Brand New Shoot Style... Again! Well Done, Internet!

Hard Hit Holy Land Pilgrimage

(2014/10/13)

1.       Shibata vs. Hiroshi Kozakai

Decent opener, not bad.

**3/4

2.       Hayato Mashita vs. Yukio Sakaguchi

Squash! Yukio was a beast here.

**1/2

3.       Tomoya Miyashita Memorial: Kosei Kubota & Manabu Hara vs. Shuichiro Katsumura & Mitsuhisa Sunabe

Very good match, exciting and fast paced, with slick matwork, painful holds and hellish strikes. Well done, this is why I love the genre.

***3/4

4.       Super Tiger vs. Ryo Kawamura

Didn’t dig it at first but then it got significantly better down the road with all the killer kicks, palm strikes and grueling holds, good match, Tiger seems suited for this thing.

***1/2

5.       HARASHIMA vs. Hikaru Sato

Another good match between the former rivals from DDT, SHIMA displayed his dangerous versatility against the well known and highly respected representative of the genre. Some of the “pro” moves were beautifully incorporated.

***1/2

6.       Kenichi Yamamoto 20^th Anniversary & Retirement Match: Ryuki Ueyama vs. Kenichi Yamamoto

Good anniversary/retirement match for Yamamoto, you could really feel the UWF aura, that touch of the 90s. The ending was killer.

***1/2

Hard Hit is definitely not for everyone, even if you like/love the shoot style it’s not a guarantee you’ll like/love Hard Hit. It’s probably the most rigid shoot style league you’ll ever see, traditional in-ring cooperation is completely absent or invisible, and they’ll easily sacrifice suspense and drama to make a match as realistic as possible. All that being said, I like the product and hope they grow, hoping to see them in Korakuen Hall one day.

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.