents against to assess their talent without having the simulation have any possible influence on them in the match. He is like the scientific control for NJPW. For better or worse, Okada does essentially the exact same act in every match and always meets his opponents precisely at *their* level. The clearest example I have of this is how Kaito Kiyomiya, of all people, got Okada to show more hate and fire in 2022 than pretty much any other Okada opponent this year, despite these two having zero history together other than some magazine trash talk. He has good matches with good wrestlers and bad matches with bad wrestlers. The people who love him will point to specific details of how he's changed his match structure or nuances he's added (the "wrist control" spot with Tanahashi being the first big example), but when you step back and look at that tiny detail in the larger scheme of what pro-wrestling can be, it's laughably unimportant. Virtually every big Okada match begins with ~5 minutes of perfunctory chain or mat-wrestling, followed by a few minutes of outside brawling and guardrail collisions, then a control segment where he hits his standard mid-match moves, and concludes with a series of reversals and counters and convoluted wrist-control segments to hit a Rainmaker. The most interesting thing he's done to change this up in the last few years is simply swapping in a new move for another - Landslide for the Tombstone, Emerald Flowsion for the Landslide - like a computer program trying new permutations of the same formula. His big matches (vs. Omega, for example) are the same as his standard formula, just filled in with more stuff in the appropriate spots. I never feel like he has any hatred for his opponents, never feel like he is thrown off his game, never feel like he is panicking, never feel he is trying something new.
