Power Pro Wrestling ’96: Max Voltage

A passionate cry from the soul that shakes the ring!!

JP release: 13th September 1996
NA release: N/A
EU release: N/A
Developer: Diamond Head
Publisher: Konami
The Inverted Dungeon Review: 8.8/10
Platforms: SNES
Version Played: SNES

A curious title for the SNES. For the most part, this is a serious wrestling game where you can take your fighter through some Japanese wrestling leagues to become the best. And it’s not a basic mode where you just go though lots of fights, there’s a ton of stats to look after, training to do and you’ll go through your career from the start until retirement. It’s very in depth, but I’m here for the Castlevania stuff.

Which is very loose. There are a few wrestling leagues in this game, with one special one being the WWK (I’d guess it’s short for World Wrestling Konami) that is full of characters based on various Konami games. This included Richter Belmont. He’s in wrestling garb, so you’re really not going to be able to guess that it’s supposed to be Richter from the sprite alone, and all the characters just use one of the standard wrestling movesets.

The wrestling itself seems quite in depth, with different types of wrestlers and lots of moves at your disposal (you can unlock more to customise your character with as well). It seems to do just about as much as you can do with wrestling on the SNES, and even has intros. I was absolutely dreadful at it, but it seems like it would have been a good wrestler at the time, before they went up in popularity on the 3D consoles.

Fine

And credit to Konami, they did make a very attractive game. I like the intros to the various matches, with the lights going and the Jumbotron showing the wrestlers intros, all before you get into the match. The fighters themselves are pre-rendered graphics, and they don’t have a ton of detail, but they do move fluidly and there’s some solid crunching to the fighting animations
Mike Finkelstein, The Inverted Dungeon

Remake or remaster?

Nothing really for this.

Official Ways to get the game

There’s no official way to get Power Pro Wrestling ’96: Max Voltage