Rumble Roses

Every one of the eleven starting wrestlers has a double. Win enough as a clean babyface and the game hands you a heel version of her with a new costume, a new entrance and a different finishing move; go the other way and the heel earns a reformed counterpart. That face/heel alter-ego system is the one genuinely interesting idea in Konami's 2004 women's wrestling game, and it does real work, roughly doubling the roster through play rather than through a locked menu.

The wrestling itself comes from Yuke's, the studio that was then building the SmackDown games, and it feels like it. Grapples chain into strikes, reversals hinge on timing windows, and submissions resolve through a struggle meter rather than a mash. Matches run short and read clearly. What it lacks is the depth of counter options and the match-type variety that the WWE titles had already settled into by that point, so the ring work is competent without ever being demanding.

Then there is the other half of the package, which is impossible to write around. Humiliation moves that pose a downed opponent, mud pits, costumes that shed during a match, a camera that lingers. Konami marketed the game on this and the result is a title whose presentation dates it badly, not in a quaint way but in a way that makes the solid grappling underneath harder to recommend without caveats. The character designs are striking, the animation is better than the subject matter deserves, and the whole thing is aimed squarely at a single audience.

The career mode is thin. You pick a wrestler, work a short ladder of matches, unlock the alter ego, and that is largely the arc. Two players in the same room get the most out of it, because the moveset variation between the twenty-odd personas gives multiplayer sessions more texture than the single-player grind does. The Xbox 360 sequel, Rumble Roses XX, pushed the same formula further without fixing its priorities.

What sits in the archive is a strange artifact of the mid-2000s console market: a fighting game with a genuinely clever progression hook, wrapped in material that guaranteed nobody would take the hook seriously.