Original Release: Human, 1992, Turbografx-16
Fire Pro 3 is the first of the original Turbografx trilogy to add character creation, but otherwise is pretty much identical to the first two games other than a roster shake-up
Fire Pro Wrestling 3: Legend Bout (Turbografx, Human, 1992)
Where to Buy: eBay
How to Emulate: coming soon!
Review by: C. M0use
Human seemed to be content to just do roster packs for the same engine for its initial Turbografx installments, and the third entry is yet more of the same. If you didn’t care for the prior games, there’s nothing to change your mind here. And as far as characters go, it’s still all unofficial bootlegs as they apparently still had no licenses from any federations.
To be as fair as possible, they did introduce some new menu/match options with each installment. And this title was the first of the series to allow one to create their own wrestler, which was what basically ended up being the main draw of the franchise. This aspect hasn’t been translated from Japanese in any way at the time of this writing, however, so it’s a little hard to assess if you don’t speak the language. What I can tell about it is that you’re basically altering the 32 included wrestlers and swapping pieces/parts around in terms of physical appearanace, and choosing trunks or pants color along with their move set. In terms of setting scripts when fighting against them, I’m not sure what the extent is as these Turbografx games seem to be so unpopular/overlooked among English-speaking fans that I can’t find any documentation at all out there.
So for the non-Japanese-speaker, this is still pretty much the exact same unplayable mess as the prequels. It has lots of moves and the sprites look nice, but it’s all inaccessible with like the worst possible learning curve and absolutely no in-game indication about how the fussy timing works. You still got the strikes that just randomly don’t connect most of the time, I was able to at least win some grapples now but the computer still wins like 90% of them and slaps on some submission that lasts an insane amount of time. I guess if you want to get into the Fire Pro games from the “beginning,” it’s probably best to go straight to the SNES ones with character creation and modern fan support, skip this whole passel of Turbografx games.
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