WrestleQuest might be a love note to pro rasslin’, but it’s an old-school RPG first

polygon.com:

Make no mistake, the whole point of investing four years of development in WrestleQuest is because Mega Cat Studios wanted to make an old-school, turn-based role-playing game, like the original Final Fantasy, or Earthbound, or the Dragon Quest series.

But that doesn’t mean Mega Cat is simply exploiting pro wrestling’s video game appeal with an easier-to-develop gameplay loop; there’s a lot of childhood love for the 1980s and 1990s superstars inside WrestleQuest, too. And there are 30 of them from real life — like Jake the Snake Roberts, Diamond Dallas Page, and, most essentially, Macho Man Randy Savage.

“We’re a hardcore sports town,” Mega Cat founder James Deighan said of Pittsburgh, where he grew up and where the studio is based. “Friends, family, co-workers would come over to argue about the Steelers game, or the Penguins, or the Pirates, my dad was more a fan of Bruno Sammartino,” the champion of the primordial World Wide Wrestling Federation of the 1960s and 1970s.

“I think he actually watched that industry come to life,” Deighan said of his father. Deighan and the younger of his six brothers were born later in his dad’s life, in his 50s. “Some of my favorite memories of my childhood are all around wrestling. I remember more about my wrestling toys,” than other sports.

It makes for an unexpected wrinkle in WrestleQuest’s story. The characters — 12 of them playable, 400 of them NPCs, and about 30 of those real-life, old-school heroes from the past 40 years — are all action-figure representations. Some aren’t even wrestlers. The world in which the main protagonist “Muchacho Man” lives is a fantasy realm of toys, the kind a middle-schooler would spread out on the bedroom floor and mash up in glorious crossover,