NJPW G1 Climax 28 begins producing match of the year candidates daily
Eight years ago today, New Japan’s G1 Climax 28 kicked off in Korakuen Hall with the kind of depth that would make the entire tournament feel less like a gauntlet and more like a festival of main event wrestling. Omega vs. Okada didn’t headline night one—that’s how stacked this draw was—and yet the preliminary matches carried the weight of championship-level storytelling. The tournament format, that beautiful round-robin crucible, had reached a point where NJPW could credibly argue that any night’s C-block match mattered as much as any other promotion’s main event. Naito was hunting for validation after a year of near-misses, White was ascending with dangerous momentum, and Tanahashi was fighting the clock against younger men who’d studied every counter to his signature sequences.
What made 2018 singular wasn’t just the quality—it was the consistency. Night after night, wrestlers delivered five-star blueprints because they had to; there were no coasting spots in a tournament where five wins could vault you forward or two losses could bury you. Okada’s matches hit a different gear when the stakes were this structured. Omega’s moveset felt like a living document of everything he’d learned. The crowds understood they were witnessing a canon being written, not just matches being wrestled. By the second week, wrestling Twitter had already accepted that the “match of the year” conversation would be decided by which G1 encounter people remembered longest, not whether it came from this tournament.
This was the last truly dominant G1 before injuries, roster depletion, and the slow erosion of New Japan’s depth would eventually chip away at the tournament’s mystique. By 2022, the G1 would feel thinner, more dependent on one or two transcendent performances rather than an entire month of them. The 2018 edition remains the high-water mark for what the tournament could deliver when NJPW’s depth was genuinely bottomless, a standard that modern wrestling—regardless of promotion—has struggled to match.