WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2008

Eight fighting styles, two per wrestler, and suddenly the roster had rules. That was the big structural change here: a brawler could not fly, a high-flyer could not throw a proper power move, and every superstar's arsenal was fenced off by the classes assigned to him. Give a style its own signature ability — the showman's crowd-fed comeback, the hardcore man's weapon under the ring, the submission specialist's targeted limb work — and the matchup starts to matter before the bell.

It was a genuinely good idea executed with too much rigidity. Create-a-wrestler players got the worst of it, because the style limits carried straight into the editor and cut off move combinations the previous games had allowed. Fans noticed and complained loudly. Yuke's had built a system that made a Rey Mysterio match feel different from a Great Khali match, then applied the same restriction to a custom character who existed precisely so a player could ignore those boundaries.

The submission overhaul fared better. Instead of tapping a button, both players fought over the analog sticks, the attacker pushing to hold a position while the victim rotated to break free — a small tug of war that made the closing stretch of a technical match feel physical rather than clerical. ECW arrived as a third brand alongside SmackDown and Raw, and the old Season mode gave way to a 24/7 structure that let you run a career as a superstar or take over as general manager, booking shows and chasing ratings against a rival brand.

The PS2 build is the compromised one. The Ultimate Control grapples that the PS3 and 360 versions used to sell the free-roaming limb-by-limb striking are absent, presentation is a generation behind, and the whole thing runs on the same engine architecture the series had been refining since 2004. What survives is the wrestling itself, which by this point was the most legible it had been: momentum, body-part damage and a stamina economy that punished spamming.

Play it now and the roster is a time capsule — the tail of the Ruthless Aggression era, with a heavyweight division in transition and an ECW brand nobody quite knew what to do with. The fighting styles were dropped in later entries, which tells you how the experiment was judged. It remains the most interesting thing the series tried in that stretch, and the only one that made you think about what kind of wrestler you were actually holding.