David’s Retro Rewind: WWE No Mercy (N64)

I’m fascinated by the number of wrestling games from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s that were exclusive to Nintendo consoles. I find it odd because I’ve never really considered the extent to which WWE’s product would appeal to a more “family-friendly” audience that Nintendo typically tries to court with first-party titles. That’s especially true for WWE games that were developed between approximately 1997 and 2004. This is a period that constituted the famous (or perhaps infamous) “Attitude Era” of sports entertainment.

In terms of strictly WWE-approved titles that were exclusively released on either the Nintendo 64 or the GameCube, there are several examples. The GameCube had WWE Day of Reckoning, WWE Day of Reckoning 2, WWE WrestleMania X8, and WWE WrestleMania XIX. The N64 had WWE WrestleMania 2000 and WWE No Mercy. There additionally existed a couple of N64-only games that featured talent from WWE’s main competitor at that time, WCW, but that’s a story for another day.

There were also several WWE games from that particular 1997 to 2004 time period that weren’t Nintendo exclusives. Examples of these include WWE Attitude, WWE War Zone, and the first few entries in the WWE SmackDown! franchise. Then there was whatever the heck WWE Crush Hour was supposed to be, but my gut tells me we probably shouldn’t dwell on that. In any case, there are a couple of final things I want to quickly mention before I truly begin this installment of Retro Rewind.

Just for the record, I’ve referred to every game mentioned thus far as “WWE” rather than “WWF” where appropriate (and will henceforth continue to do so) just to err on the side of caution. You may recall that I did the same thing in my first Retro Rewind on a WWE game. It’s just that I don’t want to run the risk of WWE’s legal department doing to me what the World Wildlife Fund’s legal department did to them.

As you’ve no doubt gleaned from this article’s title, today’s article will center on the aforementioned WWE No Mercy. This title was developed by the duo of Asmik Ace Entertainment and AKI Corporation, published by THQ, and released for the Nintendo 64 on November 17th, 2000 in North America. To name a couple of final fun facts about this game before we dive into it, it was the third best-selling wrestling title on the Nintendo 64 and the thirty-eighth best-selling release on the console overall. It shared that spot on the list with another sports title, Kobe Bryant in NBA Courtside.

No Mercy actually has a fair amount of content to offer its audience right from the get-go. The standard Exhibition Mode allows players to duke it out under the rule sets of various types of contests in addition to standard one-on-one and tag team battles. These additional types of bouts include ladder matches, steel cage matches, iron man matches, guest referee matches, Royal Rumbles, and tournaments in the same vein as those that used to culminate at WWE’s annual King of the Ring pay-per-view event.

Even considering the game’s varied exhibition match types that were fairly impressive for the time, I think these portions of No Mercy’s content are at their best when you’ve got a friend or two to play with and/or against. No matter the match type, I suspect you’ll get bored just running the gauntlet against the AI after a certain amount of time. If you’re flying solo, I would argue the game’s true main attraction is its Championship mode.

This mode puts you on a path toward winning any one of the following seven available title belts: World Heavyweight, Intercontinental, Hardcore, Women’s, Tag Team, European, or Light Heavyweight. If you’ve been keeping up with WWE programming in modern times, you’ll likely know that nearly all of these belts have since either been renamed or entirely discontinued. Even so, within reason, you can play as basically any wrestler present on the game’s roster for this purpose regardless of which championship belt you seek.

I say “within reason” because, as you probably expect, you can only play as a female WWE superstar while competing for the Women’s title and things like that. The, shall we say, “enigmatic” mind of Vince McMahon and his cohorts in WWE’s creative department hadn’t yet dreamed up the concept of Santina Marella when No Mercy was being developed. As a result, the game certainly won’t allow you to break any rules or societal norms as far as that’s concerned.

What I find so interesting about No Mercy’s Championship mode is that it’s essentially a story mode that, more often than not, adapts to whether you win or lose most of the bouts in which you’ll participate on the road to your chosen title match. The game will clearly tell you when you specifically have to emerge victorious in any given match in order to advance the story. It will also mention if the story will simply change according to whether you won or lost.

In a case where you’re told you’re required to win to continue the story line, you’ll have a limited number of attempts. If you lose on the first try, you can use up a retry for the chance to give it another shot in the hopes that things go your way the second time around. Should you consume all your available retries by repeatedly losing a required contest or failing to meet your mandated objectives your story mode run will abruptly conclude and you’ll have to start over from the beginning.

The game will occasionally throw curve balls at you while you’re competing for a title shot. For example, during the time I spent with the game as a refresher for this article, my run for the Intercontinental title came to a screeching halt when I was put in a match where I had to win by submission in under five minutes in order to continue the story mode. There were several factors that spelled my doom in this context, not the least of which being that submission holds weren’t the forte of the wrestler I had happened to choose for that championship run.

That also brings me to another brief talking point. Let’s discuss the quality of the game’s AI. Despite how that may sound, I want to emphasize that I’m not doing that just to be a jerk. I understand that this game was released on the Nintendo 64, in the very early days of three-dimensional games and the accompanying programming that goes into them. That’s why I’m willing to cut No Mercy as much slack as I can here. However, there were a couple of points during my most recent session with the game where I feel its CPU opponents’ artificial intelligence kind of crossed a line.

Of these moments, the one that infuriated me the most by far takes me back to that same “win by submission in less than five minutes or else” contest. About thirty seconds after the opening bell rang to start the match, a CPU-controlled wrestler with whom I had formed an alliance ran out to the ring to assist me. At first, this was great because they could help me weaken my opponent enough to where I might be able to achieve a submission victory within the time limit.

At least, that was what I thought until my unexpected partner proved to be a major detriment to me because they kept locking my foe in grappling moves, thus preventing me from putting them in any submission holds to actually win the match in time. I lost because I couldn’t fulfill my mandated objectives, so I had to try again. This same scenario happened every single time I attempted that match. It was ultimately what led me to say, “Right, that’s enough” after about an hour of recording gameplay for this article.

Overall, I enjoy WWE No Mercy, albeit only in short bursts and only so long as I stick exclusively to exhibition matches. The altered rule sets that are commonplace in its Championship mode tend to be too much for me more often than not. That’s basically my final verdict on the game.

This mindset is quite similar to the one I have about another wrestling title I’ve covered under the Retro Rewind banner in the past, Galactic Wrestling Featuring Ultimate Muscle. Maybe that’s just a recurring theme with me and any wrestling games in which AKI Corporation had a hand.