Champion Road was the single player campaign for the 1994 Super Famicom Human Entertainment game Super Fire Pro Wrestling Special. It is notable for being the first scenario written by Suda51, following the career of up-and-coming Pro Wrestler Morio Sumisu. It is divided into chapters and contains two main branching points, choosing the main character’s rival, and choosing his promotion. While each promotion has a different set of opponents and storylines, picking Sumisu’s rival does not affect the course of the story, just changing some lines of dialogue in the latter half of the game. These two branches don’t actually intersect, meaning that mixing and matching won’t result in any differences.
As such, this video translation is presented as a flow-chart to pick and choose from depending on your preferences. Also, Champion Road was inspired by a variety of real-life wrestling events, which have been cataloged and explained to the best of my abilities.
The Fire Pro Wrestling series does not generally use real life names for wrestlers and promotions, replacing them instead with soundalikes.
CHARACTER PROFILES
All the wrestler’s names have been romanized according to the game’s end credits except for the main character’s. His name is romanized as “Morio Smith” in the credits, but this translation opted for “Morio Sumisu” for several reasons. For one, his surname was localized as Sumisu in the sequel, Champion Road Beyond. However, CRB changed every other name, so that is not necessarily reliable. More importantly, Morio is Japanese and there is one character in the game which has the western surname “Smith” and the two are spelled differently (スミス in katakana, compared to 純須 in kanji). Lastly, this interview seems to imply that the correct pronunciation for the surname is, indeed, Sumisu, which he also verbalized in this career retrospective. Meaning that Morio has a Japanese surname that just happens to sound like the word “Smith”, with the name being a combination of Morrissey (singer of the Smiths) and his band.