Giant Gram (a title which I still can't make sense of) is Sega's latest arcade game based on the late Shohei Baba's famous All Japan Pro-Wrestling promotion. The first was AJPW Featuring Virtua, written for the ST-V arcade system and later brought home to the Saturn, where it became a bit of a cult hit among American import players. Giant Gram was developed for more muscular hardware: it first appeared in Japanese arcades running on the Naomi board, and now a Dreamcast conversion is available. The game has the excellent graphics you would expect from the Dreamcast, lots of wrestlers and moves, and a very deep edit mode, but All Japan appeals to a particular breed of wrestling fan, and whether or not you'll like the control system is another question of taste. If you like the controls in WWF Warzone (I didn't), or if you prefer more varied styles of wrestling, there may be other games that would be a better buy.

For an introduction to AJPW, you can check out my preview of this game, which went into a bit of detail on the subject. The final game includes twelve All Japan wrestlers, three guest stars from the Virtua Fighter series, and four hidden fictional wrestlers that can be unlocked through fulfilling certain requirements. Incidentally, yes, there are two Wolf Hawkfields; one is the VF character, and the other is the real-life wrestler who uses the in-ring persona of the VF character. Play modes include championship, tournament, exhibition, and human versus human; in all of these you can choose singles or tag competition. There is also a very deep edit mode, as is common in Japanese wrestling games, but it's very difficult to penetrate without knowledge of Japanese or outside help.

Giant Gram's graphics make it the best-looking wrestling game to date. The character models look and move like their real-life counterparts, and their texture-mapped bodies look smooth and detailed. You can recognize any of them by their faces, which have been painstakingly reproduced. Occasionally there's some funny clipping going on as the various segments of their bodies interlock; for example, the "Vader Time" written on the front of Vader's tights occasionally disappears halfway into the segment of his body below it. That's just a quibble, though; stand a bit of a ways off from your TV when Wolf Hawkfield executes his rotation powerbomb, and you'll swear you're watching the real thing, except with a much cooler camera angle. The camera often shifts to another position during move animations. After Vader drops his opponent with a body block and goes up to the top rope for a moonsault, the camera faces the corner head-on and drops down to a low angle that captures the move wonderfully. As for a background, again, stand far enough away and it looks great, but examine it closely and you may chuckle a bit. The expansive size of the Nippon Budokan is conveyed very well, but its inhabitants are all flat polygons textured with images of the crowd. In other words, look them in the face and they're fine, but move to one side or the other and, well, they disappear. Some bystanders also fade into the ether when you get too close; the cameramen at ringside blip out of existence when a wrestler is thrown out of the ring near them. It doesn't affect gameplay in any way, but it's a bit disconcerting.

Giant Gram's control system, as I said, is similar to the domestic WWF Warzone. There are three ways to attack your opponent. The X button delivers strikes. Depending on whether you press it repeatedly or in conjunction with a D-pad motion, you can throw a simple punch, launch a standing dropkick, cut loose with a barrage of chops, or execute any number of other moves. The B button, pressed alone or along with the D-pad, executes a variety of throws, although you have to be very close to your opponent for it to work. Stand in front of your opponent and press B, and you'll usually execute a simple slam. By attacking from other positions or using a more complicated D-pad motion, you can do a lot more damage. Finally, the A button allows you to grapple with your opponent. While you're tied up, you can change the position of your grapple and execute moves with the B button as you would while standing. Quickness and precision are key, because your opponent can break loose or reverse into a move of his own.

Indeed, sometimes quickness and precision are a little too key. The computer AI gets very good relatively early in the game. As in Warzone, it becomes very difficult to beat it to the punch when grappling, and it dodges your strikes quite easily as well. It's tricky to master the timing of the grappling system, and the positioning of the B-button throws. With practice anyone can become a successful wrestler, but some may be turned off partway by the control system, the difficulty level, or the game's setting.

All Japan's milieu and style of wrestling is not universally loved, especially in the US. Some swear by it, others have no use for it. Personally, I'm not a fan. The promotion is tightly focused around a relatively small upper card of heavyweights, who wrestle a slow-paced style built around strong ring psychology and the gradual build-up to a high-impact finish. That affects the game in several ways. For one, there are comparatively few wrestlers in the game because there aren't that many in the promotion. Giant Gram has a respectably-sized roster, but it's tiny compared to the domestic WCW games or Human's Fire Pro series. Furthermore, most of those characters look a fair bit alike and wrestle in much the same way (Fernando: "They're a bunch of fat Japanese guys." Workrate Cult: "DEATH TO FERNANDO~!"). Vader and the Virtua Fighter characters add a dash of something different, but even so, the game doesn't offer near the breadth of styles that the competition does.