Love No Mercy, love Fire Pro Returns, but WWE All Stars is my favorite, no question.
What makes All Stars so great is that not only does it use the AKI method of strong and weak grapples but it does something that few wrestling games have attempted to do, and that's separate the characters into classes requiring different tactics to be successful and then further varying the move sets of each in those classes to broaden the game play. There are even hybrid class characters who will be predominately one class such as "Brawler" but will have combos that transitions into a grapple chain, or another character will pull off surprise rope rebound attacks more commonly associated with the "High Flyer" class.
Honestly, game play-wise this was the biggest leap a wrestling based title had seen since the Playstation era, but unfortunately it was crapped on by folks raised on the Smackdown series given its lack of create modes and ultra-restricted create-a-character option without realizing the game's main draw was learning each and every character as you would a fighting game. Something that is such a foreign concept in wrestling titles thanks to hundred person rosters where everyone controls exactly the same. Little did they realize how deep All Stars' game play actually was under all the "nonsense and flash."
Also, despite a horrible matchmaking system and the nagging issue of everyone getting booted from a match when someone would quit, All Stars had some of the smoothest online game play I've ever encountered on a console. You could tell it, unlike the Smackdown legacy titles, was for the most part balanced for competitive play. There were very few exploitable moves, and one of the reasons they wouldn't allow selecting signature moves one by one for created characters was to keep that balance in check.
It's a shame whoever now has the Marvel rights couldn't get their hands on that engine, and much like EA did with AKI's for Def Jam Vendetta make something different out of it. Replace the arena with city streets and eliminate the more technical wrestling holds you would never see in an actual street fight and not only would you have yourself a pretty fun brawler but something that would set it apart from the standard side perspective super hero fighters we've become accustomed to as of late.
But yeah, it's a super fun game that everyone should try out if you haven't already. Shame online is no more, because like I said it was really great. Hell, even the 3DS version is surprisingly decent for a handheld port despite some collision issues that spring up once in awhile.
Oh, and you could do cool stuff like this...
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