25 Best Wrestling PPVs Ever
4. NJPW Wrestle Kingdom 10
Best Match: Kazuchika Okada Vs. Hiroshi Tanahashi
Worst Match: The Briscoes & Toru Yano Vs. Bad Luck Fale & Tama Tonga & Yujiro Takahashi
Wrestle Kingdom 10 was the best supershow New Japan Pro Wrestling has promoted in its 2010-onwards Golden Period - which likely means that, if it stands the test of time, it will probably top lists like this in the years to come.
Like the card which tops it presently, it hosts an incredibly diverse series of intoxicating wrestling matches - but perhaps more impressively, does so without the use of stipulation matches or (excessive) weapon shots. These are considered unnecessary and incongruous to the league's sporting, straight-laced aesthetic.
Tomohiro Ishii and Katsuyori Shibata contested another cringe-inducing war, the violent likes of which most wrestlers wouldn't have the bottle (or would have the sense not) to wrestle once. KUSHIDA and Kenny Omega's Junior Heavyweight match showed that there was considerable life in the division following Prince Devitt's departure. AJ Styles and Shinsuke Nakamura's match was an absolute classic - so good that many felt Dave Meltzer was stingy in awarding it just ****3/4.
At the apex of it all is the main event between Kazuchika Okada and Tanahashi. Unlike the previous year, they somehow eclipsed the astonishingly good undercard, and mesmerised burnt out fans by wrestling a match which recalled even the tiniest minutiae of their previous encounters to cement Okada as the company's Ace after an epic, four-year journey.
A masterstroke in the post-match saw Tanahashi, in a mirror image of the previous year, cry inconsolably on the way to the dressing room. Okada had cried because he thought he'd lost the chance to succeed Tanahashi as Ace at the Tokyo Dome. Tanahashi cried because he knew he couldn't recover it.