Sareee Produce Sareee-ISM Chapter IV |
I dont think this would have any competition for best women's show of 2024, and once you fast forward through the intermission, it's actually done in under 2hrs. I enjoyed it a lot more than the Sendai Girls show from 7/15, which also had a lot of actual good wrestlers on the card.
Chi Chi vs. Miria Koga 8:03. Rookie opener and it was perfectly fine. Koga is SEAdLINNNG's new rookie. You wouldn't need all your fingers to count how many matches she's had, and she did as good of a job as you could hope for. She wasn't hesitant, moved well, and made a nice comeback late in the match. Chi Chi spent most of the match bullying her around, and led her through a decent rookie match. **
Jaguar Yokota & Kaoru Ito vs. Misa Kagura & Sya 13:39. Sya is Manami Toyota's niece. She's trained by Yumiko Hotta, and has been wrestling 3 years, but I've never seen her before. I'm not sure if I've seen Kagura either since she mainly seems to work Ice Ribbon and JTO (which are two promotions I don't keep up with). Given that there was a 63 year old woman and a woman in her 50s who is almost perfectly round involved, this was a lot better than it had any right to be. They are limited, but they still know how to lead a match. The match was Yokota and Ito bullying around the young girls. It was a little silly in places, but it got better as it went on. Kagura and Sya were a little goofy early, but showed good urgency, and made good comebacks as the match went on. Overall, they impressed when they needed to, and it built to a good finishing run. This is worth a look because it's so well paced and the comebacks are good. **3/4
Mio Momono & Riko Kawahata vs. Best Friends (Arisa Nakajima & Tsukasa Fujimoto) 12:52. Mio brought all the speed and urgency you'd expect from her, and basically carried the match quality. Riko's kicks have gotten a lot better since I last saw her. She managed to stand out just as much as Mio did towards the end. The first bit was just, yikes, I expect more than a comedy match with a bunch of silliness from these four, but the 2nd half was pretty awesome. Apparently Tsukka was injured, which is why she didn't do anything all match, but there's probably better things they could have done even with her compromised than those first few minutes of nonsense. Nakajima wasn't particularly impressive either. She didn't do much, but it was a lot more interesting when she was in than when Tsukka was doing comedy. Nakajima wasn't taking her opponents seriously, which would cost her, and they'd make their comebacks, getting her irritated, leading to a spot where she just pasted Riko with hard slaps. Mio was the highlight, and Riko contributed well when she was in with Nakajima. ***
Hiragi Kurumi vs. Yuu 12:33. This was just embarrassing. Kurumi didn't look like she knew what she was doing at all. She was unconvincing to say the least. And Yuu was about her normal self - contributing nothing of interest. They ran into each other a bunch of times, did some comedy, some horrible striking, and there were a couple of spots thrown in. They didn't really work a match so much as they just did a bunch of stuff, and eventually Yuu won 12 minutes later than she should have. 1/4*
AZM & Takumi Iroha vs. Natsupoi & Sareee 22:20. Everyone worked hard here and put on an all action main event. They worked at a good pace and didn't get overly spotty or too contrived. There wasn't much of a story going on, but it had enough basic psychology to get by. It was really good in its own right, but left me wanting to see Sareee vs. AZM and Sareee vs. Takumi in singles matches, which appeared to be the goal. Sareee and Takumi were the best. They weren't in together a lot, but when they were, it was excellent. AZM was good as well. She can do a lot of nice moves, but she always looks like she's working an exhibition rather than a match. This wasn't as much of a problem here working with Sareee, and they were good together. Natsupoi was the lesser of the four, mainly just there to get beaten on by Takumi. She contributed more with AZM later in the match. The only thing I'd get rid of was that brawl section, and if it was a bit less aimless in the middle portion, it would easily crack 4 stars. ***3/4