Upon coming back to this game (I managed to fix the cutscene problem I was having) after playing Here Comes The Pain, I have come to realize how much of a downgrade this is.

It's so slow by comparison, not helped by the fucking stamina bar mechanic which, while realistic I suppose, just slows the gameplay down to a complete fucking crawl and makes combat so unpleasant because you have to manage your stamina on top of the injuries you receive which will result in moments of just standing still and holding the select button in order to recover.

The story is nowhere near as compelling to go through as HCTP, mostly because the VN style choices are now super fucking limited, for the sake of having fully voiced cutscenes.

I'll admit I appreciate the cutscenes but at the same time, HCTP was incredibly special because of its freeness ensuring that no two playthroughs felt the same.

Creating a character for these is just the fucking worst, constant losses because of your stats on top of the neutered combat just makes it not worth it to me.

GM Mode is a neat little novelty though and I'm a bit surprised it got dropped after this game.

All in all, I don't think I'm gonna finish this one. It kind of leaves a sour taste in my mouth because of how sluggish it feels in comparison to its predecessor and all because they added something needless to the experience.

The game who made me a fan before I even watched the damn thing - in fact, I was one of the very smart, very lonely kids who wore the fact that he didn’t like it (it was fake!) on his sleeve. Cristian lent me his copy and, as we used to do, we’d keep each other’s games for months at a time basically doubling our libraries. Thank you Cristian, you were cool.

The end of the Golden Age that was the HTCP gameplay formula, which lives another day before getting its biggest overhaul yet in 2007. The two big ones this year were the new finisher meter and stamina. The former now had a hidden multiplier that would reward cycling moves or playing true to your Face/Heel alignment by filling faster or, conversely, slower, creating the lovely positive feedback loops that made AI never recover if you pummeled them first that would persist for half a decade. The latter simply forces you to stand still every once in a while to press Select and see a bar refill: unfortunately it will never progress much past this, which doesn’t matter much now but it does later when the series goes full simulationism (which I’m one of the apparently very few enjoyers) and it would REALLY appreciate a good fatigue system. They just don’t want to snatch that Fire Pro Wrestling demo man.

Season mode now is just a cinematic, canned story that takes place in a single show and lasts until Wrestlemania, where you’d win the big one. No more wrestler career sandbox unfortunately. I remember the RAW one started with an unlikely alliance with Triple H against a Smackdown invasion and would culminate in a Hell in a Cell against him, it’s for all intents and purposes my first wrestling storyline ever and made me fall in love with Shawn Michaels, whom I hadn’t even seen in TV yet. When I did I found out he did nothing that cool, he’d get roofied and kiss Vince’s ass, what a nerd. Smackdown!’s would start with Teddy Long getting hit and run’d and closed with either accepting or refusing RVD’s ECW revival slash invasion (heh, prescient), which made me find out other federations existed.
You’d get some rare dialogue choices that changed the end of a storyline, like calling Eugene a flat out r-word, but depending on character picked you’d get new stuff altogether? There was an Austin becoming GM one, sometimes YOU rammed Teddy Long with your car. Never was able to choose them at will.

Roster was mediocre, it was a transitional period where useful Attitude Era character fodder got canned, replaced by the never ending search for another Randy Orton. Losing people like the Dudleys and Rhino aren’t worth all those tall hairless fratboys, or Hassan that unlucky motherfucker. I always hated the Batista had his new theme but the old “Evolution henchman” motion, it’s around this time I started watching on TV and went ta-ta-ta with my arms every sunday afternoon
What the fuck is a Renee Dupree?

Oh just remembered this game is son of that godawful era where PSP would get enhanced ports with exclusive features, which is just a pain in the ass 20 years later when choosing which version to emulate. Quick, do you want THUG2 to run smooth or have twice as many levels? This one had some weird poker minigame too for some reason

GM mode makes this a game to come back to. Once you get the hang of the rating system you can sink so many hours into that mode - even more fun in multiplayer. As for gameplay, it's fine except for the annoying stamina system, though you can easily tweak that to be less intrusive in the options menu. There's odd removal of classic moves and inclusion of newer poorly animated ones which I wasn't a fan of, the camera is also a little weird and unstable. Presentation definitely took a little bit of a dip but overall it's still fun. Big roster, decent story mode and great soundtrack. A good representation of one of the last great eras in WWE, though Day of Reckoning 2 edges it out in terms of raw gameplay.

I have a lot of fond childhood memories involving this game and the year of WWE programming it presented. John Cena and Batista switching brands in the Draft and bringing their respective world titles along is still one of the most epic things I've seen in wrestling.

Unfortunately, when compared to past WWE games, SvR 2006 is where the general quality starts to fall off a bit. Things like GM Mode, the Buried Alive match and Backstage Brawls are all welcome additions. However, the slow shift to have this game series be more of a wrestling simulation really hurts its appeal. Things slow to a crawl whenever you have to recharge your Stamina meter, made even worse by vapid commentary lines that sound nothing like what you hear on TV.

The recipe that was perfected in Here Comes The Pain started to be tinkered with for no apparent reason with this game, and as a result, it suffers from delivering something truly great.

I ain't gonna go too in depth on this.

I'm not super huge into wrestling, though I think it is a solid source of entertainment (and watching a few videos on the subject has piqued my interest) but I wouldn't say this game is perfect at it.

It is initially really confusing for how it works mechanically, and there are a lot of mechanics. After you figure it out it's pretty fun, but it's also incredibly imbalanced.

Basically, just play the Undertaker. You will literally never lose with him because he does so much damage and takes very little.

I tried the Season Mode and... god it's not pleasant. If you're playing as a created character you might as well not even bother, you're fighting a losing battle most of the time. Since you barely get EXP if you lose, your character will quite literally be scraping by and sometimes the game will flat out put you in scenarios where the chances of success are insanely slim on purpose.

Also it just gets tiring fighting the same two characters back to back when there's so many other characters to face.

Not a bad game by any stretch but I think I'd rather play NASCAR... or watch the Hololive girls play 2K22.