Dragon Kid vs. Darkness Dragon is More Mexican Apuesta than I Expected
Dragon Kid vs. Darkness Dragon is More Mexican Apuesta than I Expected
Mask ripping and blood!
I’ll be the first to hold my hands up and say that I really don’t know much about Dragongate and its long history going back into the days of Toryumon. Though I’ve very recently become a fan of modern day Dragongate, even the company’s very recent history eludes me for the most part. Toryumon, the promotion that initially led to the what we now call Dragongate, is especially a mystery to me. It’s an era and style of pro wrestling that I have only the most shallow exposure to.
That being said, when I saw the names listed for this match, I had an image in my head of what it would look like. Sure, it’s billed as a mask match, but Dragon Kid’s not a name I associate with hatred and blood. My mental image involved mostly very slick and high speed lucha-influenced wrestling, as is the style that basically made Toryumon famous.
I was surprised to find I was wrong! Or at least, sort of.
This match has a lot of the markers of some of my favorite apuestas from Mexico. Let’s get the obvious out of the way, there’s blood! That being said, it comes in a fairly hamfisted way in this match. Darkness Dragon takes about an ice age setting up a chair against a tree-of-woe’d Dragon Kid before he’s finally able to kick the steel into his face. I got a chuckle out of the refereeing being distracted by M2K for several minutes before giving up the pretense and turning around to actually just see the spot happen.
It does the trick though and Dragon Kid’s bleeding for the rest of the match. Not a gusher, but it looks good against his white gear (even in the 480p copy I watched). There’s also a fair bit of mask ripping from both sides that I enjoyed, good stuff to really put over the animosity between the two competitors.
It also helps that these two mostly commit to the babyface/heel divide. I really shouldn’t have been that surprised that they did, even now Dragongate makes sure to have a band of top level misfits to contrast their more stunning babyfaces. In that regard, Darkness Dragon’s work in the first fall stands out the best. He goes for an early attack, initiates the mask ripping, busts open Dragon Kid, and even uses a ring bell hammer to attack Kid’s open wound. It’s effective heel shtick combined with the rampant interference from M2K.
This allows the match to blow through the first two falls when both men get counted out, tying them at one a piece, leaving just a final decisive fall to follow. It’s in this latter half that things start to come undone for me. There’s still a major emphasis on the interference which reaches a crescendo when M2K’s own heel referee Yasushi Kanda turns on them to join the forces of good, and allow Dragon Kid to win the match. Dragon Kid’s final rana is especially eye catching too with the visual of him getting such rotation that his ripped mask comes fully off. Awesome. But before all that, it’s more of a parade of interference occasionally cut up with counter-heavy bomb dropping more akin to the Toryumon in-house style I was expecting.
The match tries to be too much, and ends up not being much of anything it aims for. It’s briefly a heated bloody apuesta, it’s often a big Toryumon spotfest, and it wants to be a big dramatic storyline blow off too. Individually these elements work fine in the moment, but I struggle to see them coming together in that final fall. In fact, of the weak points of the match, I really didn’t care for all the big spots that Darkness and Kid traded. The interference work at least felt emotionally investing, especially with Kanda’s turn. In fact, Kanda’s betrayal of M2K gets a louder pop than most any of the flashier moves that preceded it.
Far from a bad match, certainly one with a lot of historical significance as this turns Darkness Dragon into K-Ness. It just has a bit of an identity crisis that keeps it from the reaches of greatness.
Rating: ***1/2