Manabu Hara vs. Keita Yano 10:37
Toshie Uematsu vs. Kyoko Kimura 9:09
Ryuji Hijikata vs. Hiroshi Kosakai 6:27
Fujita "Jr" Hayato & Katsumi Usuda vs. Munenori Sawa & Yuta Yoshikawa 15:50. Hayato & Sawa got a chance to work out some of their ideas & escalate the tensions between them, setting up their tremendous singles match later in the year. The initial striking combo burst was nowhere near the level we'd see in their 7/21/07 match as they hadn't quite figured out how to both endlessly throw striking combos without the awkwardness of handling hitting each other at the same time. However, it was cool that Yoshikawa blitzed Usuda at the same time, repeatedly kicking him to & on the floor. Yoshikawa is an inexperienced Ishikawa trainee who, while not standout, worked his ass off in every match this year & performed well about the level of a 2nd year fighter, much less one who only managed a couple dozen matches because he didn't have a regularly running how promotion. As much as I enjoyed the few Battlarts shows that have surfaced from this year, it's truly a shame he's in such a small promotion because he's much too talented to just be a part timer with little upward mobility. You could see he was so eager to do everything that Hayato & Sawa were doing, and Hayato's opening sequence with him wound up being a variation of how he started with Sawa, with shorter & less effective striking but quick & heated mat exchanges. Yoshikawa was predictably the whipping boy, but made some nice counters & threw solid kicks. Outside of maybe Yoshikawa, this wasn't anyone's best effort or stiffest work, but Fujita can always be counted on to incite the opposition to pull a more spirited performance out of them, and here everyone was at least solid & there was no combo that wasn't outputting quality action both in standup & on the mat. Sawa was riling Hayato up here too, cheapshotting him with a kick to the back when he ran the ropes to attack Yoshikawa, and catching his revenge kick & turning it into a Dragon screw. Sawa is tremendously explosive & really a great athlete in general. He seems to generate really easy momentum & force just by being so fast & springy. There was a time when everyone & their mother was doing the shining wizard, but Sawa is still the only person who actually managed to make it look consistently impressive. He has such great body control that he seems to be flinging his whole body through the air in a reckless manner to get the kind of momentum you'd get from a flying knee in MMA even though the shining wizard is a vertical move, but he's really accurate with it & it has major impact (he does seem to go a little harder when he knows he's missing). Sawa did a great job of chaining his kicks & submissions, including a cool spot where he missed a high kick, but kept twisting & came back with an enzuigiri. He was really good in this match, and every other Battlarts match. He's not as good a wrestler as Hayato, but he's the best Battlarts has right now, & there are a lot of reasons he was in the best match on every show, particularly skill, drive, & athleticism. ***1/2
Daisuke Ikeda & Daisuke Sekimoto vs. Kazunari Murakami & Yuki Ishikawa 22:33
Yuta Yoshikawa vs. Keita Yano 8:03
Carlos Amano vs. Kyoko Kimura 10:16
Daisuke Ikeda & Shuji Ishikawa vs. Kyosuke Sasaki & Tsuyoshi Kurihara 18:33
Brian Jack & Ryuji Hijikata vs. Hiroshi Kosakai & Ryuji Walter 12:05
Yuki Ishikawa vs. Munenori Sawa 15:55. Ishikawa trained Sawa, but this was good for every reason the student/teacher match usually isn't. This wasn't a friendly, lovey dovey match, and it wasn't a match where the student is or might as well be out there bowing, as they obviously have no chance to beat the honored master. The match was really stiff, intense, & lively with no signs of friendship or respect, and though Sawa does wind up losing, with Ishikawa being none too quick to release the winning choke, he was in the match all the way. Even if it was probably 60/40 to Ishikawa, Ishikawa's advantage was not so much being the great teacher, but simply understanding more about Sawa's style than Sawa understands about his style, as well as simply being a much bigger, stronger man. Any description of Battlarts style is always contradictory at best, but Sawa, who also wrestles as Lingerie Muto, kept trying to do Keiji Muto's signature moves in what was otherwise a bizarre, updated melding of shoot style & old school technical wrestling. Some of these moves worked, but, for instance, Ishikawa knew Sawa was going to follow the space rolling elbow with the facecrusher, so he was able to counter into a wakigatame. Ishikawa also caught the leg on the 2nd shining wizard & went into a heel hook. If this sounds awkward in a match where they are otherwise brutalizing each other with credible moves & blows, perhaps the brilliance of the contest is that it's at once fun & completely serious. There's actually some excellent striking because Ishikawa wasn't falling into the usual pro wrestling routine of horrible flatfooted exchanging, he's just kept slugging away until he decided to move on to a submission or Sawa found an answer. There was a particularly impressive sequence where Ishikawa did about five nasty 1-2 open hand combos in a row (they were doing closed fists to the body & open fists to the head like the old Pancrase, which looked much more impressive than Ishikawa & Ikeda's constant punching in the 2/25/07 main) before finally dropping Sawa with a slap you could surely hear outside the building. These guys never stopped, they just kept struggling & making the necessary adjustments to gain/maintain control. Now 15 years into his career & having just turned 40, Ishikawa was working a part time schedule at this point wrestling once or twice a month, but he was rarely at this level in the heyday of Battlarts. This wasn't the Ishikawa that was out there worshipping Inoki, this guy had gone back to his PWFG roots & thought about how to update that style to kind of meld the best of what MMA & catch wrestling could be from a modern perspective rather than just finishing out his career clinging to '70's pro wrestling & pre MMA shooting. ****
Katsumi Usuda vs. Keita Yano 7:35
Carlos Amano vs. Toshie Uematsu 12:43
Kyosuke Sasaki vs. Yuta Yoshikawa 11:15. The more experienced Sasaki, a veteran of RINGS who followed Kiyoshi Tamura to U-STYLE & had a rather unsuccessful MMA career spanning DEEP, Pancrase, & even PRIDE, didn't wholy respect his young shooter wannabe upstart opponent. He patted Yoshikawa on the head when he broke on the ropes like he was a little boy, jawed with him, stuck his tongue out & laughed when he started winning the leg lock battle. Yoshikawa was going to force Sasaki to treat him as an equal, so this quickly degenerated into a match where two fighters who didn't like each other simply refused to ever back down from one another. The action was really intense as they just exchanged until one of them escalated then exchanged some more. They exchanged snapmares & kicks to the downed opponent, slaps, punches, really any kind of stiff strike. It was all really nasty, high impact stuff, & it was quickly getting to the point where you started to worry someone was going to take it too far & accidentally hurt the opponent as this match was notable & memorable for the punishment they were inflicting on one another. When one fighter was going, it was thrilling, but too often they were just standing around taking turns nailing each other. There was a great near finish where Yoshikawa finally countered one of Sasaki's punches, turning it into a flying armbar but Sasaki was too close to the ropes. Sasaki regained control stopping Yoshikawa's belly to belly suplex with a headbutt & scored knockdowns with high kicks leading to KO'ing him with a punch. ***1/2
Munenori Sawa vs. Fujita "Jr" Hayato 8:17. Absolutely fantastic short match! My general thought on a match under 10 minutes is "moving on...", it's just too little time to build the match & tell a story, but it makes sense in a shoot environment, & this is perhaps the best 8 minute match I've ever seen. Fujita was the pound for pound king of violence at this point, & BATTLARTS was the perfect venue for him, getting him out of the lucha & flying based junior matches & in with an opponent who was happy, or rather insane enough, to allow him to throw everything he had into every shot. They poured every ounce of energy & brutality into the time they had, and it was just electric while it lasted. That wasn't long, but the match was so ridiculously high impact it was mercyful for both when it ended. Even though they were faking it to some extent, I still think they probably did more damage to one another than a fighter would take in most striking based MMA matches where someone didn't suffer a serious injury. They started off as if shot out of a cannon with perhaps the greatest striking sequence I've ever seen in a pro wrestling match, both men simultaneously throwing 35 seconds of full speed, full power slap & kick combos until Fujita finally dropped Sawa with a high kick. I can't even put into words just how awesome it was to see neither fighter standing like a dolt waiting for the other to go all Pat Benatar on them. There was nowhere to go from there but down, but the match remained innovative & never disappointed, as it continued to employ the aggressive real fight mentality of attacking until your opponent answered rather than the should be outdated pro wrestling model of just taking turns watching & waiting. Instead of Fujita doing a single middle kick, he hit 5 before Sawa finally countered with his (or rather Muto's by way of Fujinami & Liger) Dragon screw. The mat work was also impressive, as they employed fairly realistic positions &, as with the standup, were flowing & chaining the attacks together. This eventually did devolve into one Kobashi/Kensuke battle of machismo exchange to supposedly prove who could withstand the most punishment, but they did mix up the shots & sometimes have someone get multiple shots in. Sawa's lip & perhaps nose were busted open hardway from Fujita's ruthless slaps, but unfortunately for Fujita, they aren't the proper defense for the figure 4, and Sawa was able to withstand yet another barrage long enough to get the submission. I loath the use of the figure 4 in more or less a shoot setting, and have never forgiven Muto for forcing Takada to cry uncle to that primitive fakery, but I have to admit the obsolete submission actually didn't take away any of the intensity. In fact, the scenes of Fujita confidently willing himself to sit up while in the leg lock to throw yet another series of hard as he could slaps until the pain was too much & he had to tap while he was down was actually one of the more intense finishes you'll ever see. This would have been an amazing effort for a Budokan main event, much less putting their bodies through all this for 100 people. I don't know if you can have a great pro wrestling match in 8 minutes, but if not, this is about as close as one can come. ****1/4
Yuki Ishikawa 15th Anniversary Match: Alexander Otsuka & Yuki Ishikawa vs. Daisuke Ikeda & Manabu Hara 19:32. Hara set the tone blasting Ishikawa with a high kick to start the match, and there was no letting up from anyone. While it was impossible to follow Sawa/Hayato, they delivered a very stiff contest with solid matwork that was more in the vein of PWFG (other than being a tag) than what was presented during the initial run of Battlarts. I really liked Hara here because he's a more energetic & explosive striker than the others, who are more in the heavyweight style of just relying on the brute force of a single shot. Otsuka would eat a flurry from Hara & then just maul him with one big blow or tackle. Though Ishikawa's anniversary was being celebrated, Hara & Otsuka were the featured performers. Ishikawa was paired with Ikeda, his top rival who he delivered the most memorable matches in the companies initial run against, but Ikeda has been somewhat disappointing this go around because while it's obvious the talent is still there, NOAH taught him not to go too hard or care too much. I'm also not a fan of Ikeda's insistence on exchanging punches with Ishikawa, while it's logical if you're supposed to be shooting & they look amazing compared to WWE whiffing, it really doesn't work when you aren't wearing gloves to keep from breaking your hands, and just winds up being the unimpressive part of a match that's otherwise mainly good because they are able to hit each other so hard with the rest of the strikes. Everyone was good, but Hara really felt like the best because he was dynamic & just had that spark to everything he did that the others don't possess. The match was consistently quality, but it just kind of was what it was throughout, without many highs or lows, rather than something that really built up or took off. ***1/4
Kickboxing: Ryo Hasegawa vs. Arabia Hasegawa
Exhibition Match Grappling Rule: Yuta Yoshikawa vs. Takuya Yasuoka
Munenori Sawa & Yuta Yoshikawa & Keita Yano vs. Kankuro Hoshino & Kazuhiko Ogasawara & Jiro Umezawa 12:53