8 Things You Didn't Know About WWE's Kyoki (FKA Hiromu Takahashi)

Starting before the creation of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, when he splurged over Ric Flair vs. Butch Reed from a CWF card in 1982, Dave Meltzer's star ratings form much of the debate among the worst wrestling fans on social media. Nobody actually cares if he went a quarter of a star too low on, for instance, Danhausen and Minihausen vs. The Miz and Kit Wilson, but 'Wrestling Twitter/X' will act like it's the most egregious take.

At least it got rated at all.

To date, 344 matches have been rated 5 stars or better, but it took until June 2017 and the 118th 5-star match for Dave to break his system: Kenny Omega and Kazuchika Okada's one-hour epic over the IWGP Heavyweight Championship tipped the scale at 6-and-a-quarter stars. A year later, they produced a 7-star match.

5 days before Omega and Okada shattered their own record, however, Hiromu Takahashi joined the above 5-star club. Successfully contesting the finals of the 2018 Best of the Super Juniors against Taiji Ishimori, Hiromu wrestled a match that Dave considered worth 5-and-a-half stars, marking just the third match to break the original peak (Tetsuya Naito vs. Kenny Omega was the second, for the record).

Awe-inspiringly, Takahashi repeated his rating at Wrestle Kingdom 14 in January 2020, again receiving a 5.5-star rating for his IWGP Junior Heavyweight Championship triumph over Will Ospreay.