Kentaro Shiga

[9.0] "Before the neck injury, Shiga was easily one of the greatest wrestlers who were never given a true chance to shine. his matches are some of the easiest to watch and most enjoyable. Check out his battles against Jun Akiyama. Actually, check out his entire early NOAH run if you can find it. Some of the best wrestling you can watch. Even after his neck injury, he was a very enjoyable character with the Punch Army. He never had the same quality of matches after his character change but he's still one of the more enjoyable things to come from NOAH."

[4.0] "After watching a lot of Shiga's material, I can come to the conclusion that while he's a decent enough wrestler, the issue has always been twofold: for one, Shiga's look isn't very good. He's extremely skinny and lean, and while that can work with muscle mass, it doesn't for Shiga as he barely has any to show. It's impossible to buy him actually dominating in a match when almost everyone on the roster looked bigger than him, and it would get worse over time as he lost even more muscle in NOAH to the point where it looked like he didn't even work out. This meant that Shiga was ALWAYS playing the eternal underdog on matches, the guy working below, and as a result was usually quite limited in what he could pull out in matches... not that he had many moves to do anyway as he's pretty limited in that he relied a lot on flips and dropkicks, as well as a lot of Tornado DDT's. The other main issue was that Shiga had virtually zero charisma in ring and mostly relied on hot tags to bigger guys on the card to pop the crowd. Sure, he'd get some cheers if they were generous, but if he's on offence, they don't really care a lot. He just always seemed generic and didn't have any fire to him, no real qualities that would make you interested in him. AJPW management tried to get him over but it just wasn't ever happening, even when tagging with giants like Taue, Kobashi, Misawa, etc. I heard he got fairly better in NOAH before the neck injury but I didn't see much difference from the limited viewing I had. All in all: a good low card act but nothing more."