YMMV / Pro Wrestling NOAH

• Broken Base: Go Shiozaki vs. Kazuyuki Fujita in 2020 features a thirty-one minute staredown, taking up easily half of the match between the two. Fans either love it because it enhances the violence to come and really sells just how much both sides hate each other, but others get easily exhausted by how much of a 60 minute title match is taken up by absolutely nothing but alternating camera cuts, and how slow the build of the match is once it gets going.
• Fandom Rivalry: AJPW, obviously, as well as Dragon Gate. Initially when Pro Wrestling ZERO1 came up it was also a case but moved more towards Friendly Fandoms as both companies declined. Also friendly with NJPW and ROH.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: While Ricky Marvin was hardly the biggest star of CMLL, he was the most noticeable figure of their Japan branch. A year after this branch was gone, someone in NOAH looked back on their shows and decided they had a hit, so they brought Marvin again and made him a mainstay of the promotion. Even more so after he became part of the Bengala legacy in AAA.
• Hype Backlash: Katsuhiko Nakajima is so beloved by reviewers and wrestling critics, especially in the West, that new people might not entirely get why a wrestler with a relatively bland character and a generic, "kick & suplex" Japanese junior style can get so much praise. The fact that he is liked for being incredibly fast paced and stiff might be a similar point, given that people like KENTA and Katsuyori Shibata have had that schtick for much more time and many other junior wrestlers use it too even in NOAH. Finally, Nakajima having been Kensuke Sasaki's Creator's Pet all his career doesn't help among those acquainted with wrestling politics.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!:
  • During the 2000s, Naomichi Marufuji became wildly popular to Western audiences due to his convoluted aerial offensive and American indy style moveset. After a decade without evolving very much from those traits, opinion about him fell down when people started looking deeper and eventually noticed his flaws, namely his slapdash selling and his tendency to dip into Spot Monkey territory.
  • Go Shiozaki was once considered a promising heavyweight and even a future ace, but when he started to turn more and more generic to the point that he looked a parody of Japanese heavyweights, fans turned on him. The fact he usually sold even worse than Marufuji didn't help. It took him over a decade to actually live up to that potential.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: While the angle that brought SUGI and RONIN to the promotion in 2011 wasn't fully understood for how random and out of nowhere it was, most people thought they both would have been great additions to NOAH's junior division. History repeated itself in 2013 when SUGI, then known as Dual Force, was never brought back after his injury.
• Unexpected Character:
  • Few people expected NOAH to notice Kenoh from Michinoku Pro Wrestling and bring him full time, and even fewer him to become a top player there (especially given that he was ultimately just another of the hard-kicking pretty boy type that abounds by the dozen in the Japanese indy circuit).
  • Kazushi Sakuraba and Kazuyuki Fujita returning to pro wrestling surprised many, but especially that it was in NOAH, the company least related to the sport of MMA in all of Japan.
• Win Back the Crowd: Shiozaki's return in 2016 was received much more positively after years of working in AJPW and honing his craft, and his 2020 run as GHC Heavyweight champ was hailed as one of the best of the entire year.