WrestleQuest

Genre: Turn-Based RPG

Players: 1

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Review:

WrestleQuest is a Turn-Based RPG released in 2023 on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. This game presents us with the unique and interesting premise indicated by its title: it is a Turn-Based RPG heavily steeped in the world of pro wrestling. And to be clear, it goes all-in on this theming – in the world of the game, populated by plastic toys, real-life pro wrestling stars like Macho Man Randy Savage and Jake the Snake Roberts are revered as legendary heroes.

However, while the game’s theming is undeniably strong, I couldn’t help but feel like its storytelling was oddly muddled. Take, for example, how this game approaches “kayfabe”. For those who are unaware, kayfabe is the pro wrestling term for the staged “reality” of events that take place within the ring, where the wrestlers have scripted rivalries and wrestlers may be designated as “jobbers” who lose matches because that’s what the continuing story calls for them to do. WrestleQuest can’t seem to decide if this world has kayfabe or if it doesn’t – one of the game’s central characters is a self-described jobber and his intro match even requires you to deliberately lose… but then he boasts that he would win a “real” match with his opponent. Wait, so was the match he just had “real”, or wasn’t it?

Another problem with this game’s story is that its characters aren’t especially interesting. The first issue here is that while this game does feature real-life wrestling icons, those icons are not the characters you play as, nor do you get to design your own original character. Instead, your main protagonist is a very obvious South American knockoff of the late Macho Man Randy Savage named Muchacho Man. While this in itself could still be interesting, Muchacho Man doesn’t have much of a personality of his own – he’s just an idealistic wrestler who dreams of fighting his way to the top (a trait that describes multiple characters in this game), and any other personality traits he has seem to just be derived from Randy Savage’s personality fed through a Spanish filter (his catchphrase is even “Oh Si!”). And while the game’s story has clever writing, I had trouble feeling attached to shallow characters like this.

Another issue this game has is its pacing, which is absolutely wrecked by characters that not only stop to talk at length frequently, but do so with pauses before and after these conversations, as well as extremely frequent loading screens. It also doesn’t help that this game’s battles, which are surprisingly infrequent for an RPG given the game’s topical focus on a fighting style… but I digress… it doesn’t help that these battles are themselves unnecessarily slow-paced, thanks in part to the game’s “timed hits” mechanic derived from Super Mario RPG. Having only just reviewed Sea of Stars, which I similarly criticized for its use of these mechanics, I think I can say that the era where these were seen as clever and fun has long since passed, and at the very least Sea of Stars was creative in its use of these mechanics, but in WrestleQuest they mostly just boil down to a circular meter indicating when to press one of the face buttons.

Oh, speaking of the buttons, the way this game handles menus in combat is just plain dumb. It starts with a Super Mario RPG-style menu system with each button assigned to a different type of move. However, once you’ve pressed it a few times, it reverts back to the RPG-standard “A is confirm, B is cancel”. If this game just picked a lane and did one or the other, it would be fine, but the half-and-half way this game makes players adapt to buttons changing their function depending on what menu you’re in means you’ll repeatedly accidentally cancel out of menus, or have to remind yourself that “oh yeah, now I need to press a different button to continue”. In a game full of some questionable design choices, this is perhaps the most needlessly wrong-headed.

I suppose at least the presentation here is mostly decent, but it’s not without its own issues. The game uses pixel art visuals that are good, but that will seriously make you wonder why the game needs to use loading screens so often. There are also voice clips for the characters, and while these do help to convey the characters’ personalities, these voice clips rarely match anything remotely resembling what the character is actually saying, making them come across as random and distracting.

However, in all of this mess, there is one unambiguous bright spot I can point to – the soundtrack in this game is excellent, with some wonderful themes in a variety of genres, such as Muchacho Man’s Theme, an electronica theme that perfectly conveys a great 80s nostalgia sound, Stop the Rudo and Zest for the Quest, which have some excellent luchador vibes… I could keep going – check out Power Trip, Funk Slam, Top of the List… and that’s just the music I could find on YouTube, there’s plenty more great stuff in the game. I never would have expected the soundtrack to be one of the biggest highlights of this game, nor would I have expected a wrestling RPG to have one of the best soundtracks of the year, but… well, here we are.

Look, I’ve spent a lot of this review smack-talking WrestleQuest, but please understand I don’t hate this game, I’m just extremely frustrated by it because there are some good ideas here, and it’s clear that this is a project that comes from a place of love. This game clearly adores pro wrestling culture, it has some clever writing, and the idea of turning pro wrestling into a turn-based RPG is delightfully silly… and the soundtrack is outright phenomenal. But then you add in all the loading times, the tedious combat, the lack of a compelling story, the poor menu design, and the result is a game that attempts a crowd-pleasing diving splash from the corner post, but ends up doing a painful bellyflop on the mat.

tl;dr – WrestleQuest is a Turn-Based RPG that combines the gameplay and tropes of the RPG genre with a theme based around pro wrestling. This game’s premise is excellent, its adoration of the legends of real-life pro wrestlers is infectious, and the soundtrack is absolutely wonderful. Unfortunately, the constant loading times, pacing issues, poor menu design, and uninteresting story leave this game down for the count.

Grade: C+

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2023 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: Best Sports Game

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