YMMV / Fire Pro Wrestling

• Audience-Alienating Premise: Not so much premise, but casual players may initially be put off by the isometric view, strict angle requirements and timing on striking, and the lack of stamina / injury indicator.
• Game-Breaker: In Super Fire Pro Wrestling X Premium, you can almost easily beat the game with any character that use high kicks to the head, like Akira Maeda, (unsurprisingly enough, as Maeda was famous precisely for this) until the referee stops the match when the opposite player cannot fight anymore.
• Just Here for Godzilla:
  • A lot of the players especially those who were put off by the actual gameplay would rather create a lot of custom wrestlers and made them fight on their own with COM vs COM choice of players.
  • World in particular, due to wide availability in Steam, online sharing, and unchanged gameplay (with the lack of indicators such as physical condition).
• Harsher in Hindsight: Super Fire Pro Wrestling Special's ending becomes this when you realize how common suicides are amongst pro wrestlers. Kerry Von Erich committed suicide (by gunshot, the same method as the protagonist's implied one) a year before the game's release. Also, the protagonist's inability to celebrate his world title win with no-one to celebrate it can be compared to Chris Benoit's response to deaths of Big Boss Man and Eddie Guerrero, which is speculated to be one of factors leading to his demise.
  • A renamed Rick Rude is one of your choices for training turned tag team partner which dies at the endgame. Rude died in April 1999, several years after the game's release.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In Special's Champion Road mode, when the protagonist arrives to America, his training partner introduces him to a MMA promotion there (based on early days of UFC). Choosing Undertaker as the training partner early in the game may remind you that the Deadman, in his later days, is a MMA fan and even incorporated MMA moves into his arsenal. Of course, this is all overshadowed by harsher moments later in the game...
• No Problem with Licensed Games: The series is mainly known for a handful of renamed wrestlers from different federations worldwide thrown into one game, yeah, but some of its' installments are actually licensed and are spinning around one or two Japanese promotions. For the record, the first one was Fire Pro Women: All Star Dream Slam on Super Nintendo Entertainment System, which featured actual female performers from All Japan's Women Pro Wrestling. Then came World, which featured both an NJPW license and a STARDOM license.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The test of strength. Good lord, the test of strength. Not only does it occur more and more frequently the higher the CPU level goes, but it becomes impossible for a player to win it above level 5...
  • In tag matches, if an opposing player takes enough damage it starts refusing to tag out, which can really take the fun out of 6 and 8 man tag matches.
• Sequel Displacement: Returns for the many, many gamers overseas. Guess whom to thank.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: Once the games started including entrance themes for the wrestlers, they simply used slightly altered versions of popular wrestlers' themes.
  • Bizarrely, Returns has one entrance theme that is basically "Moeagare Toushi - Imawashiki Shukumei o Koete" with the serial numbers filed off.