Brand New Shoot Style? Whaaaaat?

Hard Hit G-Generation

(2014/8/23)

1.      Ayumu Honda vs. Yukio Kubota

**3/4

2.      Shingo Suzuki vs. Michael Nakazawa

**1/4

3.      Kaori Yoneyama vs. Emi Tomimatsu

**1/4

4.      Shuichiro Katsumura & Toshihisa Shinomiya vs. Ryo Kawamura & Shibata

***1/4

5.      The Next Contenders 1 Day Tournament – Semi-Final: Kenta Hattori vs. Hiroshi Kobayashi

**1/2

6.      The Next Contenders 1 Day Tournament – Semi-Final: Kotaro Nasu vs. Koji Iwamoto

**3/4

7.      Takatoshi Matsumoto vs. Atsushi Aoki

**1/2

8.      Hideki Suzuki vs. Tomomitsu Matsunaga

**3/4

9.      Kotaro Suzuki & Chongwen Ito vs. HARASHIMA & Hikaru Sato

***1/4

10.  The Next Contenders 1 Day Tournament – FINAL: Kenta Hattori vs. Koji Iwamoto

***

Ah, a fresh, modern shoot style event, when was the last time you experienced that? Hard Hit is DDT’s sister promotion, btw, it’s booked by Hikaru Sato and usually filled with obscure indie guys and fighters, mixed with some DDT and, as of late, All Japan guys. Let me get something straight right now, these dudes are not Han and Tamura, Takada and Yamazaki, Fujiwara and Funaki, they don’t deliver anything fapworthy. They’re not bad either they just seem to be a group of decent shoot genre workers, more or less, with some of them being great sometimes, i.e. Hikaru Sato. They also look like they’re having fun out there. Now, looking at the star ratings it may seem a lackluster show, but it wasn’t, it was solid enough, with three good matches (two tags + main event) and the rest was decent and watchable. Thing is, the matches were quite short, in 2-6 min range, only two bouts got 10 minutes, and most of them didn’t get enough time to reach the “good shit” territory. What I particularly liked was the finishes to some matches, cool shit right there, just check the numbers 2, 3 and 6.

When it comes to stylish comparisons with other shoot genre federations (UWFs, RINGS, etc), I gotta say Hard Hit is rather rigid, they’re trying to make things as real as possible, cooperation is minimal and often completely invisible, there’s not much give on the mat (it’s tap or snap), but you’ll still find “pro” elements here and there. This particular event was focused on grappling, pure grappling with no strikes allowed, so the “Hard Hit” marquee does not apply here at all.

To sum up, this was a fun show and I hope more Hard Hit stuff hits the wastelands of internet.