Collection essentials #430 & #431: WWF Wrestlemania 2000 (N64) & WWF No Mercy (N64)

Professional wrestling! That’s a very significant field of entertainment that people make video games about which I have not at all mentioned in this entire blog yet. Of course, there were many wrestling video games before the Nintendo 64. There are certainly some older ones that gained a strong following such as “Pro Wrestling” for the NES and the “Fire Pro Wrestling” series which was stuck in Japan for a long time, but I never got into any of those when I was younger, and as an adult there are very few that strike me as standout titles that are worthy of a time investment in my current life. 

If you’re a fan of classic video games and care at all about wrestling, you’re likely not surprised to see these games here. I’m sure most fans would agree that a new bar was set for the genre in the Nintendo 64 era with an excellent series of games released by Asmik Ace Entertainment and AKI Corporation. The first one they made on the console was WCW vs. nWo: World Tour, then WCW/nWo Revenge, followed by the two titles featured in today’s post. I decided to leave those two WCW games off my list, not that I don’t like them (I even have some nostalgia for World Tour), but they’re clearly not as good as the WWF games, and I didn’t play them quiiiite enough for me to develop that strong of an attachment.

I think these games work because they have gameplay that is fairly easy to grasp, yet with an appropriate amount of complexity which makes them challenging and rewarding to master. I’m not super knowledgeable about wrestling video games as a whole and how their mechanics evolved, so I can’t really give a solid comparison of these titles to previous wrestling games. But I can say that, if you compare them to something like fighting games which have the similar goal of beating the tar out of an opponent, they provide refreshingly different gameplay. 

How does gameplay work? For starters, in AKI/Asmik wrestling games, you are always “focused” on your opponent sort of like in most fighting games, meaning that your character will always face the opponent no matter which direction they turn. When wrestling against multiple opponents, you can press a button to change who you’re “focused” on. This is good because you have to worry less about actually aiming your strikes and you’re free to pay attention to things like timing instead. You’re not aiming to get your opponent’s “health bar” down to zero, but rather to win by various legal methods, which is most commonly pinning the opponent on the ground for three seconds or getting them into some kind of a hold that they can’t break out of and causing them to “submit”. Of course, beating other wrestlers to a pulp helps you achieve these goals more easily. Executing moves is rather simple, always requiring pressing a button (tapping or holding buttons can lead to different outcomes) and pressing the d-pad in various directions to do different moves. The B button is for standard strikes like punches and kicks, and A is the “grapple” button. Strikes can be blocked, but grapples can’t, so they’re important. When you get your opponent in a grapple, the initiating grappler then is free to perform one of their grapple moves. There are unique moves that can be performed in various contexts, such as when running, when an opponent is up against a turnbuckle, when an opponent is on the ground face-up or face-down, or when your character is crouching after being knocked down (oddly, you cannot freely crouch). When it’s allowed, weapons can be pulled out of the crowd, which are quite effective but will get dropped if your opponent manages to hit you, giving them an opportunity to grab it themselves!

Each wrestler has an “attitude” meter, which at first seems like a health bar, but that’s not the case. When you successfully perform moves on the opponent, the meter increases, and it usually decreases when taking damage. When you’re in REAL bad shape, you won’t even a meter, but rather you’ll see words such as “DANGER!” A very important part of increasing the meter and decreasing your opponent’s is via taunting. Every wrestler has various taunts they can perform by pressing the joystick in various directions, and these taunts are often gestures based on something a given wrestler was known for performing in real life. When you’re meter is about to fill, you must taunt to activate “SPECIAL!”, and for a limited time you’ll be able to perform your character’s very powerful signature moves such as the Undertaker’s “Tombstone Piledriver” or The Rock’s “Rock Bottom”. 

A huge part of the game is “reversals”. Most of the time, the opponent has a chance to “reverse” any given move that is being done. For example, if a reversal is performed on a standard punch, the reversing player will grab the opponent’s arm and throw it away, leaving them stunned and open for attack. This can be frustrating, because it can make the game feel a little bit random. That’s true to an extent, but there are important things know about it as well. For example, at the start of the match or when the opponent’s attitude meter is high, strong and slow moves are much more likely to be “reversed”, so you should generally avoid attempting them in those situations. 

I’m not going to describe every single detail of gameplay because there is just too much. But there are all kinds of neat little things to learn that will help give you an upper hand. For example, if you keep performing moves that hurt a specific part of an opponent’s body and then perform a submission move on that body part, they will be much more likely to submit!

Both of these games let you wrestle in a variety of match types, such as with tag teams, or one of my personal favorites, the “Royal Rumble” which involves four wrestlers at a given time but potentially dozens waiting for their turn as anyone thrown out of the ring is immediately eliminated and replaced. 

WWF Wrestlemania 2000 has a good amount of match types to play, and a cool create-a-wrestler feature, but wasn’t great in terms of modes outside of that. The single-player campaign “Road to Wrestlemania” is pretty lackluster. A year later, WWF No Mercy came along and righted this wrong. Not only did it introduce new match types such as “ladder match” and “guest referee”, but it introduced a FAR superior single-player championship mode. In this mode, you choose one of the various championship titles, choose your wrestler, and then you play through a story mode as your character tries to take home the title belt. There are cutscenes in between matches, providing the drama from real-life wrestling that was sorely lacking in the previous game (and it’s often based on real storylines that happened in the WWF). There’s no voice acting and all the dialogue takes place in text boxes, but that was to be expected on the Nintendo 64. What’s cool about this mode is that it utilizes a branching path system, and you’re not even required to win every match. Sometimes when you lose, rather than losing a “continue” or getting a game over, you’ll simply progress down an alternate storyline in the aftermath of your character losing, and they’ll eventually find their way to a title shot some other way. And if you start a campaign with a wrestler who already has won the title, then you’ll start in a completely different storyline than normal which involves your character trying to defend their belt. It’s really cool! It takes some time and dedication to finally see every possible stage in these campaigns, and a completion percentage meter that the game displays on the menu encourages you to do so. (I think I did do it at one point, but my data got erased)

I have almost never watched wrestling in my whole life, and never did before playing these games. But my cousins Kevin and Peter liked wrestling and got these games when they first came out, and that was my introduction to wrestling. So, oddly, I became very familiar with the WWF and its wrestlers by playing these games and talking to my cousins about them. I briefly watched and followed wrestling in 2001 during the “Invasion” storyline, but other than that I never got converted into a long-term wrestling watcher, but have always enjoyed hearing and learning about it from people who do. 

And boy, did my cousins and I play these games to absolute death. For years we would hang out on almost a weekly basis, and I think No Mercy might have been our #1 most played game. And when we’ve gotten together as adults, it’s been the game that we’re most likely to fire up and play together. I remember one instance when we were young, I think we were talking about it so darn much that, if I remember right, Peter dared me and Kevin to see if we could go a while without talking about it, and so we humorously referenced the game by imitating characters’ taunts and such without speaking words. 

While No Mercy definitely outclasses Wrestlemania 2000, I do want to note that there are a few little things that I prefer about the latter. For example, character entrances show them walking all the way into the ring to perform a taunt, and they were disappointingly cut short in No Mercy. There’s a gameplay mechanic I don’t like in No Mercy that involves heavy wrestlers like Andre the Giant, where if you try to perform a lifting move on them with a less-heavy character, they’ll attempt to do a generic toss which sees them struggle to lift the big guy, and if they succeed it does a ton of damage and makes it kinda unfair because it’s a cheap way to win and there’s virtually no downside to attempting it. I think I prefer the in-game music a little more in 2000 as well. And there are a few wrestlers featured in 2000 which did not return for No Mercy. But, of course, No Mercy has far more going for it on the whole and is generally the one you’d want to revisit.

It wasn’t a surprise to me to find out later that No Mercy is considered one of the greatest wrestling games of all-time. Of course the graphics and presentation can’t stack up to games made on newer and far more powerful consoles, but the quality gameplay and great single-player mode set a standard that’s tough to top. I’ve tried out a few wrestling games here and there since, and none of them ever seem to be able to grab my interest in the way that No Mercy did. It’s one of the standout Nintendo 64 exclusives. Due to both being great games and packing a large amount of personal nostalgia to boot, these games clearly are the WWE Tag Team champions of my collection.