CIMA vs. Dragon Kid

[7.0] "Dragon Kid vs CIMA has the potential for blow away MOTY.. if it was for the Dream Gate though. But Brave Gate title matches always seem to limit themselves which makes sense from a hierarchy point of view. Still, this had some good stuff. I enjoyed the whole stretch on the ring apron. They made great use of the limited footing they had and the entire portion felt really dangerous and risky. DK focused a large part of the match on the neck of CIMA and did some neat work, using his movements wisley. CIMA at one point had to quickly get cold spray sprayed onto the neck so he took a nasty stinker on that suplex. The finish was great for rapid bomb attacks. The finish was cool from a story point of view with CIMA cheating slightly to beat Dragon Kid. ***1/2"

[7.0] "This left me rather disappointed because it wasn't as great as I hoped for, but I definitely still thought that this was pretty good by the end. The opening phase was very good, with both guys immediately showing off some impressive acrobatics and taking some energetic bumps, but then they slowed down and started working a far less interesting extended grappling sequence. The work here was actually quite decent, but it definitely didn't highlight the top abilities of either guy, since they clearly needed a much faster-paced match to really show off. The match would unsurprisingly finally pick up again once they were both allowed to up their energy levels and throw out more flashy high-flying attacks. I really enjoyed the way that Kid would target Cima's neck as well as his legs, though Cima definitely didn't sell these injured body parts very consistently in the long term, if at all. He made up for this with how clean his attacks were in his big comeback, but I still think it was a missed story opportunity for him to outright drop his selling. Towards the end of the match, they started going for rapid big-bomb trading sequences out of nowhere, which was quite jarring because of how unnaturally it arose, but they at least executed all their spots extremely well, especially whenever Kid's high-flying was the centre of attention. Cima's win would also kind of come out of nowhere, since he played possum and then used the ref as a weapon to catch Kid -- who was waiting to hit a finishing move off the turnbuckle -- off guard. He essentially went full heel by having to cheat here, and displayed very heelish tendencies in the post-match too, all of which was very jarring, considering he was only a few months removed from returning from a long injury layover as a massive babyface. His sudden heel(ish) turn at least added some extra intrigue to the finish, but I would have preferred a more 'work-rate'-based finishing stretch. ***1/4 - ***1/2"