I had a couple of questions, not sure how many people out there would have an answer to this.

It seems like most of the cast has the same damage on normal attacks, and similar hit boxes. However when I do a certain amount of damage the enemy always seems to recover at many points.

I turned off health recovery... Is there a reason its still happening in a match?

Are there more guaranteed strats to get a pin? The health meter in this game seems to mean almost nothing, in a match if you deplete it to 0, you sometimes often still can't TKO or pin an opponent. Am I missing something here?

Playing the Sega Dreamcast version for reference.

Hey DBcade, long time no see. Hope you've been doing well!

The short answer is this game is incredibly dumb.

The long answer is the developers really changed A LOT of the mechanics of this game compared to the previous Acclaim 3D grapplers. Haven't played this in a minute, but here's how I remember the game working:

Health recovery doesn't effect whether someone stays down and for how long. Instead, it determines if any players can recoup hit points in their health bar. So, there's no easy way to have opponents stay down longer.

The crowd dynamic is still very important, but for some reason, the developers made it much harder to get the crowd to cheer for the human player. There's only two things that I've found to consistently help the audience to cheer for you: Countering basic holds better than the AI, and using a very strong wrestler (Rhino, maybe some others).

This game puts VERY heavy emphasis on countering basic holds such as the hammerlock, arm wrench, and top wristlock. If you and the AI create a continuous chain of counters with these 3 holds, the damage done for each counter amplifies to incredibly high levels. End up with the last counter, and the crowd WILL cheer for you. Problem is, you're at the mercy of how well the AI will reverse your holds.

The best chance you have of pinning an opponent consistently is to have the crowd cheering for you while your opponent is in red. When being cheered, it increases the amount of damage you deal, decreases the amount of damage you take, speeds up your recovery time when down, and slows down your opponents recovery time when down.

A couple of other very important things to note: if the crowd is cheering for your opponent, don't even bother to try and pin them. Even with no health, they will kick out just about every time. Just wait for the cheering to stop, keep attacking them in the meantime. The other thing is to AVOID using the same move continuously. This will get the crowd to turn against you very quickly, which will then power up your opponent essentially. Even if you only have 3 standing "ready" moves, keep switching between each one. Just don't use the same move more than once in a row (UNLESS you're being cheered. When that is happening, you temporarily have free reign to do anything you want without consequence.)

I hope this helps, DBcade! Any other questions, feel free to reach out.