"Relive, rewrite and redefine the greatest moments in WrestleMania history!"
WWE Legends of WrestleMania is a wrestling video game developed by Yuke's and published by THQ. It was released internationally in March of 2009 for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and iOS mobile phones and in Japan in July of that year.
The game is meant to be a celebration of WWE's annual event: WrestleMania and allows players to play important matches from the show's history, well, some of them at least... It covers the first 15 WrestleMania events
This game contains the following tropes:
- Artistic License – History: For a game built around celebrating wrestling history, it does it rather poorly in some eras.
- A game called Legends of WrestleMania where some of the wrestlers in it had never competed at a WrestleMania to begin with such as Koko B. Ware. Several legends and matches are also completely absent, like Razor Ramon and Randy Savage.
- Some of the attires are completely wrong. You have correct ones like Ultimate Warrior with his Mania 6 get up for his match with Hulk Hogan, but then you have Bret Hart without his light pink attire he faced Roddy Piper in at Mania 8.
- Commentary is done by Jim Ross and Jerry Lawler, which is not at all period accurate, but it was impossible to get a lot of the older voices for the game to begin with.
- Alternate History: With the rewrite mode, you can do this by having alternate victory outcomes for matches that happened in real life. Redefine also allows you to change history, although that's more to do with that mode having different stipulations.
- Announcer Chatter: The game includes commentary from Jim Ross and Jerry Lawler.
- Button Mashing: The WrestleMania tour mode has several sections where button mashing is required to get 100%. This is used in certain sections (like Hogan and Warrior's test of strength, or Bret making Austin pass out in the Sharpshooter) but is absent for most of the rest of the game.
- Canon Foreigner: Moves from this game were later brought back into the mainline series with the release of WWE SmackDown vs Raw 2010.
- Canon Immigrant: The Hell in a Cell match did not exist for a majority of the WrestleManias in the game, though it was introduced around the time of WrestleMania 14.
- Chromosome Casting: There is not a single woman in the game, or even one remotely mentioned. This might have been different if a certain Macho Man was playable, but unfortunately, he isn't.
- Character Customization: You can create your own wrestlers.
- Dream Match Game: Not only can you do matches that never happened between the legends in the game like Steve Austin vs Hulk Hogan, but with the advent of the SmackDown vs Raw 2009 stars, you could do modern day (at the time) vs WWE legends. Some wrestlers such as original characters such as Tony or Masked Man are unavailable, as well as any wrestler who was released in between the release of SVR '09 and Legends of WrestleMania.
- Guest Fighter: Almost the entire SmackDown vs Raw 2009 roster is avaliable if you already have pre-existing save data.
- Heroic Build: As most 80s/90s wrestlers had. It was even increased for this game, making everyone look slightly more muscular, and far more like an action figure, which is probably the idea.
- Old Save Bonus: You can use the save data from WWE SmackDown vs Raw 2009 to unlock most of the roster from that game in this one.
- Press X to Not Die: The entire gameplay is based on this mechanic. The game is almost more of a quick-time event simulator than a wrestling game. Every grapple, every finishing move and sometimes even just some strikes requires you to do quick-time events in order to fully achieve them.
- Railroading:
- You can use thumbtacks in the game!... only in Hell in a Cell matches, though.
- To access any of the towers, you need to either have a created superstar or import SvR '09 save data.
- You can only do the Royal Rumble in the Royal Rumble arena, seems unnecessary because this game is all about WrestleMania and there exists no other battle royales in the game.
- Recap Episode: What the Relive part of the WrestleMania Tour functions as.
- Single Player Gauntlet: A collection of towers exist where you can go through, usually using your own custom made wrestler. This is also required to level up their stats.
- Shown Their Work:
- A lot of work clearly went into recreating the matches to the best of their ability for the relive mode.
- The video recaps for matches are really compelling and well edited, showing the story and the match itself quite well, even if it is in a truncated fashion.
- When entrances are done on the WrestleMania 3 and 6 arenas, they are done on ring carts, rather than having their normal entrances be done, just like in the shows.
- Spin-Off: The game functions as a spin-off to the regular (and, at that time) Yuke's developed WWE Video Games series. The game functions as a companion title to WWE SmackDown vs Raw 2009
- Version-Exclusive Content: The iOs version includes Hillbilly Jim as a playable character .
